What Would Thoreau Say?

You know, this has been fun.  I mean I think of something and write about it and millions of followers (three) take it and pass it on and we change the world together.  Only no reason to keep going.  Harold Camping and Family Radio say the world is ending Saturday, or at least it's starting to end Saturday but the show runs five months.  Not sure why it takes god that much time but he says it will. Camping, if you haven't heard, has taken his Bible-that book full of myths, stories, made up stuff written by men (no women allowed remember) and has figured out 1) when Noah's flood was and 2) the exact date 7000 years later that the rapture will start and the just will be elevated to heaven and the rest of us will die horrible deaths.  Never mind that in 7000 years the calendar he's using has changed several times.  Old Harold-and Harold alone!-has figured it out. Have you SEEN Harold Camping?  First of all  he looks like he was here for that floo...

In an earlier post I suggested you not take your economic prognostications from an old gym teacher.  But here I am making another one. Well, not a prognostication but asking a question.  What would Thoreau Say... Why wouldn't a flat tax work?  Really, what if we said everyone...and I mean everyone-people, companies, nonprofits (yes, nonprofits-more below), churches...everyone paid 10% on everything they brought in.  Everything. If you are Bill Gates or Warren Buffett and you make $2 billion during the year, you pay 10%-no exemptions, no deductions, no monkey business... If you are BP and you made $15 billion last year (which they did), you pay 10%-no exemptions, no deductions, no monkey business... If you are the church Our Lady of the Paved Driveway and you take in 100k in contributions during a given year you pay 10k in taxes-no exemptions, no deductions, no monkey business... Huh?  Why wouldn't that work?  I bet the treasury would have mor...

After overwhelming public response to my having not posted in a while (one email), I resume today jotting down some thoughts on the simple life, a life responding to "What would Thoreau Say?" In a talk I'm giving at the National Cathedral next week I am presenting the workshop I call SiSiSa---Simplicity, Silence, Sabbath.  In this workshop we confront a series of questions about our life in an effort to simplify it, find room for silence, and take steps toward defining what sabbath can mean to us in our lives. In the silence section we will explore something I call Two Times a Day for Peace, a simple system for meditation (it has been called meditation light) I developed and use to slow down...I present the contents of TTDP below.  Let me know your thoughts and perhaps respond with how you create peace... TWO TIMES A DAY FOR PEACE Introduction Several ago my son and his girlfriend joined me in a Peace Walk sponsored by Thich Nhat Hahn as part of “peace is every st...

The church has created some goofy stuff in its 2000+ years but nothing is goofier than purgatory.  As I remember it from my best friend as a kid, who was scared to death of being sent there after he died, it's that place you go after you buy the farm if you weren't baptized, or you were a bad person or maybe if you masturbated too much (not sure on that one but if this was one of the qualifiers, he was in deep trouble).  In other words this was the place where you waited to go to heaven.  Kind of the Greyhound Terminal for dead people. People could actually pray you out of the place too.  If you had enough people praying for you to get out of purgatory, I guess some score keeper would determine just when you had enough pray-ers and presto you were out!  My friend was always worried not enough of us would pray for him...he was right. If his fate was left to the clowns I hung around with, he was going to be there a long time. Really, heaven is s...

Every other day or so the NY Times lists those killed in the wars we're fighting.  It's always kids, in their 20's, some in their 30's...all of them dead. I read them slowly.  It's the only part of  the paper I really concentrate on.  I try to see them, their faces, their smiles, their eyes.  I can't of course, but I try.  And I pray for them and thank them like I should, though my thank you  isn't for what all the war makers want  me to thank them for-for keeping me safe, because nobody fighting in Iraq, in a war that has taken hundreds of our kids for absolutely no reason at all isn't really making me safer.  In fact as that war goes on it makes more terrorists which can be argued makes me less safe. No I thank them for being willing to say yes to the war makers because it reduced the chances my son would have to go and fight.  Yup, there, I said it.    I thank these kids for their selflessness for sure.  But I ...

Through my 62 some years I have had many heros.  From Thomas Jefferson to Ron Santo to Jesus, so many people have influenced my life and helped create my approach to the world.  None has had more impact though than Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862).  HDT, most famous for the book he wrote about living at Walden Pond in Concord, MA Walden, was in my mind America's most important philosopher who proposed a way of life designed to bring people happiness, which to some extent at least, I have followed.  Simplify, simplify, Thoreau said.  For this alone I am grateful for this has been my mantra for many many years. But he wrote much more than that.  He was a strict critic of 'politics as usual' and the stupidity of wealth dictating influence (uh, Trump anyone?).  Thoreau told us that life was to be lived mindfully, aware of each day and its being a gift. And he taught us that those in public life and culture that work to deprive us of those ...