My daughter called me yesterday, crying. Her cat had just died. Obviously, she loved her cat very much; that’s why she was crying and telling me about all of the pain that she was in.

My daughter has had very little experience with death and has not yet attained the wisdom to cope with it well. And it is a skill. Perhaps the death of a pet is one of the ways in which we learn to meet death. Since most of us cannot comprehend death itself, we learn to comprehend our own response to the loss of someone or something we love.

Yesterday my sister called me and she was quite upset. She had just found out that a young woman she knows, about thirty-one years old, had cancer. She mentioned that part of why she was so upset was that it reminded her of her own mortality.

I was talking to an old friend yesterday and I said that it was most difficult for people to cope with the death of someone young. My friend had the kindness to point out that he and I had long passed the point — we’re both fifty-two — where we could die “young.” As he put it, if either of us died tomorrow, it could be said that we died “old enough.” That made me feel much better.
To what degree do you fear this idea of death? And it really is only an idea, since we really don’t know what happens afterward. Do we really go up to some place called heaven? Have you ever wondered what language is spoken in heaven?

Do we just cease to be? Does the notion of “me” just evaporate into nothingness? Do we merge with one universal spirit? Or is it something that nobody has ever thought of? Are we reincarnated?

Is any of this really worth worrying about, especially when worrying about death is most pointedly time away from being in life?

Are some of us so out of life, so out of our own hearts, so disconnected from our souls and our environment that death might not really be all that noticeable? It might even be a much-needed improvement on our present condition.

Maybe death is really the opposite of what we think it is. Most of us think of death as having the plug pulled out of the socket, but perhaps it is the other way around. It could be the time, at last, when we are fully plugged in. In the end, we spend a hell of a lot more time not here than we do here.

I like to think of myself as swimming deeply in life — that is, being as deep in it as possible while still staying afloat. I often feel like I am part of a lake that has been frozen over. And I look up through the beautiful blue white ice and see all these people just skating on the surface of it. They either have no idea that life has more depth to it, or, as is usually the case, they are just plain terrified of the whole thing.

Occasionally, and actually all too often, these people will try to talk to me. Now, I understand them quite well, although they bore the hell out of me. Often they ask my advice. My best advice is that they should try swimming in life, not just skating on the surface.

They never seem to understand this. But I have been where they are, so I can understand them. That’s fine. I have little need to be understood by any one other than the small number of people that I genuinely know and care about.

But these people who skate above me, and like to think that they are above me, don’t understand me. Sometimes, they have a compulsion to believe they know who I am, so they project images onto me. Most of the time their image of me isn’t accurate — but that’s okay with me; I find it all kind of interesting.

The one thing that I wish I could change about myself is to have more tolerance for all of you who just skate the surface of life. Even if you never really taste most of it, smell most of it, hear most of it, touch most of it or feel most of it.

How often do you really laugh at the whole wonderful disaster that is life? How often do you let yourself roar at it, or just cry over it? Probably not often enough, I think.

It occurs to me that if I died tomorrow, Wednesday might be pretty interesting. My biggest regret about possibly dying tomorrow is that there are people who would miss me and who would feel bad. (On the other hand, I think that if I died tomorrow, it would make my sister-in-law kind of happy. I don’t mind that at all; it’s probably the least I could do for her. And actually, since she has never chosen to actually see me, she probably wouldn’t even notice.)

We owe the idea of death a great deal. Like I said, it is only a concept, an idea. For instance, if it weren’t for the idea of death, there would not now, nor ever have been, religion. All religions come out of the desire to help people cope with the suffering of life and with the idea of death. I have never encountered a religion yet in which the central tenet was not an attempt to make the idea of death less scary.

I wrote a poem a long time ago. It goes like this: “I am a wave, God is the ocean.”
That’s the poem. It’s based on a metaphor in which the ocean is life.
A wave slowly rises, crests, then falls back to the sea. When the wave disappears, we’re left to wonder whether it died or just returned to where it came from? Is it possible that our lives are the same as waves on the sea, born as small swells and then rising, bursting with energy, then slowly and quickly crashing back to sea? Some waves appear to travel to a shore and then end, while some live and end without ever seeing a shore. Does it matter, really?

Just for today, spend some time with the idea of your own mortality. You may notice that it leads to spending more and better time with the fact of your living.

The most difficult time of life or aspect of life is caring for the terminally ill. How many of you are in a situation like that? It’s a lonely, burdensome job. It puts you face to face, on a daily basis, with the fact of your impending loss. And very often, you are taking care of a loved one who is no longer the person that you used to know so well.

It requires such an enormous degree of selflessness. You give all that you can, but there may be no one to give to you. There are, though, some important things that you can do for yourself to make this easier.

The first is to come to terms with the situation. Accept what is going on. There is no suffering quite like the suffering that we experience when we resist reality.

Second, realize that it is okay for you to set boundaries based on what you need. Someone terminally ill can be very demanding. You need to remember to take care of yourself, too. Try to find someone with whom you can honestly talk about what you’re going through. It’s really important to air your feelings and to be heard.

Third, don’t be too embarrassed or fearful to ask for help. Find out what kind of visiting nurse programs are out there that can help relieve you when you need it. It is an absolute necessity that you get some time away to yourself when you can.

Finally, acknowledge what you are feeling. You may have feelings that you think are inappropriate — like anger, irritation and frustration. They are perfectly normal, and having those feelings in no way suggests that you love the person you are caring for any less.

And remember that even during the most difficult of circumstances, there are times of tenderness that can be treasured.

My father died a little more than two years ago. He really just died from old age, but it took him awhile to do it. He was basically an invalid for his final four years. It was like watching a light slowly go out.

But of all my memories of my father, there is one that I am fondest of. During this period I would visit my parents’ house in New York. He and I would watch TV, and he would just hold my hand.
Taking care of my father on a daily basis was a full-time job, and it was very tough on my mother. She never complained, but for years she could barely get any time to herself. It’s not easy. But I reckon that this is the kind of selflessness we commit to when we get married — at least, my mother did.

So often, the caretaker endures more suffering than the person being cared for, and it’s important to take that into account. If you know someone who is caring for another, call them up and offer to take their place for a couple of hours. It is only a couple of hours for you, but it may be a blessed relief for them.

If you do, you may have to face your own fears and anxieties about being with someone you know is going to die — this can be a good thing. Chances are you might be more fearful than they are. They know they are about to move on, and you may have been avoiding that idea your whole life. Take this opportunity to come to grips with your mortality.

I’m actually not afraid of death. I’ve come close to dying a number of times and have helped a number of people through their process of dying. Those times when friends have asked me to be with them through that trip have been the greatest gifts ever given to me.

I’ve been with folks who go through a crisis of faith and then regain it, stronger and more durable than before.

I had a dear friend named Robin die at thirty-five. She had promised her best friend that after she died, she would find a way to tell her friend that she was okay. Well, she died and her friend was crushed — she was inconsolable the rest of that day and into the next day. The following afternoon she was in her kitchen washing dishes and the window was open. A robin lit on the windowsill and started singing. That bird stayed there for two hours. Now, maybe it was just a bird sitting on a sill — but maybe it was more than that. I can tell you that for this woman, it made her friend’s death a little more bearable.

Some people have a belief system that enables them to believe that they know exactly what happens after death. Some of us, like me, don’t really know what happens. But I have faith that it’s going to be okay. After all, isn’t that what faith is? The belief that everything is going to turn out okay?

There have been amazing studies done with people who have “returned from the dead” — you know, people who are clinically dead for a minute or so and then make it back. The psychologist Elizabeth Kubler Ross has been studying these folks — along with death and dying — for more than twenty years. What is remarkable is that they all describe the same experience. You have probably heard the stories.

Many people describe the moment of death as an out-of-body experience. They see themselves and everyone around them from above. Many also describe being in a tunnel that is blue, with a bright light at the end of it and deceased relatives waving to them or waiting for them at the end of the tunnel.

(Personally, one of my worst nightmares is that I’ll die and find myself in the Lincoln Tunnel with the IRS waiting for me at the other end. But then, I can be a real pessimist.)

A long time ago, I smoked weed — that’s marijuana for those of you who don’t know — when I was with a group of friends and we all decided that whenever one of us died, that person would be cremated and then we would roll some of their ashes in some really good weed and smoke them. Inhale them into ourselves. I’ve since lost track of those guys, but I still find the idea kind of interesting.

I love the ocean, so I want my ashes dropped into the Pacific.

I’ll close with a story. When my father was about seventy-five, I was visiting him. We were sitting outside and I looked at him and said, “Pop, you’re an old man.” He then looked at me like I was an idiot — a look that I was very used to. I pressed on and asked what it was like for him, looking back at all those years.

Now, at seventy-five, my old man had lived a life. He lived through the Depression, served five years in the Army during World War II, had a wonderful wife for more than fifty-five years, worked six days a week during most of that time, raised three children and saw three grandchildren born.

So I asked what it was like for him. My old man took off his cap, scratched his head looked at me and said, “You know, I didn’t know it would go by so fast.”

That statement was a gift from him to me. It made me realize that should I live to be a hundred — which given who I am is very unlikely — I’ll look back and it will all seem like it just took a second.

So the real question is, how do I want that second to have been for me and for those I care about?

Think about it.

America is, needless to say, a unique place in many ways. One of the ways we’re unique is in our attitude toward death and dying.

For example, there is a funeral home in California that puts the body in an outdoor kiosk with a glass pane on top — a drive-through lane allows the bereaved to just cruise through, pay their respects and drive on. Admittedly, California is a car culture, but this takes it to a rather bizarre extreme. It’s a good illustration of my belief that we’re just not really comfortable with the notion of death in this country.

Several years ago, I felt deeply privileged when a dying friend — a born-again Christian minister — asked me to stay by her side during her last few weeks on earth. At her memorial service, the minister described my friend as standing in a gown bedecked by jewels standing next to our lord Jesus. The minister went on to say that we should not cry for my friend, for she lives on in heaven.

I went home with her mother after the service and we sat at her kitchen table drinking tea. I saw such agony in her eyes, such pain. She was a body bursting with tears. I looked into her eyes and asked why she wasn’t allowing herself to cry — I could see the tears struggling to come out.
She responded that the minister had said not to cry because her daughter was alive in heaven. My response was to tell her that wherever her daughter was, she wasn’t here anymore and we all had a need to grieve over the loss of someone we love. I told her that crying was a good and healthy thing. She looked at me and asked if that was really true. I told her that it was. She started to cry and I held her. She cried for three days.

Because we’re so out of touch with the reality of dying and death, we get confused about how to grieve or what the purpose of grieving really is. We all die. I will, you will, as will everyone you know or have ever known. Yet, in this country, we are remarkably unprepared for death and dying.

I have a wonderful parable to share about death.

Once, there was a very devout Jew who lived in New York. His great dream was to meet a very famous rabbi who lived in Europe. But our man was very poor, and was only able to save a little bit from his earnings each year in order to someday make the trip. Finally, after many years had passed, he had saved enough to pay for passage to Europe. He had the rabbi’s address, so he packed a small valise and set off on his journal.

After several days of travel, he found the rabbi’s residence. It was a small, two-story house. He knocked on the door and a woman answered. He asked her if he could see the rabbi. The woman pointed to a staircase and indicated that the rabbi lived upstairs.

At the top of the stairs was a plain door. The man knocked on the door, and a frail voice answered. Our man opened the door and saw a small bed, a table and little else. The great rabbi was sitting at the table, reading from the light of a small lamp.
They greeted each other, and then the traveler began talking to the rabbi. “I don’t understand, rabbi. You are such a great man, but you have so little.”
The rabbi smiled and pointed at the man’s small valise and said, “Well, so do you.”
The man responded, “But I am only traveling through.”
The rabbi smiled at him and said, “But so am I, my son — so am I.”

We are all just traveling through life, and it’s amazing how some folks will just go out of their way to spoil our little outing here.

America keeps trying to sell us immortality. Buy this, buy that — the more you own, the longer you’ll live.

Years ago, I spent an evening with one of America’s wealthiest men. This man was born with a platinum spoon in his mouth. And all his life, he had never met a problem that he could not pay to go away. About six months before we met, his son had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, leaving this man in a massive state of confusion because all of his money could not make that problem just go away.

We all try not to think about it. Bringing up death in a conversation is considered impolite. Yet, by burying our heads in the sand regarding our own mortality, we forget how important it is to love life and to really live life.

None of us are surprised when we hear the story of someone who has nearly died. They always say the same thing when asked how the experience has changed them: they talk about how little things mean so much more to them now, about how much more important it is to spend time with their family, about how precious each moment is.

But when someone we care for dies or gets terminally ill, so many of us are surprised. It’s as though we really never believed this could happen.

I’ve told you the story of the ninety-year-old woman who, when she realized she was dying, said, “How could this happen to me? Just bad luck I guess.”

How many of you are willing to go eyeball to eyeball with the idea of death and finally come to terms with it?

Personally, I see the whole thing like this: I am a wave and God is the ocean.
It’s a metaphor. Let me explain.

I love the ocean. Birth is like that little roll of water forming on the ocean at the beginning of a wave. At first, it’s a slight, formless rising in the water. As it rises higher, the child begins to grow and take his or her own particular physical shape and the formation of a unique personality begins. Then the roll begins to look like a wave as it gets bigger and keeps growing. Finally, it begins to have a crest and is all broiling bubbles and power — this is adulthood, the person manifesting his or her strength, showing the world what he or she can do.

Somewhere along the line, the wave or the person looks around and sees all these other waves and says “I am me and I stand alone.” Long ago, the wave/person forgot the ocean it arose from in the first place. It thinks of itself as fully unique and separate, separate from its source, separate from others of its kind and ultimately separate from its own nature.

But just then, the energy that had powered it diminishes and it begins to fall. It falls back toward the sea, then goes completely back to the ocean, gone forever. At the same time, it has gone back to what it has always been: water in the ocean.

While this cycle is happening, you notice another small swelling elsewhere in the ocean. It’s the birth of another wave — another life doing what it is meant to do.

That’s my view of life. Life and death are part of the same cycle. Death is just a matter of returning to where we came from in the first place.

Now, that’s not to say there aren’t great tragedies. The greatest is that of a child dying — really, anyone dying before his or her parents could be considered a tragedy. There is almost no solace for that.

And yet, there can be. I had a wonderful friend who died of leukemia at sixteen. He had leukemia all his life. But he was still a champion swimmer and a good student. He was full of life, and at a young age he came to terms with his condition. He decided that there was truth to the notion that each moment is a choice between love and fear. And he chose love.

A week before he actually died, he gathered all his friends together — he had so many of them — not to say goodbye, but to help them. He wanted to help them be less afraid of what he was going through. In his sixteen years, he lived more and knew more than many people I know who live for sixty years.

His father was immersed in grief for more than a year. But he was very wise, and allowed himself to feel those feelings. Then, slowly, he forced himself out of it. He held onto the memory of his son, but as best as he could, he let go of the pain of loss and was able to get on with his living. That’s what the process of grieving allows us to do.

My young friend’s mother who wouldn’t let herself cry also couldn’t let go — she just couldn’t let go of her grief for her daughter, and she ultimately sank into a five-year depression.

Grief manifests itself in many ways, but it’s our job to honor it and let it do its work with us. In the end, grief is a gift that enables us to let go of our loss and enables us to go on.

As much as I wanted to talk about other things and not recognize the six-month anniversary of September 11, it just isn’t possible. That date and those events are more alive in my mind than I would have expected, and that’s why it demands to be acknowledged.

It’s an event that, temporarily anyway, changed our perception of the world. I think it will still be some time before we return to the understanding that life goes on and our wonder at just how extraordinary our communities and our country are comes back to us.

I have often been a critic of my country’s culture and government; sometimes, when I was younger, I lost the idea of what is also great about America.

Hindus and Muslims are still rioting in India with fatal regularity; neighbors slaughter each other over ancient tribal and irrational impulses. That kind of hatred and violence is still prevalent in Africa, in Serbia and other parts of Eastern Europe. The Middle East, too, seems to breed hatred and intolerance.

When it was assured that the attacks of six months ago had been committed by Islamic fundamentalists, I found myself very worried about how we in our communities would treat our many Muslim neighbors. What happened, in fact, was a great testament to America’s comfort with its extraordinary diversity and, I think, our unique compassion for others. Around the country, there were a few horrible attacks on innocent Muslim citizens. But, as reported by the American Muslim community, for each of those attacks there were tens of thousands of acts of kindness extended from non-Muslims to their Muslim neighbors.

Isn’t it interesting that, simultaneous with the rage and bloodlust that some felt, we also, as a country, dug deep and allowed ourselves to be compassionate?

Here in the Hudson Valley — a community that suffered the great losses that day in New York — there was not one attack against a Muslim neighbor.

During difficult times, we were reminded that heroism is found in the acts of ordinary human beings.

There were many heroes that terrible day. Among our police and firefighters there were many, many acts of heroism performed. And I don’t mean to lessen what they did — but they simply did what they were trained to do.

A hero, to me, is someone who does something for which they have to dig very deep into themselves. An act of bravery so selfless, I wonder if I could have done the same thing if placed in the same position.

There were heroes like that on Flight 93 out of Pittsburgh headed for San Francisco. These were people who, in the end, knowingly gave their lives to save others.

One name from that flight comes to mind: Todd Beamer.
Flight 93 was still in the air after the three attacks, so these passengers knew that their plane had been hijacked. Through phone calls to loved ones, they also knew of the other attacks, and so they also knew what the hijackers of their plane intended to do. There was so little time for these few people to react, to say goodbye to their loved ones and then form a plan of action.

By the time the passengers learn of their fate, Flight 93 had already veered off its flight plan and was headed toward our capitol.

In a matter of minutes, the passengers composed and organized themselves, evolving from a group of frightened individuals into a team of warriors with a mission.
The last words heard from one of these men was simply, “Okay, let’s roll.”

It is unlikely that we will ever know the facts of those last few minutes on Flight 93. What we do know is that these brave souls succeeded — that flight didn’t make it to the intended target. Instead, it went down in an empty field in the rolling hills of Western Pennsylvania. We can never know how many lives these men saved, we can only know of the loss of the forty-three folks on that plane.

The courage of these people is, for me, one of those things that forces me to look inward, to ask myself, “Could I have overcome such fear and terror to act on behalf of others?” Of course, it’s impossible to know the answer. And yet, on the other hand, it is reassuring to know that such courage on the part of a group of ordinary people suggests that the capacity for such courage and selflessness must exist in all of us.

Tragedy must be given meaning and purpose by us all, and I think it can be found in what we learn about ourselves and others. Before 9/11, I didn’t need to learn about how terrible fanaticism is; I had no need to be reminded of the human capacity for violence and evil. After all, there are constant reminders of that everywhere we look. But we all do need to be reminded how much compassion and courage can really do.

One of the great dangers of evil is how we respond to it. If we allow our fear of it to rule us, we can transform ourselves into a mirror image of that which harmed us. You can see that happening in the ever-escalating and seemingly endless violence between the Jews and the Palestinians in Israel.

Americans, I’m proud to say, have so far avoided this. Too many of us just decided what we needed was to know more about this religion, so we sought to understand and to learn.
Most think of America as this great experiment in democracy. For a long time, I have also thought of our country as being a great experiment in diversity, too. Can people of different cultures live in peace with each other and even thrive from the interactions with each other?

As I look around the world today and throughout history, the horrors of tribal warfare stand out. Yet, here in this country, with more different kinds of people from more places than it is impossible to count, we have somehow found a new way to embrace difference.

Now, we heal, we recover, we go on.

My mind regularly dwells on the experience of those brave people on Flight 93 and the understanding of their ordinariness. Their example reminds us to choose selflessness, to choose bravery in the face of incredible odds and to remember that this capacity lies in all of us. In seeing that, we can find it in ourselves.

What an amazing country this is. I recently read a book about three of our founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and James Madison. While the book focused on these three, it really was about the 1787 Constitutional Convention, during which pen was put to paper and a document was created, the Constitution of the United States of America. Its very existence makes us unique in the history of the world. It proclaimed that this country is governed not by a person or a group but by laws. The brilliance of the Constitution is staggering. The fact that it has stood the trials of 225 years is staggering; wonderfully so.

Did you know that the Constitutional Convention was characterized by bitter arguments and the occasional fist fight? The genius of our Constitution arose out of one very messy, violently argumentative convention. At some point, just about everybody there accused everybody else of trying to destroy our young republic. In trying times, it’s useful to recall that.

We are a government formed and maintained by thoughtful and wise laws set down a long time ago. The Constitution ensures that we are not governed by passions or emotions of the moment, but by thoughtful considerations rooted not in government propaganda, but public debate and democratic choice.

The founding fathers’ great contribution was the creation of a government that not only promised that power would be in the hands of the people governed, but created a system of checks and balances that guaranteed it. But that guarantee is only as good and solid and viable when the people understand their responsibilities to it.

They created three branches of government to ensure that each aspect of rule would be tempered by two others. They created a congress with two houses — and each house, the House of Representatives and the Senate, would be there to temper the other.

The true genius of the founding fathers was their understanding of the inherent dangers of power. With that genius they insured that government could never get out of hand. That is why we have elections every two and four years. The founding fathers dictated that the power of the presidency was so great, no one person should be entrusted with it for more than four years at a time.

They really distrusted power a lot. So, we have the Fifth Amendment, the guarantee that no person can be forced to testify against themselves. They thought this provision would best protect the rights of the accused.

They established a legal system rooted in trials by juries of peers, not trials by government officials. These men trusted “we the people,” and had a healthy distrust of government — even the one that they were working to create. If you read the Constitution and its history, it is so apparent that the founding fathers wanted us to distrust, to question and to actively hold our government accountable because they knew that power was a dangerous thing.

Every democracy in the world has modeled its creation on our set of laws. Yet, during the history of our country, there have been many times when the Constitution has been kicked around. These were times of fear and anger. It was ignored outright throughout seventy years of slavery, and then during another 100 years during which black Americans were disenfranchised. It was ignored during the “red scare” of the fifties. It was ignored at the beginning of the Second World War, when we put Japanese-Americans into internment camps.

It was ignored when we devoted ten years to a war in Vietnam that was never ratified by Congress, never actually decided on by the American people. A war in which 15,000 young Americans died without the people of the United States ever discussing it or voting for it, as our Constitution demands.

What proves that the Constitution is so extraordinary is how much damage we have inflicted on ourselves when we’ve ignored it.

Good governance requires thoughtfulness, not passion. It demands that the important political decisions that affect our lives are made by we the people, and not just a few that we have temporarily placed in power. It suggests that we must always be vigilant against abuses of power by those we elect.

There has never been a time when it was appropriate to ignore the wisdom in that document. But people may argue for it, hoping to capitalize on the fear and anger of the times.

Is this one of those times?

I too am in mourning over the events of 9/11. I also know that fear may be the most seductive of all human emotions. How quickly we surrender to it, and in surrendering we react, we run, we attack, we get irrational, and we create the fertile soil for self-righteousness, hate and a violence that may know no bounds.

I have been struggling with whether, and then how, to express my thoughts, feelings and knowledge about what I consider the dangerous and foolhardy war that we are engaged in without disrespecting or causing pain to many of us here in the Hudson Valley who directly suffered from these attacks. There are so many now mired in grief, sadness, loss, anger and rage.

Can I argue that what we are doing in response to our grief and our fear is terribly wrong?
Can I suggest to each of you to remember what you already know, that decisions made in the heat of passion are almost always bad and destructive decisions?
Should the questioning and challenging of what our country is doing right now wait until it is more acceptable? Will that be too late?
Is a state of anger and fear a sound place from which to decide to go to war?

When I was a civil rights organizer and anti-war activist during the Vietnam War, my friends and I were regularly called un-American. This month, a new phrase has emerged for those of us who question what our country is doing, who question the propaganda machine of the most powerful nation the world has ever known. Apparently, I have evolved from being merely un-American and become downright anti-American.

It’s like some new kind of propaganda evolution. Attacking dissenters during the civil rights and antiwar movement of the ‘60s didn’t stop us. Actually, it made people like me even more determined. It is as though the powers decided that calling those who disagree un-American wasn’t very effective, so they have now decided to up the ante by calling us anti-American.
To that, my immediate answer is that you can take your anti-American label and shove it in the very same place I suggested you shove the idea that dissent was un-American thirty-five years ago.

And pal, my grief for those we lost is just as powerful as yours. But my commitment to figuring out what is ultimately best for this country (especially in light of our history in Central Asia as well as the Arabian Peninsula) is equally as strong.

Is it anti-American to demand to know what is really going on here and how it began?
Is what this particular government doing in my name right or wrong?

It’s wrong, and not just morally. Given what the government says its strategic goals are, it just takes a bit of common sense to say that they are either lying about those goals and have other agendas at work or they are setting us up to accept what we would not normally accept as rational, critical, thinking citizens.

In Vietnam, we sent in a few advisors, then a few more. We accepted a few casualties, then a few more. Then they said — and this was eventually proven to be a State Department-sponsored lie — that two small torpedo boats had attacked an American destroyer that just happened to be in their waters. So, we got all riled up and sent 100,000 combat troops, which grew to become 500,000 troops. Our successes from there on out were measured in body counts. A few million dead Vietnamese men, women and children and 55,000 dead U.S. troops later, and all we said was “Oops.”

They start out slowly, these wars — just bombing selected targets and well, you know, in war civilians will get killed. “But what can we do?” we ask. We have to do something. And while we aren’t really flushing out the terrorists who we believe are living among the people we are bombing, we’ll still send in a few more bombs and a few more military personnel. Oh well, look, the terrorists are really over there, so maybe we need to drop just a few bombs on, let’s say, Iraq. And oops, some Iranian shot at one of our B-52s, so we’ll drop a few bombs on them, too, just a few.

Most Americans know that there are a lot of people in the world who really do hate us. Many of them are in Central Asia and South America. Most Americans actually believe that people hate us because we are a free democracy. That’s what our government tells us, anyway. There are tens of millions who hate us because we are free.

Oh really? Is that true? Is it possible that there may be valid historic reasons having to do with the role that the U.S. has played in those regions which has led the people there to dislike us? If we took the time to study just a bit of history, we might understand what is going on and just perhaps begin to do things that diminish (instead of increase) that hatred, and thereby reduce the possibility of more attacks like the ones we just suffered.

There have always been those who capitalize on fear and hatred. This cat Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network are doing pretty well at that. Their goal is pretty straightforward, but what’s important to understand is that they rely heavily on our assistance.

Their goal is to stimulate a global war between Islam and the West. In order to do that, they would have to get a lot of the one-and-a-half billion Muslims in the world to distrust and hate the U.S. Getting the U.S. to retaliate is the first part of their plan.

We claim to be bombing Afghanistan to flush out the terrorist cells we think are there. This administration says that this is our goal. The U.S. appears to be winning a battle here. We’re not sure what it is, but that many bombs dropped on that small of a country must be winning something.

On the other hand, judging by the reactions in many parts of the world to our efforts in Afghanistan, the bad guys may actually be winning the war.

I have no doubt that the terrorists held two celebrations: first, a small party when they knew that they had successfully attacked the heart of America, and then a real party when the U.S. started bombing Afghanistan, a country of poverty-stricken shepherds living under a repressive regime who we just happened to support not all that long ago.

By the way, did you know that the Caspian Sea region has what may well be the world’s largest supply of oil reserves? The problem lies in getting it out. Afghanistan occupies a strategic position between the Caspian and the huge markets of the Indian subcontinent and East Asia. It’s prime territory for building pipelines. Check out Unocal Oil’s relationship to American foreign policy.

While you are checking out Unocal, also check out a company called Raytheon. They make missiles. Just check its current stock valuation. Hey, investing in war always pays off.
There are those of you who would say, “Just who does Terry Roberts think he is, challenging the word, the trust of our government and our military!”
I’ll tell you who I am: anti-American!

I’m a guy who understands why our founding fathers insisted that if we go to war, we are supposed to have our representatives in Congress decide it. This guy understands why the framers of the Constitution were so adamant that the military be subservient to civilians. Oil wasn’t a big deal in 1777, so they didn’t contemplate the idea that the government could become subservient to things like big oil.

But they insisted on freedom of speech and assembly, because they knew how important dissent was to sustain freedom and democracy.

How do I know this stuff? I study it. It makes me crazy that most of my neighbors, even today, spend more time studying which television to buy than the history of this country’s role around the world.

I hate to admit it, but at times, I think that our commitment to democracy and freedom is secondary to our collective commitment to ignorance.

The First World War began with the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand by some wacko terrorist. At the time, nobody knew who the Archduke Ferdinand was. More than a million deaths later, we all knew his name. The power of a nuclear bomb begins with one atom splitting another. A very small event. Then two atoms split into four, and it just keeps going until the universe is obliterated. Wars begin in the same way.

The builders of America, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, John Madison, John Adams and the others were pretty explicit about where our allegiance belongs. And it’s not to any particular temporary governing group, such as George Bush and Dick “Oilhead” Cheney. No, those cats knew that our allegiance had to be to a set of principles laid out in that inspired document, the United States Constitution. That’s what gets my allegiance.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men (and we need to add women) are created equal.” It’s a powerful statement. If that’s true, it means all people, and all would include the very same people who seem to hate us. If they are as equally as human as we are, is it possible that there are reasons behind their hatred?

In the end, freedom and democracy are only as strong as our commitment to being knowledgeable about those things our government does that affect our lives and the lives of others.

Until we figure this out, I will cut you what I think is a reasonable deal: you can feel free to call me anti-American, as long as I can feel free to call you stupid

It was fairly late that night in October 1967. There were no cars, no people. My then-wife Jane and I were about to cross a main street when a car suddenly appeared and swerved to a stop. Two big guys got out. They both had fresh buzz cuts and looked like Marines. One of them had a hammer in his hand. One end of the hammerhead was normal, and the other end was a sharp pick-like thing. They came toward us. One of them circled around to my back, as the one with the hammer came straight at me. Jane tried to position herself between me and the one with the hammer, but was just thrown aside. This gave me time to turn to the other who was coming at me from behind.

Both of them were screaming that they were going to kill me. I pivoted and punched the one behind me. He went down. The other one was still coming at me with that hammer, so I started talking. I don’t even remember what I said, but it stopped them both. The one with the hammer spoke back to me.

Turns out, they were Marines who had just gotten orders to go to Vietnam. He didn’t admit it, but they were afraid and they had been recruited by some college guys to kill me.

This was in Norman, Oklahoma, home of the University of Oklahoma, where I was the Southwest Regional Organizer for an antiwar organization. I had left school and committed my life to ending the war in Vietnam. At that time, the vast majority of Americans wholeheartedly supported the war. The little bit they knew about it came from what they saw on television. And the news just parroted whatever the U.S. Army and the government told them. By that time, in 1967, I had lost count of the number of times I had been called unpatriotic, un-American, a communist and even a traitor.

The first casualty of war is the truth — the rest of the casualties, unfortunately, are human beings.

I came to oppose what the U.S. was doing in Vietnam rather slowly. Most of my friends from the neighborhood I had grown up in served in the military. They were drafted. My friends affectionately called me “college boy.” I was the only one able to go to college, and therefore get a deferment from the service. By the early fall of 1966, I was as gung-ho about killing the Vietnamese as every other good American. Then, a series of peculiar things happened.

Just by circumstance, I stumbled on a book. It was an anthology of articles about the war. It piqued my curiosity, so I read more. I began listening to the news in a new way. I studied the history of Vietnam and the U.S. role in Southeast Asia through the years. I learned things not found on television or in newspapers. The real story was not to be found in our government’s rationalizations about the war. It was not found in the minds of most Americans, who were sending their children there to fight and die. The truth was that there was no reason for us to be in that country or that part of the world. It was over the course of nearly a decade that we were responsible for the slaughter of more than a million men, women and children, along with the loss of 55,000 young American lives.

Make no mistake: knowing the truth and trying to make others aware of it can be a dangerous business. My friend George Vizzard down in Austin, Texas, was murdered because he was an antiwar organizer. As an anti-war activist, I was arrested a half-dozen times, including in Chicago, where I was one of the organizers of the now-infamous demonstrations during the 1968 Democratic Convention.

From 1968 through 1970, I lived in fear and frustration. Fear that ignorance would kill me, and the frustration that nothing I, and the other folks I was working with, did to end the war seemed to impact American public opinion. At the time, few Americans could even find Vietnam on a map, but they were willing to hammer people like me for wanting to end the carnage.

And yesterday, we unleashed the dogs of war again — this time in Afghanistan.

It was B-52s that flew yesterday — planes that are among the oldest in our arsenal. I remember the B-52 well. They are really large warplanes that carry enormous bomb payloads. They fly very, very high. High enough to be safe from antiaircraft weaponry. High enough that they cannot actually see what they are bombing. Each one drops lots of bombs. In those days they called it carpet-bombing: pick a large area and destroy everything and anything down there, way down there.

I first came to oppose the war in Vietnam due to my curiosity about what was really happening over there. And some of those same questions bother me now.

They’re calling it Operation Enduring Freedom. It is, among other things, an alliance with a dozen dictatorships, including several monarchies, one of them being Saudi Arabia. This is the very same country that sponsors the form of fundamentalist Islam that created minds like Osama bin Laden. Did you know that?

So, the question for me today is: can I get you curious about what’s really going on? Are there those of you, like me, who demand some deeper understanding of what is going on?

As of this morning, almost ninety percent of America supports what we did yesterday.

When did the U.S. ever claim that this government called the Taliban was directly involved in the attack against us?

Yesterday, our government officials suggested that we have to accept that war involves killing civilians. They call it “collateral damage.”

Pal, I don’t have to accept anything.

Ask yourself what you know about the history of Christianity in the west and Islam in the Middle East and throughout the Arabian Peninsula. What do you know? It is important to know at least something about the history between these two religions that leads to realities like this.
What were the Crusades? They ended with the European seizure of Jerusalem around 1021. Why do most Arabic peoples know more about the Crusades and their history in general than we do?
Here are some other questions to consider: Why did the U.S. overthrow the first democracy that Iran ever knew back in 1954 and install a young military officer who went on to become the dictator and brutal despot we knew as the Shah of Iran?

Why did we invade the Dominican Republic in 1964?
Why did we overthrow the democratically elected government of Chile and install a military dictatorship in 1973?
Why does much of the world know more about the history of U.S. policies than the average American?
Why, when virtually all of our allies disagree with us, do we maintain sanctions against Iraq?

People are starving and unnecessarily dying of disease there for lack of medicine. At the same time, those who control that country live as well as they did before the Gulf War.

Did the U.S. seek to destroy the Ayatollah’s regime in 1979? How did Iranians feel about that? How did they feel about U.S. support for Iraq during the bloody war between Iraq and Iran in the ‘80s? Why are so many Arabic Muslims angry at the continued U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, home to the two holiest sites in Islam, Mecca and Medina? What is Mecca? What is Medina? Should we know the answers?

Is seeking historical and political truth the first casualty of war? If so, what are we left with? What exactly is being endured by Operation Enduring Freedom?

More questions to think about: Who are the Taliban and how did they come to power? What happened in Afghanistan immediately after the Soviets left after losing 15,000 of their children in their version of Vietnam?

I have some answers. When they left in 1989, the Soviets had destroyed the government of Afghanistan. At the end of that war, Afghanistan became a nation of fiefdoms ruled by vile and violent warring thugs who were overthrown by the Taliban. The Taliban brought rule to a lawless place and generally united the country — but they were ruthless and unyielding in their application of Islamic law. The old warlords are now known as the Northern Alliance. Why is the U.S. expecting this group, which controls just five percent of Afghanistan, to save the day, when the Taliban has much more widespread support throughout the country? What is the real history here?

How much trouble am I getting in here by asking these questions?
Does my raising these issues in any way suggest that I don’t find the terrorist actions of September 11 as awful and despicable as any other American does?

Al-Qaeda is a global network of fundamentalist Islamic terrorists. These cats have allegiance to no nation — their only loyalty is to their warped version of their religion. They actually care less about the people of Afghanistan than we do.
And who do you think died in the inferno of exploding missiles and bombs yesterday?
And if what we are doing isn’t waging war on the people of Afghanistan, then what are we doing?
Are we better or worse citizens for questioning the choices made by our government?

Do you really buy the official answer that these terrorists are just crazed fanatics who hate our freedom? Maybe, just maybe, there is more to their rage than some ephemeral notion that they hate democracy.

These terrorists set a trap, and we just walked right into it.

Back in the ‘60s, we tried to build a movement against the war. What was one of our key recruitment tactics? We relied on the authorities to overreact. It worked every time.
Have we just begun to end the threat of terrorism, or just enacted a recruiting campaign for the likes of Osama bin Laden? One that’s beyond his best expectations?

Is it asking too much of my friends and neighbors to read between the lines of the news and to read a book or two as we go to war? Is it too much to ask that all informed citizens study what is really going on?

When we bury our heads in the ground, all we see is somebody else’s dirt. The truth is almost always found somewhere else.

When the dogs of war are unleashed, their fangs are not very selective.

If freedom is not about the right to dissent, then just what is it that we claim to be protecting?
What is to be learned by other wars against terrorism? The Israeli war against Palestinian terrorism? The British war against the IRA? The anti-terrorist war in Columbia? The Algerian terrorist war against colonial France in the ‘50s? Egypt’s war against the same terrorists who killed the peacemaker Anwar Sadat? These same Egyptian terrorists make up much of the core of bin Laden’s global terrorist network. If we look at these, what is to be learned? Does our war against Afghanistan suggest that our leaders have learned the right lessons?

Do you know that the Koran specifically forbids suicide? That it makes no mention of a paradise full of virgins? That it dictates that violence can only be used in self-defense? That it demands that non-combatants not be harmed in war?

If the goal of terrorism is to cause terror, what was our goal in the massive bombing operation yesterday? Can we expect people in other parts of the world will call us terrorists? Is seeking historical and political truth truly the first casualty of war? If so, what are we left with?

If freedom doesn’t demand that we think for ourselves, again just what is it we are protecting?
Memory is a funny thing. That October night in 1967 seems like yesterday. Maybe it

I woke up and heard the news on the radio. Still half asleep, I heard something about an explosion at the World Trade Center. Turning the television on, I saw two gaping, smoking holes in World Trade One — a building that was an old hangout of mine, a place where I used to meet with clients and friends.

Then the horrible, moment-by-moment time unfolded with the buildings’ collapses. The day began with disbelief and quickly moved to profound grief.

My heart goes out with a deep, deep ache to all of those people in our community who lost loved ones on 9/11. My heart goes out to a whole country of friends who are in a state of shock, near numbness. They are obsessively asking and asking again how this could happen.

Now, there are many out there who are trying to cope with a deep fear of what will come next, coupled with a fear that they will never not be afraid again. They worry that the sun won’t ever shine brightly again, that the green of the trees will never again lift their spirits, that a walk will never again comfort their souls.

I have lived through massive destruction caused by natural tragedies, earthquakes and fires in particular. In a sense, those tragedies are easier to cope with because there is no one, really, to blame. But when we are assaulted by other human beings with malevolent intent, with planning, with a desire to do us harm — we feel lost, the ground no longer feels solid under our feet, and even the air we breathe becomes something we distrust.

What has struck me most as I have spoken with my friends and loved ones all around the United States is how this experience has generated feelings for us that are shared by people all over the world. In some ways, people I know in other parts of the country are having a more difficult time then us here because they feel even more powerless.

It is a trauma beyond description, and one that has affected our immediate community, our country and much of the Western World.

The object of terrorists is to cause terror. Their goal is to cause us to feel fear and powerlessness in the face of that fear. Their intent is to destabilize our sense of security.

It grieves me to say this, but this time the bad guys won.

As I talk to people there are two questions that are ever present. The first is, “How could this happen?” And the second is, “How could anyone do something this evil?”

We have been blessed in this country in that we have been sheltered from so much of the evil that does exist in the world today.

As I said to my friend, WTBQ’s Jerry Boss, most people in this country are, for the first time in their lives, coming eyeball to eyeball with people who really hate us. And a lot of us are having a hard time accepting that. Jerry is a retired state cop and is no stranger to the belief that there are people out there with truly evil intent.

No doubt, the perpetrators of this act had political motivations and a hatred of things the United States has done in the Middle East. Our unyielding support of Israel, the current American military presence in the Arabian Peninsula and the sanctions against Iraq, just to name a few.

But what makes these acts truly terrifying is that the primary motivation of these fundamentalist Muslims is that they believe that they are fighting a holy war against all non-Muslims. This hatred extends to a hatred of all things Western, and in particular there’s a real hatred of the United States — for what they see as our indomitable power, for what they see as our decadence, for what they perceive as a country of evil, decadent infidels. They think we are evil.

Many people want to believe that these acts were committed by crazed individuals. We would like to believe that these awful acts could only have been committed by crazy people.

If only that were true. These acts were committed by a vast network of very sane people. People with very conscious intent. Patient people who have the ability to develop and implement a plan of extraordinary difficulty and detail, and to wait to strike until an opportune moment presents itself.

No, these are not crazy people. These are people who, if you met them on the street, would seem as normal as your next-door neighbor. And that fact makes it all that much more terrifying.
One of the most important books I have ever read is by the German philosopher Hannah Arendt. The title of the book is Eichmann in Jerusalem, or a Report on the Banality of Evil.

For those of you who don’t know who Adolf Eichmann was, he was the man Hitler had design and implement the genocide of Europe’s Jews. After the war, he escaped to Argentina. Sometime in the early ‘60s, the Israelis tracked him down and took him to Israel, where he was tried and ultimately hung for his war crimes. Arendt then wrote her book about this guy who had committed unspeakably terrible acts, but was also a family man, well liked by his friends and a seemingly all-around normal guy. The point of the book is that the greatest danger we face is that we expect monsters to look like monsters — but they don’t always. They really can and do look just like the man or woman next door.

That said, in this case, the people who did us harm do look different from many of us. Among my greatest fears is that we, ourselves, will fall into the kind of hatred that led the perpetrators of this atrocity to do what they did. Already throughout the United States, Arabic Muslims and even Arabic-looking people have been assaulted. When you unite ignorance with hate, bad things happen. Very bad things.

There are hundreds of millions of Muslims throughout the world today. We have many in our country, and many right here in our community. It’s important to know that the Koran does not allow for the kind of perversion that has just been committed.

It’s also important to know that these acts were committed by a group of Muslims that is tiny compared to the entire Muslim population. Simply: these are people who have perverted their own religion to fit the needs of their hate.

Over the years, I have known many Muslims, and they are folks no different from you or me. Most of them are, like us, immigrants to this country. Many are recent immigrants at that, and like all new immigrants they tend to have an even greater appreciation for the freedom and tolerance that this country offers. Let us not betray them, our neighbors. I am asking you to be proactive here. If you hear others talk about a Muslim in ways that are threatening, intervene and explain that hating a whole group of people for the acts of a few is dangerous.

So far, I am enormously proud that there have been no reports of such attacks in our community.
Another thing we need to do, even while working through our grief, is to understand how this hatred against the United States forms. There are places in the world today with great poverty, where the very concept of democracy is unknown. These places are fertile soil for the nurturance of hatred of those — like those of us in the United States — who are perceived as having more. Perhaps we need to pay more attention to these places and provide help and resources to these countries.

Meanwhile, here at home, please pay attention to your neighbors. Many of them face huge losses and haven’t yet begun to figure out how to cope. Each of us has the capacity, often beyond what we think we have, to help a friend in need.

A normal human response to a trauma like this is a profound sense of powerlessness.
For me, the way out of that was to come over here to WTBQ for a few hours a day to help with this station’s wall-to-wall coverage of the news.

My being in the newsroom allowed me to feel as though I was doing something useful. It made me feel less powerless about the situation.

The story of how this station came together last week is illustrative of just how very well our community can adapt and move quickly to do what needs to be done. Within an hour of the attack, WTBQ basically reorganized. Here, as everywhere, we were suddenly confronted with a new and different reality that demanded that we change our usual ways of operating.

The station changed its normal programming from music and talk to providing ‘round-the-clock news, and the station managers did it without missing a beat. Our advertisers and sponsors supported what had to be done and allowed us to suspend playing their advertisements. They understood that this was only appropriate for a radio station whose mission is our community.
I want to express my appreciation, and also commend the staff here at WTBQ for sticking to it, hour after hour, providing national and international news — and most importantly, news about our community here in the Hudson Valley.

In the newsroom, I’d like to thank Chris Cordani, Allison Dunne, Frank Lowell and Frank Truett. They did an extraordinary and, to me, heroic job last week.

There is another person who may have had the most difficult job, spending hour after hour on the other side of a glass wall from the newsroom at the controls, switching seamlessly from discussions here to different local and national news feeds. You rarely hear his voice but you received the benefits of his hard work — he’s my engineer and the man at the controls all week, Rich Ball. Thank you, Rich.

We now have three dominant generations in this country, each marked by pivotal and terrible historic moment. For my parents, it was December 7, 1941, the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor that brought us into World War II. For my generation, it was November 22, 1963, the assassination of John F. Kennedy. And now, for my daughter’s generation, it’s September 11, 2001. My kid lost something last week, something important, as I suspect so many young people throughout our community and our country did. She lost her innocence.

My daughter’s shock was profound, and I have had to talk to her almost daily, as her fear sometimes overwhelms her. She lives in Chicago. She thought that maybe it would help to get away from the news and take her dog for a walk, but every time she goes out for a walk, she sees the giant Sears Tower. And every time she sees that building, she imagines a plane crashing into it.

It will just take time for all of us, the whole country, to heal. But we are resilient. So many people have said to me that the world will never be the same.

But the truth is that it will be. The sun still rises and shines on us. The blue of the sky can still comfort us. We need this time to grieve and come to grips with what has happened. But time will begin to heal these wounds, and we will realize that we can still smell and enjoy a rose. We will discover that somehow, almost magically, life feels normal again.

This will happen. I suggest not rushing to try to get to a state of normality, but rather allowing this process to pass in the time that will be natural and unique to you. The most important thing is to keep talking about your experience, to get it out. Lean on a neighbor or allow a neighbor to lean on you.

And hopefully, we will carry some of what is new to us now into the next period of normalcy. Hopefully, we’ll maintain the desire to help others in need, to nurture and sustain our new realization that we are all really interconnected. What affects one, affects us

Man, I had some night last night! It could have been written by Dickens. I went to bed, fell asleep and was jolted awake by loud sounds. Sounds of chains rattling. When I opened my eyes, I was staring at, like, an apparition. It was this dude wrapped in old chains and boy, was this cat ugly. His face looked like a collection of mushrooms, topped by strands of rotting straw.

So I said, “Who the eff are you?”
He grimly replied, “Yo, I am the Ghost of Christmas Past.” I thought that if this guy smiled, his face would crack.
I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t dreaming, so I said, “Say what?”
He said, “The Ghost of Christmas past.”
I said, “Yeah, right.”
Mushroom Face then said, “Yeah, that’s right”

Next thing I knew, I was on a trip revisiting my life — in full color and in full detail. Man, that was something. I revisited some good times, but there were a lot more bad times. I saw how I had hurt others, and how many others had hurt me. There I was, in times of fun, but there were too many times of shame and pain and embarrassment.

Through all of this, my arrogance hit me in the face like a boulder, as did my tendency toward anger. I also got a good look at every fear that I had ever experienced. But there was no experience of the past I was able to avoid looking at with old Mushroom Face right next to me, his chains rattling and all.

This felt like it took fifty something years, but suddenly, I was back in my bedroom looking at the clock and only fifteen minutes had passed.

To say the least, I was pretty shaken up and a bit unhappy. All I could manage to say was “Wow.”
Mushroom Face, dour as ever, said, “Terry Roberts, that was your past, pal.”

I said, “Wow!” But this time, with more emphasis — I couldn’t think of anything else. I was not a happy camper.

Then Mushroom Face did the unexpected: all his chains just fell to the ground and he smiled and said, “Terry, that was your past. But it’s done, it’s gone, it doesn’t exist anymore, so just fuggetaboutit.”
I said, “Fuggetaboutit?”
He said, “Fuggetaboutit!”
Now, at this point, I had a line of questions piling up in my mind longer than the Christmas Eve line of customers at Wal-Mart. He sensed this and said, “Just forget about it”

Then old Mushroom Face disappeared, along with his chains.

You’d think that his trip would be enough for one night. I did, anyway. I somehow rolled over and fell asleep again.

But not for long, because soon enough there were chains again rattling there at the foot of my bed.
“He’s back again,” I thought to myself.

So I opened my eyes and there, at the foot of my bed, was another ugly dude. But it wasn’t Mushroom Face. This dude was also wrapped in chains, but he was fatter and his face looked like a group of prickly pear cactus, with thorns coming out of his head. (And here I’d thought Mushroom Face was ugly.) Just like Mushroom Face, Cactus Head wasn’t smiling either.

I managed to utter, “And just who the eff are you?”
Grimacing, Cactus Head said to me, as if I should know, “I am the Ghost of Christmas Future.”
“Right,” I said.
“Right,” he said.

And then, before I knew it, I’m gone again on just about the wildest trip I’ve ever taken. It was like this dude had flung me into my future, except that it wasn’t just one future life, it was thousands of possible future lives. I watched one unfold, then another and another — more and more, they just kept coming like a baseball-pitching machine run amuck.

Some future days were great, some were awful and some were mixed. There were even a few where I died the next day.

But they just kept coming, as though I was being shown every possible future that could be mine, depending on which of an infinite number of variables affected each one.

This experience seemed to go on for about 4,000 years, and all the time ugly Cactus Head was standing next to me, offering snide commentary and rattling his chains. To say the least, it was awesome and downright terrifying.

The next thing I knew, I was back laying in bed and according to my clock, only fifteen minutes had gone by.

I was out of breath, and could only come up with one comment: “Wow.”
“Wow,” ugly Cactus Head said. He was still standing at the foot of my bed.
Next thing I knew, this dude’s chains just fell off, and then he smiled.
“Cool,” I thought to myself.
Smiling, he said, “So, Terry those weren’t even all the possible futures for you, just a preview of some.”
After a short pause, he spoke again. “I’ve got some advice for you, pal.”
“You do?” I said.
“Yup,” he said as he picked his chains off the floor. “It’s just the future, so don’t worry about it.”
“Say what?” I asked.
Cactus Head actually grinned and then repeated himself. “Just don’t worry about it, pal.”
Now, I had a lot of questions for this cat. Wouldn’t you?
Sensing this, he said, “You have a lot of questions, don’t you?”
“You bet your ugly face I do,” I said.
But he just laughed and said, “Forget about ‘em and don’t worry about it.”
So much for my questions.

Then Cactus Head, chains and all, disappeared in a puff of odorless smoke.

So far, this night seemed to consist of two major league weird trips. They may have been dreams, but I didn’t think so. Both trips, I noticed, conveyed the same message: “Forget about it and don’t worry about it.”

This put me into a momentary state of deep intellectual reflection where my thoughts consisted, almost exclusively, of the single word “Wow.”

Now, I was seriously exhausted. To say the least, it had been a hell of a night, and it was only half past midnight. I needed some sleep, knowing that I had to be here to do my radio show today.
I figured nothing else could possibly happen, so I rolled over and instantly fell asleep.

The next thing I knew, I woke up to the near-overwhelming smell of night-blooming jasmine. “Oh no, not again” I thought.

I tried to just keep my eyes closed in hopes that it would just go away. But it didn’t.

Then I heard a kind of mellow voice that said, “Hey pal, you can’t keep your eyes closed forever.”
I got the feeling that whoever was behind this voice wasn’t leaving, so I opened my eyes and there he was, another apparition standing at the end of my bed.

Now this guy had a face like a giant sunflower, and instead of being wrapped in chains, he was wrapped in vines of flowers that gave off his odor.

I said, “Can you turn the odor down a notch or two?”
Sunflower Face laughed and said, “Hi, I’m the Ghost of Christmas Present.”
I didn’t say anything, so he repeated his introduction. “I’m the ghost of Christmas present.”
“Right,” I said.
“Right,” he said, and off we went again, me and Sunflower Face, through a universe that smelled like night-blooming jasmine.

The trip this time seemed a bit gentler. Now, I was just visiting everything that was going on in my life right now, starting with all the colors of life, which I had to admit was pretty cool.

Then we checked in on all of my friends and saw all the love in my life, all the suffering in me and the world and all the joy in the world.

I got to see all of it: my arrogance, my shame, my embarrassments. All of it. My daughter, my niece, my mother and sister, my dog and my parrot — they were all there.

This trip also seemed like it was lasting a lifetime, but before I knew it I was back in bed. Again, according to my clock, it had just been fifteen minutes and, predictably by now, old Sunflower Face was standing at the end of the bed.

I knew I had to say something, so I fell back on the reliable, “Wow, man.”
He said, “Did you pay attention, pal?”
I started to ask, “Pay attention to what?” but I stopped, because suddenly I was aware of how deeply quiet it was.
Through the window, moonlight gently flowed in, adding a glow to my bedroom. Looking out the window, I saw the twinkle of stars and the vast night sky.
I said to Sunflower Face, “Was I paying attention?”
He said, “Yup.”
I said, “Yeah, I was paying attention. And it was beautiful.”
Sunflower Face said, “Yup, it is beautiful. And it’s all going to be okay.”
“Wow,” I said.
Then, with a smile and a twinkle of the eye, ol’ Sunflower Face was gone, and only the smell of night-blooming jasmine remained.

Now, it was finally quiet and I was tired, but far from exhausted.
That’s this man’s Christmas Story, my friends.
The past is over and done with, so forget about it. The future doesn’t exist yet, so don’t worry about it.
It really is okay, all of it.
God bless you all.

Have you noticed how wonderfully we have stripped most holidays of their meaning?

For example, a week ago Monday was Labor Day. Now, for most of us, Labor Day does have meaning — it means a three-day weekend, the end of the summer and, of course, another national shop-’til-you-drop day. For me, it means more traffic in my little neighborhood, and it also means an acknowledgement of something bigger, grander and certainly more important.
I wonder how many young people even see the word “labor” in “Labor Day.”

How many of you know who John Lewis was? What the IWW was? Who Walter Reuther was? What the Great Flint Sit-Down Strike was and why is it so important to our history? What happened when they tried to organize the Colorado miners? What the Centralia Washington Massacre was? Who Joe Hill was and why Joan Baez sang about him? Who Sacco and Vanzetti were?

Does Labor Day have anything to do with the fact that workers fought for and finally, in 1886, won an eight-hour workday?

Labor Day began as a celebration of the work of working folks. May 1st — May Day — is actually the traditional international celebration of the workingman and -woman, but we hold ours in September.

To me, it is a recognition and acknowledgement of the men and women who really created, built and sustain the wealthiest, most productive country the world has ever known.
Have you ever wondered where wealth comes from? What creates value?

What gives an automobile a certain value or, for that matter, what gives a diamond value?
Come on now, think about it.

You might say that a diamond has more value than a piece of granite because diamonds are more rare. And you would be half right. What gives that diamond value is that it takes more human labor to find and extract it from the ground.

What gives that car value is the human labor that goes into everything from finding and extracting metal ores for its parts to assembling the thing.
It’s the work and sweat of regular folks.

Who built this country? J.P. Morgan? John Rockefeller? Carnegie, Mellon, Steve Jobs, Hewlett and Packard? No. It was the pioneers and immigrants who came here to work and make better lives for themselves and their families. Bu so much of what they built, we take for granted. The amazing thing is how the history of labor and the struggles of working people are just omitted from the history books.

We now take our relative affluence for granted and tend to credit the individuals with great ideas for it, not the folks who actually made these things a reality. We assume that so-called job benefits like health insurance and paid vacation days just happened because employers are so innately benevolent that they just like to give stuff away.

How many of you were ever taught of the great labor struggles that won the rights we enjoy now? Much blood was shed during these battles — the blood of working men and women.

Labor Day is about what really makes the world go round. It sure ain’t love; it is work, the work of ordinary people. It’s not tax breaks for the rich; it’s that gal handing you the burger, the guy toiling in the box factory, the couple who run that small gas station, the folks at the convenience store, that gal up there repairing the electric line, the nurse, the carpenter, the sales clerk, etc. These are the folks who perform the labor that makes the world go round.

So next Labor Day when you are out there, busily getting in debt, try to acknowledge and remember those whose struggles got us to where we are today. And try to recognize the valor it takes just to be an ordinary working person.

Well, it’s Memorial Day, which either means you should remember those who gave their lives for this country or get out there and be really patriotic as you shop ‘til you drop.

Isn’t this the only holiday you wish we didn’t have to celebrate? Isn’t it worth dreaming that someday there will be a generation for whom war is such a distant memory that there is no reason to commemorate it?

I can’t argue that war isn’t part of the human condition; even now, barbarism plagues parts of the world. So, honoring those who have given their lives in war seems the right thing to do. I tend to use this day to think with compassion about all who have given their lives, especially all of those kids.

Can you forgive the German kid who fought in both World Wars, the Korean kids who died in Inchon, the Vietnamese kids who died in the battle of Hue? I can. They were all just children fighting for what they believed was right or fighting because the war propaganda machines told them to or fighting just because they were conscripted. History decides which was which. Perhaps if we can find compassion, at least for the soldiers who once were our enemies, we can learn compassion for our enemies now, and perhaps that can mitigate the possibility of more wars. It’s worth a try, don’t you think?

I have a favorite story about an old soldier — a hero of mine. A man who learned, in his own private way, the lessons of war.

This story comes to my mind every Memorial Day.

It was Thanksgiving 1966. At that time, I was a civil rights worker and antiwar activist. I was mostly an antiwar activist because the war in Vietnam had somehow managed to become even more egregious and more horrible than the war against blacks in this country. Also, the war was being fought mostly by those same people who still could not vote in the Deep South. In those days, I was based out of Norman, Oklahoma, where I had been a student before quitting to become a full-time activist. Being a student seemed kind of irrelevant in those days. As a matter of fact, the only relevance college had for many of my friends was the student deferment that it gave them to protect them from being drafted. This was one reason why the war was fought mostly by the poor.

My best friend, Jody Bateman, and I had hitchhiked several hundred miles from Norman to Columbia, Missouri, for a regional SDS (Students For a Democratic Society) conference at the University of Missouri. In places like the southwest, where fear ruled my life, getting together with other radicals was a real morale builder. When Jody and I left Norman, the weather was moderate and we wanted to travel light, so we did not bring heavy coats. We left with exactly one quarter between us, and as people in those days often did, we counted on the kindness of strangers to get by. This was before the term “hippie” was coined, so to most folks, Jody and I probably looked more like a couple of pretty ragged bums — or maybe communists. But even in Oklahoma and Missouri during those years, there were strangers who offered the little kindnesses it took to get by.

After the conference — keep in mind that this was late November — Jody and I started the trip home. We walked out of Columbia and hit the road, thumbs out. It was colder than when we started, a lot colder. I don’t remember the first ride we got, but he dropped us off at the edge of a town. Next came one of the most hilarious trips of my life.

An old Dodge stopped and picked us up. Stuffed inside were six women. I wish I could say they were all beautiful, but at best, they were just kind of plain. They invited us to jump in and soon, Jody and I were sitting kind of across the laps of the three gals in the back of the car, who couldn’t stop giggling. Very quickly, we learned that our hostesses were the town’s entire complement of hookers. They didn’t come on to us; it was pretty obvious that neither of us could have afforded one minute with even the homeliest of the group. But we sure did have fun. They joked with us, we joked with them. We were having so much fun that we just drove around town for awhile. The car was warm — warm from the heater and warm from the open hearts of six small-town hookers.

The best they could do was drop us off at the edge of town near a road that would, at some point, take us to the interstate that would get us home. So there Jody and I are, on this two-lane blacktop stretching to the horizon, on a prairie as flat as the slate on a pool table. There were no cars, so we just started to hoof it.

I learned a little trick back in those days to keep from getting overwhelmed with things like how far away the horizon seemed to be. I learned to measure the small successes. So instead of thinking “My God, we may have to walk forever,” I’d instead say to myself “Well, now I’m just walking to that third telephone pole.” When I got to that one, I’d do it again. Time goes by easier that way, and the mind is more at rest.

As we walked, a small kitten started following us. Nothing we did could scare it away. Eventually, Jody just picked it up and carried it. The weather was very cold, and the kitten was clearly unhappy. After several hours and with the sun going down, we finally made it to the interstate. We climbed the embankment and started hitching. Every time a truck came by, the wind it created would whip against us — it cut like a knife. But nobody was stopping; we just had to keep walking. The weather was just downright ugly, and I reckon that ugly weather affects the mood.
Soon, it was just too cold, so Jody and I went down into a roadside ditch that protected us some from the cold. We wrapped our arms around each other (this was in the days when guys could do that and not get paranoid about the other guy being gay) and put the little shivering kitten in between us to keep it warm.

We woke with the break of dawn. The night had been so cold that my feet had swollen and burst my shoelaces. The kitten was barely breathing. We climbed up the embankment to the highway and saw a small town in the distance. The town looked warm.

We started walking toward the town. It was a very small town, with maybe one traffic light and a dirt road that served as Main Street. Finally, we got to a cafe and I told Jody to go inside and get a bit of milk for the kitten. He did and came out with a quart of milk, which meant he had just gone and spent our entire bankroll. Jody was like that, and I couldn’t get angry about it. We tried to feed the kitten, but the little thing just died right there in our hands. The best we could do was put it in a trashcan. At least we had the milk — it was our first nourishment in two days.

We decided to see if there was a way to wire a friend in Norman for some bus money. Some folks in town directed us to the town’s telegraph office, which was a small shack along the railroad tracks. It had a chimney and there was smoke coming out. Finally, we could get some warmth.
We knocked and a voice said, “Come on in.”

We did and setting next to an old wood stove was an equally old man; he was gaunt, with a day or two worth of beard and bright eyes. He was shelling pecans. He invited us to “set down and get warm.” He introduced himself as Mr. Bradshaw.

We explained what we needed, but the old man told us it would be kind of difficult. For one thing, he could not send a telegram without payment. And even if he could, it would take a least a day for the wire to be routed back and forth.

So we just sat there and talked. I noticed a lot of pictures on the wall. One of them was a black and white of a handsome, smiling young man in a pilot’s uniform. He was standing next to a jet plane. I asked Mr. Bradshaw who was in the picture. With a deep sadness in his eyes, the old man told me that it was a picture of his son, who had been shot down and killed during the Korean War.

We talked about that, and then Mr. Bradshaw told us his story. He had grown up in Brahmen — the town that we had happened upon. At the beginning of the First World War, he and his best friend volunteered for the infantry. They then spent more than a year engaging in trench warfare in France, watching their comrades die like flies. That was the term Mr. Bradshaw used — “died like flies.” Somehow, he and his pal survived the war. The Army discharged them in New York City. From there, the boys hopped freights to get back home to Oklahoma. During the trip, his best friend got sick and developed pneumonia. There was nothing Mr. Bradshaw could do for him but hold him in his arms. He died about 200 miles short of home. Mr. Bradshaw held him until the train finally rolled into Brahmen.

As he told the story, he just kept shelling those pecans.

Then he looked at us; dirty, ragged clothes and all, and said “I can trust you boys, come with me.” Next thing we knew, we had followed him across the street and entered the town’s one small bank. Mr. Bradshaw introduced, and I could tell everyone had a special fondness for this old man.
Then he withdrew $10 and wrote something on a piece of paper. When we got outside, he gave it to me. On the piece of paper was his address. He told us where and when to catch the bus to Oklahoma City, and then he gave me the ten dollars, saying that he knew we’d return the loan when we could. Jody and I got home that night, and the next day I mailed Mr. Bradshaw ten dollars.

Something had taught this man from a tiny isolated town with an unpaved Main Street compassion, tolerance and faith in other human beings. Maybe, just maybe, it was his experience with the horrors of war. We never talked about it. I sent him a Christmas card every year for a long time. No doubt, Mr. Bradshaw has been dead for a long time now.

On this Memorial Day, may God bless you, Mr. Bradshaw. I’ve never forgotten the blessing you bestowed on me, sir.