Catching Up

When I was a kid in Estes Park, Easter week was my favorite time of year. It was even better than Christmas. It was a special time because I was the head altar boy at Our Lady of the Mountains catholic church and the whole week was spent getting ready for all of the beautiful services that were about to take place. We would have rehearsal with Father Sanger after school for the entire week leading up to Palm Sunday. I had to teach the newly appointed thurifers how to properly carry the incense holder (there is an impressive name for the incense holder, but along with losing my faith I've also lost a lot of the latin). I rode herd on the new acolytes, admonishing them about spilling wax on the carpet in the sanctuary. After years in the altar boy business, I already had all of the latin responses memorized and I could get around the sanctuary with my eyes closed.

Palm Sunday was always a beautiful ceremony and I remember our house decorated with the palms my mother, grandmother, and aunt collected on that day. I was always dropped off early so I could serve morning masses for all of the different priests who happened to be visiting and Father Sanger always gave me a ride home late after I had helped him clean up after services.

I served mass every day of the week leading up to Holy Thursday (Maundy Thursday). It was a beautiful candlelit ceremony with glorious vestments and the entire female population of my family anchoring the choir. Good Friday was solemn and sober and I remember always being overwhelmed by Christ's sacrifice. I should hasten to add here that I was not overwhelmed in a sadomasochistic Mel Gibson way. It was much softer than that. Mostly I was taken in by the gorgeous pageantry of the whole thing. Midnight mass on Holy Saturday was filled with the same wonder. Easter Sunday always seemed a little anti-climactic to me. The service was during the morning. People were dressed to the nines. I was comfortable doing my altar boy schtick, but I guess I was too burned out from my liturgical fortnight of practice and perform to appreciate the wonder of the resurrection. Mostly, I was ready to go home and score some chocolate bunnies and eggs.

And even more important, Easter Sunday was the last significant event to check off before the end of school and the beginning of summer. Talk about a resurrection.

Easter is different now. Nowadays I am surprised when I see ashes on good catholic foreheads on Ash Wednesday. When I was a kid, Lent never surprised me. Father Sanger was a kindly if ineffectual man who taught me to ski and fish and chase mice from behind the confessional. If he ever wanted to get underneath my cassock I didn't know about it. But now, instead of talking about the redemption Christ offered all of us, the church is busily spinning facts to work a redemption for its increasingly tarnished reputation. Seriously, when you think of the catholic church (I know I'm supposed to capitalize that, but I refuse), do you think missionaries and martyrs, or do you think pedophiles and molesters? Too bad. The church I have chosen not to believe in used to be a bastion of morality and temperance. Nothing lasts.

Now I just focus on things in the news that consistently amaze me. I think I'll make a short list.

1. The Denver Post's transmutation into The Rocky Mountain News. The editorials are getting more and more strident and snarky. In an editorial last Wednesday ("Health care hit didn't take long" March 31, 2010)the paper cites a few corporations (AT&T, Deere and Company, 3M. among others) who warned their employees that the new health care legislation, because one of its provision reduces the tax break that companies offering employee health coverage receive, would probably result in workers getting laid off and higher prices to consumers. Then the paper went on to blast Representative Henry Waxman, a democrat from California, for demanding that these companies show some hard data, facts, and figures to justify these measures. The editorialist said that Waxman was "politicizing" the debate by attacking industry. I guess I'm stupid, but it seems to me that The Denver Post is the entity doing the poliiticizing in this particular instance, especially when further investigation shows that all of this brouhaha was purely speculative. In fact, the decreased tax break would represent at most 1% of the gross budget of any of these companies. Since states have been spending the last year or so trying to absorb budget shortfalls vastly greater than that, it seems reasonable to assume that AT&T, through some MBA smartness, could figure out a way to survive their lost tax break without sticking it to consumers and employees. In other words, this was all just a tempest in a teapot and to the best of my knowledge the Post was the only news outlet that even bothered to talk about it.

2. Against my better judgement, I watched Bill Maher the other night and was surprised to see that Bill was being reasonable. He wasn't calling names; he made no random attacks on organized religion; he seemed to realize that Obama got what it was possible to get (no public option, alas) and it was time to move on. His panel had his usual two liberals and one conservative and, like all of his panels, spent the entire evening interrupting each other and not listening to a thing anybody had to say. The conservative guy put on the typical conservative "I-Know-Something-You-Don't-Know" grin and interrupted every speaker with some completely unsubstantiated certainties that health care would bring our country down. When Maher mentioned the Congressional Budget Office's projections, the conservative asshole simply dismissed the CBO and anyone who would actually give it any credence as ludicrous.

The CBO has been around since 1974 and since that time has been an integral part of every legislative action in Washington. All bills are filtered through the CBO to assess any impact, unforseen or otherwise, on the budget. According to my reading, their predictions are as accurate as any other similar organ on Wall Street.

As I understand it, the argument against the CBO in this particular instance rests on the idea that many of the facets and stipulations of the complex bill will never come into fruition; therefore, the bill will be a budget buster. If that is the case, why do we have a CBO? Wouldn't we save money just to abolish it and instead just use the projections of the Republican National Committee? Their prudent use of money is, after all, well established.

The CBO is comprised of an impressive list of economists and business gurus (is that an oxymoron?). They look at the way things are and assess the impact any new legislation might have on that picture. They do it in a bi-partisan way. They seem to be the only game in town.

To give you an idea of the CBO's accuracy, it predicted that President Bush's tax cuts way back in 2000 would result in a 1.8 trillion dollar deficit. They were right. The chances are excellent that they are right again.

3. I was recently blown away by an article in The Atlantic ("Man versus Afghanistan" April 2010). It was a typical analysis of the situation that spoke to the morass we find ourselves in, but also offered some real possibility of hope. The thing that fascinated me the most was the idea that the Afghans (Afghanistan has the highest illiteracy rate in the world) really have no idea why we are there. They don't keep up with The New York Times and they hardly ever read The Drudge Report. They don't know about the history of our involvement in the region. They only know that we are invading their country. Also, given the fact that life expectancy in Afghanistan is 44 years, we are trying to talk reason to a country and an insurgency populated mainly by illiterate 17 year olds. I've never fully comprehended that situation before now.

4. Play Dates! I saw a report somewhere that talked about the phenomenon of youngish parents setting up play dates for their children. I guess that means that parents go out and find friends for their kids to play with instead of letting them wander over to the playground, or the back alley to make connections of their own. I think that is appalling! I remember three year old Franny sitting on the sidewalk in front of our new house in our new neighborhood yelling "Friends! I need friends!" It worked and I didn't have to do anything except smile and love her. I don't know if she still employs that method, but she always seems to have plenty of people who like to hang out with her. Youngish parents take note.