Project Vote Smart is a non-profit organization that researches and provides objective information about election choices in the U.S. Read more about the project here. At the Project Vote Smart website, you can view any presidential candidate’s voting record, synopses of what they voted on, and other information that will help you to make an informed decision. To learn more about the current presidential candidates, just go to the “Current Candidates” page, click on the “President” link, and you’ll find a listing of all the 2008 Presidential Candidates (Democrat and Republican). Click on a candidate’s name to view information about the candidate’s background and experience, and find links to other information, including the candidate’s voting record.

I haven’t looked very far into the information provided there on third party candidates. I clicked on “All Candidates” and saw that there is limited information there about some of the third party candidates, but the one I clicked on didn’t have complete background data, so the information found at the site may be most valuable to those who generally vote either Democrat or Republican.

I balk at turning on lights in the middle of the day, but that’s what I’ve had to do the past two days in order to get any work done. I’m sorting through files, which is a bit scary, especially in the dark. I’ve also hibernated through these dark days to some extent because I’ve been under the weather. We both had the flu over the Solstice and Christmas, and though we’ve recovered, it tried to come back on me a few days ago, sending me once again in search of my vitamin bottles and throat lozenges, and whining about an earache.

It’s a good, wet winter, good for staying indoors and drinking hot beverages, celebrating the fact that we’re actually having winter, even if it is most people’s idea of spring or fall. The more wet winters we have, the less likely we are to have such horrible fire seasons.

Meanwhile, because I’ve decided to keep politics mostly off this blog, whenever I get the urge to wax political I post my views at my other blog, Spirit Blooms. I am putting my political blogging efforts into support of Dennis Kucinich for President.

Don’t worry, I haven’t given up this blog, and I don’t intend to. I’m still somewhat of a mystery to me, and I intend to keep writing, even if not mystery novels. I’m also still opinionated and have lots to say about writing, books, and lots of other stuff you might find interesting. Mystery of a Shrinking Violet will live on until the bitter end of my blogging adventure, whenever that is, sometime in the far future. I’ll be back in a day or two, hopefully with more to write about than the weather — or politics, which I honestly hate but can’t avoid in good conscience these days.

Political dramas are playing out over the Northwest Passage, igniting fresh strife regarding who owns northern waters and the numerous islands that are revealed as ice melts.

If you’d like a look at what’s happening by way of the now-familiar backward chronology of a blog, check out BBC News’ Diary: Taking the Northwest Passage. It chronicles an actual passage by David Shukman on board ship with the Canadian Coast Guard. He includes information about the disputes that have risen in the past and may again in the near future. Shukman also answers questions from readers, with the help of Professor Jean-Eric Tremblay, the chief scientist of the expedition, in Northwest Passage: Your questions answered.

If you wonder how much global warming could change your nearest coastline in the next two decades, take a look at ABC’s What Global Warming Looks Like. It features the work of Edward Mazria, an architect who turned to spreading information about global warming and the contribution to it by the building industry. He’s produced a set of images showing what he predicts some large coastal cities in the US will look like in 2030, with projected rising water levels due to global warming.

Thanks to Georganna Hancock at A Writer’s Edge, for her post, Writing on Blog Action Day, and its heads-up that today is Blog Action Day for the Environment.

Where would we be today if more people had listened?

When I worked, as a student, in a public library that carried several different newspapers (one of my jobs was placing newspapers on those sticks that hung on racks), I quickly got the idea that different newspapers had different slants, just as my journalism teachers had told me. But back then those slants were less obvious.

The news today isn’t what I learned it should be in junior high and high school journalism. I learned in those classes (the most recent in the early 1970s) that journalism was a format that could inform and educate, or misinform and manipulate. But, I was told, the most ethical journalists and news sources attempted to be more balanced and factual. More and more today, I think we’re simply manipulated by the news. It’s less about the facts, and more about opinion, speculation, or passing judgment. Every news source seems to have its bias, whether toward liberal or conservative politics, toward or against religion, science, environmental concerns, current business and economic influences, and so forth. It resembles what I learned was yellow journalism or propaganda, back in school. I’ve also noticed, as I look back, that nearly all my life even the most factual news has been about carefully selected facts. There was always something left out. And it’s what people don’t say that often carries the kernel of truth.

For instance, I learned recently that modern news sources sometimes almost completely ignore a candidate in their presidential election coverage. (Look up Larry Agran, who ran in the Democratic primaries in 1992 to learn just how effectively the news media can marginalize a candidate.) In what we consider a democracy, we depend perhaps too much on news coverage to provide us balanced information to draw on when we vote. In our desire for a convenient source of information, we fail to realize news coverage can be lax, and even manipulative.

I’m not going to criticize any particular news source here, though I could mention several, probably some that you and I both attempt to learn from or rely on for facts. There are few that seem to provide objective news anymore. The other night I watched what appeared to be in-depth coverage of a recent minor political intrigue, in which a journalist used judgmental terms to describe what had occurred. I thought the events and facts could stand for themselves, with the viewer left to judge, if enough facts were given. Instead the reporter made judgments for us.

What I take issue with the most is something I see in nearly every news source I’m familiar with: News reporting with strong emotional hooks that get people worked up, but barely scratch the surface of fact. This kind of reporting doesn’t lead us to a resolution or even a path toward solutions — which could be gained simply by providing more information in a balanced, responsible way, about news that really matters, then letting the viewer or reader make up his own mind. Even when we’re presented with straight news rather than opinion, even when journalists don’t judge or speculate about the background or outcome of an event, even when they’re not reporting on Paris Hilton’s or Britney Spear’s latest exploits instead of a newsworthy event — even then, these emotional hooks leave me with little wonder that many people today are too stressed by the “news” to think straight or take charge of their own lives, let alone vote or spend intelligently and responsibly.

Is anyone else increasingly dissatisfied with news coverage? Is it any wonder newspapers are folding, or that with more television channels than ever, there’s less news worth watching? Does anyone else think the news anchors sometimes seem less informed than we who bother to read rather than just rely on their reports? Do you think that TV news networks are less involved with reporting the facts, and more involved with increasing our culture’s adrenaline addiction and steering popular opinion in particular directions?

The only thing that keeps me a bit more interested in the news today than when I was younger is the Internet. When I see superficial or emotionally involving coverage by the media on something that interests me, I can read several more perspectives on it, if I do some judicious research of my own. One needs to exercise skepticism when reading on the Internet. Even edu sites are sometimes suspect sources these days. But once I locate a few different and disparate sources of a particular story, it’s easier to find the thread of truth in the news than when I depend on a single newspaper or TV source for coverage. Some news that’s important to me is missed entirely by mass media, or the media is slower to respond to it.

But researching the news on the Internet takes time, more time than I usually have, and more time than many people are willing or able to put in. That leaves us with the more convenient “professional” news sources, which I find more suspect and less responsible than ever.

Publishers Group West, a distributor of books for many small independent publishers, faced bankruptcy recently. New York-based Perseus Book Group offered 70 cents of each dollar owed to the small publishers left in the lurch, as well as continuation of service, while the National Book Network offered first 85 cents on the dollar, and later full value. The judge listened to the publishers themselves, 85% of which stated they were willing to take the lesser offer in order to continue service with staff who knew their products, which I take to mean people wouldn’t lose their jobs.

Washington Post – Lanham Firm Loses Book Deal

Perseus chief executive David Steinberger said that the decision showed that the independent publishing world is looking beyond tomorrow’s sales to ensure solid financial footing. (read article)

Independent publishing is on the rise, with a greater concern for quality, for the writer, and for the reader. I’m involved, as an aspiring writer, in one end of the publishing spectrum, and as a self-published writer I quickly came up against the immense and immovable boulder of distribution channels at the other end. I’m also unspeakably weary of everything in our world coming down to profit in the short term, and size and power meaning more than people and quality. So I felt great relief to read about this development in the past month’s scramble over the bankruptcy of one of indie publishing’s distributors. My hat’s off to the publishers who chose to sacrifice hard-earned money in order to keep some people in their current jobs and keep independent publishing focused on what matters — getting high quality books into readers’ hands.

I look forward to supporting more independent publishers with my book purchases.

More on today’s development:

San Francisco Chronicle —
Small presses will get money

The New York Times —
Perseus to Take Over Publishers’ Contracts

Some background:

Monday, January 22, 2007 — International Herald Tribune —
Deal announced for Perseus Books to acquire imperiled distributor

Saturday, January 27, 2007 — San Francisco Chronicle —
A financial thriller in the publishing world

Sunday, January 28, 2007— Market Day —
Bankruptcy hurts small publishers

Saturday, February 10, 2007 — Los Angeles Times CalendarLive.com —
The next chapter may be 13

Thursday, February 15, 2007 — The Book Standard —
The Battle Continues for PGW’s Clients

Friday, February 16, 2007 — The Daily Californian —
Book Distributor Waits On Ownership Decision

We live in a filthy world of our own making, mostly made filthy through our mental twists on reality. It seems strange to me sometimes that when we’re out in wild places no amount of dirt seems out of place, yet in our neighborhoods and especially in our houses it can feel as if the whole of nature is intent on affronting our sense of cleanliness and order. Though my sense of order is weaker than some, I know everyone who lives indoors develops some degree of this need for order. Even the cat, to whom the state of her litter box and blankets matters a great deal, and the dog, who will go through all kinds of personal agony to wait to go outside to perform certain functions (thank God—or should that be Dog), and who gets nervous when I rearrange furniture in the living room. They like their people to be securely in place, too. He got so he knew the sound of my suitcase zipper when I used to travel for work, and would come into the bedroom when he heard it, to give me this look that made me feel like the worst kind of traitor. They both seem to go into fits when we so much as drive to the store, if we’ve been home a lot and they’ve grown used to that. When we return they greet us as returning heroes, and later the dog ceremoniously sniffs the soles of our shoes as if to learn where we’ve been—the usual places, or somewhere strange and exotic?

Orderliness is important to all of us who live under the umbrella of civilization. Not so much in nature, where a broken branch may hang by a thread for two seasons before falling to the ground and lying there for several more, gradually contributing its substance to the soil—what the ants don’t carry away or the termites consume. Maybe that’s order, too, in its way, and our skewed notion of order twists our perception of what is out of place, what must be plucked or added to the woodpile, burned in here so it doesn’t burn or rot out there.

The work of an artist or a writer requires some residual sense of the disorder in nature. A Japanese gardener calculates his design to mimic nature, if in a scrupulous, disorder-bending fashion. A painter avoids symmetry in her compositions. Some of the most amazing paintings I’ve seen depict skies full of drama rather than peace, states of cloud that in real life would make me wish we had a storm cellar. My favorite part of any piece of music is often full of drama, that exquisite break after a heart-rending crescendo. A writer fills his story with conflict, unresolvable problems and sympathetic characters full of flaws who perform acts we would never consider in real life. Why do we love this in artwork? Deep down, do we know everything isn’t supposed to be orderly all the time?

What is all this fuss over cleanliness and order? Can we carry it too far? Is that the reason that now, when our indoor world is in many ways its most orderly, we crave violence in the movies—and it increases in the streets? Is our twisted sense of order what makes us think we should control which two consenting adults marry, and push our religious or political agendas on others? Is it what makes us build walls at borders and regulate language? Is it what makes some people hoard wealth? Is it behind addiction and pornography?

Should order stop at the walls of our own houses? Is order’s purpose simply to help us feel secure in the future of meals to come, fresh water to drink, mortgages paid up? Do we try to make it fool us into thinking we’ll never die? Does it mimic the cycles of the seasons, the regularity of rainfall and harvest? Did order arise along with agriculture? Or did we find it in the vast movement of stars as we navigated seas full of monsters? What is it about order that lends us so much peace that we grow irritable or confused without it? Why do we grow a little insane from too much of it? Does it carry a deeper meaning? Is God order, or is God chaos? Or is God both, a balance, yin and yang? Where should we draw the line? Should there be a line?

Maybe I’ll draw the line today at leaving the vacuuming for tomorrow. It’s late, getting hot out, time to close the windows. Or is that too orderly, keeping the heat out and the cool in? I need to find my balance.

***

To me being privileged means having more than one’s basic needs met, and there are degrees of privilege, and it is relative, and basically meaningless. I’m more privileged than some people I know, and less privileged than some I know. But all I can really say about that is what I see on the surface.

It’s tragic that so few people in the world have adequate food, water, sanitation, shelter, clothing, necessary transportation, education, rest, safety, security, and health care, even some people in the US. Those should be basic, subsistence level expectations, especially considering how far we’ve come technologically in this world. Unfortunately those advances seem to be reserved for the wealthiest people in the wealthiest countries, for those living under certain forms of government and economics. Basic civil and human rights should also be considered subsistence level—everyone should have them. Not everyone does, even in the most economically “privileged” countries. We can’t even agree on what civil and human rights people should have.

But I also think many people in the world have a skewed notion of what it is to live under what they consider privilege (i.e. better apparent economic or social conditions than theirs). It looks easier. In many ways it is. It’s no guarantee one will be happy.

Comfort exists on many levels. People in wealthier conditions still get sick (health care doesn’t guarantee health), suffer, die, lose loved ones, fall in and out of love, get abused, depressed, lonely, fearful, deal with pain (much of it hidden and not obvious to anyone else—some physical, some psychological or emotional). They experience disability, addiction, disasters, worries, or slip through the cracks of their society. Many so-called privileged people live very unhappy lives, or don’t only because they overcome adversity no one else would guess at. Just because some people have their basic subsistence levels met in ways that too many in the world don’t, doesn’t guarantee they won’t still lead difficult or even miserable lives. Conversely, among those who don’t even have what we consider the basics, you’ll find some fairly happy people.

A lot of this may have to do with choice, though much of it doesn’t, but let’s face it, being privileged doesn’t guarantee you’ll make the right choices—or that your family members will. Some of this also has to do with individual thresholds. Some of us handle certain types of stress more easily, some have chronic health issues, and some have an inability to think we have choices, even when we do.

So the idea of “privilege” doesn’t really tell you how much one will suffer or how happy one will be.

No one can know another’s pain. We can try, we can develop our empathy and compassion to a deeper level and care about others, try to walk in another’s shoes. But we don’t live the other’s life. To judge what another considers his or her suffering, abuse, or pain, is simply judgmental and likely unjust. Privilege is relative, and can exist right alongside extreme suffering.

So in many ways privilege as we think of it is pretty much meaningless. It seems to me that instead of nurturing a notion of being privileged or not (as if one should feel guilty for being what others consider privileged), it’s more important to nurture compassion, unconditional love, mutual concern. This isn’t to say there isn’t a grossly unbalanced distribution of wealth and power in this world. Obviously there is. It’s also clear that a wealthy person in a position of power is more likely to help his wealthy peers than those he doesn’t consider his equals. But we have to be careful of what we allow to separate us, of allowing ourselves an “us and them” mindset.

The idea of measuring privilege separates us.

The idea of all people belonging to the same human family with equal rights to the basics, and with equal capacity for suffering and happiness, connects us.

***

What does privilege mean to you?

And while we’re at it, Happy Independence Day!

Why? I fear it has more to do with intolerance than anything else. Not just intolerance for religion as a whole, or an individual’s intolerance for one or another specific religion or group of religions. This is bigger—intolerance within the leadership and membership of large, established religions—intolerance for all others. I see wider and wider gaps between religions, lack of communication and cooperation, lack of compromise in politics. I find this development increasingly disturbing. Secularism isn’t just vanishing in Iraq. It’s vanishing here at home and in the world at large.

It’s more common these days for a single religion to call all others (including no religion) evil, to condemn all others outright. It’s more common today for a state religion to dominate government to the extent that some form of religion becomes the law.

If I’m wrong, if intolerance isn’t all that common among spiritual and religious people as a whole, then we’re hearing a lot of extreme voices—or a few loud ones—and not much from more tolerant religious folks at all. I wonder why this is, and it worries me. Don’t most mainstream religions still teach some form of tolerance? Have the extremists won all the other religious people over? Why aren’t all religious people speaking out more on the side of tolerance—not just tolerance for their own faiths, but tolerance in general? If they are, why aren’t they being heard? What is behind the lack of tolerance we find so rampant today in the news? Are people more worried their children will follow other faiths than they are worried their children will be forced to follow theirs?

Religion today, at least the religion we hear about most in the news, seems to be led by power brokers, people more interested in gaining followers and keeping them, and even in controlling governments, by any means possible—often through emotion, primarily fear and hatred—than they are interested in anything else. Where’s the quiet work toward spiritual growth? Where’s the charity? Where’s the worship? The humility? Must a religion use fear to gain followers? Force? Domination? That’s what many religious leaders in the world today appear to teach. If extremists are so political and so vocal, perhaps it’s time for the mellower side of religion to speak up in response.

Where will it end? What’s the answer? My greatest fear about this is that the world has entered a new dark age. I fear a future in which my generation’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren will live as the Europeans of old did, who scrambled to act the faithful Protestants under one king and good Catholics under the next, or have their beliefs vanish like those of the various pagan cultures buried in obscurity since missionaries first traveled the globe.

That kind of scurrying to appease the dominant religious leaders isn’t religion or faith. That’s abuse and survival.
–

Some links to related articles:

On Afghani Christian convert:

Afghan Christian asks for asylum

Mood hardens against Afghan convert

Afghan Christian Convert May Avoid Prosecution

Judge Defends Court In Afghan Christian Convert Case

CAIR Calls for Release of Afghan Christian; Islamic Civil Rights Group Says Conversion a Personal, Not State Matter

On Missouri resolution to establish Christianity as a state religion:

Reject state religion

Proposed House resolution on religion irks some here

Missouri House resolution on religion, prayer and government

I started my website back in 2000, when Shadows Fall was first published, for the same reason most writers do, to promote my work. Four years later I started this blog as a way to provide up-to-date content on my website and let visitors know what I was working on—basically as a way to keep the website from stagnating when too much time passed between novels. Little did I know at the time that the blog would engage so much of my attention.

The immediacy of this format holds a certain attraction. Type, click a button, and what you’ve written is published. But that has its drawbacks. As easy as email, which carries its own risks, a blog can suck you out into public view in a way that’s scary and in some ways deceiving. It’s easy to forget you’re putting yourself “out there” to the degree we do online. After all, I’m seated here alone at my home computer as I type this into a little window on my screen. It doesn’t feel public at all, at the time I write.

I tend to be more reticent when I’m face to face with people. As a private person—in fact an introvert—I find the public aspect of blogging conflicts with those personal, internal privacy constraints. The degree of narcisim that comes into play in me when I engage in this blog or others startles me, especially after the fact, if I go back and read what I’ve said. I’ve always kept a journal, so I grew accustomed, years ago, to exploring and sorting out my thoughts by writing them down. But that used to be strictly private. Anything that might be published went through heavy editing and self-censoring. It had time to simmer, to boil down, before it left my hands and confronted other readers. Even then, I sometimes felt overexposed when submitting work. I’ve come to realize this mental exploration through words can come across in blogging and commenting as total self-absorption. At least that’s how I see it. I find myself talking about me, me, me, in a way I rarely do in real life, and then only with a select few people. I’m not sure I like doing this online. It’s a little too much of me, if you ask me.

Maybe blogging and commenting is too easy, too instant, too uninhibited—and far too permanent once it’s out there. Effective, judicious communication requires more time, more thought, more self-editing than this. I feel a need to take a step back. I’m not this spontaneous a person.

Then again, maybe getting me out of my native reticence is a good thing. The business end of writing requires that one put oneself out in the world in a way that’s uncomfortable to many of us who tend to be introverts. Writing is the form of communication we’re most comfortable with, so blog as conversation is a handy tool for us to use.

There’s a teaching attributed sometimes to Sufism, and other times to Socrates as the Triple Filter Test. It states that one shouldn’t speak until one’s words have passed through three gates or filters: truth, necessity, and kindness. Still, the questions linger in my mind, especially recently. So much of the rest of my life draws me, calls to me. I find I’m leaving the blog sit for long periods of time. I’m building dreams in the physical world that I want to pour my energy and time into.

Is all this blogging I do really necessary? Does it serve a purpose—the right purpose? If it’s all just so much babble about me or my life or my opinions, why do it at all? And what about my comments elsewhere? I’m a passionate, opinionated person. I’m an impulsive, temperamental commenter. I flare up over news or politics. I say things on the spur of the moment that I may later regret, because I didn’t think things through, or I wrote out of context to the original post, or I reacted and blurted out my first thought rather than responding from my core. Maybe I erred, or changed my mind. I’m not afraid to admit when I do that, but a comment made on a blog I visit may be around for a long time, while I may forget where it was. I have gone back and edited my posts on my blog at times, sometimes deleted them altogether. But, just as with emails, when we don’t know who they may be forwarded to, we lose control of comments.

Now this is not to say I intend to give up blogging—or commenting. I don’t. But recently I want to give all this more thought, take it a little slower. Is my attitude about this suddenly too furtive, too cautious? Am I dithering?

Sometimes I wonder if the next step beyond blogging is for the human race to become more telepathic. Here in the blogosphere we sometimes share our thoughts almost as soon as we think them. They’re not just first draft writing, sometimes they’re first draft thoughts. They spring newborn onto the screen, brain to fingers to blogosphere. Telepathy sometimes seems like the next logical step. If we need to be concerned with those three gates or filters when speaking and writing, perhaps blogging will teach us to engage them when thinking as well, to govern our thoughts, preparing us to wise up before we jump that communicative gap. Or is it possible that our thoughts already carry far more power—or distance—than we realize? Who knows?

So I wonder, why do other people blog, and how do you feel about it?
Have your reasons for doing it changed since you began?
Have you written posts or comments you regretted?
Does blogging accomplish a purpose for you? If so, what?