So, What Are You Asking Me To Agree With?

"The fact that you can't sell your daughter for three goats and a cow means we have already redefined marriage," or so a saying goes that's been making the rounds on the internet. And I would tend to agree. We are indeed redefining the legal institution of marriage, although not the sacrament of marriage. One of course is a legal contract, the other is not. Sometimes and in some places, the two are the same. In our country for instance, priests are currently authorized to act as the legal agent of the state and when they "perform a marriage" it is recognized as valid by the state. In other places this is not the case.

In Mexico, for instance, only a civil marriage is recognized as legal. A Church wedding has no legal effect. It is not authorized. You may certainly have a church wedding, but you must also have the civil ceremony for the union to be legally recognized.

I am Catholic. The Church has always taught that marriage is between one man and one woman. People can holler all they want about us being intolerant and narrow minded and having no right, yada yada yada, but I can not see any circumstances in which the Church will change its mind on the issue. Of course, this is our definition of the sacrament of marriage. It appears that we are headed into one of those places and times where the Church's definition of marriage and the State's definition of marriage diverge. Since I am both a Catholic and a citizen of the State, I am being asked to assent to a legal change in the definition of marriage. So what is it that I am being asked to agree to?

The previous model can be stated as follows: marriage is the union of one man and one woman. The new civil definition of marriage that I am being asked to agree to is...? Might it be stated as the union of one _____ and one _____, and the blanks may be filled in with any combination of the words man and woman? I am no lawyer, but from what I have seen, the new marriage laws are limited to providing equality to same sex couples. Is there no provision for unions other than couples?

Might not marriage be redefined as the union of x _____ and x _____, where x is a number from 1 to whatever the market will bear? I am not being facetious here. There are other cultures where the numbers involved are not limited to one. The current President of South Africa has four wives, for example. Will a change in the math be part of the redefinition of civil marriage? And why shouldn't it be?

I also have to wonder whether the list of nouns might not be expanded from just man and woman to include boy and girl? There are certainly precedents for this as well. Mahatma Gandhi was betrothed at age 8 and married at 13. As a society, we already take great care to interfere as little as possible in the sex lives of our children, and take great care to provide them with appropriate contraceptives because "we know they're going to do it anyway," so might it also be appropriate to include them in the marriage discussion?

Now it may well be that the proponents of the redefinition of marriage will never ask for more than the recognition of same sex couples, but then I would have to suggest that such limitations could be construed as narrow and intolerant, denying the basic rights of those who have a different vision of marriage.

For the record, I am leaning more and more to the idea of cutting the idea of marriage loose to see where it goes. Civil marriage, that is. I can foresee something along the lines of the Mexican model -- a clear separation of civil and religious ceremonies. That would leave two clearly defined groups each coupling as they see fit.

Incidentally, I know of no mention of goats and cows in the marriage laws of the Church. I believe that was a civil custom.

I don't Live There Any More

I grew up in Pittsburgh. That's why I was able to do such a photorealistic representation of downtown Pittsburgh showing the three rivers, the fountain at Point State Park at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers, and the city's skyline.

If you ever go to Pittsburgh, you could take a copy of this picture with you so that you could feel more comfortable navigating about the city.

I drew this picture from memory, so I would be cautious about the possibility that changes may have occurred since I left. The last time I was in Pittsburgh was, let's see, I think about thirty years ago. It might be as little as twenty-five years.

I know I have changed in that amount of time. I am older, balder and fatter -- more bald than I could have anticipated, although not as fat as I could have become had I not exercised at least a bit of self control. One thing I am particularly pleased with is that I really have not regrets about the past twenty-five or thirty years. I am not where I might have been if all my plans had panned out, but God has a sense of humor, and to be honest, where I am is probably a lot nicer.

I am content. I am comfortable. I am at peace.

I have no desire to be in any other place or in any other time in my life. No offense, Pittsburgh. It's just that now is a nice place to be.

Blog

            equals

                         hits.

No Blog

             equals

                          no hits.

I have discovered an interesting phenomenon.  If I blog, the traffic on my site goes up. If I do not blog (as I have not for the past six weeks), the traffic on my site goes way down.

You may not think this is true. You might say "Bernie, people will go to your site every day just to look at old stuff you might have written months or even years ago."

But I think not.

You must bear in mind that I am a hermit, and I am bound by the code of hermeneutics, and one of the rules about hermenation and the use of the interweb is as follows:

        In regard to relationships with virtual people, one must not allow their virtuousness to seen as license to parcel oneself  out to others. Hermits should follow the principle of "pressen Sie den Schließmuskel zusammen" [clench the sphincter] and conduct one's affairs such that sufficient impediments are used to discourage unnecessary attachments -- Hermit Code of the Western Province, California, Nevada and Unincorporated Parts of Utah.

I have therefore used protracted periods of silence as one such impediment to insure that people don't start to read my blog on a regular basis and get all attached.


Having now dispersed my readership, I may comfortably return to blogging into the vast, hermetically sealed emptiness of cyberspace, confident that no one is listening.

Happy Anniversary Piker Press

Those of you who know me probably have at least heard of The Piker Press. The Press is a weekly e-zine that has for the past ten years provided a place to showcase the creative efforts of artists from around the world. It has published the work of writers and artists from China, England, South Africa, Scotland, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Mexico, Canada, New Jersey, North Carolina, Iowa, Cleveland and Florida to name a few places. Really. The Press has been an outlet for an extraordinarily eclectic group of artists. Just google Piker Press and look at the page after page of references.

The most astounding accomplishment of the Press is something it is celebrating this month -- ten years of continuous weekly publication. I don't know how many e-zines have managed to last that long, but I know that there simply aren't many that can make the same claim.

Have a quick look at The Piker Press here. This month The Press will publishing stories from many of authors whose works have appeared there over the past ten years.

Congratulations, Piker Press, and Happy Anniversary.

Andons and Grandmothers

Wiring Diagram

When I mowed the lawn today, I happened upon a manual sprinkler head hooked up to a length of old garden hose. Thinking it was just a piece of hose, a remnant from some old attempt to augment the automatic in-ground sprinkler system, I picked it up and gave it a yank. Much to my surprise, the hose was quite long. It ran behind our tool shed where I assumed it ended, but no, it ran the entire length of the shed and beyond. I walked around the shed and continued tracing the line as it ran along the house, and I eventually lost it in behind the ferns planted there. I gave it a tug, but I think the plants had grown around it, securing it in place and concealing where it might have gone.

The incident reminded me of the assembly plant where I used to work. It had a miles and miles of conveyor lines, and it had the Toyoda Andon System. These conveyor systems were complicated in themselves, but with andon, each workstation along the line could stop the line by pulling a cord or hitting a switch. Additionally, some pieces of equipment used in the process could automatically stop the line. Then there was the lighing, power outlets, fans, and lots of other equipment and power tools.

Wiring this whole thing together was a total nightmare. Over the years, so many things had been added or modified that there was nobody who really knew where all the wiring went. The maintenance people could and often did spend hours just trying to figure out where something was plugged in and how it was integrated into the wiring scheme. There really were no up-to-date schematics.

I think peoples' behavior is like that. Over the thousands of years we been around, there has been a lot of modification to what people think is good and bad behavior. There is stuff we don't do any more because somewhere along the line people began to think it wasn't a good idea. We forget why we thought the way we did.

In the movie The Fifth Element, a priest (not a Catholic one) shoos away a little boy, and as he does, he tells the boy Go with God, be safe from evil. I've always been struck by and challenged by that line. In the fictional culture of the film, there was a mindset that allowed for an intimate awareness of good and evil. There was a recognition that the choice between good and evil was personal and of consequence.

Upon entering a home, my mother would frequently greet the owners with a traditional Polish greeting: Pochwalony Jezus Chrystus, praised be Jesus Christ. The proper response would be Na wieki wiekow, amen, for ever and ever, amen. The tradition came to her from my  grandmother who had left Poland sometime around 1910. It was a way to remind the greeter and the greeted that they were part of something far bigger than themselves, that there were standards to which they tried to hold themselves.

I do not say things like that, and if I try, I feel a bit silly.

Still, it's a good concept, this good and evil thing. I do believe that there is good and evil in the world -- there is the possibility of peace and order, and there is the risk of chaos and destruction. And I do hope that people look for what is good. I do hope that none of the rampant cruelty in the world overwhelms them.

So go with God, be safe from evil. Spend some time figuring out where you're plugged in and how you fit into the bigger picture.

I know...it sounds silly.

Hunger Games???

Movie Projector Still Life

Ya all have been waiting for Sand's and my review of The Hunger Games so that you can decide whether or not you want to see it.

That's completely understandable.

The wait is over, my friends, our review of The Hunger Games is just a mouse click away at pikerpress.com.

Low Profilers

Class of  '71

Nobody from my class has become famous even after 40  years of trying. Not that we were a bunch of losers necessarily, and not that some of us didn't achieve a fair amount of local success and recognition. One of my best buddies is a U.S. Attorney in Pennsylvania (good job Dennis), several others have had good careers as lawyers, and a number of others have reasonably successful careers in business, although no one plays on the national scene, and none have made it big in pro sports or the entertainment industry.

Christina Aguilera went to my high school for a while, but that was almost thirty years after me. She probably wasn't told about me while she was there.

And admittedly, it's difficult to be famous. You have to know or be known by 7 million people just to reach one tenth of one percent of the world's population.

I'm guessing that the vast majority of us just went about having a normal life, getting married or not, having kids or not, paying the rent and eating lots of pizza and hamburgers.

I am surprised at how few of my acquaintances have any kind of presence on the Web. If you Google "Bernie Pilarski," you come up with a fair number of references -- mostly self-serving stuff that I put out there in a desperate attempt to gain attention, but nonetheless, I'm visible. I suppose that if I wanted to spend some bucks on a good search service, I could dig up some stuff on more people, but just using the standard Google and Facebook searches, it's apparent that the overwhelming majority of the people I knew growing up have maintained a very low profile. And maybe they are all just blocking me specifically.

Still, it's been good...very, very good.

I've got no complaints.