Wacky optimist award. From Mayflower Transit’s “checklist for a smooth move”: “Give yourself at least two weeks to unpack and organize your belongings.”
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“Like Christianity and most other religions, TV offers its congregants a coherent story concerning how to live in the world,” writes David Marc in his new book Bonfire of the Humanities. “Television is the oracle of a religion called consumerism…. Opponents of consumerism–right, left and otherwise–are generally blind to the nature of consumerism’s dominance. To secular humanists network TV is another dangerous drug served up by the dealers who gave you the opium of the masses; to born-again Christians it is another false messiah brought to you by the folks who gave you Darwin, Freud, and Marx. But consumerism is a revolution against the paradigm used by both sides to explain consumerism. The messiah has both arrived and is arriving at all times. Utopia is both declared and imminent. The commercial has made the material spiritual. There’s no use complaining about the shortcomings of life, except that complaining reminds you that you are looking for solutions. Remedies are available. Buy them.”
“Large numbers of Mexican trucks entering the U.S. are not meeting basic U.S. standards,” according to a recent press release from the National Association of Independent Insurers, based in Des Plaines. “Many Mexican trucks have numerous accidents due to containers that leak, brakes that malfunction and bald tires…. Mexico imposes no ‘hours of rest’ restriction on truck drivers…. Mexican trucks frequently exceed the U.S. legal weight limit, sometimes by more than double.” The insurers want the Clinton administration to continue its moratorium on Mexican trucks traveling beyond border commercial zones until these and other safety issues are resolved.
Lest we forget. Tashi Delek (Summer), newsletter of the Tibetan Alliance of Chicago, notes the visit of Buddhist monk Palden Gyatso, who was arrested by the Chinese in 1959 at age 28 and “spent most of his adult life in prison, finally gaining his freedom at the age of sixty-one. Outside of prison, most of the rest of his family had gradually disappeared…. Reflecting on his long years in prison, he observed that for him, life had been something like a dream: he never had a chance to really feel it.”
