I left my hotel and headed down Fremont Street toward Las Vegas Boulevard. Fremont throbbed with loud, drunk revelers carrying supersized beers and giant cocktails brimming over from clear plastic containers shaped like footballs.

The celebrants were waiting for the next lightshow, a pulsating, pounding, eardrum-piercing music experience shown on the hour throughout the evening—showcased on the world’s largest video screen, an arched canopy that stretches along three casino-studded city blocks. Nowhere but Vegas can you find this sort of mega-extravaganza of flashing, glittering sights and sounds. Think MTV on steroids. Think Lake Mead and the Hoover Dam and the Mojave Desert of lightshows.

During my walk down Fremont Street, I encountered two men in wheelchairs, each man missing a leg, as evidenced by the raw, mottled stumps that protruded from their chairs. My guess is they were in their late forties, maybe early fifties, though they could have just as easily been hovering around 60. They both wore green army fatigue jackets made of heavy cotton ripstop, worn and faded and tattered at the edges. The jackets hung loosely around the men’s sloped shoulders and folded into their bent legs and stubs.

One said something to me as I passed, his words so mumbled and shredded and hoarse, I had no idea what he meant or even what language he was using, but the wild glare in his eyes suggested it was best not to ask him to repeat himself. Or step too near to where he had parked his chair.

The other said nothing. He sat motionless, his clothes scruffier than the first’s, his hands so greasy and soiled, they appeared not have been washed in months. He stared at his boot with slitted eyes. I saw no perceptible movement his body or even a twitch in his face, as though lost in a reality so distant that returning seemed no longer possible.

I headed south on Las Vegas Boulevard until I reached a 7-Eleven. I waited in a short line at the counter while holding a pack of gum. The woman in front of me—30, perhaps, with scraggly brown hair and a scarecrow sagging face—tapped her foot, bounced from leg to leg, picked at the candy bars on the shelf in front of her, stopped, looked around, then started her movements over again. She finally grabbed a Snickers and dropped it on the counter next to her giant can of Foster’s. Her eyes darted nervously while she clicked her nails against the can. When it came time for her to pay, she dropped a five on the counter, along with a handful of coins, and mumbled, “Keep the change,” her voice shaky and throaty, like that of a tweaking frog.

She ran out of the store and across the parking lot.

If such events were rare, they would perhaps garner more attention from the press and the public. As it is, the streets are full of people falling through the cracks. I came across more of the same in Sacramento last week. When I was standing in Capitol Park, next to the California State Capitol and amid several homeless crashed out on park benches, a man with a dark beard and Medusa-like hairdo raced past me and shouted, “I’m getting me a Bud. I’m getting me a Bud.”

After he sped away, I slipped into the restroom to pee. Perhaps it was the suggestion of beer so early in the morning. Perhaps it was the pot of tea I drank earlier.

At the sink, a man who looked surprisingly like the Budweiser sprinter, was standing at the sink, mixing a Tang-like concoction in a Tupperware container while clutching under his arm a mini-box of Cheerios. He stared and stirred and mumbled into the container. I believe he spoke in anticipation of his orange-ladden cereal.

That happened the day after I arrived from San Francisco, a city chock full of folks who wonder the streets and talk to themselves and struggle to make sense of a world that by no measure can be judged as anything even close to sane.

At one point during my stay there, I was riding a bus down Mission Street. We stopped at a traffic light at an intersection like hundreds of other intersections in that town—full of people and trash and brick and concrete and shouting and glass. I noticed a young man leaning against an ancient building worn and tagged and ready to fall. He banged his head against the wall and pulled at his hair with a ferocious grip, as though trying to rip off his scalp. A look of anguish had settled on his face, a look that ran so deeply nothing could touch whatever terror he held inside.

Later that day I ran into a drunk guy up near Castro, about 50 maybe, give or take a decade or two. Between staggering steps and gasps for breath, he belted out an offer to sell his wife for 25¢. A mere quarter, he said, so he could get some beer. Obviously he meant more beer. And at such prices, who could blame him?

I’m in Palm Springs now. Yesterday a windstorm raged through here with gusts reaching 90 MPH. Sand blew. Trees fell. Tiles flew off roofs. Some hit my van, in fact, leaving a reddish scar many inches long.

Shortly before the winds began, a slight, bent-over man stormed down the sidewalk across the street from me. He screamed with a thick Mexican accent at the cars passing by. He yelled at them to go away, get off his street, leave him alone. He huffed and puffed, until the wind picked up and blew him down the sidewalk.

Later that evening, after the gusts had somewhat subsided, I was strolling past the Jack in the Box on South Palm Canyon Drive. A young man sauntered out of the building, holding a carton of curly fries and a Coke. He said hello and offered to share his weed with me. He spoke in a rambling, slurred, nasally, pothead sort of voice. I’m not sure he even really saw me. I declined and moved on.

This morning I was driving my tile-scarred van through Palm Springs—again traveling down South Palm Canyon Drive—after hiking part way up the mountain that overlooks the valley. A man wandered into the street, all the time staring at the asphalt several feet before him. A breeze fluttered through his long, thin, unnaturally yellow hair. He reminded me of a burnt-out, one-hit wonder from the ’60s, a man unaware of the traffic about to run him down, a man unaware of the fact that he was in the street at all—the way he weaved back and forth with an unerring stoner’s gate, glancing up for only a moment, as though to assure himself that his place in this world had been secured.

I can’t say whether he was high or drunk or tweaked or whatever. I can’t say whether addiction or substance abuse or mental illness was even a factor. The same is true for all the folks I encountered. Something is going on, though—with them and a hell of a lot of other people out there.

According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, nearly 20% of US adults—over 45 million people—suffer some form of mental illness, with close to 9 million of them are dealing with substance abuse issues. Then there are the homeless, 3.5 million in any given year, at least 20% of whom suffer from severe mental illness. In fact, the US Conference of Mayors considers mental illness the third largest cause of homelessness for single adults.

Given the state of our economy and our growing trend toward undercutting public safety nets—a trend with roots in Ronald Reagan but one that found an easy home with Bill Clinton and the George Bushes—we’re not likely to see the number of homeless and mentally ill and addicts diminish any time soon. In fact, I suspect the problem will grow much worse before the politicians and political pundits and the populace who put them in power take these problems seriously.

But if there’s one thing we’re good at in this country, it’s pretending that problems don’t exist, or if we do acknowledge their existence, we figure out a way to blame the victims for causing them in the first place. Perhaps if all the disenfranchised souls were to form a corporation—a friggin’ multinational conglomerate the size of Wal-Mart—they’d at long last have a voice in government. In fact, they’d probably receive more handouts than all the oil and tobacco companies out there.

I particularly appreciated his discussion about his own experiences with meditation—how it had helped to bring about a sense of happiness and balance and equanimity and connectedness to the world around him. Meditation, he believes also made him more intuitive, which he thinks is a real cool thing for guys. “I was never intuitive being a guy,” he said. “It didn’t make any sense to me. Why would anyone want to have feelings like that?”

When he said this, he spoke with the same easy drawl he’d been using all along, a way of talking that somehow emphasized his roots as a real man, despite his having slipped into a more spiritual and enlightened persuasion.

What concerns me about casual remarks such as this is the implication behind them, that normal men are not intuitive beings, which means, by extension, to be male and intuitive is to be abnormal.

I’m sure he meant nothing by these comments, and I do appreciate his openness and frankness, yet I’m nonetheless reminded of the countless remarks of this sort that offhandedly typecast men and try to define what it means to be one of the guys, that is, someone who’s not intuitive or sensitive or self-aware or thoughtful or caring. Those who grow up not fitting into these stereotypes, who are bombarded with messages that define what it means to be male, reminded over and over that they experience the world in a way that leaves them out of the inner sanctum, are often left with a perception of themselves that make them feel inadequate, odd, and anything but normal. At least that had been the case for me.

When I was a freshman in high school, our PE class met two days a week to learn about men’s health and their sexual peculiarities. At one point, our gym teacher showed us a film—a fifties style docudrama—that tried to explain how boys are emotionally different from girls. Boys, it seems, are naturally unfeeling and much more direct when expressing themselves. Girls, on the other hand, are given to emotionality and would rather dance around a topic than risk hurting someone’s feelings.

The film illustrated the point by dramatizing the way teenage boys and girls deal with friends who have a problem with body odor. The concerned girls dropped carefully targeted hints to their female friend that tried to suggest ways to attend to her BO. The boys, on the other hand, simply threw their smelly male cohort into the shower, clothes and all, without thought to his feelings or reactions or natural inclinations. They were just being guys, after all, and what could be more normal than that?

After watching the film, I knew—although I would never admit it—that I could never do that to someone without taking into account his feelings, no more than I could be thrown into the shower without feeling deeply embarrassed and hurt myself. Once again, I was faced with another indicator that something was decidedly wrong with me. Never, no matter how I tried, could I ever be one of the guys.

From the time we plop out of the womb, we’re inundated with messages—both overt and not so—that tell us how to live and think and feel and see the world. Gross generalizations that define what it means to be a woman or man, to be sinful or pure, to be productive or lazy, to be stupid or smart, to be rich or poor. Yet this one-size-fits-all mentality is based on anything but reality and achieves little more than to confuse, hurt, and often destroy those who cannot meet the constant barrage of expectations.

And perhaps the greatest tragedy in all this is how we come to believe these gross generalizations and consequently judge ourselves with the harshest of condemnations for not living up to them. We indeed become our own worse enemies, no longer believing in ourselves or our ability to reach any sense of fulfillment or self-satisfaction because we’ve become convinced that achieving them is permanently outside our capabilities.

I suspect if we’re ever to pull ourselves out of this mire, we must start by each of us looking at our own complicity in generating these expectations and perpetuating the generalized myths. Not an easy task when we’ve come to identify ourselves by such sweeping ideas. Yet if we don’t strive to examine the things we say and the impact they might have on those around us, we may be inadvertently contributing to the hurt and frustration of others as we impose our simplistic justifications and expectations upon them.

Even casual remarks, such as those spoken by the speaker on the podcast, have the potential for contributing to the low sense of self-worth that seems to have reached epic proportions in our culture. How else do you explain our rampant consumerization and consumption of resources and addiction to entertainment? We must constantly go outside ourselves for validation because we’re afraid or incapable of finding it within.

And all this from a podcast on Buddhist meditation.

Perhaps if I were a more normal type of guy, I wouldn’t have noticed or cared about the speaker’s comments. Perhaps I would have simply shrugged them off and listened to the rest of the discussion without reaction. Perhaps I would have instead turned on sports radio and listened to a huffing and puffing announcer and his harrowing attacks against superstar athletes and the teams for which they played. Perhaps then I would have known what it felt like to be one of the guys.

About three-quarters of that increase comes from developing countries anxious to catch up with their wealthy cousins in the West, suggesting that those of us sucking up most of the resources are starting to get a handle on our myopic habits, despite the zealot naysayers who argue that greenhouse gases and rising temperatures are the stuff of science fiction and of little consequence to our everyday lives.

But closer examination suggests that all we’ve really done is export our problems to those developing countries that have taken on much of the energy-intensive manufacturing we used to do, while we continue to consume and waste and beg for more. And more is what we’re getting, especially when it comes to greenhouse gases.

Most credible scientists agree that a rise of just 2 degrees Celsius is enough to set off a series of global climate changes that can result in extreme weather conditions everywhere, whether droughts or floods or hurricanes or record snowfalls. Not only will the oceans continue to rise, but we could see widespread famine and disease.

In fact, rising temperatures may be threatening not only the quality of life for future generations, but also the ability of those generations to survive, whether in the next few decades or next few centuries. Add to this mix the record number of species at risk and shrinking pockets of sustainable ecosystems, and we have before us a doomsday scenario that makes the Mayan calendar seem like amateur hour.

Of course, it’s never easy to predict what will happen 90 years into the future, and most of us will have checked out long before we can learn if our predictions come true, let alone have to answer for our actions. Besides, even at its best, scientific theory is just that—theory. Despite the melting icecaps and record droughts and shrinking glaciers and loss of habitat and record high temperatures—all measurable, verifiable, present-day facts—we cannot know for certain what is to come at the end of the century. Yet even our most optimistic projections paint a dark and frightening future when we take into account the rapidly rising temperatures.

Even so, as a global community, as sovereign nations, as individuals, we are generally ignoring the problem and are more than willing to pass the consequences of our careless actions onto future generations.

In his book The World We Have, Thich Nhat Hanh says that each of us can do something to protect and care for our planet. “We have to live in such a way that a future will be possible for our children and our grandchildren. Our own life has to be our message.”

We all know that our planet is in danger, Thich Nhat Hanh says. The way in which we walk on the earth has a great influence on the plants and animals. “Yet we act as if our daily lives have nothing to do with the condition of the world. We are like sleepwalkers, not knowing what we are doing or where we are heading.” He believes that the future of all life, including our own, depends on us learning how to “live in a way that a future will be possible for our children and our grandchildren.”

Clearly, Thich Nhat Hanh sees no contradiction between spirituality and conservationism, a viewpoint, as it turns out, shared by numerous other spiritual leaders.

The Dalai Lama, for instance, believes that our current activities demonstrate a lack of commitment to humanitarian values and consequently threaten life on earth as we know it. Because of our greed, ignorance, and lack of respect for living things, we are destroying nature and its resources, which will result in future generations inheriting a vastly degraded planet.

It’s not just a question of ethics, says the Dalai Lama, but a question of our own survival. We have no other planet than this one, and that should be reason enough to protect it.

And it’s not just Buddhists who want to protect the environment. Sally Bingham, an Episcopal priest at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral, heads the Regeneration Project. The Project is an interfaith ministry devoted to deepening the connection between ecology and faith. Recently, the Project brought together leaders from Muslim, Jewish, and Christian faith groups to ask the White House and US Congress to act on climate change.

Then there’s Joel Hunter, a Florida pastor and board member of the National Association of Evangelicals. In addition to being one of 86 Christian leaders to sign the Evangelical Climate Initiative, he was part of a coalition of over 20 religious groups that urged the Bush administration and US Congress to do something about climate change.

There’s also Richard Cizik, vice president of governmental affairs for the US National Association of Evangelicals. He thinks that evangelicals should become known for their love and care of the earth and their fellow human beings. He shares with others a belief that the Bible supports the idea that Christians have a duty to be environmental stewards.

Even the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, believes that Christians have a moral duty to practice sustainable consumption. In fact, the Pope himself—Benedict XVI—endorsed the need for environmental stewardship, ideas echoed by Fazlun Khalid, founder and director of the Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Sciences, and Warren Stone, founder and chair of the Central Conference of American Rabbis’ Committee on the Environment.

Then there’s Miriam MacGillis, a Catholic nun who founded the Genesis Farm in order to provide a learning center for earth studies. And Karen Baker-Fletcher, an eco-justice theologian who interprets the Bible from an environmental, womanist, and African-American perspective. And Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, leader of over 30 million Orthodox Christians, who says that crimes against the natural work are sins and that to protect the oceans is to do God’s work.

There are more, of course. Many more. People of all faiths who believe that protecting the environment is a spiritual responsibility as well as an ethical one, people who understand that you cannot express a doctrine of family values while disregarding future families. That’s not to say that all politicians in Washington and executives in corporate boardrooms are listening, but the greater the numbers who speak up for the environment, the louder the voices become. Eventually, even the staunchest anti-environmentalist will have to listen.

“When we walk upon Mother Earth,” says Oren Lyons of the Onondaga Nation, “we always plant our feet carefully because we know the faces of our future generations are looking up at us from beneath the ground. We never forget them.”

That’s the point, isn’t it? Never to forget the children and the grandchildren.

When I first visited The Grotto, it reminded me of the 1943 film The Song of Bernadette, which chronicles the visionary adventures of Bernadette Soubirous and her numerous visits to a Lourdes cave in 1858. The cave, as it turns out, also doubled as the town dump, which was one of several reasons why many at the time questioned the authenticity of Bernadette’s visions. They also thought the girl might be a bit touched and should be taken away to an asylum. Despite these naysayers, Bernadette insisted that she had had numerous conversations with a woman who wore a blue girdle, a while veil, and a yellow rose on each foot, a woman who eventually identified herself as the Immaculate Conception—the Holy Blessed Virgin Mary, for those out of the Catholic loop.

Having been reminded of the film about Bernadette, I updated my Netflix queue to include the movie, which friends and I watched over the Thanksgiving weekend. It turned out we had all been raised Catholic, some of us much more loosely than others, and had watched the movie regularly on our black-and-white TV sets when growing up. The film provided us with a nostalgic glimpse into our pasts, a time, from our adult perspectives, that seemed far simpler and easier to negotiate, if for no other reason than as kids we knew no better.

In fact, it was such a treat to see The Song of Bernadette after all these years that I returned to Netflix and ordered the 1952 film The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima, another must-see for all good Catholic boys and girls of that era. The movie, however, was not nearly as much fun as the first one. Perhaps it was the strong and somewhat simplistic anti-socialist propaganda at the beginning of the film that set me on edge—or maybe it was the overabundance of bad writing and acting in general. For whatever reasons, I returned the movie unimpressed and ended any further journeys back to my childhood.

I did, however, decide to google Fatima to learn the latest scuttlebutt on the goings on there. I was not disappointed. The first link returned by the mysterious and wondrous and powerful search engine pointed me to the Fatima Network, which is packed full of information about the children, the visions, and the warnings.

One thing I discovered is that the Holy Mother—or whoever the woman was in the Fatima visions—placed a great deal of importance on Russia being consecrated by the Church. I don’t know why Russia was singled out, but the website warns that many nations will be “enslaved by the Russian militant atheists” if this consecration does not occur. I also don’t know whether these words can be attributed directly to the Holy Mother or whether they come from the site’s somewhat enthusiastic web master.

But what’s more frightening than the Russian renegades is the Fatima Network’s insistence that we have clearly failed to heed Mother Mary’s warnings, as evidenced by the numerous wars around the world and the 600 million abortions that have occurred in the past 14 years, a trend that, like Communism and vodka, apparently has its roots in Russia—not unlike a cold virus spreading through a kindergarten classroom on an icy February day. But that’s nothing compared to the legalization of “mercy killings” and “homosexual acts,” which prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that we’ve failed the Virgin big time.

So there you have it. If the Fatima Network is correct, the Holy Mother in October 1917 came down from heaven to warn us about queers. That’s right, Our Lady of Fatima chose that moment in history to appear before three small children and regale them with the evils of gay sex.

Perhaps it’s not so surprising she’d show up then. First Walt Whitman comes along and suggests that we take pleasure in the body. Then Oscar Wilde comes along and talks about the beauty of the body. And finally Gertrude Stein comes along and tells us the body is not what we think it is, while parading around Paris with the likes of Alice B. Toklas. Obviously, the Virgin, along with all the other heavenly hosts, understood what was coming and sought to put an end to it then and there. Screw that nonjudgmental loving shit Jesus used to preach about. This was out-and-out war.

And Christians around the world have heeded the Fatima call and have been carrying their anti-gay banners into battle. Last year, for example, when Pope Benedict XVI was in Fatima (of all places), he celebrated mass before an estimated 400,000 people before announcing that gay marriage was an insidious and dangerous threat. Rick Santorum, another proud and righteous member of the Church, says that gay marriage would lead to our country’s failure. Then there’s Pat Robertson, who has it on good authority that God plans to punish the US because the White House wants to stand up for gay rights abroad. Christian metal rocker Bradlee Dean claims that homosexuals molest an average of 117 people before they’re found out. And now Linda Harvey, founder of Mission America, is telling folks there’s no proof LGBT people even exist.

Wow. The Lady of Fatima would have loved that one.

Indeed, given her social and political wherewithal, she would have been enthralled by all these true-blue Christians lining up to spread hate and prejudice and fear in her name—and in the names of her ever-popular son and his omniscient dad.

Bernadette’s Holy Mother wasn’t nearly so colorful. She seemed more concerned with prayer and penance, with faith and devotion, with building a chapel, with healing the sick, than with all these worldly affairs. But don’t forget, she preceded the Fatima Mother by nearly 60 years, when the ink had barely dried on Leaves of Grass.

Perhaps it was her lack of political and social wherewithal that made the Lady of Lourdes turn out to be less of an anti-gay rallying point than her Fatima counterpart. After all, the Fatima Mary was threatening war and famine and the ravages of hell. All the Lourdes Mary seemed to be offering was eternal salvation.

But a lot of religious folks like their punishments. And they like their scapegoats. And they like their revenge. And if gays and lesbians happen to be the victims du joir, so be it. There’s plenty of hate to go around. And there are plenty of ways to justify that hate, Fatima being merely one of them.

It’s a great system, when you think about it—a way in which prejudice can be codified without assuming blame. Merely point to visions or scriptures or the word of God, and you can do or say whatever you want. It all boils down to the same thing—a convenient method for ensuring that we don’t have to take responsibility for how we act or speak or treat our neighbors. A surefire way, in fact, to absolve ourselves of all responsibility altogether. In fact, you’d almost think that’s what religion is all about.

The tweeters provided up-to-date news and perspectives on what was happening when it was happening, information I wasn’t likely to find elsewhere. What struck me most about the rapid fire of Occupy-related comments was not so much the self-congratulatory pats on the back, but the number of malicious attacks by local tweeters who felt put out by having their after-work commutes disrupted.

My initial reaction was to feel resentment toward these maligning messengers and their twisted tweets. After all, every benefit they receive from their employers—the sick pay, the vacation days, the lunch breaks, the retirement accounts, the medical insurance, and the reasonable workdays that let them go home this early—all came about as a result of people taking to the streets a century ago to seek changes in how the government and corporations did business.

The malevolent tweeters, to my way of thinking, had no problem reaping the benefits of protests and strikes, but inconvenience them to the least degree, and they become hell-bent on delivering distasteful and demeaning diatribes against the occupiers and their supporters, all while remaining safely ensconced in their cynical and complacent worlds of entertainment and self-indulgence and cable TV.

As I said, this was my initial reaction. But then I thought, in all fairness, I needed to step back and try to understand their gripe. After all, the Occupy folks were disrupting the lives of the 99%, not the lives of the elite few. And no social or political movement should be exempt from criticism.

But I realized my frustration was not that people should disagree with the Occupy forces, but the way in which they did it. The tweeters didn’t offer constructive criticism or provide viable alternatives. Nor did they address the root causes that had brought protesters into the streets to begin with. Instead, they merely attacked and name-called and threatened—and did so with no small level of meanness.

Many of the tweeters, for example, expressed their hope that the drawbridge would be raised, throwing the protesters into the frigid waters below. At the least, this would douse them with enough realty to cool their rebellious spirits, and at the worse, would leave many killed and maimed. Apparently, so intent were these tweeters on getting home without being inconvenienced that they were willing to sacrifice just about anyone who got in their way.

I’ve also seen this sort of malicious outpouring when monitoring the tweets of Occupy Portland, Occupy Oakland, and Occupy Wall Street. Again, many of the tweeters attempted to dismiss and denigrate and demonize the protesters as their messages happily condoned pepper spray, police brutality, and taking out the occupiers with whatever means necessary.

When I hear such an onslaught of attacks, I can’t help wondering what’s at the root of all this anger. Why is it that the only way we seem able to react to different perspectives or controversy is to lash out at our opponents? Is debate and and the exchange of ideas so out of the question that it is impossible to disagree without receiving something akin to a death threat?

I suppose that, in an ideal world, we could turn to our political or religious leaders for guidance on such behavior—or perhaps even to the more esteemed members of the press. Unfortunately, there seems to be a shortage of public figures capable of providing anything in the way of mature guidance.

Newt Gingrich, for instance, responded to the occupiers by telling them to stop whining, take a bath, and get a job. Michelle Bachmann accused protestors of being ignorant and disrespectful. Joe Walsh called the movement anti-American. Herman Cain called it un-American. Illinois Representative Ed Sullivan Jr. also called it un-American and stated that he’s read reports suggesting the occupiers were raping and pillaging and beating people up and murdering them. Fox News called the movement anti-Semitic and linked it to the White House shooter. Bill O’Reilly went so far as to say the movement has been overrun with thugs, anarchists, and crazies.

And on and on it goes.

Yet the Occupy movement is hardly the only victim of such adolescent pandering. Anti-gay slurs, for instance, are a mainstay of the US lexicon. Recently, a New Jersey teacher was accused of posting anti-gay remarks to her Facebook page, referring to homosexuality as a perverted spirit that breeds like cancer. And just last year, Sarah Palin came to the defense of her daughter, Willow, who called a former classmate a faggot on Facebook, which only reinforces the fact that anti-gay slurs have become the classroom norm.

And it hardly stops there. We’ve heard plenty of celebrities lately—both sports figures and Hollywood heroes alike—let loose their homophobic slurs. And of course there are those political and religious leaders again, turning their obsession with gay sex into political gain.

But the gay community is certainly not the only victim. Racially motivated remarks seem to have diminished little. Attacks on immigrants have become quite common. Few think little about hurling harmful slurs at women. And there appears to be an outright war against the sick and poor.

The point is not so much who’s being attacked, but rather how easily these attacks are carried out. And outlets such as Twitter seem the perfect venue for those who thrive on taking aim while hiding behind the relative safety of their obscure screen names. They can tweet away without thought or consideration or regard for the people they malign. And Twitter’s 140-character message limitation proves an ideal outlet for the sort of sound bite mentality that has become so common to online attackers. They need to provide no evidence, no sound reasoning, no willingness to hear both sides—attacking in a way that to them seems clever and fashionable, without concern for thoughtful and reasoned debate.

Since its inception, the Internet has been steadily changing the way we read and write, and social networking sites have taken this evolution a step further. It’s hard saying whether these sites are merely reflecting the world around us, or our world is changing in response to these outlets. But at every level, communication seems to have broken down and been replaced by posturing and name-calling and drawing lines in the sand.

How do we strive for rational discourse in such an environment? How do we communicate when socially engineered constraints limit authentic exchange in favor of quick retorts, simplistic dialogue, and black-and-white thinking? Perhaps it’s time for a new model, one that values quality over quantity, substance over superficiality. Perhaps it’s time we recognize that the things we say—and tweet—have an impact on all of us, that the language we use is the life we live.

“Language,” according to Gustave Flaubert, “is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.”

At least that’s what the signs suggested.

I turned at the corner of Fourth and Main, where Main cuts between Lownsdale Square and Chapman Square, the two city parks that the Occupy contingent currently called home. Just then, the police hauled a man out from between the tents and ushered him toward the sidewalk, not far from where I was taking my stroll. I assumed that he’d been imbibing a bit, judging by his haphazard struggles and the bloated, bulbous, burnt-out look on his face, the sort of look you often find in this part of the city.

Once the cops got him under control, they pushed him against the sidewalk and forced him into a pair of handcuffs, while he shouted out protests that could have been accusations about police brutality or rights violations or needing to take a piss. Between his slurred speech and the fact that his face was in the ground, he could have been saying anything.

At one point, a guy standing inside the camp—another fan of all-day happy hours, judging by the look on his face—called to his handcuffed friend, “Quit resisting.”

“I’m not resisting,” the detainee shouted. “I’m not.”

“You are resisting. Just don’t try to resist.”

I left the encampment and headed toward the river.

Over the next two days, I passed by or walked through the camp several times. For the most part, the place remained relatively peaceful despite the number of tents and the mass of campers. Sure, music might have blared on occasion, and there might have been some yelling now and again, but these sorts of disruptions seemed to be the exception.

What struck me most was not the fact of the encampment or the gathering of all those young, self-styled, mostly white, mostly male revolutionaries with their prerequisite beards and carefully crafted hairdos and assortment of knitted wool beanies. We’ve all been there, after all. All of us.

What I had not anticipated was the large number of homeless and mentally ill and unsavory grunge-clad street folks who latched onto the movement like cattle to a watering hole on a dusty Oklahoma day.

It didn’t help that straw had been strewn across what little uncovered ground remained, giving the entire encampment a stable-like feel that swelled with the odors of unwashed bodies and beer-soaked sweat and the suspiciously acrid aroma of burning weed. The seedier members of the camp, the only ones I could really hear, spoke with that rough illiterate stoner slur that circled about in generalities and trendy clichés. I had the sense they could have easily landed anywhere that offered a safe haven and a place to have a good time.

It would have been easy at that point to walk away with the impression that the only thing the Occupy people had accomplished was to set up a place to party, this despite one of their signs explicitly stating that they were not there for that reason. Even so, it was difficult to see the political or social advantages of setting up an urban campsite that had been for the most part approved by city hall and at least to some degree taken over by outside forces, some of them in genuine need, others simply looking for a place to unfurl their skull-encrusted black leather bags.

That evening, however, I dropped by another city park—Jamison Square. The Occupy forces had marched there earlier that day and planned to remain throughout the night, despite threats from the same city hall that had given a wink and a nod to their semi-permanent encampment.

The gathering was small, quiet, peaceful. From what I could tell, there were nearly as many cops—on horses and bikes and feet—and members of the press as there were protesters. I’m not sure why the city decided to make such a big deal out of occupying this park, considering how accommodating they had been about the other parks, but the general theory being tweeted that day was related to the fact that Jamison Square sat smack dab in the middle of one of the city’s more affluent neighborhoods.

I don’t know whether this really was the mayor’s reasoning for giving the protestors the boot. I don’t even know whether this part of town actually qualifies as one of the city’s most affluent. But I do know, or at least I suspect, that had the city not issued their ultimatums and had the cops not arrived prepared for a riot and had the press not shown up in droves, the sit-in (or whatever they’re calling it these days) would probably have gone unnoticed.

But going unnoticed is not the point of civil disobedience. And to this end the protesters got what they wanted. Many were arrested. Many made the news. Many tweeted till the cows came home. In the meantime, those who remained at the encampment had been all but forgotten.

And they weren’t the only ones. The city was full of the forgotten, people who had nothing to do with the Occupy movement—the amputee in his wheelchair, the kid asleep in the doorway, the vet looking for work, the panhandler with her two children, the man at the bus stop sitting for hours staring at street signs and clinging to his torn and greasy pack.

Then there was the other tent city, the one on Burnside set up for the homeless, shoved behind a makeshift wall built out of dilapidated rotting doors. No members of the press followed those campers around. No politicians pontificated on their plight. No one held up signs to remind us that these people needed our attention. They had been rolled into the folds of the city so thoroughly that most of us had forgotten they were there.

My last night in Portland, I visited the Occupy camp one last time. Across the street from the tents, a crowd was gathered in a small brick plaza, round and tiered like a mini-amphitheater. In the center, a man spoke to them in a clear, calm, defiant voice. I caught only snippets of what he had to say—something about sustainability, I believe—but I could still discern that this was an articulate, confident speaker, one who knew how to carry the crowds.

I had not seen this side of the camp until now, and I was relieved to know that people like him were part of the movement. I needed to see something here that gave me the same sense of satisfaction I felt when I watched the protestors gather at Jamison Square.

I’m not yet convinced that the encampments themselves are the best way to achieve the changes we need right now. They require resources and energy that could perhaps be better applied elsewhere. And that fat ugly rat I saw scurrying across the sidewalk toward the camp hardly helped to sway me in its favor. Yet I’m grateful that these people are here. I’m grateful that so many people across the country are willing to do something to make those changes happen.

Sure, there might be the opportunists who come straggling in, an inevitable consequence of any movement. And there might be the campers thrilled to follow the latest trend. Also inevitable. And propping up tents in the middle of the city might seem like nothing but a desperate measure. But we live in times that call for desperate measures. And in my mind, it makes more sense to pitch a tent in the middle of Portland than to sit at home and watch another night of cable TV.

My monkey’s been working overtime lately. A lot of overtime. Filling my head with thoughts of shrinking incomes and looming bankruptcies and impending foreclosures and medical care reserved for the privileged and few.

Even when I seek refuge from my fiscally-induced panic attacks—and strive for the mind of a forest deer, as the Buddha suggests—I’m quickly bombarded with the realities of an economy so depressed that seldom can I step out my door without my primate being roused from his fitful and haunted slumber.

In the past two weeks, I’ve helped friends vacate their mortgage-logged home, overheard strangers rail about their unemployment, received an email from a friend laid off from her nursing job, listened to chainsaws mow down the trees my neighbors are selling to pay their mortgage, spoke with another neighbor who can’t find a job after laboring all his life as a carpenter, ran into an acquaintance who’s moved in with his parents until he can locate work and afford a place of his own.

All within a span of two weeks.

What makes it worse is how commonplace such stories have become. No matter where you travel in the US, you can find hordes of people struggling to keep their heads above water. Even if the DC elite want us to believe that recovery is at our doorsteps, the fact is, many of those doorsteps are floating downriver, along with the rest of the houses torn from their foundations.

And it doesn’t look like the trend will abate anytime soon. The national foreclosure rates continue to mount at a staggering pace. In August alone, mortgage holders filed 78,880 first-time default notices. Admittedly, that number was down 18% from the previous August, but the total still represents a 33% increase over July of this year, the largest month-to-month increase in three years.

And all these defaults mean one thing: Banks will be repossessing even more homes in the coming months as the new foreclosures work their way through the process. But here’s the kicker. Those banks received billions of dollars in bailouts after they helped to orchestrate this mess in the first place.

Of course, it doesn’t bode well that jobs are as scarce as they are. According to the US Department of Labor, the current unemployment rate hovers around 9.1%. That means, assuming the Department of Labor is correct, a staggering 14 million people are out of work.

But the department is not correct. At least not completely. Their figures don’t reflect the 9.3 million people working part-time because they can’t find full-time employment. Then there are those who’ve given up looking for work altogether—another nine million. Now throw in the 2.5 million who want to work but haven’t found anything in the past year. And what about the self-employed, another group often ignored in the economic tallying?

Add those together and we have an unemployment rate that easily exceeds 20%, a rate, in fact, fast approaching the 25% reached during the height of the Great Depression. Even Ron Paul is scratching his head at this one.

And then we have all those bankruptcies—a projected 1.46 million this year. The good news, I suppose, is that this estimate actually amounts to fewer bankruptcies than the previous year. Still, that’s a hell of a lot of bankruptcies. A hell of a lot of people in the process of losing everything.

So that’s why my monkey mind has been getting the better of me. And I must not be alone, based on what I’m seeing with the Occupy movement. A lot of us, it seems, have been affected by all those scrambled thoughts that suggest something isn’t quite right with the system. One might even conclude that it’s downright criminal.

The Occupy movement started on Wall Street when 1,000 protesters gathered before the bastions of capitalism to express their outrage over social inequities and corporate greed. Within four weeks the movement had spread to Seattle and Los Angeles and Tokyo and Frankfurt and Madrid and Santiago and Auckland and Tel Aviv and Kuala Lumpur and 900 other cities across the globe.

Not all these protests, however, have their roots in the Occupy forces. In Spain, the Los Indignados movement gathered steam last May when protesters set up tents in Madrid in response to the high unemployment rates. In the UK, students have been in the street for the past year protesting the rise in school fees, while students in Santiago have been organizing protests since May, demanding that education be available for free to everyone. This past summer, protesters in Tel Aviv occupied the city’s financial district in response to the high cost of living. And the Arab uprising last spring has served as an inspiration to movements across the globe, including those who found their way to Wall Street.

Regardless of what fueled the original flames, the frustrations are the same all over, with more and more people fuming over the economic hardships they must endure as a consequence of corporate pandering, laissez-faire politicians, and economies that have trickled neither down or sideways, but only up to the money-grubbing misers who got us in this mess in the first place.

So the growing wave of anger continues to spread—and so do the number of protests. In fact, the movement has grown so strong that the mainstream media can no longer ignore it—at least not completely.

And you can always tell when the media finally notice something, but want to maintain a hands-off approach. They conduct polls, like the one conducted by CBS News and The New York Times. According to their results, 43% of Americans agree with the Occupy movement, that is, 43% believe that money and wealth should be more evenly distributed. 27% disagree. Mostly older conservative Republicans.

Yet the big question that remains—a question, I believe, not included in the poll—is whether the Occupy efforts will result in meaningful change. The movement is already bigger than the tea party, but it’s a movement still in its infancy, and we’ve a long way to go before the gold dust settles. Then there are the 1% who control most of the wealth in this country—along with the media and politicians they put into office. None of them is likely to take such a movement lying down.

Even so, the Occupy banner brings hope at a time when many of us believed that the final war cries of Reaganomics had pushed all hope aside. So for now, my monkey mind can enjoy a brief respite—at least until the next round of legislation sends me leaping to another branch.

Or heading to the nearest Occupy shindig.

In the meantime, let’s get back to my post. One of the issues I discussed was the rapidly growing ebook market and the profound impact the Internet has had on the publishing industry. From this, you might have concluded that these changes were what caused me to embark upon the Good Ship Ebook. But that’s only part of the story.

My reasons for diving into electronic publishing are not only the result of new opportunities—although they’ve certainly helped to forge my decision—but more the result of old opportunities drying up.

Like a lot of folks, I’m trying to survive in a climate in which professionals are being cast off in favor of cheap, untrained labor, which in the case of publishing has resulted in a plethora of amateur writers and an overabundance of pop-culture one-liners meant to appease a sound-bite sensibility born out of Hollywood, raised on Madison Avenue, and dragged through puberty by the World Wide Web.

Quite a generalization, I know. And certainly not true for all publications. But true for enough of them to make me believe that this online hijinks is leading to a steady decline in our ability to discern quantity from quality or make-believe from the truth, as though we’re sitting in the middle of the snack aisle at Safeway watching a Disney movie and eating potato chips and drinking an unending supply of Coca Cola, while practicing tai chi and doing deep breathing exercises and murmuring Hindu mantras, if that makes any sense at all.

But let me clarify a point. Writers are not being cast off completely—only those who want to get paid for their work.

Case in point. Over the years I’ve written numerous articles for an outfit that publishes several magazines and websites. Recently I was in contact with an editor over there about contributing to one of their blogs. After a few exchanges, the editor expressed interest in having me post every week. The catch? She wanted me to do it for free. Yep, not at a reduced rate, not at my year-end discount, but for nothing. Nada. Nil. Zip.

I should have asked her how she’d feel about providing her services for nothing. “We could trade,” I should have said, “free writing for free editing.” Instead I simply declined her offer. I suspected she was under enough pressures without adding to her load.

Yet I can’t help wondering why writers are the ones being singled out to provide free services. Would publishers expect the same sacrifices from their lawyers or accountants or hairdressers? Their doctors or nurses or sex therapists? Their plumbers or electricians or feng shui decorators? What makes writers so special?

After several more exchanges with the editor, she finally agreed to an article—at a third of what I’d been paid several years ago. I neither hemmed nor hawed nor came up with a witty retort. I took the assignment.

But publishers can get away with this sort of behavior. There are more writers than there is work. Experience and ability and competency and a proven track record mean little in today’s climate. All that matters is whether a writer is willing to work for nothing—or practically nothing.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of writers out there willing to do just that—peddle their wares for free. They might not be particularly good writers. And their grammatical skills might be at a third-grade level. And their work might be full of inaccuracies and inconsistencies. But they come at the right price, and with today’s economic realities, that’s all that counts.

Yet such policies are taking their toll. You can see their results in the ever-increasing deluge of substandard material found on the Internet. With its blogs and web pages and online articles and electronic publications, the web is teaming with work that is so inferior that at times it’s unreadable, let alone comprehensible. A lot of that stuff is, of course, self-published—blogs and websites and ebooks—but a surprisingly large amount is not. Besides, self-publishing in itself doesn’t predict a lack of quality any more than working for the big boys ensures professionalism.

Moreover, having to compete with amateurs for low-paying gigs is not my only beef. With the growing popularity of digital publications, publishers are now repackaging content as ebooks, and the writers who created that content are being hung offline to dry.

Another case in point. The same publisher who wanted me to blog for free created an ebook out of a series of articles I wrote several years ago and is selling it for over 15 bucks a pop. The only reason I know about the book is because I discovered it while researching something altogether different. I was never notified it was out there, and I certainly have not received any royalties from it. Before I wrote the articles, I had signed whatever it was they had asked me to sign in order to get the work, and consequently they felt no moral or legal obligation to include me in the electronic process. After the ebook was published, all I got out of it was a sense of frustration and the feeling I had just taken it up the ass in a big way.

But that’s what it means to be a professional writer these days. You never know which end is going to get it the worse.

My final case in point. I promise. Earlier this year a group of bloggers who had contributed content to The Huffington Post brought a class action suit against Arianna Huffington, her website, and AOL. The suit is based on the fact that she sold The Huffington Post to AOL for $315 million but never compensated the writers who contributed much of the publication’s content. In fact, some estimates put the number of unpaid writers at 9,000 people—a hell of a lot of slave labor according to my calculations.

In all fairness, though, I should point out that one of the reasons some publishers—those not of the Huffington ilk—are relying more and more on free and cheap labor is because the industry itself is undergoing such upheaval. They’re feeling the Internet pinch big time, as are the editors who work to keep those publications going.

Still, it’s not the publishers who’ve been hit hardest by these changes. It’s the writers. Yet without writers there would be no websites or blogs or electronic publications. Without writers there would be no novels or how-to books or newspapers or magazines.  Without writers there would be no plays or movies or TV shows or broadcast news. Without writers, in fact, Arianna could never have pulled off her multimillion-dollar coup.

So that’s why I’ve moved into the world of ebooks—to take control of my writing, at least partial control. If I’m going to be prostituting my services anyway, I might as well do it on my own terms. Besides, what choice do I have? What choice does any professional writer have? We’ve been marginalized and ostracized and penalized for doing what we do best.

But there’s hopeful news coming from the National Writers Union. They’ve put together a new campaign called Pay the Writer, which is trying to establish a fair pay scale for freelance writers and journalists. To achieve this goal, the campaign is relying heavily on the Internet to garner support—through websites and emails and tweets.

The Internet might have turned our lives upside down, but it will be the Internet that saves our sorry asses. Unless someone figures out how to take that away from us as well.

But now we’ve entered the era of electronic publishing. The era of Kindle and ePub and Nook and iBooks and all the other ebook players. Through Web sites such as Smashwords and Amazon, anyone—and I mean anyone—can submit a book for publication, and within minutes or days, that book is available to Internet users from Iceland to the Malay Peninsula.

Just think, now you can bundle all those stories you’ve been writing about your pet dog and the neighborhood squirrel into a neat little electronic package and share them with the rest of the world in minutes.

Gone are the days of willful publishers and frustrated editors dictating the content of an entrenched and implosive system. Gone too are the controls on quality and quantity and marketability. As broken a system as publishing had become, it still provided a few safeguards against an overabundance of amateurish prattle spilling out of bookstores and libraries and the peripherals of home entertainment centers.

A few safeguards.

But as I said, those days are gone, and like it or not, the mega-publishers no longer have a stronghold on the market, just like the literate elite in the 15th century lost control on learning and education. And now the world of publishing, like the world back then, is morphing into a bit of a democracy.

And ebooks are leading the charge, like Don Quixote, quickly proving they’re a lot more than a passing fancy, no matter how fanciful they may be. In 2010, retailers sold an estimated 100 million ebooks. Projections for 2011 put that number at 500 million. By 2014, retailers expect half their book sales to be electronic publications.

That’s a hell of a lot of books.

And as I might have mentioned…anyone can publish an electronic book, that is, anyone with a computer and Internet access. I suppose I should have qualified the “anyone” part sooner, but given that in all probability there’s going to be over 25 billion Internet users by 2025, I doubt a few wayward computer illiterates will make a difference.

Even the stuffiest, most conservative publishers appear to be aware of what’s coming their way. Of the top ten new releases on Amazon’s site, eight offer Kindle versions. That’s not surprising in itself. These days, most publishers are in it strictly for the money. What is surprising is that recent studies indicate that eReader devices are actually causing people to read more. Not only are ebooks rearranging the market demographics, but it also looks as if they’re helping to grow that market.

You might be wondering why I’m hitting you over the head with all this information about digital publishing. I suppose it’s my roundabout way of explaining why I’ve jumped into the ebook fray. In fact, if you view my Publications page, you’ll see I’ve been a busy little ebook beaver, so busy that now I’m working on my own ebook about publishing ebooks. The title? Ebook Now: The Essential and Simple Guide to Creating and Publishing Professional Ebooks for Kindle and ePub. Pretty cool, huh?

One of the reasons I decided to write this book was because of all the conflicting and vague and inaccurate information I came across when trying to publish my own books. Not only did that material include help files and online articles and blog postings, but also other ebooks, most of which were so poorly written that they didn’t deserve a preview, let alone an actual purchase. That’s not to say I didn’t happen upon a few promising books, but I did have to dig through an enormous amount of crap to find them.

That’s how electronic publishing works, though. It’s the great democratizer.

In a way, Ebook Now represents my official entry into the world of electronic publishing. Although it won’t be my first ebook, it will be the first piece I’ve written specifically for the ebook market. I still have a fair amount of trepidation about the system itself, but what new technology doesn’t require a period of adjustment? After all, ebooks haven’t been around that long. I suppose you can trace the first one back to the ’70s, if you want to return to the Dynabook days. But it was the advent of the Internet in the ’90s that made ebooks a real possibility. Hardly a blink of an electronic eye.

It took Gutenberg’s printing press several decades to spread throughout Western Europe. But spread it did, and by the end of the 16th century as many as 200 million books had been printed. In fact some historians cite the printing press as a major factor in the spread of literacy, the breakdown of existing power structures, and the rise of the middle class. Indeed, the printing press altered the world forever.

We’ve yet to see what the impact of electronic publishing will be on our current times. I suspect that any evaluation will have to take into account the influence of the Internet as a whole—a medium that has been instrumental in disseminating news and connecting populations and spreading democracy and filling the information highway with buckets full of shit.

After all, isn’t that what technology is all about?

Bachmann’s campaign later reported that her comments were made in jest—and maybe they were—but even if they weren’t, no one would have been surprised by such remarks. A lot of folks who boast about their religious proclivities are quick to claim they have insight into the mind of God and consequently an inside track on divine retribution.

Televangelist and past presidential contender Pat Robertson also pointed to the quake as a sign from God, when he reported that the cracks in the Washington Monument, one of the few telltale marks left by the quake, might indicate that we’re closer to the coming of the Lord, based on his understanding of the Bible.

And who would know better good ol’ Pat? After all, he was the one who belted out a holy amen when Jerry Falwell, another one of God’s mercenaries, told the world that the ACLU, the National Organization of Women, People for the American Way, pagans, abortionists, gays and lesbians, and all the “Christ-haters” were to blame for bringing on the 9/11 attacks.

Yet the blame game is hardly limited to Robertson and Falwell. Fred Phelps and his Westboro minions have been praising their God for killing off US soldiers as retribution for America’s immorality and tolerance for abortion and gays and lesbians. Like Robertson and Falwell, Phelps is so convinced that he knows the mind of God that he’s willing to picket the funerals of US service members and carry signs that read You’re Going to Hell and God Hates the USA and Thank God for Dead Soldiers.

But Phelps was picketing funerals long before he began showing up at the services for soldiers. Before that, he would attend the funerals of gay men who had succumbed to the ravages of AIDS. There he would hold up signs that said such things as God Hates Fags and other messages indicating heavenly retaliation. Apparently AIDS was merely one more blow from God’s omniscient fist.

Of course, there was far less concern about Phelps picketing the funerals of men who suffered agonizing deaths as a result of such an unpopular disease. I suspect too many people secretly agreed with Phelps for them to be much concerned. After all, preachers and such have been gunning for the gay and lesbian community for decades—and any chance they have to point blame, they do.

Take a look at John Hagee, another pastor with an inside scoop on God’s thinking. He announced that the devastation in New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina was another example of God’s swift and mighty judgment. A homosexual parade in the middle of the city, according to Hagee, was simply too much.

So all this talk of God getting even with all the sinners got me thinking about the logic behind such sentiments. After all, if God whips the sky into a frenzy and rattles the earth and sends disease and arranges for soldiers to be killed to teach people a lesson, then by extension, all such disasters, whether natural or not, must point to the unerring presence of divine retribution.

Take hurricanes, for example. According to the National Hurricane Center, 96 major hurricanes have struck the Atlantic and Gulf coasts since 1851. The five states hit the hardest? Florida, Texas, Louisiana, North Carolina, and South Carolina—with Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi following close behind.

And it’s not just hurricanes that are keeping Southerners on their toes. Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee are in the top 10 states for killer tornadoes. Then there’s Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Louisiana, all in the top 10 for the number of deaths due to lightning strikes.

In fact, according to the New York Times, the South is the riskiest place to live when it comes to natural disaster. And NewScientist reports that Southerners are more likely to die from the effects of weather than anywhere else in the US.

But the South, often referred to as the Bible Belt because they have the highest concentration of socially conservative evangelical Christians, faces a lot more challenges than a few tornadoes. Five of their states rank in the top 10 for the highest unemployment rates in the country, six rank in the top 10 for teen pregnancies, six rank in the top 10 for hunger among older Americans, eight rank in the top 10 for residents without health insurance, and of the 10 states with the highest rates of obesity, Southern states take the top nine spots.

Someone, it would seem, is sending those Southern folks a message, at least according to their own logic. Perhaps it has something to do with their staggering divorce rates. It turns out that in the US conservative Christians are the most likely people to seek out a divorce. Evidently the family that prays together doesn’t always stay together.

Perhaps God is telling them to divorce. Perhaps God is telling them to work less and to impregnate more teenage girls and to let their elderly go hungry and to eradicate health insurance and to eat fattier, greasier, gooier, deadlier foods.

But what about all those natural disasters and weather-related events? How do you explain those?

I cannot. I would not presume to know the mind of God. I was raised to believe that God is omniscient and unfathomable, utterly beyond rational comprehension, sort of like the Tao or Nirvana. But then, I’m no biblical scholar or preacher or Sunday school teacher, not even close, and the South is certainly not the only region of the country to suffer from events both natural and otherwise.

I do find it interesting, however, that the New York Times also reports that much of the West Coast, that bastion of liberalism, is about the safest place in the country when it comes to natural disaster, particularly up here in the Northwest. But we do have earthquakes and volcanoes and flooding and tsunamis; they just don’t hit as often as events down south. But they do hit. And they’ll continue to do so.

Maybe when it comes right down to it, none of us should be casting that first stone.