Life and Politics

I haven't posted in forever! For anyone still reading:

I sang Grieg's "Ich Liebe Dich" at a wedding this last Saturday for Lane and Kristin. I enjoyed learning the music, which is brief yet beautiful and narrowly avoids being overly sentimental. Lane and Kristin paid a very high compliment when they thanked me for helping make their wedding just like wanted it.

In less happy news, I received a phone call from Mom yesterday informing me that my brother Matt and his wife Terri, who were expecting their first child, visited the doctor to find that the baby did not have a heart beat. I am deeply saddened for them. I had two good friends from undergrad who both lost their first baby while still in the womb. I can only imagine the let down and grief after having such high expectations.

Today I had a customer tell me that he decided to purchase a diamond online. This is MADDENING because he has been in everyday for nearly a week. I was SUPPOSED to have two diamonds to show him last Saturday, but both of my top diamond suppliers dropped the ball and didn't even ship me the diamonds! How can I sell a diamond I can't even show? So for reasons completely out of my hands, I have lost an important sale, and I look incompetant in the process. I'm about ready to fly to New York and strangle some diamond dealing Jews.

I am finding it increasingly more difficult to avoid being entirely elitist, but when the world is becoming increasingly more ignorant, what can I do? The following excerpt from Mark Hemingway's National Review Online article regarding the Obama New Yorker cover is not only well-written but completely on point:

As for the baseless charge that Obama is a Muslim, let’s look at some
actual data rather than base our preconceptions on a cartoon. Back in late
March, Pew did a survey. One of the questions they asked was “Do you know if Obama is a ... Christian, Muslim or don’t know?”The headline everyone ran with from the study was of course, “Poll: 1 in 10 think Obama is Muslim.” But who, exactly, is it that thinks Obama is a Muslim? According to Pew, 14 percent of Republicans, 10 percent of Democrats and eight percent of Independents thought Obama was Muslim. However, the poll has a margin of error of plus or minus three percent, so statistically we’re pretty even. Further, the study reported that 54 percent of Republicans correctly identified Obama as a Christian, compared to 52 percent of Democrats. Twenty-nine percent of Republicans said they didn’t know Obama’s religion, compared to the 34 percent of Democrats who said the same.So this leads us to a fairly inescapable conclusion, obvious to anyone who’s toiled in the salt mines
of public-opinion polling: there’s a large cross section of the American
people who are not very well-informed. And that cross section appears to be
a much more diverse sample of people than one might think. For instance,
after this week we now know that smarty-pants New York magazine editors are
often no less ignorant, and even more prejudicial, than the trailer-dwelling
backwoodsmen in West Pennsyltucky, whose perceived mindset they eagerly
skewer in their clumsy attempts at appearing urbane and sophisticated.
America, it seems, is truly egalitarian even in its faults. Contrary to what
Barack Obama and The New Yorker would have you believe, no political party
or ideology can lay claim to a lion’s share of ignorance. And everyone
should expect to see plenty more of it between now and November.

Ha! I love it!