is today. Stores are having sales, banks and post offices are closed, the newspaper’s filled with uncontroversial human-interest stories, and all are decorated with the flag’s colors and tacky stars. I don’t understand why Memorial Day is seemingly practiced as a day of patriotism. What do barbeques have to do with remembering our dead soldiers? I’m not against celebrating, but it should be via the appreciation of life and our relative good fortune, not of the military and cheap crap. Memorial Day is to remind us how awful war is, which considering we’re in the midst of one, is a pretty fucking important remembrance.

Since I work for a religiously based non-profit organization, they send everyone weekly reflections and things-to-think-about-on-holidays-and-events via e-mail. Sometimes they’re pretty interesting and sometimes they’re pretty lame.

Today’s was a quote by some quote-guy about how encouragement is the most important gift you can give to somebody and if people were encouraged more we’d have more “great minds” in the Einstein-Gandhi-Mother Theresa vein. This seems like an almost too simple and obvious solution to the world’s problems, but maybe it’s not. With encouragement people would push themselves more creatively and our arts and sciences would progress more freely and blah blah blah, but I think the biggest advantage would be that all those encouraged people would, as a side effect of the given encouragement and resulting tryings, probably feel better about themselves in general.

Imagine a world full of people with hearty self-esteems, and I don’t mean people who are cocky and narcissistic, but honest to goodness secure people. People who wouldn’t feel so easily threatened and would be less likely to engage in agression, people who wouldn’t be mean to those with lesser abilities than their own just to make themselves feel superior, people in whom jealousy and pettiness would have no purpose and therefore little existence. However, at second glance the problem of how to actually make the biggest impact with encouragement is clarified. My parents were always very supportive in that you-can-do-anything-you-put-your -mind-to sort of way, but I still ended up with poor ideas of myself and slumped through several years of depression.

This encouragement, then, seems to need to be rather specific. Perhaps if they had said, “I think you should do X because you’d be great at X-ing and I look forward to the results” instead of “of course you can do X, you’re so talented!” I’d have fallen into the well-adjusted category (sooner?).

And so I’d like to make a Call to Action! Woo! We must make a point to recognize other’s specific strengths and encourage them to develop and augment those strengths into skill and achievement, while offering our help along the way. Anyway, seeking out virtues in others is always a good exercise in humility and therefore worth some non-self-centered time.

I want to be a cowboy.

I’m afraid of becoming a desperado.

Also, the miscellany section has been busy.