My Thoughts on This And After Life

When I was reading a blog online, I came across an interesting question. If you are on a torpedoing airplane, what would you do? The irresolutely evangelical Christian blogger's answer was that everyone would pray to Jesus. She just could not see how anyone, again anyone, would do otherwise. I was not surprised at her answer and her inability to see how anyone would think differently.

What would I do? I would probably take stock of how my life has been. Whether I am leaving this world with regrets or without. I am striving toward no regrets everyday, and that is how I choose to live. I would also probably make a mental list of all those that I love and make sure that I say for one last time "I love you" before I depart.

I attended a Catholic funeral a few weeks ago. It was a real ritual: the songs, the ceremony, the whole thing. A woman from the choir sang, "Jesus is my shepherd, and there is nothing more that I want." Here we were, gathered to pay respect to a young man whose life was tragically cut short. And that is what this woman is singing. He is returning to God as will we all return to God. That is what ultimately what everyone wants, including him and all of us. He is going to a better place, so we shan't be sorry or sad for him. But what if you were? The whole ceremony, it seemed to me, was designed, not to celebrate the life that this young man had led, but rather assuage our fears of mortality because the afterlife is better than this life.

This is when I, between the sobbing and the crying, began to think about the role of religion in this life. And then it occurred to me that all religions is really about the afterlife. Because we know nothing about it, whether it really exists or not, we are divided in our thoughts. On the one hand, we would like to continue this life in the afterlife (in which case we try to take as much of this life as we can as the mummies did). On the other hand, we think that there is a better life afterward (as Christians, Muslims do), and we do what we can to earn it. Or you reap what you sow, and you are reincarnated accordingly (Buddhists).

I have a more empirical attitude toward it. I cannot possibly know anything about it, so I am going to live life so that whenever I am departing, I do so without regrets. I do not mean it in a hedonistic way. I do believe that humans, no matter what religion or no religion, have a moral compass. Therefore, we strive toward having our positive mark by striving toward being good because being good is a goal in and of itself. Not because it holds the promise of heaven in the afterlife, but rather because it is good.

Christians fail to see that. They use God and Jesus as crutches, as that external force that tells them to be good or to do this or that. How about we turn that inward? Can we be innately good? Don't we believe in the goodness of the heart? I think that is a better to improve oneself because the motivation is truly from within rather than without.

Bobby Jindal, the folksy hero?

Everyone agrees. Bobby Jindal had a tough act to follow. He had to rebut a popular American president, one of the most gifted orators since perhaps Lincoln himself. The president had just given an impassioned speech, had the Congress swooning and, gasp, its members hugging him. Now, since when do men hug each other like that?

And here comes Jindal. He is not a presence, nor does he have the gift of oratory, that much we knew. We knew, however, that he was a smart man, perhaps of intellect to equal the president's. Jindal's voice is not thunderous, his speech lacks the cadence that the president so skillfully employs, we knew that too. To expect him to match the president would have been impossible. But we expected Jindal to at least give us something different than what so many of us were used to as coming from the GOP. After all, he is supposed to be the standard bearer of the new GOP. And what happened? He came across as "amateurish," uncomfortable, and not genuine. Hmmmm, how did that happen?

I am a Korean-American woman who lives in the South. I live on the coast of North Carolina, and I stick out. There is simply no getting around it. I go to PTA meetings. I am the only Asian. I go to school board meetings. I am the only Asian. In fact, I make frequent appearance on the news, not as a reporter, but as someone that the camera zooms on. Call me a token. That is just the way it is where I live.

I have lived in North Carolina now going on 10 years. I have picked up a little bit of the Southern drawl, and I can sometimes imitate it pretty well. My musical training has helped me with that. However, I may talk like that all I want, but I make no mistake about the fact that, in the locals' eyes, I am never one of them. I know that. I simply don't look the part. So I don't try to be. I find that I get more respect for knowing what I am talking about rather than sounding like one of them.

So, here is what Bobby Jindal did wrong. He tried too hard to sound like everyone. He tried to be the folksy hero that the Republicans have tried to serve up every election. Therein lies the first of his two mistakes. He forgot that folksy did not work during this election. Sarah Palin had the folksiness all locked up, and she didn't help the party any. In fact, she made folksiness popular at the cost of being intelligent. So instead of being folksy, he should have been himself, arguing and making valid points.

Much more than that, however, is the second mistake that he made. In trying to be folksy, Bobby Jindal forgot who he was. The reason that he has been hailed as the savior of the Republican party is because he is so unlike the Republicans of the recent past. He is the child of immigrants, he is young, he is not Wonder Bread white, and he is patently intelligent. But he tried so hard to be one of them, to be folksy. I know, and I bet he knows that he will never, ever be folksy in so many folksy people's eyes. He simply does not look the part just like I will never be a Southerner.

Perhaps Jindal's cluelessness is just indicative of the implosion within the GOP itself. As David Brooks argues, it doesn't know where it wants to go, what it wants to be. While personifying the kind of transformation that the GOP needs by simply being what he is, Bobby Jindal does not know how to convince the GOP any other way than the good old folksy way. The new GOP and the old GOP are mutually exclusive. And that is the logical conclusion that he should have drawn before he appeared before the camera.

So, here is to more implosions with the GOP. The drama continues.

New Era

In just two days Bush will no longer be the POTUS. Hurray to that! And Barack Obama will be the next POTUS. Double HURRAY to that!

I was offered an inauguration ticket. I don't know whether that was because I volunteered so much during the campaign or because I gave whatever I could of my money so that Obama could pay his people.

I loved all the field organizers that worked out of my town's field office. They were all young, idealistic people, people who had put their own lives on hold to take part in something greater than themselves. They felt a calling, and they literally dropped everything to help out in the movement that they saw as their generation's duty. Most of them were college students who had taken a year off. Now what did I do when I was in college? Hmmm. Some were already successful in their careers, but were besieged by doubts as to whatever they were doing was at all meaningful.

Now we are about to swear in Obama as our new president. I believe that this is a moment that I will not forget the rest of my life. I wish I could have gone to the inauguration. I had to give up the ticket because I was offered only one ticket. But I can't possibly go without my family. They helped me volunteer. My husband by babysitting countless hours, my children by helping me decorate the office, sort papers, make meals for the staff members. It was an effort that really took the whole family.

As Tuesday nears, I am going to sit back with my family and watch the inauguration. And I will be beaming with joy.

Help and Love Those Near You

Ok, I am not a conservative. Never will be. There is just so much about this world to love.

Conservatives believe that this world is imperfect. Conservatives believe that human nature is imperfect. We need to always be on guard so as not to fall to temptations, not to give into impulses, not to live as sinners. The whole world is one big temptation, and we need to be constantly vigilant because you never know where the next danger lies. We are just one split second away from falling.

Wow. How can you live like that? I would much rather believe that, though we are not perfect, we are within ourselves the Divine. Why would the Supreme Being create us in her image and not lend us divinity? Only if you recognize your own divinity, we empower ourselves. We can in our own way affect. That is what I would like to believe. Together we can march toward perfection. We may never get there, but it sure is a powerful incentive.

Can Yogis Be Conservative?

When I volunteered for Obama during the summer, I had a curious encounter with an undecided voter. I walked up his driveway, and I noticed a sticker from a local yoga studio on his car. When I finally talked to him, he said he wasn't too sure who he was going to vote for. Having been immersed in yoga for a few years now and training to become a teacher, I just can't see how someone who practices yoga can have a conservative mind.

Let's see. First it is necessary to define "conservative." Though there is no facile, universal definition of "conservative," I believe it is safe to say that "conservatives" believe in looking for answers in the past. They believe in "good, old" values and tradition and are, therefore, resistant to change. They also tend to look outside themselves for guidance, most notably from religion. That seems to be true especially of conservatives of today.

Yoga, on the other hand, teaches enlightenment within yourself. You look inward to find peace and practice to live in the moment, for anything other than the present moment is not within our ability to fully enjoy. If you look too much into future, you may be fearful of the unknowables happening. If you look too much in the past, you may be fearful of the bad things repeating. Therefore, you may live in the grip of fear if you are not able to focus on the present.

I refuse to live in fear. I would much rather live for the moment, focusing on making each moment more beautiful than the last. Isn't that what progress is?

Democracy vs. Republic

This from a letter to the editor in Star News: "The United States is a republic and not a democracy and the majority does not rule."

I have to agree with that. If democracy were synonymous only with the majority rule, then everything would be relative. The majority rule trivializes inalienable human rights. In other words, there would be no inherent rights, only those that the majority would vote for. Imagine the struggle for Civil Rights in the 60's. Can we imagine voting for Civil Rights? And are we sure that the majority would have voted for the Act?

For example, prop 8 in California. It put gay marriage, which was ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court of California, to a vote. The scant majority (even that is questionable as many people did not even vote on the proposition) voted for the proposition in banning gay marriage. The majority ruled here that gay people do not have a right to marry when the state Supreme Court, in interpreting the state law, said they did. Hmm. I think that this majority rule is dangerous. Another case in point: I like to point out to my students that Nazis were also voted into office.

It truly is important for citizens to be educated so that the vocal majority does not rule and the true majority does not remain silent.

Bush's Contribution to American Culture, Finally.

I see on blogs and on facebook that a lot of people are getting ready to send and/or throw shoes (sadly, only symbolically) at Bush. We are truly taking cue from our Iraqi friend.

And then it dawned on me; this could be Bush's unique contribution to American culture. We didn't know before we invaded Iraq that being hit with shoes is a supreme insults in that part of the world. And how symbolic it is!

Being Korean-American, I can tell you that, at least in Korean culture, feet are considered the dirtiest part of your body. Why? I can only guess, but I will try. Just the little bit of Korean culture that I know tells me that, again at least in Korean culture, there is no romantic notion of Mother Earth. Earth is dirt, and dirt is dirty. And so being hit with shoes that amble on this dirt, I can see why being hit with shoes in that part of the world is also an insult.

So, here we are. Bush might have inadvertently introduced the shoe as the agent of insult to American culture.