Bee, Being, and California

Tucson, Arizona. In his quest to unseat incumbent Gabrielle Giffords for AZ CD-8, Tim Bee has started to upgrade his presence in the media. Blake Morlock had a Citizen piece about him yesterday, and Bee has a thirty second piece, "Grounded", running during local and evening cable news shows. Bee recently had sympathetic appearances in the local news, perhaps about the state budget. So far all content I have seen remains positive and free of hits. That will change.

Regarding matters presidential, the RNCC has started hit pieces against Obama during cable sports programs (baseball, NASCAR, etc.) that don’t even mention McCain. One of the future prospects they tie to Obama, "No lower gas prices."

That sure got my pro-McCain juices flowing. Of course, how anyone supports just about any GOP candidate in 2008 defies the reality that plays on my view screen. A better blogger would provide links to various articles and op-ed pieces articulating the ontological malaise afflicting the GOP (translation: inability to answer, "Who are we? What is our vision?"). Bee's Being in this race for this seat suffers the same ontological vacancy, and his choice to run is a mistake. He will lose.

The astute who devote energy to the subject would note ontological angst with the current blogger since a visit to California. Prolificity has fallen and a certain doubt has emerged. Influence rankings fell so fast I wondered if the BNN guys had psychics. Since California I don’t even think this place has made the list.

Above is the very deck where I shared a particularly special moment with another human being. The photographer (to my considerable chagrin) missed a photograph of the woman, but he did catch of photograph of her daughter, starting at Stanford as a freshman this fall.

In addition to the woman I met an elder who sat with me, an extremely successful man who made his first ten million before the age of thirty, and he stated, “I had everything, and I was miserable. I employed illegals, dozens of them, and I remember one night up in the Arizona mountains. There was still snow in the areas that had shade during the day, and these people kept from freezing to death by walking all night. They had scraps for clothes and not two nickels to rub together, but that night they sat around a campfire, singing, and happy to have work in Arizona and be alive. They were singing, and they were happy, really happy. There I stood, worth millions, the business owner, and they were happy, and I was not. At that moment I realized I knew F about life."

I have a friend I’ve know for three decades who is slowly dying of an incurable disease that robs its victims of energy. Imagine being exhausted all the time. On the phone yesterday she cried about how in the last couple weeks she grasped the extent to which she had lived life in the undistinguished context of considering herself redundant, because as a child her know it all father had always replied, "I already know that" to everything she had ever said. As a growing girl to every enthusiastic discovery, every insight, every learned or newly seen idea she had shared with daddy, she had heard, "Oh I know all that."

(In California) Unconsciously she organized a life of one who is redundant and matters not, one who has nothing to add. Despondent, she asked on the phone, "Is there anything encouraging you can offer me? Can you say something supportive that might help, maybe an angle or an approach that offers some hope or a better way to think?"

I am well trained in this notion of creating possibility, and I completely locked up. Everything that came to mind seemed inane and idiotic, something that would put her in the position of having to be generous by pretending what I had said had value when it did not. I could not do that to her, so I froze, too choked up to speak and feeling completely bankrupt. I sobbed after hanging up the phone, experiencing Failure as never before.

I don't profess to understand what someone meant when he said, "It is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven," but I am clear the speaker was not talking about money or knowledge or fame or power. Something Else has to be surrendered. I only speculate, but I sense that the answer to such considerations defies many limitations in simplicity, elegance, and difficulty.