Hey Joe: Police Harrassment

While listening to Jimi Hendrix's Hey Joe and conducting what I believed to be a private diatribe, or protest, or, if you're Yogi Berra, a private diatribe to myself, a police officer approached me and asked why I had mentioned the sniper.

Now, he was obviously referring to the Palestinian, Fort Hood, sniper, while I was referring to the DC sniper. Hence, I told him that I had not, at least not in the context of the report had allegedly been made to him, one that undoubtedly implicated me. Because he could hear me from his car, I was not sure anyone had actually, as he claimed, made a report, or whether he simply either disagreed with, or misunderstood the nature of my protest. I then, attempting to explain that i was actually protesting the glamorization of Hey Joe, which involves a scenario in which Joe gets a gun, from a home, and goes down to shoot his " old lady," allegedly, according to Officer X, conceded that I had referred to " the sniper." Again, he failed to specify which sniper.

The DC sniper, to whom I was specifically referring, because I don't know that Jope was Palestinian, and maybe the Palestinian sniper, as well, implicitly, were the basis of what I believed to be a private rant, which even if it were not, private, I would believe to be nonetheless legitimate, and within my First Amendment rights - to protest what I think to be a horrendous Supreme Court ruling on the 2nd Amendment for the first time in the history of the country, to overturn not only the 1976 DC gun law - explicitly - but also the Brady Bill - so that DC residents could possess guns in their homes. What about Columbine ? Those guns were not taken from-homes-to-schools ? Does anyone remember the scene from the Deerhunter, with Robert DeNiro ?

I raised funds for the renewal of the Brady Bill, in fact, while with a private firm called the Share Group, so the issue is close to my heart. Guns are serious. DeNiro's character was someone who'd returned from Vietnam, only to discover himself impotent with respect to his ability to use a gun, even to shoot a deer. He would later discover his friends playing with a gun, which sent him into a fit of rage. That rage is how serious I believe we should be about not only guns, weapons in general, but about the issue, about the Constitution, and our First Amendment rights, and the same Supreme Court that effectively elected George W. Bush, stopping a recount and nullifying the votes of not only the majority of Americans who voted for Al Gore, but every American who voted.

Luke 8:22-25: Jesus Rebukes The Storm And Scolds Disciples' Lack of Faith

Luke 8:22-25

One day Jesus said to his disciples, "Let's go over to the other side of the lake." So they got into a boat and set out. [23] As they sailed, he fell asleep. A squall came down on the lake, so that the boat was being swamped, and they were in great danger. [24] The disciples went and woke him, saying, "Master, Master, we're going to drown!"He got up and rebuked the wind and the raging waters; the storm subsided, and all was calm. [25] "Where is your faith?" he asked his disciples.
In fear and amazement they asked one another, "Who is this? He commands even the winds and the water, and they obey him." Luke 8:22-25

On 6/26/05, the St. Matthews Cathedral Bible Study Group again met and engaged in a fruitful and spirited discussion of biblical scripture. The subject matter was the above passage, taken from the gospel of Luke.

There are many ways in which we might examine the passage. First, we can all probably relate to the " storm metaphor " in an abstract sense. We face storms in our own lives on a continuous basis.

My own opinion was based on an article I'd just finished reading in the Washington Post Express about Claudio Reyna, an American World Cup soccer player. It was more of a psychoanalytic perspective on performance than anything necessarily derived in scripture, but I believed it to be nonetheless relevant. What I thought was that for all us, no matter who we are, storms exist that are greater than we, greater than our power to contain them. I think it probably relates to the old adage about wisdom - to paraphrase, God give me the strength to control those things that I can and the faith to turn over to you those that I cannot. I might add to this: God give me the insight to be able to differentiate between the things I can and cannot control.

Sports psychologists essentially preach the same thing to athletes about performance: do not worry about the score, the outcome, what's going to happen in the seond half, what happened yesterday, things you cannot at that very minute control; worry about the next pass you're going to make, or the person you're defending. In other words, in order to perform, maybe even be a happy person, athletes and people in general, must learn to be ' in the moment.'

Ironically, the same is true of actors. One of the great acting teachers of all time Uta Hagen, devised several techniques that actors could practice that, upon recollection, in the storm of a performance, on stage, would enable that feeling of immediacy that being in the moment is epitomized by. Athletes also refer to it as being in " the zone." Nowadays, people practice Yoga intensively or go to the gym to attain the level of focus that demanding career and family life require in order for success to be attained.

The pressure of modern life is enormous. It is the proverbial storm. To deal with it effectively, we have to focus on those things we can control and do them to the best of our ability. Of course it's not that simple or people would not suffer stress. Most things are interrelated and because we're intelligent, we're able to develop an appreciation for life as a complex web or sometimes obscure and abstract interrelationships. " ' If I could predict where that next pass should be, I could make a better pass; if I could predict the tendencies of other players, both my teammates and my opponents, I might even have a greater margin of error.' " ( sympathy )

In other words, sometimes the things we think we can't control, we actually can by observing certain abstract cause-effectual relationships that enable us to make predictions about future events or states of a system so that we can better adapt or prepare for the onset of those states. ( political debate about what we can and can't control )

Sometimes we recognize patterns or cycles. In baseball, for instance , players not even in the game can help their team win and teammates perform at a higher level by " scouting " pitchers, analyzing their motion, their delivery, etc. and charting pitch sequences. When something is discovered, expectations can be adjusted in such a way that performance is optimized.

To have an idea about what the future might hold, is to be able to plan more effectively and to adjust in the most stable manner.