Get in the way

By SKIP MENDLER

People are sometimes surprised to find out that although I’m a Quaker and a pacifist, I study a martial art. I hold a black belt in aikido, which focuses not on attacking others, but on defending oneself by redirecting or otherwise neutralizing an attacker’s force, transforming the situation from conflict to harmony. The many connections between peace/nonviolence work and aikido are fodder for a whole other essay, if not a book. But recent events make me want to look at one question in particular.

It’s one thing to be able to defend one’s own self from attack—but how do you respond when the subject of the attack isn’t oneself, but someone else?

It’s kind of obvious: you have to draw force away from the victim, and onto yourself.

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Paint the TV black

I grew up without a television. Looking back on it now, it doesn’t seem like a strange thing, although I know that I am in a minority among others my age. My friend, Gil, tells me that he had cable in his bedroom when he was five.

I associate television with my grandparents. I did all of my early watching at their house on Route 97 in Narrowsburg and I have fond memories of Big Bird, Mr. Rogers and Duck Tales.

They had a large gray satellite dish, one of the early ones, in their backyard. To change channels you had to actually wait for the dish to move, and I remember punching in a channel and then running out to their back yard to watch it slowly make its way across the sky.

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We are with the program

By PAT CARULLO

You can count on us. We’ll cause no waves. We are team players. We’ll stay the course. We’ll be totally non-divisive. We’ll be patriotic to the end. We are with the program.

There’s no environmental destruction. There’s no conflict of interest in government. There’s no massive debt. There’s no evolution. There’s no corporate control of democracy. There’s no encroachment on our personal liberty. There’s no global warming.

But here are some facts: Based on input from 72,000 weather stations around the world, NASA’s Goddard Institute climatologists determined that 2005 was the hottest year since modern record-keeping began. Of the 10 hottest years on record, eight have occurred since 1996.

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