daily prompt

#RaifBadawi: ‘We want life’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“I didn’t think there could be anything worse than watching a shaky cellphone video of my husband being publicly beaten in front of a mosque thousands of miles away,” Raif Badawi’s wife, Ensaf Haidar, wrote in yesterday’s Washington Post.

Ensaf continues that Badawi’s family is currently experiencing something worse than that: It appears that he is once again facing a trial on a charge of apostasy, renouncing one’s religion, a crime that comes with an ultimate punishment—beheading—if a person is found guilty.

No flogging took place today for the Saudi Arabian blogger, activist, father of three:

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Keep Waving

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In a column from 1996, I wrote, “The world should be more friendly, damn it.” Even in that pre-IM, pre-text, pre-now world of yesteryear, something was changing in our society’s social skill set, and a prematurely elderly person like me was taking notice and not liking it at all.

With tools like texting and IMing, matters have not much improved. However, that prematurely elderly person (I was 27 going on “Get off my lawn!” back then) has become an appropriately aged middle-middle-aged man.
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Insert Important Words Here to Attract Attention

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“Son. May I call you that? No? Complete stranger, they say ‘you must give it away to keep it,’ and while I do not know what they mean by ‘it’ or even who ‘they’ might be, I just know that they keep telling me this. Again and again and again. But what do I have to give away? Pray tell, what? My wisdom, that’s what. My easy-won wisdom. And my encouragement.

“They also tell me that life should be worn like a loose Garmin, which I do not pretend to understand. Is it loose on the dashboard? That might be dangerous. You have to keep your GPS on a mount of some kind. You should wear your life like a fully charged GPS or phone—don’t want to get too hung up on terms and technology, because it is the philosophy I am getting at here that is important—wear your life like a portable device that you keep charged up and then hide in the glove compartment when you leave your car in a public parking lot. So don’t wear it at all. Carry your life like an electronic device that requires a two-year contract for you to use it, one that you would consider purchasing a protection plan for, but you ultimately do not, and you chance it.
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