It’s a pleasant morning in Holland Michigan. I just emailed my boss with an idea my violinist had yesterday just to get it off my mind. Amy pointed out how much it would free up the back of our church if we lowered the entire choir area to the level of the congregation. This idea comes at an very inconvenient time. We have a plan to alter the area to prepare for the new organ. If we were to consider doing Amy’s idea it would change almost every aspect of our present plan. I tried to pass it on to my boss yesterday but she was already gone for the day. So I worried over it until this morning. I wrote the email just to get it off my mind.
Today is the last day of July and I feel like my summer has slipped away. I still haven’t found that sweet spot of rejuvenation that I dream about the rest of the year. I haven’t done any composing this summer and my books are in disarray. Nevertheless it is a pleasant morning in Holland and I feel unreasonably relaxed (especially after getting that email off my chest).
How Germany Prevailed in the Greek Bailout – The New York Times
This is a long article I read yesterday while treadmilling. I have been watching the events in Europe. It seems to me wrongheaded to punish Greece the way the Union has chosen to do. I have been listening to a book about WWI in the evening. Night before last I was kept awake by its ideas.
The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark was a $1.99 Kindle deal recently. I purchase it and for $1.99 more was able to purchase the audio book which is coordinated to the ebook (whispersynced as it were).
Clark meticulously analyses the time before WWI. He is doing so with an eye on what is happening in the world now. Most of the actors in WWI misunderstood entirely what they were doing according to Clark. At the end of the book he mentions they were all convinced they were going to war as an act of defense not offense.
It is this misunderstanding, this gap between what was happening and what the leaders thought was happening which Clark says ha the most to teach us in the present day. As I watch the USA and the Eurozone continue to institute austerity (especially for others) as a solution to economic problems and pull back from the real human problems of feeding the hungry of the world and tending to our broken planet (and not killing each other), I can’t help but wonder if there are solutions and cooler heads whose voices are being drowned out and/or ignored.
