sam mccool's blog
Desert Walk
Sunday, January 14, 2012
In August, I started routinely walks at work and home. By September, I was walking nearly every day. Since then, I walk on average 2.5 miles, 5-6 days per week. My longest walk was 6.1 miles in December.
I'm at the point where I can visualize the action of my feet, ankle, femur, and thigh bones as I walk. Today I was able to imagine the rotation in my hip sockets and the phalanges in action as well. I had a full motion picture in my head of each stride and foot fall. My breathing has stabilized as well, 8 steps to each breath cycle. I enjoy the scenery and the air while in a secondary consciousness I follow the rhythmic cycles of my strides and breathing.
At some point, I became aware that the mental movie in my head was mimicking the actual steps to the point that missteps on stones and loose pebbles were "captured" in my mental view of each step. My arms and legs were in sync, left arm and right leg forward, right arm and left leg forward, each step a coordinated movement of appendages, torso straight, hips and shoulders the pivots for each stride. Adjustments for rocks, ridges, grooves, debris, and pebbles in the dirt roadways and paths were shifts in my footfalls, sometimes a quick twist of ankle and knee to avoid injury and slowing the pace.
What happened to the Republican Party?
Once upon a time, the Republican Party stood for something. It represented the rugged independence of frontier families, the self-reliance of the pioneer spirit. Its leaders valued the free-thinking rationalism found in the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Natty Bumpo novels of James Fenimore Cooper. It stood for the ethical humanism of Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. It was the political party that I admired as a child -- unfettered by unionism, religious fanaticism, or corrupt urban political machines.
Now, on the eve of the next decade of the 21st Century, I look back at the preceding ten years and wonder what happened to this once great political party. Once upon a time, the great Republican Senator from Connecticut Prescott Bush championed civil rights legislation, served as the first treasurer of Planned Parenthood, and helped to establish the Peace Corps. He motivated the Republican Party to stand up to the racist Democrats from the South and pass critical legislation. How ashamed he must be of his son who played a racist to get elected in Texas; and his grandson, who played an idiot to pander to the religious right.
Are we ready?
We're armed with technology, like the profs of the sixties were armed with secretaries and assistants, but the technology isn't making our communication with our students any better than the distance created by layers of staff in former years. We're wasting precious time letting inadept users fumble around while the promise of enhanced communication, interaction, and collaboration are unfulfilled, at least between the professoriate and learning classes.
