Relation is the essence of everything. Meister Eckhart (1260-1328)

Last week US Representative Joe Sestak held a townhall forum on health care at a faith-based organization, Broad Street Ministry (BSM), in Philadelphia.  The front-page article in The Philadelphia Inquirer the following morning described the event as "overwhelmingly civil".  

The evening went so smoothly in fact that some thought the forum had been in the planning stages for several weeks, or that opponents to the Democratic plan were purposefully kept out of the gathering.  Neither assertion is true.  I work at BSM several days a week.  I was there from the beginning of the planning process until the end of the actual forum (Sestak stayed on afterwards to meet with a small remnant of the more than 1000 people who showed up that evening).  And while there were any number of reasons that the townhall was a civil one, not the least of these was the fact that a very welcoming and grateful tone was set from the outset, and was carried through to the end.

It's that time again - time for sorting through the pile of books that have been sitting there on the night table waiting patiently for your attention.  Or perhaps finally getting around to actually reading Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.  Or even a bit of Tolstoy...

Then again it may be time for a non-fiction page-turner.  If that's the case, some of the Whitmanians have a few suggestions to offer.  Hopefully, these suggestions might add to your beach experience. They also may encourage other TWI members to chime in with some gems of their own. 

First up is a new book by Fred Kaplan, columnist for Slate.

Reading through the timeline in the beginning of Kaplan's new book, 1959 The Year Everything Changed, will give you an immediate sense of just why the author has identified this year as so pivotal to the political, cultural and economic future of the United States.

A few highlights: 

January 1   Castro takes power in Cuba.

January 2   Soviets launch the first spacecraft to break free of Earth's gravity.

January 9   Judge orders Atlanta to integrate its buses and trolleys

January 12 Berry Gordy borrows $800 from his family to buy a studio for his new record company, Motown.

And that is just in the first two weeks of January. 

The rest of the year is equally eventful - from Miles Davis breaking into new territory in jazz, the US Air Force coining the term "aerospace" to stake military claim to space as well as the skies, to the introduction of The Pill, the invention of the microchip, to Ginsberg's Howl, Malcolm X's fateful trip to the Middle East, to the dismantling of the obscenity laws, to the opening of the Guggenheim, and Ornette Coleman's debut in Manhattan.  And this is merely a sampling of what occurred during this remarkable year.

a health and environmental research institute where for three decades we have worked at the interface of personal and planetary healing through focused initiatives in the environment, education, and health.

"Many of the small schools that we invested in did not improve students' achievement in any significant way. These tended to be the schools that did not take radical steps to change the culture, such as allowing the principal to pick the team of teachers or change the curriculum. We had less success trying to change an existing school than helping to create a new school.

Even so, many schools had higher attendance and graduation rates than their peers. While we were pleased with these improvements, we are trying to raise college-ready graduation rates, and in most cases, we fell short."

"So our new strategy focuses on learning why some teachers are so much more effective than others and how best practices can be spread throughout the education system so that the average quality goes up. We will work with some of the best teachers to put their lectures online as a model for other teachers and as a resource for students."

"The moral of this story is not the danger for Obama going forward with his Gitmo decommissioning, the moral is that when venal, shallow, small men are given unfettered power and authority, they do incompetent, stupid, and evil things."
 

"For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus and non-believers."

"I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots."

The Atheist Bus Campaign launches today, Tuesday October 21. With your support, we hope to raise £5,500 to run 30 buses across the capital for four weeks with the slogan: "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."

"...the actors who are supposed to be the guarantors of security and rationality - the state, science and industry - are engaged in a highly ambivalent game. They are no longer trustees but suspects, no longer managers of risks but also sources of risks. For they are urging the population to climb into an aircraft for which a landing strip has not yet been built."

Recent empirical research from Taipai has validated anecdotal evidence that has long suggested that medical practitioners have a physiological capacity to disengage "natural" empathic responses to seeing others in discomfort, or in pain.  This kind of neurophysiological research leads to any number of questions about the interplay between thinking and feeling.

Here is one of the interesting research findings:

Physicians registered no increase in activity in the portion of the brain related to pain, whether they saw an image of someone stuck with a needle or touched with a Q-tip. However, the physicians, unlike the control group, did register an increase in activity in the frontal areas of the brain--the medial and superior prefrontal cortices and the right tempororparietal junction. That is the neural circuit that is related to emotion regulation and cognitive control.