Keep Rexburg Real.

Where stood six now stand none. And nobody cares. After a week long demolition project, the historic houses on First West rest diminished to barren holes in the dirt. Where wood beams supported structure now rubble supports chaos. Where trees and sidewalk provided shade and comfort now pot holes and uneven ground allow heat and unease. Memories of the past once resided inside homes and now they have defected with the Rexburg wind leaving a vacant nothingness and stagnant air.  Non-existent homes and cast-away histories give way to a mis-guided future.

The owners of the Pines sealed a lengthy negotiation with the various owners of the houses and soon began plans to put in the Hemming Towers. These buildings will provide much needed housing to many incoming students and better yet will keep urban sprawl down by building up and putting parking down, facilitating an easier walk for future students by keeping things compact, all plusses in my book. The trouble at hand here is not the future, it is the past. It isn’t lovely new apartments that are going up, but it is the destruction of the old ones.

I watched one-by-one the houses be torn down. I rode by them daily on my bike for the past 9 months, through the fall snow, the winter snow, and the spring-time snow; i watched the orange iron beast smash in their sides and crumble their facades, and stump-out their insides, leaving only ruined stairs. I watched the trees they said wouldn’t be taken out be fed to the beast as well, their branches and trunks cracking and snapping under its force. I beheld the pretty brick one smolder and burn, a subject to Madison Fire Department’s training. They kept that one around longer, not because it was pretty but because they needed it to train. It was fed to the beast just like all others. Make way for the future. And forget the past.

The trouble here isn’t the future, its the past. How do we know where we are going if we don’t know where we came from? How do we know who we are if we don’t know who came before us? These houses stood as landmarks, monuments to the past. They were marked with the water line of the Teuton Flood on their walls. Perhaps they  even served as shelters for a war veteran or two, veterans whose names are engraved on the sides of that monument that nobody knows about at smith park. Surely they served as the cradle from the world for many good families. And now they will be forgotten.

Without knowing the past we have no sure direction for the future. We will be compass-less, anchor-less. Our culture and Identity are founded on our past. In a world where the unification of global culture increases and interest-based culture skips across nation and state lines, connecting people by mere electronic impulses, we should fight to maintain our geographic and local identity. Leave your mono-tone-earthen-tone fake stone buildings and frozen yogurt for everywhere else. We don’t need it. Give us something new, but give us something that’s ours. Rexburg should maintain its identity, recognize and celebrate its history, and, yes build on it. Innovate, but do not forsake the past. Celebrate in it. Rejoice for it. Learn from it.

In that I close. I beg of you to act. Keep Rexburg Real.

3,000

Woohoo- 3,000 all time views for Loving Rexburg. Yes! Thank you all for your diligent participation in the blog and well placed appreciation of the written word.

Thank you,
GS

Godzilla What, Kraken What.

This is a little didly I wrote up for my POLSC360 Modern Political Theory class. It was a good time. I turned it in late. You might understand it, its written in the style of Thomas Hobbes of Calvin and Hobbes, or rather the political philosopher Hobbes, of the Leviathan of the Book of Job, if that makes sense?

My hands applaude both the President and the dead man, Osama bin Laden. 

The former for acting so righteously as the sovereign of our country and the latter for providing such a perfect example of man in the condition of mere nature. 

As men are oft to disagree and grow angry at the lack of understanding, let us first set aside some definitions to begin on clear grounds.

Bin Laden’s death a half and a week ago represented the collision of two objects in motion: one the bigger object and one the smaller. The bigger object, being President Obama, let us referre to it as Godzilla, and the smaller object, being bin Laden, let us referre to it as the Kraken.

Godzilla as we know is the gorilla-whale super lizard that pillages and torments villages, created by the Japanese to represent the destructive power of the nuclear bombs of the United States. And it breathes fire. This is Mr. Obama and the nation as a whole, characterizing their confrontational, trigger-happy pridefulness.

The Kraken is a gargantuan spider-like squid monster of enormous size that attacks nautical units with its ravishing tentacles of beastly strength. Perhaps better known by its scientific name Micrcosmus it is a fitting representation of Mr. bin Laden and his sneaky submerged, cloak and dagger tactics. 

Hope is an appetite with opinion of obtaining.

Despaire is the same without such opinion. 

A cup is a cylinder with one side open and one side closed of approximately 8 ounces. 

Now that we have these definitions laid out we may begin. 

First I would like to direct attention to the actions of Godzilla as they excite me. Upon receiving the information of the location of the Kraken, Godzilla counseled with his advisors and then went against their will sending in Navy SEALs to do the kill. The maneuver was successful, his risky move playing out well. 

Thankfully, he went and made the decision himself without even consulting the people, or thinking of their opinion. This is one great step towards a more perfect and stable society. Conversely, he was a foole to council at all with his counsel, as this simply slowed down the decision making process and ran the risk of allowing the victim to escape. If he were to counsel with his council he should make it a point to do so with each one-by-one to gain the proper and unbiased opinion from each. As for the people, there is no reason for you to justify yourself to us, just go and claim the power, finish the nearly done job of becoming sovereign and then all your actions will be justified by simply being your actions. Well done on the unilaterall decision and providing a superb outcome, you near sovereignty by institution.

As for the Kraken, all the poor foole really wanted was to not die. And he failed. But almost succeeded. In a true state of nature Mr. bin Laden raged and lead war against the “infidels” of the United States to promote his own survivall. A pawn of the US in the USSR-Afghan war upon completing his mission he turned his violent heart against his maker, the US. As he had done with the USSR he desired to do to us: lure us into a never-ending conflict which eventually lead us into bankruptcy. And he nearly had us, and maybe would have had us if it weren’t for the quick decision of our sovereign. If yet another air strike had been ordered, who’s to say what would have happened.

Mr. bin Laden, as all men, wanted three things. 

The Kraken desired glory. He rallied muslims across the world in holy Ji’ had, compounding a multitude of problems into one and giving them a singular origin, the United States, all to glorify himself as a saviour figure amongst the muslims and also to win glory for his nation. 

The Kraken desired Gain. He wanted to have more than ourselves, more materials, more monetary wealth, more dominance. By luring us into battle he planned to whittle away at our funds, slowly eating them away until they were no more, at which point he would surely have more than us. 

The Kraken desired security. In the end, this was his desire. He was legitimately afraid of the threat western philosophy and culture posed to the sociall and physicall well-being of his society. He lashed out with all of his many tentacles, attacking from all different directions in an effort to over through us. A lack of space, freedom, customs, resources, and all things existed between Godzilla and the Kraken, so they fought.

He got all but the last; security was not obtained for long. He acted within his right of nature and was justified in his action as no covenant was intact between the two parties. Surely there may have been a covenant between the two in the last years of the USSR, but any such covenants had since dissolved, leaving them in a state without agreement, without norms to follow, and so without justice. Anything went in this war and the Kraken lashed out with everything he had. Godzilla, slightly fatigued, at most, from his attacks, finally quit messing around and pulled out his big guns and blew fire down on the beast, withering its skin, and melting its insides until it died. Godzilla victorious.

In a world where scarcity is omnipresent the unavoidable conflict between the strong and the weak crashed together leaving one dead and one alive. 

Now in closing, I would like to address an issue of particular salaciousness. That is the frat boys of GWU. Regardless of ontology, political standing, and beliefs, their reaction to the death of the Kraken was altogether inappropriate. Celebrating the death of another with drunkenness and crude behavior is indecent and uncalled for in any society. I’m not one to draw out many rules and regulations but I feel like the celebration of death by such means is grotesque and wrong on that it is not beneficial to any party. 

 In sum, I am overall quite pleased with these recent events. I thank President Obama for his decisive action which was entirely justified and I would like to see more actions of power like it. Osama bin Laden provided a classic example of Human Nature and their desire to self-benefit. 

Now I ask you all to act. To subject yourselves to the rule of our President, to provide a more sustainable  society and to preserve your own welfare, and to destroy the remnants of evil wherever they may be. 

Blackfoot Climbing

Thats right, we climbed. The day before I went cycle for a good 20 miles and then I streaked down a friendly part of the Teton in a kayak. I may have wet exited and have been rescued by Joe Temus and his rope, who's to say. But then I redeemed myself with my first in current role. All that practice in the pool pays off. Practice and hard work always does. As well as some intelligent practice. I'd say it was a fine prelude to a rock climbing trip.

And why not film it? Well, I couldn't think of any reason either, so here it is- new for the Outdoor Activities.

The politics of the pump: A rhetorical blowout | The Economist

Is anybody else endlessly boggled by the endless debate over oil prices? People get all riled up as prices near $4 a gallon; politicians get all protesty and call each other names; adolescents keep on play Black-Ops; and all of us grow slightly more confused. Of course its the middle east's fault even though we get the majority of our oil from Canada (but it actually is). We attempt to fund hydrogen fuel, the electric car is invented, and destroyed, and then reinvented with cooler comercials, and some of us await for the Star Trek teleporter or a James Bond personal helicopter to pop-up to get us around. I concur with the above article, that in the end, we just have to face it that oil prices are going to go up because, simply, more people use oil now-a-days. And that's that. Ride your bike.

The politics of the pump: A rhetorical blowout | The Economist: "the best hope for America’s irate drivers is more of the same."

Celebration

This is to be published as an editorial for this Tuesday's Scroll, the student newspaper of BYU-Idaho.

How many people have died inside your home? How many people have been killed inside your apartment? How many people have you killed with the colored buttons of a video game controller and justified it because they were in the confines of a flat-screen boob tube? “Those of you who spend time playing video games where you kill other people ought to reflect on that scripture,” stated President Clark in a recent Devotional.  Thou shalt not kill. Reflect on the phrase “and nothing like unto it.”

Osama Bin Laden was reported dead on the evening of May 1. US Navy SEALs killed Bin Laden in a house in Abbottabad, Pakistan, 40 miles outside the capital city of Islamabad in a gutsy overnight maneuver. They confirmed his identity with a DNA test and then buried him at sea. 

Video game killings and the death of a terrorist are two topics not so far separated and they both seem to be celebrated by the public.

The news of his death spread nearly instantly across the globe. Many students here at BYU-Idaho received the news through text messages and online media sources.  Some received the news with “hoo-rah’s” of jubilation and others received it with the due respect for the dead.

It seemed that the overwhelming majority of the audible public received this news with rejoicing, showing themselves to be apathetically detached from the reality of the situation: the death of another human being; the death of a brother.

Frat boys across the nation celebrated their patriotism and victory of their country with drunkenness, dancing, ridding themselves of superfluous baggage,  and then followed it up with more drunkenness. They sang “Na-na-na-na, Hey, hey, hey, good-bye” in not-so-somber mourning of his death, providing, as some say, a sense of closure for those who were terrified little children when the airplanes hit and the towers fell back in 2001.

On the other hand, in Afghanistan, locals expressed their displeasure with the treatment of Bin Laden and the way he was killed, asserting that he should have been captured and taken alive, and that his death will now provoke more of his Muslim brothers to fight.

Yes, he was one of the master-minds of the infamous 9/11 attack that killed over 3,000 people, yes, he has fled from our armed forces for nearly ten years, yes, he is responsible for the death and terror of countless other victims. But yes, he is human, and, no, we should not rejoice in his death.

The death of Osama Bin Laden should instead be seen as a great symbolic victory for the United States, not celebrated with chanting and dancing in the streets, nor with snickering remarks in school hallways. To outwardly celebrate the death of an individual, even one that is labeled “bad” by society is to dehumanize him.  To kill a man who is responsible for the death and harassment of countless others is justified and legal, yet still it is a sad and unfortunate event, as it is the death of a child of God.

 “But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” Matthew 5:24.

We should deal with and accept reality as it is. To laugh over some things and to find humor in mistakes is appropriate but find glee in the death or loss of another inappropriate.

 “I'm disturbed by the idea of celebrating a death. It's just smacks a little too much of the lynch mob there, you know?” as Clarence Page, who advocated celebrating justice not death said on NPR, Thursday.

Death is death. Killing is killing. It doesn’t matter if it’s behind your TV screen or across the world in a different country, just or unjust, it is not something to glorify in. Let us see the death of Osama Bin Laden as the just and necessary consequence to his unfortunate choice of action to attack the United States of America.