Driving While Elderly

Sorry, but it should be the one allowable case for profiling: geezers behind the wheel. I just stepped out on this lovely spring morning, to run a few errands, and as I am crossing (with the flashing pedestrian beeping that it is safe) first, a women in a smallish car makes a left turn, pulling into, not a parking space, but onto the sidewalk in front of me. She is looking over her shoulder at the car close behind her, a blue station wagon, I guess trying to guide it to park as well? Not sure, really, but moments later BANG, this second car succeeds, not in pulling into the parking space, but into the tree beside it. Lady in first car (containing two kids in back seat) goes to see the old man who sits in car. The tree, for some reason, only let loose one branch, and that branch is now swinging overhead, attached by either a wire or some leftover decoration (I have been noticing that the trees seem to have some unnatural sparkle in the sunlight). Willie the parking meter man happens to be across the street, and he calls it in. Moments later, there is a firetruck, an ambulance, and a police car. All because, as a passerby says, "he forget which one was the brake and which was the gas." Seems to be likely: he was confused by unfamiliar surroundings. The woman, who was speaking Spanish, had either a DC or a diplomat license plate. Why do old people insist on driving? My Dad, the other day, referred to the fact that "until recently" he had a car (and thus, had trouble finding his way from the Visitor's parking lot, where I parked to the front door of his residence). It has been at least 3 years since he totalled it and I basically forbade him to get a new one which he (then a mere 84) wanted to do. More on his other sensible choices (like ignoring some evil looking black spots on his skin and not seeing the oncologist whom he was supposed to see for regular check ups until they had been there over three months -- at least if you can believe his sense of time, which how can you? I can't trust my own!) And now the blue station wagon is being carted off by a tow truck. Let us pray the geezer learns that the time is upon him for dispensing with driving.

Can it be?

Is the state of the world not as bleak and hopeless as I tend to think? Discovery of the website Arabs for Israel does seem to offer a crack in the dark picture that I hold, a slight chink of light. Of course, one cannot tell how many people are behind this site, and share its ideals, or have visited it, but I would like to believe that there are more Arabs and Muslims who have the reasoning powers to realize that the Jews are not behind all of their problems, than than the louder, angrier voices would have us believe.

Heretic v. Heretic

As most of my learned readers already know, Dan Brown did not originate the ideas that he spun into a best seller with The Da Vinci Code; he merely packaged them perfectly so that they had maximum appeal for a world eager to believe the worst about organized Christianity and devoid of the minimum critical skills needed to discern the difference between fantastic speculation and verifiable fact. But I have to say, I find it rather humorous to read about their expensive little squak fest over who deserves credit for originating these ideas. Haven't they even read that book they are so eager to dismiss, the part where it said: "There is nothing new under the sun..."

Good DaVinci Code debunking article.
This one isn't even from a Christian perspective, but it traces the history of the fraud from which BOTH writers borrow.