WOW! It's Been More Than A Month ...

... since I've posted anything.  It's been a fairly busy month, too, which has a lot to do with it.

I've been to two conferences this month:  the American Immigration Lawyers' Association annual conference, and the League of Historic American Theatres annual conference.  I found myself being inspired by different things at each.  In the case of AILA, I was inspired by the dedication of hard-working professionals who strive to do their best, under increasingly difficult financial and political circumstances, on behalf of people who are increasingly unpopular in this supposedly open society.  Yes, everyone says they're in favor of lawful immigration, and are only opposed to "illegals."  But they have an odd way of only identifying non-whites as "illegals," even when they're not.  Like it or not, that's why so many of us are opposed to the rancid Arizona attempt to snatch the Federal government's constitutional authority away from it.  As written, the law is a blatant invitation for race profiling.  The hypocrisy of this, coming as it does from supposed strict-constructionist, limited-government conservatives, is almost beyond belief.

At the LHAT conference, there were no political issues raised (thankfully, the guy who did the anti-immigrant rant at last year's conference in my face behaved himself this year).  But I was inspired by the positive attitude of a large number of theatre professionals--restoration specialists, theatre operators and others--working to restore and operate historic theatres in the face of both a depressed economy and a tidal wide of cultural change that continues to take us away not only from live entertainment, but from any cultural experience shared with anyone or anything other than a PC, an iPod or a smart phone.  I have always believed that historic theatres are historic not merely for their architecture, but also for the roles they have played (pun intended) in the development of a common culture.  We are losing that culture, I fear, in the Internet age, and that loss plays a large role in the political divisiveness that dominates what passes these days for public discourse.

Those of us who hold progressive values need to do what we can to maintain, and even rebuild our common culture, by directly engaging those who disagree with us and listen, even if we don't like a lot of what we here.  Whether we consider ourselves part of the same country or not, we are indisputably part of the same world--and that world is shrinking all the time, through the mobility of people, money, ideas, technology and the pollution that all of us create.  And, above all, we need to be persistent--to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and to remember that progress in this country has always been one step at a time.

That was the Fourth of July message I'd hoped to write earlier.  I hope everyone had a good holiday.  And I hope that the heat has inspired everyone to wake up and work together to save the only planet we have, before it's too late.