'Come On Rise Up' - B. Springsteen

I went to sleep late last night, I was psyched up from a great jam session with the 'Telepaths' yesterday afternoon, (I thought we sounded pretty good - what we lack in polish we make up for with...spit!) and a great night out at the theater, we saw A Red Orchid Theatre's 'Gargarin Way' a bleak comedy written in 2001 by a Scottish playwright. It's a great piece, very dark, very funny, strangely exhilarating; it was about globalism, about how much of the world has been left behind, about how we all work for the multi-nationals now. It depicted a world where we all look a little stupid and crazy.

Good work like this confirms my belief in the power of live theater. Since I hit the pillow late, I was planning on sleeping in, but I woke up early, the Bruce Springsteen song 'The Rising,' was actually rattling around in my head, The Boss' words beckoned me: 'come on rise up, come on rise up,' I thought, 'why fight it?' so I got up. While I was brewing my coffee I heard a radio program about the 'theologian,' Rienhold Niehbur. He talked about the moral man in an immoral world, about how paradox and conflict are the normal state of things, how most choices are not between good and evil, but between evil and less evil. Oh how, Samuel Beckett, oh how Jean Paul Satre. Niehbur was billed as a Christian Realist, I think Satre would characterize him as a Christian Existentialist. Niehbur was against idealism, thinking it was simply arrogance, instead, he counseled a humble realism in order to try to understand the world as it is...at the moment, with the knowledge that what looks fixed and unchanging... is not.