Ok, so if anyone actually reads this… you might have noticed a little lag in my blogs the past few days… the truth is, you can call it either laziness or tiredness… I’m approaching the end of my 13-day trip to the Left Coast. It’s been enjoyable and honestly I’m not as tired as I thought I’d be by this point… but still the blogging has slowed down… so maybe I have!
This past Saturday, I took it easy most of the day, caught up on stuff and watched some college football. The good thing about being out west, is as soon as you wake up on Saturday morning, the college football games are already on… I think I slept in until around 10am… when I flipped the TV on, a bunch of games were on, all into the late first quarter/early second quarter. And, it’s not like games end much earlier here, as the west coast games are just on later. It’s a sweet deal in that respect.
Later that evening, I met with a guy who is getting his PhD from Fordham University, but lives in Seattle with his wife and their 5 kids! Yea, they’re in their 40s – and he (like most people around Seattle) works in the software industry, but is getting a PhD in philosophy, he already has a few master’s degrees – theology, philosophy and an undergrad in biology. Impressive. Ganske came with me and met with him too, I think we’re forging a nice little network of ISI and Discovery Institute folks in the Seattle area, not to mention people interested in what it means to be a Christian intellectual.
On Sunday, I woke up and went to mass at the St. James Cathedral here in Seattle. It’s very nice, but very modern. It was a great service, and it is the only hope I see for Seattle… though hope for this city, in terms of a positive culture, is bleak. I wasn’t very impressed with Seattle overall, but I can only think that the demographics will eventually be with us… a lot of “strange” people out here, in all sorts of ways.
Later on Sunday, I met with a Professor from Shoreline Community College, encouraging him to get more involved with ISI and the GK Chesterton Society we sponsor out here. We had an excellent 2-hour conversation over lunch and I think I helped lift his spirits about the positive elements that are going on in academic circles because of ISI. Yes, we’ve still got a long way to go, I reassured him, but there is some hope. He related to me that he was very disturbed that most people on campus – even the students – were “brainwashed” into thinking bad things about Western Civilization – even the study of Western Civ, calling it “racist” or “imperialist”. I just told him – read Dinesh D’Souza and offer his ideas as an alternative. He liked D’Souza’s points (which I cited to him) about why Western Civ is the most superior culture in the world and why it deserves to be studied and promoted. I think he went from discouraged to encouraged in a matter of two hours. And so goes the work of the ISI missionary.
Later that evening, I hung out with Ganske some more and we went to downtown Seattle for dinner and a couple beers… he then dropped me at the space needle, where I felt I “had to” go up. There really isn’t much to do in Seattle, I discovered… so I wanted to ride up to the top of the famous space needle. It was ok up there… best view I had of Seattle, but still it didn’t do too much more to impress me. I don’t want to leave a feeling of depression here, but let’s just say, I now understand why grunge music came out of this city. I just wish it were still around to console me.