10 flights:

I have scheduled in the next three weeks 4 trips, two of them one way and two through the two busiest airports in the country. I'll be on a total of ten planes.

Am I afraid? Not really. Mostly I'm preparing to be annoyed and to spend lots of exciting time in airports.

But what do you do? I have to go to this places and I sure as hell can't drive. So I'll get on 10 planes in the next three weeks and I'll play the odds and I'll somehow develop more patience to hang out in airports.

It's still not as bad as the 44 hours in transit, right?

Do the ends justify the means?:

We started on an interesting conversation that never really happened tonight. Do the ends never justify the means? This is something spouted at you a lot, but I think it's a surprisingly tricky question and it took me a while to come up with a satisfactory answer. But I think I have one.

First you have to define the greatest good. If we believe that saving human life is the most important thing and that saving more lives is better than saving fewer, than it seems clear that the ends could justify the means. One can easily imagine a situation where killing one person could save many people.

But I believe that there's something worse than death, and that saving a life isn't the most important thing. Then things become a bit more interesting.

Let's consider a currently topical case. Let's assume that torturing a terrorist could produce reliable information. Should we then torture a terrorist to save innocent lives, to prevent another 9/11?

I would argue no. Our way of life is worth fighting for because we don't do things like that. We don't torture prisoners, we don't try to kill innocents even in wartime, and we punish people found guilty of doing that. Once we aren't different than (better than) the terrorists, I don't see why I should continue to fight for us.

That's sort of a long-winded way of saying that one could come up with a hypothetical in which the ends would justify the means, but in the real world, our actions have good and bad consequences. One cannot divorce the negative results of an action from its positive results. So when I torture a terrorist, I may save hundreds of lives, but I have done something fundamentally immoral, and there are consequences to that also. I pay for it by losing the moral high ground, by blurring the lines between right and wrong, between good and evil, and one day I may find myself on the wrong side of the line.

The world is a very grey place. I would hesitate to say that the ends never justify the means. But I would say, in the real world, that I can't come up with a case where I believe one should compromise one's morality to achieve a good result.

J.M.M.

"The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially."

Some days are not so hard and other days are. Yesterday was a really good day and I didn't have to hold myself together along the giant faultlines running through my soul. And today I found an Easter card from my sister that had been in some trash I hadn't bothered to take out months ago and for once I was so happy about my laziness. I couldn't bring myself to read it though, I don't know why. I opened it and saw her handwriting and put it away in the section of my accordion file labelled "Jenny."

There aren't a lot of times to cry when you are sharing a two-bedroom apartment with a shiftworker and a student. I cry in the shower sometimes, maybe about once a week by now.

Jenny was such a good person. She always wanted to make everyone happy, and she always did what she thought was right. Sometimes the worst of it is the unfairness; she was on her way to a vacation she'd been looking forward to for weeks and she worked so hard and couldn't she have just gotten to enjoy the vacation?

But there's no point in thinking like that really. We wouldn't be any less sad if she'd been on her way back, and if there's any God at all, she's in heaven now and that's better than any vacation.

Now we're left to put glue on the cracks somehow, to try to remember that scar tissue is stronger than regular tissue, to keep on living. It doesn't hurt as much now as it did last month, and next month it will hurt less, and one day I'll be able to remember the happy things without thinking about the pain.