It is a wrenching thing to change values, something like switching horses in midstream.  The OP-ED page of the NY Times this morning is filled with such values – values that have changed because of time and circumstance.

Maureen Dowd values the privacy of her body and complains about the searches in airports and other security conscious locations. We spend most of our lives protecting our sexual apparatus, from strangers and officious police. I see the need for such searches because I certainly do not want to be blown out of the sky or have the building I am in falling down with me inside. What Ms Dowd, I and others object to is the WAY in which such searches are conducted.  She makes the point that jerking up the cost of such searches by making them private and with better trained personnel would make the process more acceptable.  The time invested in safety could, at least, be more stylish and less onerous.

Charles C. Mann wrote the central piece about Unnatural Abundance which is a feature of today’s celebration of THANKSGIVING, copying the “Pilgrims’” success in surviving among strangers.  That the strangers shared with the Pilgrims is an irony for other newcomers, including the Pilgrims (whose descendants have just allowed Native Americans back into the Boston area) made war on the original inhabitants and pushed them to the west to get them out of the way of “progress”?  I suppose progress is the introduction of plant life that was not native to America.  The newcomers brought with them seeds of flora that proliferated sometimes causing native life to become extinct – like the passenger pigeons (fauna) whose numbers darkened the skies in their yearly travels across America. We can give thanks for abundance but we should also give thought to the plants crowded out by introduction of foreign life.  Personally I think that Japanese Kudzu is a human blight and is a vegetable terrorist.  But that is just my value speaking its mind.

Tom Friedman also had some thoughts about Thanksgiving.  He titles his piece “In My Next Life” and points out the confusion of traditional values being discarded in favor of an individual, in this instance, Tom DeLay, otherwise known as the Hammer in the U.S. Senate. He escapes censure for a felony committed in Texas and should lose his job as House Majority Leader. Friedman goes on to study the values of a professional athlete whose millions of earnings are not enough for him to feed his family. He goes on to think about his next life when he is a Hummer owner, guzzling ever expensive gas – although we will keep that Hummer.

Values are variable in different places and different times but our personal ones are inviolable.  Don’t mess with our bodies, jobs, money or wasteful habits.