"Adopting an attitude of universal responsibility is essentially a personal matter. The real test of compassion is not what we say in abstract discussions but how we conduct ourselves in daily life." -His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Imagine All the People

It's the birthday of the short story writer Isaak Babel, born in Odessa, Ukraine (1894). He was the author of Tales of Odessa. In 1939, he was arrested by the Soviet secret police, and that following January, after a 20-minute trial, he was executed in Moscow.

It was Isaak Babel who said, "There is no iron that can enter the human heart with such stupefying effect, as a period placed at just the right moment."

Here's something that George W. Bush should read (or have someone read to him):
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It's the birthday of Julius Caesar, born in Rome around 100 B.C., who said, "Beware the leader who bangs the drum of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor. For patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind."

This is from Garrison Keillor's "The Writer's Almanac" on NPR (National Public Radio) in the U.S. :

It's the birthday of short story writer Alice Munro, born Alice Laidlaw in Wingham, Ontario (1931). She grew up on a farm in the poor part of town. Her father tried to make a living raising minks and foxes. She said, "We lived in this kind of ghetto where all the bootleggers and prostitutes and hangers-on lived ... a little town where nobody was interested in writing or the world of literature." She was though, and she loved to make up stories. She said, "You were never praised for the things you could do well. You were taught to pay attention to whatever you were bad at." Every day on the way to school she told herself a new story, though she never told them to anybody else.

She ran away to go to college, University of Western Ontario, and studied journalism. She dropped out after a couple of years, got married, and had children. She became a housewife in the suburbs, a life which she did not care for. She said, "So many things were forbidden, like taking anything seriously." She was trying to write fiction, but her schedule was very tightly managed. She couldn't find time to do it, though she did try to get her kids to nap a lot.
She was in her 30s when she and her husband opened a bookstore. That, she said, made her feel as if she had a function in the real world. She locked herself in the bookstore on Sundays to write, and after nearly 20 years of struggle, she published her first collection of stories, Dance of The Happy Shades in 1968.

Her marriage broke up. She took a trip back to her home town to care for her aging father. She was only going to stay for a year, but she found that the landscape she had hated so much as a child suddenly seemed like the most interesting place in the world. She said, "People's lives in [my home town] were dull, simple, amazing, unfathomable—deep caves paved with linoleum. It did not occur to me [as a child] that one day I would be so greedy for [my hometown] ... to want every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together—radiant, everlasting."

Returning to her hometown gave her the material that she needed, and she's gone on writing about ordinary people in small town Canada ever since. Munro is the author of Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You, The Moons of Jupiter, Open Secrets, and many other books.

"Brute force, no matter how strongly applied, can never subdue the basic human desire for freedom and dignity. It is not enough, as communist systems have assumed, merely to provide people with food, shelter and clothing. Human nature needs to breathe the precious air of liberty."
-His Holiness the Dalai Lama

From The Pocket Dalai Lama, edited by Mary Craig, 2002.
Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications,
Boston, www.shambhala.com .