He seemed to assume in all seriousness that I would have some loyalty to this team or that I would care. My only connection to it is having graduated from that school more than 20 years ago. I don't know the players or coach, nor do I have any past association with high-school sports.

It's not just my father and high-school sports, of course. It's kind of expected that sports fans will root for the home team -- and that voters will vote for the local candidate, and that people will generally show some pride when someone who shares ethnicity, an alma mater, or the like does something noteworthy.

I don't care about such factors, however. For me, it's all about relevant factors, quality chief among them. Now I might end up knowing more about the similar person/team/company/whatever, and that may lead to favor, but the favor does not derive directly from the connection.

I don't root for the US teams at the Olympics or the Steelers/Pirates here. (Bad example, I know, because I don't follow football or baseball anyway, but if I did, I wouldn't necessarily favor those teams. I would favor the teams that showed the best balance of skill and sportsmanship, whoever they are.) I don't vote for politicians just because they're from my neighborhood/county/state, or women, or Jewish, or Carnegie-Mellon alums, or (speaking theoretically) SCA members or coworkers.

Now there are some areas where having something in common can affect a decision. In an election for city council, the guy who actually lives here and participates in the community has an edge over the guy with a local post-office box who's never seen on the streets. Or, if all other factors are equal (which they rarely are), I'd probably vote for the candidate who shares my religious views, because those views can affect how one governs (or judges, since we elect judges here). But that's not at all the same thing as favoring the secular Jew just because he's named Rosenblum.

I've seen a lot of campaigns that amounted to "vote to put a woman in office" or "vote for the home-town candidate". (And, of course, the "vote party line" appeals.) That sort of thing is actually less likely to get my vote, because they should have been talking about issues instead of appealing to my presumed "nationalism" ("statism"? "townism"?).

Now voting is important and sports are not, but I suspect that a lot of people base loyalties on the same kinds of factors in both. But I just don't feel that connection -- that someone went to the same school or lives in the same town is casually interesting, in a small-talk sort of way, but not really relevant.

What's your reason for doing good works? (I sound flippant, I think, but I mean it seriously.)

Several reasons, in no particular order:

Karmic debt: Other people have done good works from which I've benefitted, so I "owe" the collective good will. I usually can't specifically repay the people who helped me out when I needed it, so the least I can do is help out other people who now need it.

Enlightened self-interest: the world is a better place when we are all good to each other. I would like other people to be good to me, so it behooves me to make this as easy as possible, including by setting a good example.

It's the right thing to do, morally: yes, sometimes I have an advantage due to real effort on my part; I've "earned" it, so I should benefit from it (and if someone tries to take it away I'll fight). But in other cases I have done absolutely nothing to deserve an advantage. It could just as easily be me with [insert fatal disease of your choice], or with [insert dysfunctional-family story of your choice], or whatever. So if I just happen to have the means to help out, and I didn't really do anything to earn that advantage, then it's wrong for me to hoard.

This is an area that's a little fuzzy for me, I'll admit. I am not a socialist or a communist; I believe that people have the right to work hard and earn advantages. I object to many of the tax schemes that have been proposed over the years. (Taxes are involuntary, though, so in a different category.) But on the other hand, does a high-tech worker really deserve a significantly higher salary than a nurse, or a social worker, or the guy who hauls away the trash? Well, no. It's just the way our society works -- but take away the nurses and the social workers and the trash collectors and we're all doomed.

"Good works" isn't just about money, of course, but it's a fairly common way for it to manifest. Some people have little free time but have disposable cash; others have lots of free time and little money. The world needs both.

It costs very little: Other kinds of good works are centered on individual, personal interaction. It costs nothing to be kind, and little to be helpful. Yeah, sometimes it backfires; the guy you say hello to is lonely and latches onto you and you sometimes have to disentangle. It's a risk I've decided I'm willing to take. (I'm reminded of a past landlady, of blessed memory. Very kind person -- she did more pre-emptive maintenance than any other landlord I knew, routinely brought over cookies and cakes, and so on. But you could not have a short conversation with her, either. It was occasionally frustrating, but on the whole it was a good and kind thing to give her the time she wanted.)

Ok, one more: you may have noticed that I haven't mentioned religion or God in any of this. I probably wouldn't have ended up where I am religiously if I had a fundamental disconnect on something like this, so that's not really the cause, but it is a source of awareness. I'm not always successful, of course, but I am trying to do a better job than I have in the past in the "good works" department, and a lot of that is because my religion has made me aware of just how important it is that we treat each other well. For anyone reading this who recognizes the reference, I've found the Chofetz Chayim rather inspirational.

This probably isn't a complete answer, but I think it hits the major points.

A few days ago, I was reflecting on Challenger and had started to compose an entry in my head. But this past week was a little hectic and I never got the words down in bits. Now, instead, I will write a slightly different entry.

I am old enough to remember the first landing on the moon, but I wasn't old enough at the time to understand what the big deal was. (I was 5 going on 6.) My formative years, educationally-speaking, fell during that decade or so when the space program was no longer "current events" but was not yet "history". Neither my parents nor my small circle of friends followed the space program, so I was pretty unaware until, probably, sometime in college. I heard a lot of space history for the first time from the filk tape "Minus Ten and Counting", which prompted me to go out and learn more. Now that I think about it, I have never properly thanked Julia Ecklar and Leslie Fish for that.

I remember the morning of Challenger quite clearly. I knew there was a launch coming up, but had lost track of the schedule. And I wasn't so hard-core that I watched (or listened to) launches live anyway. I caught them on the news when I could, or read about them in the paper. I was at work that morning, and I had a cubicle, not an office, so I wouldn't have had the radio on anyway.

Scott walked out of his office into my cubicle and said "It blew up". I thought he was talking about some code I had handed over to him. I said "on what? I ran the test suite". And he said no, not that, and I should come into his office and listen to the radio. And I did.

I didn't actually see the footage until later that night. They were playing it over and over, and I sat there stunned. And several of us said that this was probably the end of the manned space program, even though these had hardly been the first deaths. They were the first deaths that we had witnessed, as opposed to reading about, though, and it made an impact.

That was 17 years ago, and it didn't kill the space program, though clearly that program hasn't been a major priority. But it's been there, and that's important to me. I have hopes that some day people will actually leave this planet for more than a few days or weeks or months. I desperately hope that we do a better custodial job on the next planet we get our hands on, too.

Shuttle trips have become fairly routine. There have been enough that I guess I got complacent about it, the way I do about driving a car. I didn't even realize that today was the day they were coming back.

Today was Shabbat. I didn't hear the news. Tonight I read my email and saw a message from someone in the local SF club saying something like "shall we plan a memorial after this week's meeting?". Memorial? What the heck was he talking about. I figured maybe some SF author had died. I bopped over to CNN to see if I could tease it out.

Damn. How did that happen? My heart goes out to the victims. Seven, like before. A first, like before -- last time a teacher, this time an Israeli.

I feel mildly guilty that my heart aches a little bit more for those seven (and their families) than it does for many of the truly innocent, unexpected deaths that happen around the world every day -- earthquakes, famines, wars, disease. Astronauts, at least, know they're going into danger; they're taking a chance. The folks who die in brushfires or monsoons or tornados, or in skyscrapers in New York, weren't doing anything risky or out of the ordinary. I should have more sympathy for them than for astronauts. But I don't, somehow, though I am not uncaring. Call it a character flaw, I guess.

I suspect that this is a setback, not an end, to the space program. But I do wonder how many setbacks it can withstand before an impatient public calls to shut it down and spend the money elsewhere. I wonder if private enterprise will be positioned to take up the slack any time soon.

[1] Literally, "praised is the true judge" -- said upon hearing of someone's death. Meaning: God had His reasons, even if we can't comprehend them.

Some teachers (and maybe my parents?) told me to just cover my heart with my hand and stand there silently. This was dishonest, though; I didn't think I should be giving the impression that I was saying it when I wasn't. But mostly that's what I did, because I wasn't aggressive enough to really push the matter. I valued my grades and I was told they would suffer if I made a big deal out of this.

So I don't really buy the argument that no one is forced to say it so it's not coercive. Of course it's coercive; many things done in the name of public education are. This doesn't mean it's automatically wrong; there are areas where I not only accept but expect coercion in school, such as to instill minimum standards for interpersonal interactions. But I think it's silly to say that the pledge isn't coercive when it often is.

I do object to this particular coercion, though. And beyond the general objection, I have a problem with "under God" being included in anything that's required (or nearly required). It's not just the pledge, either; I'm uncomfortable when being "sworn in" (I say "affirm") as a juror ("...so help you God"), and I was startled when I was asked to swear an oath ("...before Almighty God") when applying for a marriage license. All of these are inappropriate, and all of them are functionally if not technically coercive.

I am not an athiest. I believe in God. And the God I believe in shouldn't be trivialized in this way. The hordes of school children who say these words every day do not, for the most part, have any real understanding of what they're saying. If that's not taking God in vain, I don't know what is.

And it is not for the state to give some religious views precedence over others. This isn't a constitutional argument; that only restricts Congress. This is a moral, or perhaps ethical, objection. No one has a pipeline to The One Truth here; what is right for me is not right for you, and what is right for you is not right for me. This does not change if you get yourself appointed as school superintendant, or governor, or president. (In this case, you don't even have the weight of historic precedent; "under God" is a MacCarthyism, not original text, and I gather that the author of the original would be displeased if he were capable of rendering an opinion.)

From what I understand of the court ruling (not being a lawyer or scholar), the ruling is goofy in one way: they seem to have said that this particular text is forbidden in the abstract. Forbidding "under God" in an arbitrary piece of text is as offensive as requiring it; the problem, either way, is in how the text is used. The judge who said that there's a problem with the athiest's kid even hearing "under God" is way out in left field, assuming he hasn't been quoted out of context. What they should have done is to forbid schools and the government from requiring anyone to take this pledge as it is currently written, and left it at that.

One of these days maybe I'll get around to school prayer. :-)