I Wonder as I Wander…

The organization I work for has a weeklong Institute every year. It’s held on the campus of a major university. This year that university was near Chicago. I flew directly from Jackson to O’Hare and Bob drove from home, so he was able to pick me (and a couple of my colleagues) up at the airport.

We have a GPS in our car, so Bob hadn’t brought a map of Chicago along, thinking that he could set the GPS and it would route us to the college. When he put the CD in for that area—the readout said the CD wasn’t working. So we were in the city without knowing where we were going. Luckily, one of the women with us had the directions—so we found the college. I guess it goes to prove that you can’t always trust technology.

The Institute was wonderful, with some really interesting speakers who make you think about things from a completely different angle. One of the best speakers was Reza Aslan. He is an internationally acclaimed writer and scholar of religions, is a regular commentator for NPR’s Marketplace and Middle East Analyst for CBS News. He is the author of ‘No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam’, and the soon to be published ‘How to Win a Cosmic War: Why We’re Losing the War on Terror’.

Reza Aslan’s presentation was about the recent poll by Foreign Policy Magazine which indicated that nearly 90% of US foreign policy analysts on both the left and the right believe the United States is losing the so-called “War on Terror.” In his book, Reza argues that America’s poor performance in this conflict is due not only to the decisions made by the Bush Administration, but more importantly to the very way in which the struggle against Islamic extremists has been framed as a “cosmic war” between the forces of good and evil.

Another speaker, Dr. David M. Oshinsky, talked about the polio epidemic and how horrible it was, primarily striking children. The race for a vaccine led to the largest public health experiment in American history involving nearly two million school-age volunteers. When Dr. Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was declared “safe, effective, and potent,” in 1955, the nation celebrated as if a war had ended - and, indeed, one had. The crusade against polio not only prevented future cases of this horrific disease, it also revolutionized the ways in which medical research, charitable fundraising, and government drug testing would be done in the United States. This united effort produced The March of Dimes, one of the greatest scientific and philanthropic achievements on record.

On the R & R day of the Institute, everyone received a “Go Chicago” Pass and two train tickets so they could go into downtown Chicago. We caught the train to Union Station and then walked to Navy Pier (probably between 1 & 2 miles). We took a boat architectural tour of the city, which was really interesting. We wandered around Navy Pier for a while--rode the ferris wheel and found the Ben and Jerry’s Ice cream stand. Then we took a hop-on-hop-off bus tour—and hopped off right near Gino’s Pizza. Gino’s is one of the original places that has deep dish pizza—yum! It’s also an interesting place—they encourage people to do graffiti on the walls—so every square inch is covered. But the pizza was delicious. We also went up to the observation deck on the John Hancock building.

Saturday when everything was done, we drove back to Mpls and stayed at our son’s on Sunday, our daughter came to the cities and we went to “Les Miserable” at Chanhassen. What a wonderful play! And Chanhassen is a wonderful dinner theatre! That night we went to our daughter’s and spent one night in St Cloud, then we drove up to Brimson and spent a night at her place there. While there, we did a ‘Harry Potter’ movie marathon and watched all four movies.

Another fun trip!