Some of you who are friends with me on Facebook know that last year I started a memorial page for my best friend, Einer Rasmussen who died twenty years ago in Guatemala. It's not like I don't have things to do with my spare time but a few years back I kept getting the feeling that I needed to do something to keep his memory alive. He had lot's of friends who knew him and I got the idea that Facebook would be a great place to celebrate his unique life and spirit. We met in college and immediately became friends. The free spirit inside him allowed him to make friends with everyone he met. You just felt like you had known him all your life. He had an insatiable desire to travel and see the world and his enthusiasm was infectious. He ran away from home as a teenage and hitchhiked to Daytona Beach, calling his mother a week later to tell here what a great place Daytona was and that she should move there. He had a love of Geography and spent hours planning out where his next journey would take him.During college breaks he would take side trips to Central America and Thailand. After college he would disappear for a year at a time traveling the world. He lived with two Indian guys in an apartment in Munich for a few weeks, a Nepalese family in the Himalayan mountains and became good friends with three Norwegian guys who would go on to become the 80s super-group A-Ha. His life was such an interesting tale that a Raleigh reporter did a story about him last year for the News & Observer.
Einer had a very healthy outlook on life and spent his time trying to live it at maximum capacity. Along with his zest for life he believed in honesty and had little tolerance for bullies or lies. He felt that the world was one big family and that borders were just fantasies. He believed that we all have more in common than not. He died living those beliefs on the mountainside of an active volcano, Pacaya in Guatemala in 1991 after falling to his death. He left behind friends from all over the world and the belief that if we got to know the world a little better we would realize our own humanity. What has that got to do with wine you may ask. Nothing and everything I would say. Wine is a great transmitter of truth and like Benjamin Franklin said although referencing beer, it's a clear example of how God loves us and wants us to be happy. I finally finished converting all of the thousands of slides he took during his journeys and will be posting them to his Facebook page over the next few days. If you'd like to check them out here's a link:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=h#!/group.php?gid=169583925886
This brings me to the world at large. These are heady times we live in.It's hard to avoid the events that have been playing out in Egypt this week. They've been all over the news networks. As I watch the news this morning there is estimated that somewhere over 1 million people are gathered in Cairo to protest against their government, demanding their basic rights. I've been watching the BBC and Al Jazeera English ( the latter amazingly lacking in political bias...) to get some in-depth coverage of the events unfolding. From the best I can gather this is a democratic movement with truly grassroots beginnings and as inconvenient as it may be for the politicians, democracy is coming to the Middle East.(Bismark once said "People who like justice or sausage should never watch either being made.") I'm also blown away by the role that Facebook, Twitter and other social media have played in allowing people to organize. If he were here I believe my friend Einer would have said it's a good thing. The world is changing rapidly and everyone in the world is aware of what the rest of the world is doing. (It's no mistake that half of those banners at the protest in Cairo are in English. They are saying that we are like you; we want freedom. Like my friend Einer always believed, at the end of the day people are pretty much the same and we have a lot more in common that different. We could all take a lesson from that, I know I have...
