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It's in moments like these that my love for dictionaries knows no end. Today is Epiphany Day. Here's what I found for the definition of epiphany :

epiphany |iˈpifənē| noun ( pl. -nies) (also Epiphany) the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles as represented by the Magi (Matthew 2:1–12).
• the festival commemorating this on January 6.
• a manifestation of a divine or supernatural being.
• a moment of sudden revelation or insight.

DERIVATIVES epiphanic |ˌepəˈfanik| adjective

ORIGIN Middle English : from Greek epiphainein ‘reveal.’ The sense relating to the Christian festival is via Old French epiphanie and ecclesiastical Latin epiphania.

Now, I've repeatedly said here how even though I am an atheist, I am strongly attached to many of the catholic rites I grew up with. This has to do with what Joseph Campbell called The Power of Myth. I love mythologies, I love the stories humans have created and propagated through millennia in order to justify our existence.

I've been missing "Navidad en Puerto Rico" for a long time. It is the perfect social expression of our mulatto culture and mythologies and it's nothing, and I mean, nothing like Christmas in New York or anywhere in the United States.

In Puerto Rico we call today El Día de los Reyes Magos. It's the day catholics all around the world use to commemorate the Three Wise Men's visitation of the baby Jesus in manger in the middle of nowhere in Bethlehem. That's where the "manifestation of a divine or supernatural being" comes into play on this day.

On this day we kind of do what anglos do with Santa Claus. On the evening of the 5th, kids gather grass and water dishes for the three kings' horses. Parents put together candy with a little "ofrenda" of rum. "The magic revelation" happens when the kids go to sleep.

My parents loved to get their Reyes Magos on and would go as far as get coconuts and, in an unironic Monty Pythonesque moment, clopclopclop their way around the house while scattering the grass, emptying the bowls full of water and washing down a coconut candy or two with the "ofrenda" they had left out for themselves.

I tried doing the same for my kids but it just doesn't work out the same. For one, all the kids in Puerto Rico wait eagerly for Los Reyes Magos. Here in New York? Not so much. Not even american catholics celebrate the day!

Yet what I love and miss about los Reyes Magos is that it marks the half-point of our Christmas festivities.

Yes people, we Puerto Ricans have to do things differently, especially if it involves partying. In Puerto Rico we don't have 12 days of Christmas. We have 22 days.

This is about the same spot I end up everytime I go to El Alambique beach in Isla Verde, Puerto Rico.

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Este es el sitio en donde termino sentándome cada vez que voy a la Playa del Alambique en Isla Verde, Puerto Rico.

So the controversial Cindy Sheehan is quitting her one-woman crusade, maybe giving up her citizenship in disgust and moving to Canada? Did her 15 minutes of political celebrity make her a heroine, did it serve life, liberty and pursuit of happiness for the American people, or just serve as spectacle?

"I have tried ever since he died to make his sacrifice meaningful," she wrote. "Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives.

"It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this system for so many years, and Casey paid the price for that allegiance.

"I failed my boy and that hurts the most."

Whatever her failures and disillusionment, is there anything better one individual struggling within massively failing systems could expect? Not according to the 1990 holistic system thinking movie "Mindwalk" (which btw is airing this week on Showtime channels if you want to catch it and think about it in this updated context). . .maybe save the system, save the world?

Actor Sam Waterson's answer, after starring in Mindwalk, was to lend his celebrity to Unity08, trying to reform the whole system through new interconnections rather than win-lose adversarial elections. Both Democrats and Republicans (who together "are" the entrenched political system) are naturally resisting and ridiculing him in these efforts, as they have successfully done to Sheehan, manipulating all the media they can dominate to keep systemic change from being taken seriously by real, regular, reasonable people going about their private business and wondering who can save them from what they have wrought.

I think (though Sheehan doesn't seem capable of such analysis) the opening trick we can't manage is thinking well enough to understand what "saving" the system even means, in such complicated plotlines populated with infinitely interdependent characters, aka the Real World. Making it do -- what? Making it work -- how? Making it serve -- whom? Because we fail at that, we fail at everything we attempt after that.

This morning my expert public policy eye spots a (rare imo) right answer in the New York Times business news, real analysis and insight for all those of us who puzzle over public schools and party politics, religious wars, et cetera and just can't understand why we keep doing all the wrong things wronger, regressing rather than progressing.

"Overbooking, Bumped Fliers and No Plan B"
by Jeff Bailey

The whole story is about aggressive and insulated data analysts crunching endless numbers to create operational models that are statistically attractive to their own part of the "enterprise" but unfit for human consumption, thereby infuriating regular, responsible people just trying to participate in the system in good faith, in their own private, statistically insignificant roles.

Necessity being the mother of invention, savvy front line folks experiencing the fallout have to cope somehow. They create practical workarounds at their own lowly level that seem to compensate the consumer reasonably well and thus protect the system from its own longterm self-inflicted wounds. But that in turn makes the analysts redouble insistence on THEIR strategies, further infuriating users and further hurting the systems's credibility, requiring even more creative counterprogramming and loss of respect from the people caught up in it all. More and more regular people wise up to the system's escalating adversarial shortcomings, thus making it all even worse. Finally the system becomes neither workable nor fixable at any level . . Dörner's Logic of Failure.
"Stuck in a quagmire . . ."
"Scant credbility. . ."
"People view [it] as not on the up-and-up"

. . .what psychologist Dietrich Dörner shows, is that the problem lies not in the world, but in our own world-view . . .most of us are too simpleminded, especially when it comes to anticipating future trends or interactive processes. We don't think about the implications and consequences of what we want, or want to do, with results that come back to haunt us.

Nevertheless, and contrary to many current claims, Dörner also argues that there is no secret formula or mental trick . . . to overcome complacency or over-confidence. The world always has been very complex, but as the ambition and scale of our intentions has increased in modern times, the malevolent implications and consequences of our simple-mindedness becomes more and more frequent and compelling. . .
This is a book that public policymakers, politicians, planners, and the general public desperately need to read. We are squandering our environmental capital and undermining our social capital because we are trying to do things, or avoid doing things, that cannot be sustained for very much longer. . .

Remember that Kansas town that got wiped off the map by a giant tornado? Its mayor just quit, said he would not lead the rebuilding effort, wasn’t temperamentally suited to that kind of system work with competing ideas about what to do and how to do it. The town council said oh, don’t quit, we’ll just consider that you’re on sabbatical to get your own family squared away and then maybe you’ll come back and lead us. We’ll just wait.