Thoughts on Life

 Naomi Judd passed on yesterday and that set me to thinking about life.

There has been at least one time when I was ready to let go, but never a time so far when I've thought about ending my life. Whatever put me here was above my grade and I don't feel qualified to say when I'm done. I do understand how someone might tire and decide to "ring out." I don't know whether or not Ms. Judd did that and it's none of my business. I wish her fair winds and following seas as she continues on her journey.

Happy Birthday, Ronni!

I am obviously not good at all about keeping up my blogging, but I want to mark Ronni Bennett's birthday.
Going back to my beginning here in December 2004, Ronni's blog, Time Goes By, was my inspiration that this could be a thoughtful forum. Despite cross-country moves and medical challenges, she continues to post reliably and thoughtfully. She is way more than a blogger, and her blog is about way more than aging,
Happy Birthday, Ronni! Best wishes for a happy life!

Thoughts on Karma

I've been pondering since I brought MJ home with me. Of course I've had outdoor dogs before, and Max was pretty uncomplicated but I got him at 9 months. MJ is said to be 6 years. I don't know how long she lived on the streets in LA, although I think it wasn't very long because I don't think she'd have been very good at it. She only seems really relaxed when she sleeps at night. I think about where she's been and how she got there.

When I'm home she never takes her eyes off of me and when I stand she darts over to where I'm standing. It has occurred to me that one day she'll kill us both by tripping me. She's not as anxious when I come and go as she was - she's stopped barking - but she doesn't let it go. When I come back from the laundry room, she's standing where she was when I left.

This morning I was thinking perhaps in a past life MJ had been inconsiderate of a pet and she was afraid of that happening to her. Perhaps that could be my fate as well. Why not? Why couldn't the essence of life be non-specific to species, genera, family, order, class, or phyla? It serves us to believe that we are of a higher order, but is it true?

Thoughts on what makes #45 the way he is

The fact is that I don't hate #45. I don't love him, but I don't hate him either. I kind of feel sorry for him.
I have no idea how a shady New York real estate developer came to believe that being POTUS was in his wheelhouse, but he doesn't appear to me to be having a lot more fun with this than we are. I look at him and the sycophants around him and, while some of the sycophants appear to be having a pretty good time, #45 himself does not. I don't know if he has a true friend in the world.
I'm not a "shrink" but I think a lot of it goes to his emotional reactivity. Emotionally he's an adolescent.
I suspect most have noticed by now that his go-to move in any contest is to trivialize his opponent with a pejorative nickname. That probably served him well through middle-school as it does for a lot of bullies, but an incapacity to speak to the issues is generally regarded as a disadvantage in the world of adults.
"Who is the whistle-blower?" In the world of adults, it doesn't matter. It could have been completely anonymous and, if the information was true and correct, it would be actionable intelligence, but that's where his brain is stuck. He can't get past the personal affront and, to him, it's always personal. What he does, on the other hand, is just how he does business.

I don't want to see POTUS impeached... and I certainly don't want to see his VP elevated into that office. I want #45 to walk out of the White House on Inauguration Day 2021 back into his natural habitat and then to think no more about him as we hopefully begin to heal the wounds inflicted on the fabric of our Republic and the world.

Thoughts on Making Entertainment Our Priority

Some of you who read this may be familiar with Juvenal's Satires, one of which (#10) laments that the People "now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses."

Recently, I've been seeing/hearing a lot of chatter about the World Cup, and I actually took the time to watch this year's Women's Final match. Fans interviewed during Wednesday's ticker-tape parade gushed about how important this victory was. Well, it wasn't that important. The soccer team won a soccer tournament, and I'm happy for them, but it was a soccer tournament. Nothing has been changed, and the whole competition is already well on the way to becoming answers in sports trivia competitions.

I think that's the big danger of our apparent hunger for entertainment. What might have been a healthy distraction has become a priority. In society, we venerate entertainers - including athletes - above all. Our universities are judged on their athletic programs.

With the passing of Ross Perot this week I am reminded of a time when we challenged the assumption that we had to choose between a Republican or a Democrat to represent us. Certainly, neither Party is even the least little bit interested in representing you or me, but we accept that. Lincoln was elected President just six years after his party was founded

In fact, choosing our representatives is something that we do have the opportunity to control, especially at the local level, but we don't vote in primaries where candidates are chosen or in local elections where local voters can actually make themselves heard.

Humanity vs Animal Husbandry

I think I may have stumbled upon the reason religious-right men are so fixated on women's reproductive rights or the lack thereof. I think they regard women as livestock.

In animal husbandry, the object is to get the most utility from each head of livestock. When a hen stops laying, it becomes food. You don't keep a racehorse after it's through racing unless you can use it as breeding stock.

Have you listened to people talk about their livestock? It's not a chicken; it's a hen or a rooster (and you don't need many roosters). It's not a horse; it's a mare or a stallion (and you don't need a lot of stallions). I'm uncomfortable with that last analogy because gelding doesn't sound that good. In their minds, to have a fecund woman not producing offspring offends nature. When their wives no longer engage them on that level, they have affairs. (I guess they could do worse.)

I was a bit puzzled at first that these men seem to have little if any concern for any offspring, but I'm reminded of my foster family's milk cow who was bred as her milk production fell off and the calf was eaten shortly after its birth. The offspring are by-products.

A couple of questions come to mind. I have no idea why these men's mothers, wives, and daughters have allowed these men to live so long while they were being totally disrespectful of said mothers', wives', and daughters'  humanity.

Thoughts on Humanity

I find myself reacting to the inhumanity of humanity. People I care about seem to me to make distinctions between humans that I am unable to reconcile with my idea of humanity.

Many people seem to accept the idea of "race" as a distinguishing characteristic among humans as a given, although there is less science to support it than there is to support differences among various "breeds" of dogs. Why is that not absurd on its face?

Nationalism makes even less sense, especially in a country such as ours where we have gone to considerable lengths to eradicate our few common historical precedents. I've said before that everything European culture has done in American has been built over the dead bodies of the indigenous population and slaves. It appears that we gringos brought nothing with us but imperialism and hubris.

In the absence of science or logic, we find ourselves, as humans and a nation, unable to engage in meaningful discussions of a path forward together. That's a shame because, as I've pointed out before, there are an estimated 7.7 billion humans on Earth of whom about 4.3% are "American." If we seriously believe we're going to survive separately then I believe we're seriously delusional. If we seriously believe that the rest of the world is going to be patient while we get our shit together, again, I believe we're seriously delusional. On the other hand, I'm five weeks from my 72nd birthday so let me just apologize to my kids again and wish you good luck with that.

"No hay peor sordo que el que no quiere oír."

Stop Chasing Squirrels

Among the things I believe are bad ideas are spending the next 314* days assigning blame, calling one another names, and anything else that reeks of early adolescent behavior. I generally agree that our 45th American President is a tragic mistake from which it may take generations to recover, but we can't afford to spend a lot of time in recriminations. There's too much work to be done, much of which is time-sensitive. My only issue with first-term Senator Kamala Harris is that she's been running for President ever since she got to Washington. She wasn't elected to run for President. The U.S. only has about 4.4% of the world's human population, and we cannot imagine that the other 95% are going to wait long for us.

There is no excuse for not putting the House of Representatives in order and on the path to a positive agenda. If it can't be passed through the Senate, that's on them. If #45 won't sign it, that's on him. There are always reasons why something might fail, but to not even attempt to do your job until you're sure to win is just lame. We have the rest of our lives to talk shit about #45. Get to work!

*California will hold its Primary Election on March 3rd, 2020. 

Thoughts on Support Systems

I was at a meeting at the VA Medical Center in La Jolla Thursday afternoon. During the Director's remarks, Dr.  Smith noted that veteran suicides continued at about 20 a day and that about two-thirds of those had not accessed the VA Health System. That set me to thinking and it occurs to me that, more than 40 years into the modern All-Volunteer Force, veterans are more on their own than at any time in our history.

I suspect mental health support for the military has always been somewhat problematic. Even back in my day, there were clusters of us doing different things with different levels of stress attached to them. An Engineman assigned to a patrol boat on the Mekong had a completely different experience than an Engineman on a frigate out in the Gulf. I think exposure to combat changes people in ways that people who have never been exposed perhaps cannot comprehend.

Nothing in civilian experience prepares us for what we're going to do in the military. All of our training from enlistment through deployment is to temper us as in a crucible to think and react in specific ways to specific stimuli. Undoing all that has never been given a lot of attention.  My sense was that when there were hundreds of thousands of us in the community we could always depend on one another as we had done on the line. On the other hand, when we interviewed a WW II B-26 pilot for the Veterans History Project in 2014, he told us as we were leaving that that was the first time he'd spoken about his experiences because no one had wanted to hear about it when he got home.

I don't have a background in behavioral health. I do remember a period when I didn't feel as though I belonged here, but whether that was due to the seven years in foster care or 1968-69 or some mix of the two, I couldn't tell you. I don't think we're any more serious about providing mental health support to transitioning veterans than we are about providing rehabilitative medicine.

Farm(ed) Animals

I suspect that I'm prone to overthinking some things (and underthinking others), but I keep hearing about the meaning/purpose of life and it sends me off into contemplation of where that comes from. I'm pretty sure #45 sincerely believes he's as fantastic as he says he is, so clearly that can't be left to individual decision-making.

I may be wrong, but it seems to me that theists cling to a belief that their deity - usually an omniscient and omnipotent male - crafted fish and then amphibians and then each mammalian species in turn. If that were true, it would go a long way toward explaining how so many things appear to have been done badly, but that's not the point. (I know that I just jumped right over all the species of vegetation, but I didn't want to get too far into the weeds here.)

Theology seems to teach that the Universe was created by this super-entity for the express benefit of Earth-bound humans., and that makes no sense to me. I'm fairly certain that life is simply life. Beyond that, we're getting into beliefs.

Where am I going with this? I think there is a strong argument to be made for "animal" rights to humane treatment, but there's also an increasingly critical question of the expenditure of resources in order to farm animals. What nutritional elements do we get from meat that we couldn't get - perhaps more efficiently - from vegetation?

Don't get me wrong; I am a carnivore. I went to Arby's and ordered their bacon sandwich with extra bacon. In a finite environment with 7.7 billion people to feed (of which 4.3% live in the U.S.), is there a better way more respectful of our resources and production capacity.

I don't know that much about farming fish and, although I know that fish will learn to recognize people, I don't care as much about them. I'll always remember when my foster family had the milk cow bred to "freshen her milk", and then we butchered and ate her calf. That seemed harsh.