Life getting out of hand

Letter

10/14/17

In 2006 I read a fine little book called Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris.

Upon re reading it now in October of 2017, I find that there are things that have become worse in our struggle to bring rational thought to a divisive question.

Sam tells us on page 5, that one side of this argument is really going to win, and one side is really going to lose.

So far with the government we have now, it looks like rational thought about religion is really losing.

The courts have entered the fray in a big way, giving religious organizations the power to take away rights and privileges that had been won by women in the past and dragging us back to the “good old days” when women had few rights over their bodies, and powerful religions ruled.

We can look to Islam to see how very powerless women are in the non-Christian nations. We are stealing a page out of the Muslim playbook when we denigrate women to second class status by harassing them in the workplace, condone rape, remove contraceptive services, and in general take the attitude that women should “shut up and sit down” in congress.

The progress of the past, where women had fewer children, and could time their arrival according to their economic situation and health, seems to be eroding. Fewer children means a better life style for the whole family.

Removing contraception devices from poorer women the world over does nothing for the progress of mankind.

This is what happens when a country elects a bully to be the leader. This bully thinks that whatever he wants is the thing that will happen. His attitude towards women is plain to see in his past behavior and words.

His sucking up to the conservative money bags that run the lobbyists in Washington only hurts our legislative progress.

Our only hope is to rally the lawyers and sue the hell out of every new law that threatens our health and environment.

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Night

Night

10/02/17

“The night is dark and full of terror”

That quote from the Game of Thrones reminds us that we are facing increasing terrible acts in this country with no end in sight.

Nothing in the past has changed the minds of those who want to keep their freedom to purchase war weapons for home use, and no legislator dares to go up against the gun industry or the NRA.

What is more important? Keeping your elected seat in Congress or the safety of the citizens?

We know the answer to that.

Safety be damned.

We seem to be a law abiding nation when it comes to auto safety, and follow the rules of the road and buckle up our seatbelts. Some of us lock up our Glocks which renders them useless in any case of home protection.

Sport hunters only knock off the minimum amount of hapless deer hunters per year, while the opioid use fells us like flies.

I blame big business, but without the huge profits of the pharma people and taxes from gun sales many states could not afford the amenities of good roads and infrastructure.

I turn to watching all the years of Game of Thrones just for comic relief.

Reunion

Reunion

10/2/17

On Saturday afternoon I returned to the town where I graduated from high school in 1957. Understandably it was a smaller group of classmates that met to reminisce and eat a steak dinner.

One of the things that happened which I was dreading was women coming up to me with their hand over their name tag and high school year book picture and asking if I knew who they were.

That was rather puzzling, and as I had been out of the area all my life since 1957 with marriage and work, how was I supposed to know who these white haired ladies were?

One recounted an episode of my early life that I distinctly failed to remember, so had no clue.

The other one had not changed her hair style in 70 years so that was no problem.

For the rest, I had a chance to talk to people that I had a minimum of contact with while in school, and learned a few new tidbits about friends and teachers. Speaking of teachers, we had the Home Economics teacher there and one coach both over 90 years old.

They remembered their time with pleasure, and had spent at least thirty years teaching at the high school.

I have nothing but admiration for them, but could never handle the repetitiveness of a job like that.

The big surprise of the evening was my son, who was my chauffer and dinner partner. He was a quiet child, and not a hard charging sports enthusiast while a teen, but an introverted computer whiz.

At the dinner he was an animated speaker and told family stories to one of my old friends, and kept up a conversation with the couple who were strangers seated across the table.

Besides that we had three hours of driving time to visit and discuss plans for the future.

I was pleased to find that there were at least 9 survivors from my elementary school who were either there or mentioned by the master of ceremonies. The high school graduating class of 1957 was only about 134 members, but we have branched out to cover all sorts of activities and careers. There were nurses, doctors, teachers, engineers, prison guards, writers, landlords, farmers, vintners, and world travelers.

Of course we had to be reminded that there were a lot of classmates who were deceased or in convalescent hospitals but I was surprised to find that those who were left had good attitudes and were grateful that we could gather once again to visit and re connect. Everyone expressed the hope that we would see each other in five years. It is a hope that is admirable but the world being what it is who knows what the future will bring?

 

Dear Al, Funny man

Giant of the Senate

9/23/17

I finished reading Al Franken’s latest book by skipping the middle and just trying to find the funnier spots at the end.

It is so depressing now a days when I look at our political scene.

He seems to think that there is hope, but I can tell that even he is not too overly optimistic.

He mentions all the words coming our way via Tweets, and I have a few words about those.

I think we have maligned technology when we use it to spread hate and lies.

This seems to be what Trump got elected on so what recourse does a thinking person have?

We can look up some words to describe Trump and apply them, and most derogatory ones would apply.

Besides being a “dotard”, he is a curmudgeon.

Besides being a dolt, he is a scrofulous, crapulous bag of camel dung.

Besides being a prevaricator he is a clown, capable of scaring the crap out of us all, with apologies to Stephen King.

Do we- the population of America and the world deserve all this?

Does Mother Nature hate us now?

Are we being punished by storms and earth shaking because we elevated an idiot to power?

If the right wing nut jobs claim that natural disasters are brought about by human beings misbehaving, why I can’t I claim that we have sinned against nature and are now facing the consequences?

About the Mormons

About the Mormons

9/24/17

When I was in high school, around 1956, I met a blue eyed, curly haired young man and immediately asked him to take me to a dance after a football game.

He was a new comer and was a fugitive from New Zealand where he was accused of getting a young Maori girl pregnant.

He was also a Mormon, and was sent to live with his brother while the scandal in New Zealand blew over.

We were an item for a while, but called if off when he would not change his religion and I would not give up being Catholic. We also had no money to elope to Reno.

That was all I knew about Mormons until 1998 when I met a woman at work in New York while working as a librarian, and had seen my younger daughter get married in secret to a Mormon that she met at BYU.

My friend had lived in Utah as a teen, and informed me that yes; Mormons got divorced, drank alcohol, smoked, did dope, and had sordid lives just like the rest of us.

I got onto the god Google and found a bulletin board that gave the stories of people who had dropped away from their religion and told their true stories to the world.

Since these stories were both good and informative, they provided some much needed rounding out of my education in the anthropological sense.

I had studied the major religions in college, and only touched on the minor ones like Jainism, Taoism, Amish, and Mormons.

For years I went to the board to catch up on gossip, and keep track of those who were personal friends. I even went to two conventions and got to know some more people, but had to drop them for want of things in common.

My daughter asked why I would even be interested in studying a religion from those who proved to be apostates. Since I am a full disbeliever in all gods, it is only natural to study not only the publically approved version of any religion but also the dark sides.

All religions have their dark stories: the Amish have control freaks and incest, the Catholics have control freaks, government interfering and sexual predators. Why would we think that any religion is different when they are made up of human beings with all the flaws contained therein?

Maps

Maps

9/16/17

Lately we have seen a backlash against the use of the cell phone for every function in life, with Infinity ads about family togetherness at meal times. The expression on the teen age girl’s face is extraordinary when her mom pauses all internet devices.

We have a cell phone for driving, where the driver follows the little arrow or responds to the voice directions from a virtual female.

We have innumerable social applications that are taking the place of real time face to face interactions.

Parents are duly worried, as their offspring show no aptitude for meeting challenges in logic or even being aware of where they are physically located on the planet.

It was not always like this.

Long ago within my memory, which my grandkids would probably consider the Jurassic era, we had no cell phones of any kind, no television, no internet, and no surveillance of street corners or hallways.

How could anybody operate or even be happy under those conditions I hear my grandson ask.

Simple, we did not know any better.

What we had were cars manufactured in 1930, gasoline at 25 cents a gallon, and books.

Newspapers were big, and magazines fat with mouthwatering ads.

I was ten years old before we had a rotary phone installed. Our number was 4264, or something simple.

We got taught how to read a road map in the third grade, how to use a compass, and knew all the seasons and dates of the equinoxes.

We studied a little printed booklet to learn the rules of the road, so knew what all the signs meant.

With the map reading skills, we journeyed for thousands of miles across the country with no roadside help or cell towers to worry about. We also never drove into rivers, blindly following the directions of a virtual personality which was often wrong.

Later, I even navigated cross country flying, with no cell phone, or high tech help other than a magnetic compass and freeway system.

On a family trip to Europe in 1970, all we had to use as to navigational aids was knowledge of English and German, and a small map of Yugoslavia checked out from the Fremont library.

We bought a new Volvo station wagon in Sweden, and the local bank in California arranged the sale via their communications system.

I have no idea if they used a telegraph, teletype of trans- Atlantic telephone, but it was ready when we arrived, and we put a couple of thousand miles on it before shipping it home via slow boat as a used car.

From 1975 to 1989 I drove that Volvo up and down the west coast, with no cell phone, car insurance, computer, or even maps, as I knew the freeway system pretty well from years of driving around the Bay area.

To this day, I am not prone to use any help in getting to know an area, preferring to just memorize bus system maps, read atlases, consult print maps of states to find a location, and in general ignore the computer versions of reality.

There is hope for the future when I hear my granddaughter say that she is not going to allow her son to watch television or use a personal device to play games.

Social scientists are finding that young people are being disconnected from their peer group when they spend too much time looking p messages on their phones. Children are losing the sense of being able to discern between real life and virtual life, and measures are finally being taken in the education system to address this problem.

Remembering September 11

I was there. I had oily ashes in my bathtub. I had to work nine days in a row because of scheduling and it was good to have a place to go to and do an important job.

I still get choked up when I see any movie about the day or watch documentaries on t.v.

I went down to visit the site much later as I could not bear to see all the pictures on the fences.

I was really gratified when the leader of this infamous attack was finally rendered into the next plane, and I do hope that Osama bin Laden’s journey to his afterlife proved less than paradisical.

In fact I found that a quick and clean shot to the head was much too lenient a form of justice, but that was at least a final solutioon for him.

It is too bad that this virulent form of hatred for strangers still lingers in many societies.