Stand or Kneel?

I’m not sure where I stand or don’t stand on the stand-or-kneel question now in the news. It’s a little like the eyes-down-and-closed or the eyes-up-and-open, the kneel or stand, when we’re asked to pray or recite the Lord’s Prayer in a church. Personally, I think it’s a matter of personal choice. If I choose to keep my eyes open or choose not to kneel, should it be sinful enough that God would say, “Kick the son-of-a-bitch out!” No. God is too dignified to do that. And if NFL players and coaches choose to kneel or stand with locked arms during the playing of the national anthem, is it so disrespectful of our country and flag that our president shouts to an assembly in Alabama, referring to Colin Kaepernick, “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, out, he’s fired!” It seems to me that Donald Trump is being disrespectful of his role as president of the United States when he uses such unpresidential and divisive language and, in turn, disrespectful of our nation’s First Amendment rights of free speech. Granted, he has the same right to say what he said, but not when he’s the leader of our country, not when we and the rest of the world need a leader who can bring the world together with his dignity and leadership. “Dignity,” now there’s a word that simply doesn’t apply to Donald Trump. The people of this country need to get together to fire him, get him off the field before he brings down the flag, the national anthem, the country, and the world. There. I guess I really do know where I stand on the question. I guess I’ll kneel.

Facebook & Some Not Nice News

Facebook is a useful place for finding and reconnecting with old friends, but it can also be a place where you reveal to anyone and everyone more about yourself than you should. And your words are there forever, uneraseably stored in one of those mysterious clouds above. Emily Dickinson, over a century and a half ago, wrote about the dangers of being too public—too many deplorables in the bog, pretending admiration. Remember, all you Facebookers, the whole world is watching. Emily, in 1861, wrote, “I’m Nobody! Who are you? / Are you—Nobody—Too? / Then there’s a pair of us. / Don’t tell! they’d advertise—you know! / How dreary—to be—Somebody! / How public—like a Frog-- / To tell one’s name—the livelong June— / To an admiring Bog!”

Not Nice News:

Puerto Rico looks like an island ravaged by war, where bombs and artillery leveled cities and countrysides. But the war was a mean lady called Maria. And the same amount of rebuilding will be required as that of the bombed-out European cities in WWII or the Iraqi cities Mosul and Fallujah. The news reports that power on the island won’t be restored for three to six months. In this day and age, how do nearly three million residents exist for that long without power?

In the next century (maybe even sooner), the oceans will rise by six to nine meters as polar ice caps melt faster and faster. What will happen to coastal cities and low-elevation islands when the seas rise that much? The world’s heaviest populations are located in coastal cities. Millions and millions of people will have to relocate inland and upward. Low-level islands will disappear. What happens to Japan, Ireland, England, Polynesia, the Philippines, Guam, the Caribbean islands? And what can we do to slow or reverse this trend? Stop all industries from using carbon-fossil fuels for power, acknowledge that we’re to blame for this dramatic climate change.

Last Wednesday at Yankee Stadium, a young girl was struck in the head by a foul ball liner going 105 mph. Yankee third baseman Todd Frazier hit it and when he saw what had happened, he bowed his head hoping it wasn’t as bad as it might have been. And the girl is recovering. But this incident once again shows us the dangers of close stands along the foul lines, especially if one isn’t paying attention, especially if one is too young to get out of the way. There will probably be more plans by all stadiums to extend the netting farther down both lines. Breakable bats is another danger for the fan. A bat can act like a spear when it flies like a helicopter into the stands. Solution? That’s easy. Require unbreakable bats, aluminum or something equally light, just like they use in colleges. Batters would complain that the feel isn’t the same. But that’s tough, boys. Just do it, commissioner.

Another comment in my feud with the NRA and gun owners: According to Wikipedia, the U.S. leads all nations in the number of guns legally owned 101 guns 100 people, or one per person. It goes on to point out that only one in three households have guns, which means that those household have an average of three guns. Wow, that’s a lot of guns. Is there a true need for that many? The next closest to us is Serbia with 58.21. Tunisia has the fewest at 0.1 guns per 100 residents, or about one gun per thousand people. Also according to Wikipedia, over thirty thousand deaths happen by firearms in the U.S.—about 20,000 suicides, 11,000 homicides, and 500 accidents. Okay, the suicides would probably find another way if they couldn’t find a gun; the homicides could be reduced by stricter laws about who should and who shouldn’t be allowed to own a gun; and the accidental deaths would go down to zero. I think the numbers make a resounding case for stricter laws.

Whistling

I wonder what ever happened to the art of whistling. I don’t mean whistling for your dog or calling for a taxi or the two-finger version to applaud or get someone’s attention. I mean whistling a song, whistling as with an invisible musical instrument, played with the lips like an absent harmonica. In the old old days we didn’t have IPads and IPods and Smart phones to provide us with music as we worked or walked, so we had to provide it for ourselves. I guess humming and singing softly to oneself are also activities of the past. When I was a young man of ten or twelve, I whistled all the time. Or so my older sister would have me believe. She always called me Elmo when she heard me tootling away. I only learned what she meant when I was in high school and one of the top-ten songs was “Heartaches,” whistled by Elmo Tanner, a member of the Ted Weems band. I’m not sure if girls whistled back then or if it was forbidden because it was too un-feminine. Back then, boys and girls weren’t allowed to swear or mention bodily functions or talk back to parents or skip school or stay out after the ten o’clock curfew whistle sounded on the village siren—just one up-and-down alarm for the curfew. It was a continuous alarm for fires and a single whistle for blizzardy mornings to tell us we didn’t have school that day. Oh, the joy of hearing that whistle. It almost made me want to whistle when I heard it, but usually I just went back to sleep. We did lots of things back then, and had lots of things forbidden to do. Back then we all remained in our strictly delineated boy and girl roles, even though we may have wanted to escape. Just as those barriers have now dissolved (the lines between boy and girl, man and woman), so too has the art of whistling disappeared. In the arts, the three most memorable mentions of whistling are Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio telling us, “When you meet temptation and the urge is very strong, give a little whistle, give a little whistle! Not just a little squeak, just pucker up and blow”; Anna when in Siam singing, “Whenever I feel afraid, I hold my head erect, and whistle a happy tune, so no one will suspect I’m afraid”; and that most famous of all, Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not telling Humphrey Bogart, “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.” Everyone in the theater knew she was talking about something other than whistling, but back then we weren’t allowed to mention it. Now, in a world that keeps getting more and more confusing led by a man who keeps getting more and more confusing, I think we should all take up the lost art of whistling. Just pucker up and blow.

The Browning of America, Part II

A long time ago (January 2013) I wrote a blog entitled "The Browning of America." It seems to be even more relevant today than back then, so I'm going to post it again. In 2017 we have more divisiveness about skin color and racial and ethnic identity than ever before. Under the Trump administration we are seeing more and more groups actively promoting racial separation, whites separate from blacks, Asians, Hispanics, Native Americans, or any combination thereof. How fruitless. They should surrender to the inevitable--We really will become that melting pot envisioned so many years ago, the national race which is a combination of all those races who have immigrated to this country, all of us some shade of brown, all of us Americans. What I'm saying will offend a lot of people but soon enough we'll see their passing and a more liberal generation will replace them. Can't be soon enough as far as I'm concerned. Here is what I said four and a half years ago:

A bit of news last year that most people didn’t notice or didn’t acknowledge. As of May 19, 2012, in this country there were more babies (under 1 year) of color than white. The media called it “The Browning of America,” a label that says a lot about the future of our country. Demographers also predict that by 2042 we will have no ethnic majority, just a majority of brown-skinned folks of mixed ethnic backgrounds. I remember reading something by Phillip Wylie half a century ago in which he said he looked forward to the day when we’re all a little tan. Well, fifty years later he’d be happy to see his wish coming true. Since our very beginning, the U. S. has been known as the melting pot, meaning we were a nation of immigrants amalgamated into one new nationality. Well, now we’re seeing us as a melting pot of ethnic diversity, a mixture of races too diverse to be labeled. Amazing that as recently as 1967 there were still anti-miscegenation laws in most of our Southern states. What idiocy. One of my nieces, as pale as virgin snow, married a man as black as Columbian coffee. And they have a lovely daughter who is latte tan. She will grow up in a society that no longer looks askance at children of mixed ethnicity, may even marry someone also mixed and have children even more mixed. And who will care? I hope no one. Tiger Woods has described himself as Cablinasian, a mixture of Caucasian, Black, Indian, and Asian. But we don’t need to invent new labels to describe ourselves. I look forward to the time when we no longer need labels for anything—not our religious preference, not our political persuasion, not our ethnic makeup. Especially not our ethnic makeup.

Happy Valley & Bits of News

Classmates, friends, fellow Gamesters, Doggy Dog followers,

Just after my extended stay in the hospital and another extension being pretty much confined to my home, I finally finished a book I’d begun over ten years ago. It’s a story about a retiree living in a place very much like Sun City West. I’d love to have anyone who might be interested to buy it at Amazon, either as a Kindle e-book ($1.99) or a paperback ($10.00). If and when you read it, would you write a brief review of it for Amazon, giving it as many stars as you think it deserves? I’d be thankful even if you rated it only one star. What the hell, one star is better than a pitch black night with no stars. Here’s where you can go, Happy Valley on Amazon.

What’s newsworthy lately?

The Arizona Cardinals played what I consider the ugliest NFL game I’ve ever seen when they beat the Colts last Sunday. This might prove to be a very long and ugly season for the Cardinals. Or maybe it was just a temporary aberration and next week they’ll play great against the hated Cowboys. We’ll see. It’s really too early to leap off the Cardinal bandwagon.

Our president is still at it, trying to insult and bully as many people and nations as he can—the “Rocket Man” tweet about Kim Jong-un , the comment to the UN General Assembly about making the UN great but not great again, his continued denial that we are responsible for the climate changes now hitting the world with hurricane force, his fight with what he calls the “fake news” on MSNBC and the “Morning Joe” co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mike Brzezinski, the fake news on CNN and in the N.Y. Times and the Washington Post, his continual assault on Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. And it goes on. And it will go on for as long as he’s president.

The opioids epidemic, the thousands dying from overdoses. I guess I’m confused by all of it. How many of the thousands are accidental, how many purposeful? If it’s accidental, why do that many people feel a need for lethal doses of the drug? If it’s purposeful, why do we need to keep people from taking their own lives by whatever means they choose? In a world fast approaching seven billion population, we don’t need to keep people alive against their will. I’m confused. If, for whatever my reason, I want to take my own life, why should it be anyone else’s business? Allow me to define my own life and death.

That’s enough tough questions for the day. Maybe I’ll come up with a few others for tomorrow.

9-11, Practical Jokes, & Telephone Peeves

I wrote this blog several days ago and never got a chance to post it because I had temporarily lost my internet connection. So I hope my mention of 9/11 doesn’t confuse you.

Time has a way of speeding up for me. What seems like something happening only a week or so ago is really almost a month. We get our cats nails clipped when they need it and keep track of the cutting dates. Tiger jumped up on my arm this morning and, naturally, drew blood. But it told me we were probably behind in our schedule. Sure enough, it had been seven weeks since they were last there. Seven weeks and it seemed to me to be only two or three weeks. Same thing is true about this day. Sixteen years ago today the Twin Towers in New York were brought down by terrorist cowards. It doesn’t seem like it was that long ago, but there it is—sixteen years. Lest we forget. Lest we forget. I read in the paper this morning a letter suggesting that September 11 be designated a national day of mourning. I think that’s a splendid idea. We never ever want to forget what happened to us on that fatal day sixteen years ago. It would be nice to have a reminder on our calendars to prevent our ever forgetting.

I recently got a letter from the Arizona Dept. of Transportation about renewing our golf cart license. I wrote them a check, folded the return form along its length, and then discovered that the return envelope was about half an inch too short for the form. So I cut it down to make it fit. And when I moistened the return flap to seal the form and check, the glue didn’t work or was never there in the first place. I could imagine someone in charge of printing forms and envelopes laughing their butts off as they pictured all those recipients trying vainly to make the form fit the envelope, trying vainly to make the flap stick. Okay, so it wasn’t intended as a practical joke, but how much it epitomizes too many of our faceless agencies that can’t do much of anything without screwing things up. A long time ago, when I was in the army, we had a word for it—SNAFU—situation normal, all fucked up. It’s like the Catch-22 “put on hold” that fills our ears with noxious hold music and messages we patiently listen to for twenty or thirty minutes until we get a busy signal and a computer voice telling us, “Your call could not be completed. Please hang up and try again.” GRRR! We seem to have a growing number of snafus in our society today, of which the biggest of all is sitting in the White House. How appropriate for one who loves to blow his own horn that it be a trumpet. Too bad he never learned to play it with a mute.

Another joke of some kind, either practical or unintentional. We just switched out TV, internet, and land-line phone bundle from Dish Network to Direct TV. One of my obligations was to wait for the UPS delivery of a shipping container for returning all of the Dish hardware. The shipping stuff arrived, one small box for the modem and connecting lines, power line, and two phone filters; and one large box for DVR’s, remote controls, and the hardware attached to the outside dish. The directions for packing were extremely specific, showing me exactly where to put each piece in the bottom and top plastic shelves. The box was about 2’ x 3’ x 1’. Most of the equipment went easily into the designated places. But when I tried to pack the LNBF (whatever that is), there was no way for it to fit in the place they said it should go. No way. I fought it for longer than it deserved and then finally cut the hard plastic form to make room for the piece. I’m a reasonably intelligent man who can usually follow instructions for assembling desks and tables and dressers even though the instructions were probably written by someone in a furniture plant outside of Beijing. Someone in the Dish corporation had to be doing a number on customers who bail on them.

And while I’m at it on pet peeves, let’s go back to the phone. Many of us today often need help with one or the other of our digital devices. So we call for technical support. Let’s say you have a problem with your internet connection. The first number you dial gets you to a gigantic answering service located somewhere far far away. You wade through menu after menu of computerized voices telling you where to go. Finally, you hear a human voice. You then go through the ritual explanation of who you are, where you are, and why you’re calling. The live human tells you he/she must transfer you to the department that handles such problems. Hold. “Dum de dum de dum,” you hum for ten minutes until another human voice comes on the line. Again, the ritualized giving of information. Again the need to transfer you to another department. Again, the hold. Again, the new voice asking for the same identifying information. And then, finally, after several hours, you get an answer to your question. Nearly every human voice you’ve worked through speaks too fast or in too heavy a dialect for easy understanding. I’m always left wondering why so many of our technical support experts are from another country, mainly India. Are there no Americans who could do tech support or are we all too stupid?