Resolutions

I resolve to moderate my language and cease southern slang next year, and all you sorry outfits that don't like it can just sweep around your own door first cause, to begin with, you make my ass want a dip of snuff. There. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Resolutions

Doesn’t seem like the day after Christmas. Seems more like a week before New Year’s. Isn’t New Year’s when were supposed to promise to do better? Isn’t making it through the year enough? Must we really give something up? Isn’t that what Lent is for? Let me get back to you on giving things up for Lent.

I remember my days at the gym at the old YMCA in downtown Little Rock. Come the 2nd of Jan., the place was packed. Seems everyone wore new exercise togs, except the old crowd with their faded shorts and their “I’m With Stupid,” tee-shirts. They all formed a dandy crowd. On Jan. 5, it was a crowd minus half-a-dozen. A week later, we saw a crowd minus 20 and by the 30^th, it was the same old hollow-eyed OCD crew as before.

Still, I sense I must give up something or take up something. Let’s see.

Oh, I’ll give up watching the Super Bowl since they’re going to feature the dog murderer. No, don’t think that will work. I’ve only watched one of them in my life. That was when Joe Namath and crew defeated the Baltimore Colts. It was a few years ago, I think and was only because I had weekend duty aboard the USS Hunley and it was either watch the game or make “Macnamara Lace” on the fantail. Tough choice.

I could take up baking bread as a hobby. Somehow I don’t think that meets the spirit and intent of the act of “resolutionizing.”

I could redouble my efforts at the local gym. Do more walking while I dream of a Trump-free world. Yeah, that’s it. I can feel my blood pressure rising already.

It wouldn’t be seemly not to write about new years and new beginnings today. Everyone else is doing it, so why not? It’s colder than a pimp’s heart outside so there’s not much else to do. Here goes.

Two New Year’s Days stand out with me.

I have to start with January 1, 1940. That’s the day George and Mabel von Tungeln quit picking cotton and became grocers. They had been sharecropping and caring for a year-old daughter near the community of Ladd, Arkansas when Daddy went to town in their ancient panel truck one day and came back with a hog. There may have been a beer or two involved. They never said.

Long story short, they sharpened table knives that night, butchered the hog next day, and he began “peddling” meat in Pine Bluff to delighted customers who had bought from his father. One hog led to another and they saved enough to buy a small grocery on “The New Warren Road” leading south out of the city. They operated it until January 1, 1980.

As for me, I’ve tried to count, and I think I’ve been to three New Year’s celebrations in my life. Been up a few times, some by choice, some by orders from the military or greater authority. The most alarming must have been January 1, 1968 when I was pulling guard duty in a tower at Camp Tien Sha near Da Nang, Vietnam. It overlooked Tien Sha village where all was quiet then save the periodic scream of a baby. Guys said rats would bite them, but I don’t know. Behind me stretched row after row of barracks.

I carried an assault rifle. Security forces received one. I hadn’t been in-country long so I think I was still carrying an M-14. It was heavy, but I preferred it to the early M-16s for it would actually shoot if you pulled the trigger. Anyway, it was a support base, and very few others qualified to carry weapons. No problem for them. A person could hitchhike to a dismal settlement near the Da Nang Air Force Base, a dark and dangerous place nicknamed “Dogpatch” by the GIs. There, a serviceman could purchase near anything he wanted. Though not the hottest selling product therein, guns were available, courtesy of a holy triad consisting of the United States military, supply officers, and the Black Market.

If you didn’t want to make the trip, there was a guy in our company who would get you one.

Back to Camp Tien Sha. I had just come on the “mid-watch,” a miserable assignment designed to protect the base from midnight until 0600. That’s it: 0600. The Navy didn’t add “hours” like the lesser services do.

I relieved the post early for some reason. Maybe so the other guys could sneak a beer of two before “hitting the rack.” Maybe so I could get settled down for the transition. I expected some racket, but the combined imaginations of Jules Vern, Stan Lee, and J. K. Rowling couldn’t have prepared me for what came next.

Remembering back, I’m sure that every sailor on that base suddenly had a weapon in his hand firing away, some on full automatic. They were aiming at the village and not at me, but the bullets didn't know that, or care. The racket was awful, but not so awful that I couldn’t hear rounds zipping by me. That's when I detected an anomaly. Guard towers are designed to protect from frontal assault. The rears are open to provide access. Oh my.

What to do? A combination of alcohol, nostalgia, black-market weapons, pent-up anger, and an American serviceman’s natural penchant for irresponsibility had me trapped. I dropped to the floor of the tower and assumed a fetal position. To hell with heroic death postures.

There had been inklings of some sort of trouble in January, nothing to worry about we were assured. We had been issued flak jackets, though, and I positioned mine toward the tower’s opening. I thought about climbing over the front wall and clinging against the sandbags until the “celebration” was over. Then I thought about what a marvelous time this would have been for a surprise attack. Hundreds of drunk sailors firing at random, and at anything, would have done “the heavy lifting” and a few dozen VC could have simply strolled in past the bodies and rounded up the survivors.

It lasted a good while. The perpetrators didn’t have to account for their ammo. It had evaporated in the impenetrable dungeons of military accountability long ago. There were roving security guards, but they were bunched up at Headquarters and would have charged an NVA regiment rather than deal with the merry makers outside. Some of the old-timers later said it scared them as much as a mortar attack. Who knows?

I lived. To tell the truth, however, I’ve never been much of a gun nut since. It's fine if you are. But pardon me if I don’t care to hear about the latest addition to your semi-automatic rifle collection. Forgive me if I don’t appreciate the fact that your wife now has her own Glock, or that it is pink. Excuse me if I don’t care that your ten-year-old son just killed his first deer, or that you load your own shells. And I don’t particularly care how worried you are that somehow the federal government is going to take away your assault rifle.

They took away mine in 1968 and it was the happiest … no, the second happiest, day in my life.

Happier times: post Da Nang.

End of Year Thoughts: December 31, 2107

Sometimes a person feels conflicted. Tell someone you disagree with them and you create ill-will. Don’t and you imply agreement. That is a bipolar paradigm that doesn’t bode well. Many of our leaders, news sources, and wealthy contributors are feeding this polarization, the reason is anybody’s guess. It certainly isn’t aimed toward the common good.

Is there another form of interaction? I hope so. To that end, I’ll mention a few things that bother me these days. I will do so without, I hope, denigrating or insulting those who don’t agree with me. These are my feeling only. I don’t intend for them to change your mind. I only hope that, if I disagree with you, you might leave with a better understanding of why.

Here goes.

I worry about discourse that divides us. Simply adding the phrase “I know some thoughtful and reasonable people disagree with me, but this is how I feel” could certainly “make the medicine go down” a bit easier. Please take that as a prelude.

I worry about (and this is certainly not a new phenomenon) the use of the press to destroy an individual’s character.) Moreover (and this is new), I worry about the use of social media to spread the hate. It bothers me to see how little most people understand about politics—how few people see that it is not the art of the perfect, but, as Ben Franklin said, “the art of the possible.” It is messy and can’t be evaluated by the criteria of perfection.

I worry about the use of personal destruction in politics. When a woman who has devoted her life to public service and protecting the least of those among us is subjected to upwards of $200 Million in investigations, invectives, innuendoes, and false news, only for legitimate investigators to say, in the end, “We find no criminal fault with this woman” is amazing, in my opinion. Mistakes? Yes. Ill-considered comments? Yes. Poor speaking skills? Yes. Deserving of bitter hatred? You decide. In my opinion, she should be our president. Feel free to have your own. Ad hominem attacks will not change my mind, and, assuming they wouldn’t yours either, I’ll leave it at that.

I am a veteran of the United States Navy. I carried a rifle for a year in Vietnam. Later, I was offered the chance to return and serve on river boats. I lacked both the patriotism and the personal courage to accept. But, and I have friends on both sides of the political spectrum, I will never vote for a political party that attacked the character of a brother-shipmate who did drive Fast-Boats in Vietnam and was awarded multiple Purple Hearts. Sorry, just can’t do it. You vote your conscious as well. I don’t condemn individuals. That isn’t my job in life. I only condemn party leaders that would promote such injustice toward someone who served this country with bravery.

I worry that war brings too many profits to too many powerful institutions.

I worry about our worship of guns and the belief that they solve problems. I don't want your guns confiscated. I just want you to shut up about them. I've almost been killed by firearms several times in my life, mostly by careless friends, and once by a neighbor who liked to take his out and wave it around to show how harmless it (i.e. his gun) was when he he'd had few drinks. 

I worry about what I see as a lowering of noble standards. I never thought I would live in a country that would nominate a person for high office who was captured on film mocking a disabled person. Just my reaction. You are welcome to yours.

I worry about the economy. While it is true that the stock market has risen consistently for the last nine years, and has continued with a bump in 2017, there is a physical concept called gravity that enjoys a kinship with financial concepts. I worry that the present bump resulted from the anticipation by corporations that, soon, they wouldn’t even have to pretend to pay federal taxes, and could operate in the regulation-free world that saw rivers catching fire and toxic chemicals buried next to residential areas, or deposited in our waters. Those are not policies that imply a good future for us. Gravity will come into play, I fear, and there will be, in my opinion, great wailing and gnashing of teeth. Timing the market is hard.

I worry about our hatred of taxes. It is allowing our infrastructure to crumble and abetting the end of retail business. I fear future neighborhoods will simply become areas filled with “storage containers” for isolated and unconnected individuals.

I worry that entire "Christian" religious groups have abandoned the teachings of the Galilean, who promised mansions “in Heaven” in contrast to the teachings of the “Prosperity Gospel” adherents with their customized planes and multiple mansions here on Earth. I further worry that these groups are guided by homophobia, fear of science, and by choices that could best be reduced by sex-education, birth-control, and increased responsibility placed on the male-half of the equation, all of which are eschewed at present by the same religious groups.

I further believe, as did the founders of the country, by no means perfect men, but wiser than some, that religion is a personal matter best controlled by the heart and not by the government. Theocracies haven't worked historically, nor at the present in the Middle East and Africa.

I will believe, until reviewable and falsifiable evidence indicates to the contrary, that trust in science is more efficacious than trust in mythology. Science eliminated smallpox and polio from our lexicon of fears. Consequently, a vice-president who denies science scares me to my bones.

I believe, on evidence I have examined by the most educated among us, that homo sapiens are destroying our planet’s ability to sustain us and that distrust of science will hasten the apocalypse. I’ll make it through, but I worry for friends with children and grandchildren

I’ll stop. Believe as you will. My only feelings toward you are that you live long and prosper. May we all be guided by our consciences and not by false promises made to excite our embedded prejudices. That may be our greatest challenge for the future.

Happy New Year.