Morning Thoughts: October 5, 2017

May I make a modest proposal on the violence imposed on America from firearms? After all, everyone else has.

Thanks. Now these are just my personal thoughts. You are welcome to yours. If we don’t agree, we can still be friends. Okay? Here goes.

First, our congress will not seriously consider passing any legislature involving gun control anytime soon. Emotions are too high, potential political repercussions too drastic, fear of strangers too endemic, and the firearms lobby too rich for there to be any serious discussion.

Let’s just shut up about legislation? Okay? I know the majority of Americans desire it. But, the majority of Americans would like for women to be treated as equal to men. See what that’s gotten us?

Second, the violence will continue. It is too tightly woven into our country’s emotional fabric. Just watch the movie trailers. Any problem that can’t be solved with a car chase and shootout isn’t worth addressing. Violence is not, it would appear to aliens, our best solution to failed human interactions—it is the only solution. Now, the bar has been set even higher. “Only 58 killed? Hold my spare Uzi and watch this.”

Can we do anything? Perhaps. Consider the following.

Americans don’t urinate or defecate in public. Why not? It’s a natural thing to do, after all. They do it in some societies. The Vietnamese do. At last they were doing it the last time I was there. My first memory of the country was standing by my sea-bag at the airport staging area, waiting for a mortar round to land, whistling “Popeye the Sailor Man,” and watching a local worker “hist up” one leg of his silk pajamas and take a leak in front of everyone. It didn’t rate a second look. Going to the bathroom in public, or anywhere, is a natural thing.

Face it, any American would do it under the right conditions. For “the happy few,” of us who still believe in biology, it is one of humankind’s most sacred rights.  Nonetheless, we discountenance the public practice of the act to the point of passing laws and regulations against it. Those laws result from no intrinsic threat to the health, safety, welfare, or morals involved. We simply choose, as a society, to deny the public practice of a completely natural function granted our bodies by (take your pick) a benevolent deity or 4.5 billion years of genetic descent through modification.

So what? Here is my thought: if we can, through the force of social abhorrence, deny display of a natural bodily function in certain places, a function that is necessary, unavoidable, and a right, why couldn’t that same technique be applied to firearms?

See, we don’t deny ourselves the right to go to the bathroom, we simply say that it’s not fitting to do it in certain ways. That works, generally, with the exception of babies, and southern males feeling the call of nature within a specified driving distance of a beer joint.

Anyway. Suppose society begins to say, “Keep your guns. Collect your guns. Shoot your guns. Hunt with your guns. Sleep with your guns. Fondle your guns until your heart’s content. Protect your home with them if necessary; I would with mine.”

“Just don’t:

- Expose them to view or pull them out in public,

- Wave them around it public,

- Empty them out in public,

- Talk about them in public, particularly in a bragging manner,

- Tell young children what you would like to use them for (your guns, that is) in public,

- Or use them to be a jerk in public.”

We are talking about social approbation, not legal stricture. Why goodness, in a few years, the violation of the any of the above would be as socially unacceptable as describing one’s female problems while yelling into a cell phone at Walmart. Uh, wait ….

Let me use another example. It would be as socially unacceptable as “dropping trow” at a Sunday School picnic. Yeah, that’s better.

I won’t go as far as to suggest registering repeat offenders. Someone very close to me did, but she always sets higher goals for society.

At any rate, for gun worshipers, go at it. If you feel the need for heat or the smell of cordite, go inside and blast away. Outside? Hold it in and don’t talk about it. It will be hard, but take Hamlet’s advice:

“Refrain to-night,

And that shall lend a kind of easiness

To the next abstinence: the next more easy;

For use almost can change the stamp of nature …”

You will soon be welcomed back into polite society.

Just thinking.
Pardon the length - complicated topic

Morning Thoughts: October 5, 2017

Woke up in Alma, Arkansas at a nice Quality Inn, thinking about what a lucky man I am. I get paid for visiting places like this. Further, it allows me to know some of the finest people on our planet, the elected officials and public servants who serve our state at the local level.

Then another thought occurred to me. I'm at the western edge of Arkansas, headed back East in a few moments. I got to thinking about how I could use the trip back to stop and visit friends along the way that I have made while working as an urban planning consultant in this state. I could just drop in and say "Hello, I was passing through and thought I would stop and say hello to wonderful friends whom I've had the pleasure of serving . I've made a few over the last nearly 50 years. Many have gone on but many are still here."

I truly believe that they would be glad to see me. I know I would enjoy it immensely.

There's just one problem.

I'd never get home.

Born to serve.

Morning Thoughts: October 4, 2017

As one whose graduate education was in public administration, I’ve nothing but praise for the women and men who work for and protect the City of Las Vegas.

They have, in my viewing of the news, operated on a professional scale that could be a model for all. They must all be exhausted, shocked, and operating on pure adrenalin, but they press on. They are simultaneously working to discover the facts, analyze the facts, report the facts (accurately), and support and comfort the survivors and their families. I’m in hopes that someone will chronicle their actions from the first shots until the final resolution.

It is with dismay that I see the “conspiracy theory worms” already crawling from beneath the rocks and out of the cesspools around the city, anxious to spew their noxious filth. It is insulting beyond belief that they do so. It cheapens the acts of heroism and professionalism displayed by the elected officials and public personnel of the city, from the brave public safety personnel to the office workers. They all deserve better, as do the victim and survivors.

I can only hope that it will stop, but I doubt that it will. The urge to rewrite history to suit our own notions and prejudices is a strong one, perhaps best described by author William Manchester while discussing the decades-long efforts to distort the facts of the assassination of John F, Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald. After publishing his famous work, The Death of a President, he wrote:

“In the end I concluded that [the Warren] report was correct on the two main issues. Oswald was the killer, and he had acted alone.… Those who desperately want to believe that President Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy have my sympathy. I share their yearning … if you put the murdered President of the United States on one side of a scale and that wretched waif Oswald on the other side, it doesn’t balance. You want to add something weightier to Oswald. It would invest the President’s death with meaning, endowing him with martyrdom. He would have died for something.”

As the beleaguered public workers of Las Vegas enter their third full day of a special kind of hell instigated by a special kind of twisted mind, my hope is that we give them the undiminished support that they deserve. This includes our not paying the slightest attention to the ill-reasoned attempts that will surely emerge, attempts aimed at disparaging the findings of the professionals and confusing a stunned and stupefied public.

Sailing To Oblivium: October 3, 2017

They say insanity consists of performing the same act over and over again, hoping for different results. It is happening now, after Las Vegas.

Some folks are screaming for some official policies relating to a citizen’s right under the Second Amendment. That is not going to happen. They’ve performed this act so many times before and it hasn’t worked, not for any discernible length of time. It certainly won’t work now, a time in our nation's history when the firearms lobby owns all three branches of government.

Some folks will say “Don’t worry. The next attempt at mass murder will be miraculously prevented by well-armed citizen-militia groups roaming the streets, colleges, nurseries, churches, theaters, schools, restaurants, and marketplaces of America. Give them even more guns this time and you'll be even safer. We see how well that has been working.”

Those speaking for the elected officials will, while the bodies are still bleeding, echo the words of Bob Dylan, “Now’s not the time for your tears.”

The politicians will give the next one the ubiquitous "moment of silence" and go back to what they were doing.

We'll all, to a man or woman, offer our "thoughts and prayers," as if that has worked in the past.

And we’ll go on, numbed and waiting for the next time, doing nothing, while our terrified citizens distrust anyone they see. Parents will learn to dread a phone call from their child’s school. Public gatherings will take place under a cloud of dread. Our brave police officers, firefighters, and medical professionals will wonder if they are the ones who must charge into the melee, or extract the bullets next time.

The ammunition factory near where I live will put the “help wanted” banner on its fence the way it always does after a mass killing. That’s when sales are at their most brisk, after all.

Then we are left alone to face the most terrifying part: the knowledge that next year’s Stephen Paddock will be able to accomplish the task with silencers, on even more advance killing machines.

Now is the time for our tears.

Sailing To Oblivion: October 2, 2017

Some mornings I feel downright ashamed of myself. This was one. I'll explain.

You see, sometimes I can’t sleep about three in the morning. I tend to worry.

What do I worry about? Oh, real important stuff like whether I’ll get around to mowing a strip of pasture on the farm before first frost. Yeah, and about the patch of roofing that needs repair, and a door latch that needs replacing. Then there is this magazine deadline due soon and I haven’t thought of a topic. And don’t forget the couch we need to move. Did the autopay work for the credit card this month? Gosh, I need to order some tractor parts. Should we economize to protect our retirement savings or splurge a bit? Neither of us has ever experienced bad health. What if it came now? We live pretty well, but what if suddenly we couldn’t, for some unknown reason?

I’ve even been known to imagine that I hear “the eternal footman snicker.”

Sometimes, with these heavy, yea almost epochal, concerns weighing on me, I simply get up and listen to music while I read or catch up with the news on the internet. After all, who could sleep with such cosmic concerns worming around in his mind? I must be carrying far, far more than my fair share of the weight of the world on my shoulders.

First, let’s get some Schubert playing on YouTube, just the thing for my beleaguered psyche.

Then I turn to the news, like this morning. The headlines flashed. I gasped, read more, and wept for my country. In short, I was ashamed.

Will it ever stop?

Growing Up Southern: October 1, 2017

As I’ve said before, a grown man in America is a miracle, considering the potentially devastating temptations presented to the young.

Consider the reason why I don’t eat marshmallows today despite once having loved them. Actually, love doesn’t rise to the proper level of description. I worshipped them as a boy. I loved them. I dreamt of them. I never got enough of them. Then one day I did.

It happened this way.

After the third grade, they allowed us a range of choices for lunch at school. One could bring lunch in a brown paper bag and enjoy it in a designated lunchroom, a choice generally reserved for the poor and the untrustworthy. One could take a quarter and walk four blocks north to the Pine Bluff High School cafeteria. One could walk the same distance due west on 15th Street until one reached a diner or, one block farther, to a corner drug store lunch bar. Those meeting two requirements qualified to dine. One had to have money and one had to be white. That’s all.

When not on probation and sentenced to the lunchroom, I opted for the western sites. This way, if I skipped a drink with a meal, I could purchase a five-cent bag of marshmallows at the corner drug store for desert.

Neither drugs for the dope fiend nor solitude for the poet had a greater pull than the thought of a bag of marshmallows had on me. Therein sprang the plot

You see, they didn’t just sell nickel bags at the drug store. They sold ten-cent bags as well. These were tempting, but the piece de resistance, the holy of holies, was a 25-cent bag of marshmallows the size of a small pillow. They perched on a tall display counter, screaming temptations like the sirens on the rocks of Scylla. As I concocted my plan, the image of those bags grew until I thought of little else except the day I would buy one and devour its entire contents—in one sitting.

But how? I only received a quarter a day for lunch, knotted in a lady’s handkerchief and placed in my left pocket each morning by my mother, who knew too well that to advance a boy of my age funds for more than a single day’s food was to telegraph an open invitation to Satan to make room for another soul.

I would have to operate within the perimeters set for me. I had to skip the normal meal. It was that simple. Besides, a meal of marshmallows had to be at least as healthy, probably more so, than a chili dog. Tastier too.

So, one fine fall day, about this time of year, I put my plan into action. I purchased my quarter-bag of marshmallows and set off to find a quiet spot, clutching my prize the way a wino might cradle a gallon of wine, and with as much anticipation.

I settled for a nearby alley, found a clean spot, sat against a wall, and proceeded to fulfilling the dream of a lifetime. I popped the first batch of the creamy white dream-things in, only barely chewing. The next few, I enjoyed the experience more slowly, the next slower still.

Then the power of mathematics interceded, for it was at that moment that I discovered a scientific fact that haunts me yet: the mathematical difference between having all the marshmallows one wants, and a nausea so intense that death would be a blessing and relief, is about three marshmallows.

In total, that represents about a third of a 25-cent bag of marshmallows purchased in 1951. The rest of that bag may yet rest in the base of a hollow tree where I left it. I don't know and I don't care. Further, the entire amount of marshmallows that I have eaten since that fateful day, in that fateful year, is—thanks to the Arabs who invented the concept of zero—none, nada, Keiner, aucun.

Some of life’s lessons prove easy. Some of life’s lessons prove difficult. Some of life’s lessons require what seems to be divide intervention. All contribute to the miracle of a young boy reaching manhood. If giving up marshmallows is the price one pays, so be it.

See what a quarter-bag costs today?
If inflation had only set in earlier.

Morning Thoughts: September 30, 2017

Our perspectives on some things in life change as we age. Books and movies do for me. A friend started me thinking on this.

I had posted an ending of a movie I liked and said it was my favorite. He voted, instead, for the ending of the film that brought Dustin Hoffman into fame: The Graduate. It wasn’t a bad choice, but would not have been mine.

The director produced a well-crafted ending for a well-crafted film. It started me along this line of thought, though. That film represents one of what I call “age-perspective” works.

I’ll explain.

When I first saw that film, I had just returned from overseas duty in the United States Navy. Respect for others was not high on my list of worthwhile endeavors. I watched the film at the time, marveled at its “groovy” music, and said to myself, “Yes!”

Years passed. I watched it again not long ago, marveled at the timeless music, and said to myself, “That young woman just ran off with the biggest loser in the state of  California.”

That’s just me. But I wonder if other people have similar reactions to works of fiction as time goes by. Do you reckon?

A book that has that effect on me is Catcher In The Rye. After its publication in 1951, it became the icon for teenagers feeling alienated and disaffected. Of course, I fell in with the angst-ridden. As the years have progressed, I continue to respect the superb writing for its rhythm and style, unmatched, in my opinion, in American literature. Old Holden Caufield, however, has seemed a bit more insane each time I have read the book, which is maybe 20 times or more.

I do think Salinger left a lasting influence on American literature. It remains as a lasting axiom that almost any novel since “Catcher” is filled with angst-ridden characters bent on self-destruction. They aren’t teenagers, though, but adult characters that become tiresome two pages after they appear in a book. That’s why I read so few of them, modern novels, that is.

Ahh. The great ones don’t change. Tortilla Flat , The Brothers Karamazov, and Heart of Darkness still ring with the same epic themes as they did on first readings decades ago. The heart still floats on their clouds of majesty. (How’s that for gibberish)?

Speaking of great themes, though, certain aspects of novels only appeared following careful study, after my formal education. It was only after I undertook a protracted study of Eliot’s The Wasteland, for example, that I began more fully to see the “grail” imagery in The Great Gatsby. Without such study, I wouldn’t have picked up on the marvelous imagery of the actors driving past the local landfill on their way to their various searches.

Oh, well … enough babbling for one day. Think I’ll go start re-reading One Hundred Years of Solitude. Maybe I’ll make more sense out of it this time. Then maybe I’ll watch The Wild One, again. Boy, that Brando character was a lousy creep.

Or was he? I didn’t think so at one time.

Just thinking …