Letting Off Something...

     This is my rant.  Or maybe "rant' is too strong a word, so just consider this a bit of clearing the air and letting a few things out, of me unloading if you will.  And who doesn't want to do that these days?  With all that is happening in the world we seem to all be struggling to figure out our priorities.  Suddenly (or perhaps not so suddenly) political posturing and campaigning seems frivolous, all while Ukraine dreads yet another winter of fighting, where the death toll has now passed 100,000.  Throw in the situation in the Palestinian territory of Gaza and Israeli jets striking ambulances trying to help the wounded (according to Aljazeera) and things do seem bleak.  How can things get worse?  Then your daughter is killed in a(nother) random mass shooting, or you suffer a stroke, or your friend tells you that she has cancer, and your priorities shift again.  So yes, you'll have to forgive me if I use this platform to vent just a little...

     Originally I was going to title this "Hamas Is That Doggie In the Window" not in a negative way but because I felt that so much of that children's song related to what is currently happening in Israel and the Palestinian territory of Gaza; but I recognized that such a title could send readers into a frenzy, or at least into wildly separate camps (my reasoning about the song is in a footnote at the end, in case you decide to take a peek).  And no, I am NOT anti-Semitic by any means; in fact I'm not much into defining or defending religions or ethnic groups in general.  But the onslaught of both real and unreal "news" is making it difficult for all of us.  Emotions are rising on both the right and the left on many issues and I truly believe that all that anyone seeks is fairness.  So let me add that I hopefully feel in line with many of you in trying to still figure out why such cultural and societal hate can fester over decades and centuries...blacks, Jews, Muslims, and another 50 or so groups and categories we've decided to create for ourselves and then start fighting over.  It's said that this is what makes us human, which is a sad statement if that is the case.  

     So let's jump to justice and bring it back to the U.S.  In his book Injustice, Inc. attorney and author Daniel L. Hatcher writes about the courts-for-profit system developing in several states with the victims all being children or teens.  Here's but a small part of what raised his ire the more he investigated: As part of increasing efficiency in their business operations, county justice systems often do not use actual judges for high-volume court proceedings that impact vulnerable populations, but rather employ lower cost officials such as magistrates, masters, hearing officers, and referees, who in some states are not even required to be attorneys.  Juvenile court "referees" in New Jersey are not required to be lawyers and need only a four-year college degree.  North Carolina magistrates who decide civil and criminal cases do not need a four-year college degree.  North Carolina also allows nonattorney juvenile court counselors to order juveniles into secure and nonsecure custody.  In Alaska, magistrates do not even need a high school degree but are simply required to be twenty-one and a citizen of the state...The juvenile courts in Ohio run like a business [and] process children through factory-like operations...The judges hire attorneys to act as magistrates for much of the caseload and combine services that are supposed to be independent into business structures with hundreds of employees.  The courts operate their own juvenile detention centers, jailing children as young as age ten.  The courts oversee work programs in which children as young as twelve work to repay court-ordered costs.  Although children are supposed to have independent advocates, the courts run the child advocacy programs.  The courts operate their own probations departments, with probation officers using the children to claim more foster care revenue.  Some of the courts run their own residential treatment centers, allowing the courts to claim yet more foster care funds when placing children in their facilities...An increasing number of Ohio juvenile court systems have signed interagency contracts to claim foster care revenue through the children, and many of the courts have hired a revenue maximization consultant to help.

     Martin Luther King once said: Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.  We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.  Podcaster and author Rachel Hollis put all of this a bit more bluntly in her book: So, let's acknowledge that this sucks.  Then, let's go one better.  Let's acknowledge how frightening this is and how hard it is and how much we wish it weren't happening -- and let's allow ourselves to be deeply disappointed by the unfairness of it all...Maybe your partner disappointed you.  Maybe your child disappointed you.  Maybe the economy came crashing down just when you were starting to make strides in your finances, and it's disappointed you.  Maybe life disappointed you because what you hoped for and dreamed of feels impossible because of loss.  Maybe all of this feels like just another disappointment in a string of many.  And maybe, if you can allow yourself to be honest about what it feels like for you, instead of pretending that you're strong enough to ignore the negative emotions, you'll actually be able to overcome them and move forward...Will you allow this season that you're in to wear you down and diminish you?  Will you become bitter or angry?  Will you live the rest of your life drowning in anxiety and fear of being hurt again?  Will you allow loss to define you for the rest of your life?  Or will you fight back?  Because make no mistake, this will be a fight.  Hatcher points out that this juvenile court processing is now a "business" worth millions to the courts, for the more children the courts can place into the foster care "system" (which the courts are now running in most aspects), the more they can make from federal funding meant to care for the good of the children.  And justice for all?  Okay, maybe not the children...

      All that said (grrr...), I do try to read what I consider a balance of material although my conservative friends tell me that I read only "liberal" magazines such as TIME, while my liberal friends tell me that I read only "conservative" magazines such as --you guessed it-- TIME.  Go figure, there's no pleasing everyone.  So step back for a minute.  What do you watch?  What do you read?  What or who do you listen to?   And at the end of the day, what does any of it accomplish?  Does it raise your blood pressure?  Calm you down?  Make you feel angry?  Make you feel helpless?  Now ask yourself how much you know, or feel that you know about it all.  What is the difference between Hamas and Hezbollah (or the Revolutionary Guard)?  Or the difference between Shia and Sunni which can and does divide countries?  Or Baptist and Mormon, or Catholic or Protestant...or Christian?  Or the difference between an atheist and an agnostic?  Or between a religion and the same religion but its orthodox form?   For that matter, what's the difference between muscular dystrophy and multiple sclerosis?  The more each of us gets pinned down for specifics, the more we begin to see that we are basing much of what we feel on emotion and on what we've been taught, vs. what we actually really know or have learned for ourselves.  I see a lot of kind people everywhere, people who stop and let your car enter traffic when leaving a parking lot, people who donate when they read about a cause or a disaster, people who pick up a piece of trash on the ground before they walk in a store, people who will rush to help someone who has tripped and fallen in front of them.  And I am certain that all of those people, throughout the world, are the majority.  Maybe the quiet or the silent majority, but the majority...

     So is that me?  Am I part of the 'majority?"  For one thing, I am not the type tempted to eat one of the 33 billon commercial chickens machine-readied after just 6 weeks of life; wrote a review about that in the New York Review: If you are an American, odds are that you eat meat.  In this country roughly 4 percent of the population identifies as vegetarian.  Americans who do eat meat most frequently choose chicken, the consumption of which overtook beef sometime in the late 1990s.  Pork has maintained a steady position in third place for decades.  Pigs become pork when they are processed and eaten; cattle become veal or beef.  But chicken is chicken everywhere, and chicken is everywhere.  If you are a home cook preparing a whole carcass for dinner, you are almost certainly roasting a chicken.  Only the very adventurous or committed will roast an entire pig or goat, and usually only as part of a special celebration.  The home cook can still with relative ease purchase a whole chicken (albeit usually with the feet and head already removed) almost anywhere meat is sold.  She can address the carcass herself: whether to split the breast or separate the drumstick from the thigh; to section the wing into flat, drumette, and tip or leave it intact; to toss the neck and innards or keep them for stock.  It is through the chicken that most American cooks acquaint themselves with the techniques of butchery, if they butcher at all...

     Before I start to sound all high and mighty about my eating choices, here's what author Gary Goldschneider* had to say about me in his book on "birth" days -- well, not me specifically but to all of those born on the same day as me, those who "have their own way of doing and seeing things": Because they so often take the opposing point of view with great self assurance they sometimes arouse antagonism and make enemies.  Also they generally rebel against regulations and rules, wanting to change the social order...One of their weaknesses is a blindness to their shortcomings which can keep them from making necessary changes in their lives and personalities...Their ability to achieve lasting success in any area of life is directly proportional to their self-knowledge, gained at the expense of merciless objectivity.  Note, however, that the Tarot has me down as the Fool card, saying: The highly evolved Fool has followed life's path, experienced its lessons and become one with his/her own vision.  The Fool does not eat chicken (okay, I made up that last part)...

     I will add that I do eat fish (but never octopus, shrimp or swordfish, all of which I've written about in earlier posts).  And I also believe that there is something "out there" after we die, maybe energy or atoms or some "thing" or concept our feeble minds have yet to be able to visualize.  But do I believe in a humanoid figure of some sort, or that we humans are any higher than bacteria in deserving life...nope.  There's more that I can add about my side of life and how I view it, but here's the thing...all of that is me.  Those are my choices and mine alone; I can't change how you feel or believe, nor can I change what you choose to eat.  All of those are your choices, which is how it should be.  I've stopped reading a book five pages in, or turned off a movie after just ten minutes, or read something like this blog and decided, nah, not for me.  Maybe you're totally opposite and feel that you need to finish that book or movie.  No problem...such decisions are what make us who we are, what makes the world go 'round.  But hate, and killing someone because you feel something is yours, or deciding that land can be parceled into pieces you own, even if you have to bomb it and ruin it to prove that?  Now those things I don't get...and I think most of us are equally puzzled about such feelings.  As Madeline Engle wrote in A Wrinkle in Time (and Disney reinterpreted in their film version):...this is what the ‘it’ does.  One person at a time, until fear takes over.  Fear turns to rage.  Rage leads to violence.  And then there’s a tipping point.  If we do not act soon, darkness will fall across the universe.  A quick glimpse at who once occupied the land you're now on, that parcel or state or country you claim as "yours," can be viewed throughout history here (you'll be surprised)...and even after you view all that, you have to wonder what life was there before such native lands were even declared as "theirs?"  Perhaps the birds or animals or humans which once lived there are now extinct.  Perhaps we will become extinct as well.  And perhaps in the future some intelligent organism will arrive on this same spot and find our Machu Picchus and our Las Vegas stadiums and our feedlots and chemical plants and wonder, "what were they all about?"  

Abravanel Hall, home of the Utah Symphony

     In the Carl Sagan-inspired movie Contact, an ancient and far-advanced alien species says this to a human scientist about us: You're an interesting species.  An interesting mix.  You're capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares.  You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not.  See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.  Friends, not the sitcom Friends (which was so popular that each cast member was being paid a cool million dollars per episode), but friends, as in having friends.  Then this appeared in TIME: While many people assume it's the number of friends that counts, research indicates that quality is more important -- and having even a small selection of close friends is a stronger predictor of happiness than having lots of casual connections.  My wife and I tended to assume that everyone has friends, but we are discovering that this may be far from the truth, that a feeling of loneliness may be more prevalent than we thought.  So tagging onto that thought, a co-worker from way back invited us to join her at the symphony (our first time going to such an event), for which we were both grateful and entertained, not only to be in her company and to catch up with her,  but to be exposed to such a beautiful concert hall, even if the conductor had chosen to rearrange the orchestra from the way I remembered such placements. 

      Speaking of how I remembered things, I agreed with linguist John McWhorter when her wrote in The NY Times: Now, in much of America, the idea of kids playing with one another outdoors for open-ended periods of time has gone from the default to something many parents imagine in horror....But from 1981 to 1997, American kids’ unstructured playtime went down 25 percent.  In the ’70s, nearly half of students in kindergarten through eighth grades walked or biked to school; today, only about one in 10 do.  In a 2004 survey, 70 percent of mothers said they played outside every day as kids, but only about a third of their kids did...In line with many studies, a recent article by Peter Gray, David Lancy and David Bjorklund concludes that “a primary cause of the rise in mental disorders is a decline over decades in opportunities for children and teens to play, roam and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults.”  True and extended play -- rather than supervised “activities”-- gives kids a sense of autonomy and helps them learn social skills and even physical coordination.  Elsewhere, Gray has said, “Until very recent times, during all of human history with the exception of times of child slavery or intense child labor, children always spent enormous amounts of time playing and exploring with other children away from adults.”

     And just when I'm ready to settle down and take a deep breath, along comes the NY Review with a slew of pieces in a single issue: There was the struggle of the Tuskegee Airmen, black airmen who fought for their country during WWII, and got little in return.   Said part of the review: Black Americans... lobbied and campaigned for their right to fight for a country that at times didn’t value them enough to let them die for it. “White folks would rather lose the war than give up the luxury of race prejudice,” Roy Wilkins of the NAACP argued in 1942.  Then there followed a review of trying to understand war and its aftereffects.  Wrote that review: “How many American presidents or members of Congress have suffered from PTSD or taken their own lives rather than live any longer with the burden of having declared a war?” asked Robert Emmet Meagher, a professor of philosophy...According to a report by the Costs of War project at Brown University, as of 2021 the number of US soldiers who died in the so-called war on terror was 7,057, and the number of active-duty soldiers and veterans who committed suicide was 30,177, over four times as many.  Do policymakers, writers, or citizens, Klay [Phil Klay, author of the book] demands throughout his book, shoulder any such burden for twenty-first-century wars?  Do we think of those wars at all?  And then there was this review of a school bus accident in the West Bank, one which burned with children trapped inside: The Jaba‘ Road is entirely within Area C, the 62 percent of the occupied West Bank that is under full Israeli control, where today there are close to two hundred settlements and settler outposts.  Because of the nightmarish maze of roads in the Ramallah area --some of them closed altogether to Palestinians, others blocked by army checkpoints to keep Palestinians without special permits from entering Israel-- rescuers were slow in reaching the site of the accident.  They were also slow in evacuating the injured, many of them badly burned, to hospitals in Ramallah or inside Israel.  Fire trucks, army medics, and ambulances were only a mile or two away in nearby Jewish settlements but failed to arrive quickly.  Israeli ambulances coming from Jerusalem were held up for critical minutes at the checkpoints.  Moreover, Palestinian neighborhoods in the vicinity of the Separation Barrier had (and some still have) almost no emergency or police services.  As one of the Palestinian rescuers at the site of the accident later formulated what had happened: “If it had been two Palestinian children throwing stones on the road, the army would have been there in no time.  When Jews are in danger, Israel sends helicopters.  But a burning bus full of Palestinian children….”

     Grrr...and dang.  Then you read about our Congress that gives a pension to their politicians after just 5 years of service, and up until recently, never had them pay for health insurance (Obama put a stop to that, although people in Congress still have a different health plan than Medicare, unlike most of the American people they represent).  But no, there is no $800,000 pension plan, the one trolls paste online almost daily.  And have you looked up the actual meaning of a troll?  According to Wikipedia, the original definition has them as "antisocial, quarrelsome and slow-witted creatures," all of which sounds about right.  So again, does any of this raise your blood pressure, or are you slamming this down in disagreement?  Or does all of this just leave you without feeling anything at all?  It is a difficult situation in today's world, and one even author Daniel Hatcher faced when writing his book on the injustice done to young children in our courts: i do not write this book with hopelessness.  There are moments, more than I would like to admit, when I crave the numbing peace of apathy.  But when I read the numbers, the numbers of children and impoverished adults processed by our justice system into byzantine contractual revenue schemes, numbers reflecting how the factory-like operations are fueled by over four hundred years of racial and economic inequality, numbers uncovering the extent to which our systems of justice have turned toward unconstituiional and humanly destructive moneyed pursuits, I know that apathy is not an option.

     So if it seems that this "unloading" of mine has been all over the map (and it has), it's likely similar to when you meet a friend after so many years.  You have so much to say and you're so elated and enthusiastic and can't wait to get "everything" in that you sometimes appear to be jamming everything into a giant, rolling ball; but that same overflow of emotions can emerge when you're bubbling over with anger and bitterness.  So many emotions want out all at once that it often comes out discombobulated.  Or it can simply result in a breakdown, as was so achingly shown in the movie with Robin Wright, Land.  The classic movie Billy Jack had the title song saying "go ahead and hate your neighbor, go ahead and cheat a friend...you can justify it in the end."  But can we?  What happens, as the song asks, "on the bloody morning after?"  Perhaps it is a question we have to ask ourselves as individuals, and as a nation, and perhaps as a species.  If that same ancient alien organism came down after our extinction, they might label us as a species that was never happy, one that always wanted more.  More money, more land, more power.  Or maybe they'd view us as a species wanting more, but one wanting more freedom, more peace, and more love and compassion.

     Regardless of your reaction, Rachel Hollis says to just be yourself, and sometimes that will be at the cost of not pleasing others: If someone tries to make you feel badly with the line "You've changed" your only response should be "Thank you, I'm working at it."  She goes on to say (and with which I tend to agree): I want you to know that what's been good will always be good: the smell of coconut sunblock, a five-year-old showing you the spot where his front tooth used to be, a home-cooked meal...a job well done, the kindness of strangers, the human spirit...What's good will always be good, and one of the most awful, beautiful things about the hard seasons is that unless we experience hardship, we'll never truly appreciate and remember the good that was always good.  Smithsonian wrote about Teddy Roosevelt, losing his bid for another term as President and now deathly ill in the Amazon (and far away from reaching any sort of civilization); he is reported to have famously told members of his expedition: I have already lived and enjoyed as much of life as any nine other men I know.  I have had my full share, and if it is necessary for me to leave my bones in South America, I am quite ready to do so.  All in all, I feel much the same, fortunate to (still) be here and still of (semi-) sound mind.  But every now and then, disparity and injustice rises instead of falls, and it gets to me.  And I have to "let it out."  So that's my rant.  Phew, I feel  better already...we now return to our regular programming.

As Bette Midler sang, "You gotta have friends..."

*Goldschnieder's book is The Secret Language of Birthdays: Personality Profiles for Each Day of the Year.  It's a fun read to those interested in astrology, the Tarot, the moon, the stars and all that stuff.  All in all, it proves to be a fun and inexpensive "psychic" analysis, with a few grains of salt thrown in...

A brief explanation of my rant from above: Again, far from making fun of the situation in Gaza, the children's song "How Much Is That Doggie In the Window" resonated with me for several reasons. #1) it's a song that endures from your childhood and stays with you throughout your adult life, as will the war's effect on the many children in Gaza and other war-torn areas; #2) just as the window separates the child from the puppy in the song, so it must seem to those seeking peace and a unified settlement between Palestine and Israel, something unattainable after decades, something only to be dreamed; #3) the story being told in the song is from a single point of view, much as we're witnessing with this war, lines of communication often blacked out or destroyed in Gaza, even in this day of satellites; #4) the disparity the child sees in the song also seems to be the view in this war, the killing of 7 or more people in Gaza (women and children included) for every person killed from Israel;** #5) the child's wish in the song also reflect the lack of anyone hearing anything on the other side of the window, the cries for humanitarian aid to be let in by over 120 countries being mostly ignored by both Israel and others such as the U.S.  To protest against Israel in Germany and elsewhere will get you arrested (but not if you do so against Palestine), even if you are just a single speaker.  People are speaking out, but so far the weapons from the largest weapons manufacturers --the U.S., Germany, and the UK-- continue to arrive in Israel.  Firearm exports by the U.S. have more than doubled since 2016 (when Trump removed the Department of State's responsibility of reviewing gun exports and gave such authority to the Department of Commerce, the NRA wrote that it was "...among the most important pro gun initiatives by the Trump administration to date."...since that time, export license approvals are up 30% reported Business Week).  I don't like to pick sides but in this case, this battle in Gaza does seem rather out of kilter, at least from what I'm reading...

**As of this date, over 11,500 men, women and children have been killed in Gaza according to NPR; nearly 40% of that number is estimated to be children.  These 11,500 deaths can be compared to the 1200 killed by Hamas (Israel recently admitted that it made a mistake in its original count of 1400) in this incident, a nearly 10 to 1 ratio.