Waste, Waste, Don't Tell Me

      Apologies to the popular NPR radio show but in this case, it was the latter half of that phrase that caught my attention.  With the show, the meaning is one of not revealing the answer, as if to say, "wait, I know this and just give me a moment."  But it can also be a phrase of denial as when a doctor may walk in the room with your results and you simply say, "don't tell me."  Of course there's the mother that shows the dad the empty cookie jar (do such things still exist?) and the dad says with a roll of his eyes, "don't tell me."  The scenes of childhood are the memories of future years, wrote The Farmers Almanac...in 1850!  And it was thus that I happened upon a rather large batch of both sports and motivational books being cleared out at my library.  It was seemingly all there, the "best" sports writings of earlier years, the "extreme" limits of professional athletes, the blah-blah-blah of sports.  Alas, I am somehow just not into sports...but I nabbed a bunch of those books, including a 2-CD set that had "all" the actual broadcasts of winning events, from Billie Jean King beating Bobby Riggs in 1973, to Muhammad Ali beating Sonny Liston  in 1964; and from the US Olympic hockey team beating Russia in 1980, to Don Larsen pitching a perfect game in the World Series.  And it all brought to mind the interview with Michelle Kwan who told Jay Leno, "I didn't lose the gold; I won the silver."  She was referring to her loss to Tara Lipinski, still the youngest player (at 15) to win a gold medal in the Winter Games (Michelle Kwan went on to win five world titles and nine national titles).  Still, it was the outlook, that old saying of nobody remembers who won silver.  What a waste...

      We can get caught up in that no matter our age, feeling that within ourselves is some sort of special talent, but somehow we ended up stuck in a "job" we didn't plan: punching numbers or selling stocks, watching TV or caring for a elderly parent.  But waste is such a hurtful word.  Wasting your life away is used in the sense that your true purpose in life is simply being discarded as if trash, that you've abandoned it, or given it up, or at least are not fulfilling your full potential.  You're now more like the Jimmy Buffet song: "wasted away again in Margaritaville," be it with alcohol, drugs both legal and not, or social media/devices (I did enjoy the phrase that we're such prisoners to our phones that they're appropriately called "cell" phones); and while most of us have at one time or another "gotten wasted" at a wedding or party, there also exists an entire segment of society which seeks almost daily solace in being wasted in a bar or in a dark alley or in a lonely room.  Depression and suicide become such close companions that drifting away and staying zoned out can prove more comforting than facing the "real" world.   On the other hand, another segment of people wasting away are those lacking access to food and water (although hunger and malnutrition is widely misunderstood as noted by the quiz on Gapminder, one question of which asked: Which of the following regions has the largest share of children under 5 who are dangerously underweight?  North Africa & Middle East, South Asia, or Sub-Sharan Africa?  As it noted, 85% of people answered incorrectly, including me).  And at this point, I should note that Israel allegedly just bombed and destroyed a Catholic charity warehouse full of infant formula and fresh vegetables in Gaza, all of which was due to be distributed in the coming days; the IDF said that they were "targeting" terrorists.  My recon friend of the last post told me of his unit being within range of the Hanoi Pipeline, the notorious highway which supplied troops, weapons and fuel to the Viet Cong during the Vietnam war.  "We could have taken it out at any point," he told me.  But the order came from high up, as in Washington high up: do not touch that highway.  It was then, he told me, that the folly of war came to him not of lives lost but of keeping the war going.  War, it seemed, was the true waste of lives... 

      In the Don Juan books by Carlos Castaneda (much of which is now thought to be fiction), he wrote: One of the great aids that the shamans of Mexico employed in establishing the concept of the warrior was the idea of taking our death as a companion, a witness to our acts.  Don Juan said that once that premise is accepted, in whatever mild form, a bridge is formed which extends across the gap between our world of daily affairs, and something that is in front of us, but has no name; something that is lost in a fog, and doesn't seem to exist; something so terribly unclear that it cannot be used as a point of reference, and yet, it is there, undeniably present...Death is the only wise adviser that a warrior has.  Whenever he feels that everything is going wrong and he's about to be annihilated, he can turn to his death and ask if that is so.  His death will tell him that he is wrong, that nothing really matters outside its touch.  His death will tell him, "I haven't touched you yet."

     My wife and I have been watching some older films of people fighting against a brutal system or at least a system which has little faith in them.  First up was the 30-year old film, The Shawshank Redemption, a classic tale by Stephen King (yes, that one) about a man wrongly convicted and sentenced to life in prison, and soon realizing that to survive in a world of injustice he would need to use his smarts and not his brawn (the film has recently been reissued).  Then came Miracle, the Disney version of the 1980 US Olympic hockey team's win over Russia against horrible odds (Russia was the dominating force in hockey for over 30 years).  When coach Herb Brooks was interviewing for the head position, the "advisory" board suggested a roster of professional talent which he immediately rejected.  "I'm not looking for the best players," he told them, "I'm looking for a team."  Remember that back then, in my early days, it was a time of Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth, and Don Juan's shaman teachings; a time of grow-your-own pot (and risk getting caught) or for the more wealthy, to arrive at a party with cocaine (those Richard Pryor years).  Anything to escape a world seemingly out of tilt.  We had a corrupt President to whom life seemed expendable, and America was in trouble, or so it felt.  Landing a man on the moon did little to warm the tensions and threat of the Cold (and nuclear) war so it seemed we needed whatever "escapes" we could cheaply get.  But what, you may be asking yourself, does any of that have to do with today?  Because outside my window the flowers appear to be fading and dying, even if my wife and I do our best to conserve water while the churches and golf courses stay effervescent green.  Ants, bees and wasps all struggle for the sugary liquid of the hummingbird feeders; and even the trees with their deep roots, seem stressed, as if a reflection of our country today.  We are close to day number 50 without rain here in my state, all with temps in the mid- to upper-90s, as if also reflecting our country's mood...unsettled, uncomfortably hot, and ready for a break.  And yet I also feel that struggle among the police, and the National Guard, and the military, caught between doing their "duty" and perhaps asking themselves what is right or wrong, their three Cs --the coaches, courts, and Congress-- no longer there to offer assurance or guidance.  Their world likely seems out of tilt as well, as if they’ve unexpectedly caught their brave fathers crying in the corner.  And yet there is hope.  It was Charles Lindberg who said: Success is not measured by what a man accomplishes, but by the opposition he has encountered, and the courage with which he has maintained the struggle against overwhelming odds.  And that is where the sports books came into the picture...

     Curt Menefee in his book, Losing Isn't Everything, wrote: I've long believed sports teaches us everything we need to know about how to be a good winner, stressing such timeless values as teamwork, leadership, sacrifice, and discipline.  No lesson, though, is more essential to learn than how to handle adversity.  Adversity, after all is the one obstacle that each of us must face at some point, no matter how privileged our background may be or how much we achieve. Which is why it's necessary to discover a way to "move on" -- or, at the very least, make peace with it, so it doesn't hold us back in our careers and lives.  How we manage that task will go a long way toward whether we enjoy a rewarding life or a future filled with sadness and regret.  Enter Wilma Rudolph.  Born prematurely and weighing less than 5 pounds, she would later come down with double pneumonia, scarlet fever and polio which doctors told her was not curable; she would never walk without leg braces, she was told.  But determination and nightly leg massages by her siblings not only got her walking, but running, enough to catch the eye of baseball star, Jackie Robinson, who told the 15-year old "someday you're going to be the fastest woman in the world."  And it was not long after that she became just that, winning three gold medals in 1960's Rome Olympics.  

      And she was far from alone.  Star hitter for the LA Dodgers, Kirk Gibson, was in the locker room frustrated at his ripped hamstring and injured knee, both injuries coming during the playoffs and injuries that now sidelined him from playing in the World Series.  But seeing the Dodgers behind in the 9th inning, he told his coach that he felt he still had "a good swing" left in him, if he needed to be brought in.  Coach Tommy LaSorda did exactly that, pitting him against the best pitching reliever in the league, Dennis Eckersly.  A couple of fouls by the hobbling Gibson brought a full count with 2 out in the bottom of the 9th.  One more pitch was all that was needed to end the game, something felt by both teams.  Eckersly wound up, looked again at the solo man on base, then threw his best pitch to try and end it.  But Gibson connected and the ball sailed over the right field wall, all from a player who could barely limp around the bases.  Another uplifting story was the 85th meeting of the college football rivals, Stanford and Cal Berkeley: Stanford was led by a young John Elway who had strategically moved his team downfield for a field goal and left just 4 seconds in the game.  Four seconds!  Stanford's marching band rushed to fill the end zone in preparation for the victory as the clock started.  But what happened next would likely never be seen again in football history.   And neither will we likely see an "unknown" long-distance runner whose best time in the 10,000-meter race was a full minute behind most of his Olympic rivals.  He wasn't even expected to be close when the final lap came around.  But again, this US contender --whose first comment from a Japanese reporter at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics was, "who are you?"-- surprised everyone and beat his own personal best by nearly 50 seconds, winning the gold by 4 tenths of a second and setting a new Olympic record (he remains the only American to win the event in the Olympics).  The Olympic site said this about the newcomer, Billy Mills: Spotting the eagle embroidered on the shirt of German runner Siegfried Herrmann, he cast his mind back to his childhood and kicked for home.  “The wings of an eagle!” he says.  “Back to my dad when I’m small: ‘Son, you do these things, someday you’ll have wings of an eagle’.  I may never be this close again.  I’ve got to do it now: wings of an eagle.  Then I felt the tape break across my chest."

     Such stories are sorely needed these days and yet, as editor Glenn Stout wrote in the 2019 Best American Sports Writing: It's no secret, to either readers or writers, that the entire writing industrial complex is in trouble as regards not just sports writing but just about every kind of writing that makes use of letters, sentences, and the occasional paragraph.  Jobs are scarce, layoffs have spread like measles among the unvaccinated, and print and online publishers close or merge into the dim-witted mists of capital reorganization every day.  The few that remain not only publish less written work every year but often treat it like an enormous bother.  Somehow writing itself has become the greatest impediment to the reigning business model, which measures success in IPOs, an office fridge full of double IPAs, and a summer tiny house.  (the next year, after 75 years of publishing such collective writings, the Best American Sports Writing series would abandon ship and cease publication)  Wrote a piece in The Economist 1843 on the late Vaclav Havel, the Czech dissident who later became its president: ...how a regime built on lies demands that its people acquiesce to those lies.  Daily acts of submission, no matter how seemingly insignificant, "confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system."  Havel says that it's worth risking punishment for affirming the truth, because living a lie alienates you from yourself.  Sometimes we lose track of those lies, whether we're hearing them from society and our "leaders," or whether they're just the voices in our heads.  You're a nobody.  You're a disgrace, a loser.  You've contributed nothing.  You're worthless...a waste of space.  Immigrants, the poor, the homeless, the disabled.  What next?  The neighbor?  The neighborhood?  The country?

      Strange days have found us, sang The Doors: ...and through their strange hours we linger alone, bodies confused, memories misused as we run from the day to a strange night of stone.  Strange days indeed, as we witness the pendulum of history swing back in the other direction yet again.  But as M. Scott Peck said: Until you value yourself, you won't value your time.  Until you value your time, you won't do anything with it.  So full circle.  Whatever your age, whatever your political leanings, whatever your situation, what are you doing with your time?  That quote was just one tidbit that Christian motivational speaker John C. Maxwell had in his rather tiny book, Success, One Day At A Time.  Now before I go any further, I need to add that books on success, especially those by "motivational" speakers, religious or not, is a category similar to sports in my mind, a section I quickly bypass as if they were books on wiring your unfinished basement, or how-to books on replacing your car's engine.  But Maxwell condensed a series of quotes, observations, and stories about success and failure into a tiny 124 pages.  Here are a few examples: Charles Schwab (yes, that one) died penniless; cutting out 30 minutes of screentime 5 days a week, for 50 weeks, adds an extra 125 hours to your year; and this quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson: To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you lived.  This is to have succeeded.

     When I glanced at the final sports book, it was by Pulitzer Prize winner, David Halberstam on four greats of baseball who carried their friendship into their 80s: Ted Williams, Bobby Doerr, Jimmy Pesky, and Dominic DiMaggio (brother of Joe and one of the few ball players to wear eyeglasses), the author wrote: That was something unusual in baseball: Four men who played for one team, who became good friends, and who remained friends for the rest of their lives.  Their lives were forever linked through a thousand box scores, through long hours of traveling on trains together, through shared moments of triumph, and even more in the case of the Red Sox, through shared moments of disappointment...they were all too aware that it was unlikely to happen again, that the vast changes in the sport, especially free agency, made rosters more volatile while the huge salaries somehow served to lessen the connection among teammates rather than solidify it. They and others who followed the sport realized there was less continuity and community on teams.  Of one Red Sox team of the 70s it had been said that when the team plane landed, the players quickly dispersed on their own -- "25 players, 25 cabs."  And there it was, our country once again in a nutshell.  When the "miracle" happened in that Olympic hockey game, coach Brooks was watching this already happening.  As he noted in the movie: A few years later the US began using professional athletes at the Games.  Dream teams.  I find the word ironic, because now that we have Dream teams, we seldom ever get to dream.  But on one weekend, as America and the world watched, a group of remarkable young men gave the world what it needed most: a chance for one night to not only dream, but a chance, once again, to believe.

     So one more story from Maxwell's book, this of an elderly couple looking for a room, late on a rainy night in Philadelphia.  Discovering too late that three conventions in town had filled every hotel, the man at the desk told the couple that they could stay in his small room at the hotel; he would be working all night so it would remain unused anyway: When they checked out the next morning, the elderly gentleman said to the clerk, "You are the kind of manager who should be the boss of the best hotel in the United States.  Maybe someday I'll build one for you."  The man at the desk simply smiled and thanked them.  Two years later, the hotel clerk received a letter from the elderly gentleman.  In it was a round trip ticket to New York City and a note. The note reminded the clerk of the night he had helped the couple and invited him to come up to visit them.  Though he had nearly forgotten the incident, he decided to take them up on their offer.  They met him at the station in New York and then took him to the corner of Thirty-Fourth Street and Fifth Avenue.  "That," said the elderly man, pointing to a mammoth new building made of reddish stone on the corner, "is a hotel I have just built for you to manage," ...The elderly man's name was William Waldorf Astor.  The huge turreted building was the original Waldorf Astoria Hotel.  And the young clerk was George C. Boldt, the hotel's first manager.

     While I can't picture myself diving into more sports or motivational books, I've learned that accidentally venturing off into these subjects had the same message: that teamwork and kindness and friendship --even, or perhaps especially, to yourself-- is rewarding to and for everyone.  That no one is worthless.  And that despite what a very few "leaders" may try to tell us, nobody --not the poor, not the less-educated, not the indigent, not the ones who look different or struggle with their sexual identity, not the fired worker or researcher, not the single mom or dad, not those in financial trouble or those dealing with mental issues, not the domestic workers losing wage and safety protections,* not the refugee or the immigrant, not the child or family in Gaza or Sudan or any of a dozen other places whose homes have been bombed or who are quite literally starving-- not a single one of them are worth less.  We all have value.  We all bring something to this planet...

     As the song by Kieran Kane said: Trouble, we have known trouble in our struggle just to get by.  ...It's the love that will be remembered.  Not wealth, not poverty.  ...When we're gone, long gone, the only thing that will have mattered is the love that we shared, and the way that we cared.  When we're gone, long gone.

*The new Department of Labor proposal introduced a few weeks ago would roll back safety regulations and wages for many workers, but especially those involved in home-health care and agriculture (broader cutbacks are in the works but not in this proposal).  The recent proposal is summarized here by the legal group Fisher Phillips: The U.S. Department of Labor just quietly launched one of the most sweeping deregulatory efforts in recent memory, advancing over 60 proposals that could reshape workplace rules across industries.  From overtime and minimum wage exemptions to cuts in affirmative action and workplace safety oversight, the July 1 rollout is being called one of the most ambitious federal red tape rollbacks in recent decades.  The "official" explanation comes from the Office of Advocacy: To advance the President’s agenda, on March 27, 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) launched an Anti-Competitive Regulations Task Force (Task Force) and published a Request for Information (RFI).  The RFI invites public comments to eliminate anti-competitive state and federal regulations that undermine free market competition and harm customers, workers, and businesses.  The Task Force is seeking information from the public about laws and regulations that make it more difficult for businesses to compete effectively, especially in markets that have the greatest impact on American households, including housing, transportation, food and agriculture, healthcare, and energy.  The Task Force asserts that regulations can impose undue burdens and costs on small businesses, inhibiting them from competing on a level playing field with powerful corporations, entering markets, and lowering prices for American families.  And what exactly IS this Office of Advocacy?  Here's one explanation from the diversity group NYNJmsdc: The Project 2025 proposal would double the budget of the Office of Advocacy and significantly increase its authority, turning from simply an advocate on behalf of small business and into a bottleneck and watchdog of regulations being proposed by all other Federal agencies.  The Project would “amend the RFA so that all agencies are required to provide a copy of any proposed rule along with initial regulatory flexibility analysis to the Office of Advocacy at least 60 days before a notice of proposed rulemaking is submitted for publication in the Federal Register.”  While Advocacy was created to limit the burdensome and disproportionate economic impact some regulations have on small businesses, such a change could essentially weaponize the office as a tool against the protections and rules instituted by Federal agencies (e.g. food safety, worker protections, workplace safety, environmental regulations, etc.).  Yes, Project 2025 (which Trump continually claimed to have never read but ironically is implementing its playbook) is in full swing.  Comments, reactions, thoughts (even for those workers at Mar-a-Lago) are due by September 2nd.  And a final note for you Creedence fans, today (Saturday) brings not the bad moon, but the black moon...like out government regulations (or lack thereof), you won't see it, but it will possibly expose much more.