Thar She Blows...

     Have you seen the price of gold, or silver (or groceries)?  Metals are considered a "safe" haven for investors, those people with loads of money who want two things...more of it and to keep what they have.  And while I've written about this before, that of digging through childhood collections of whatever --coins, stamps, comic books, Pokeman cards-- it is worth repeating that now might be a good time to reevaluate your life and possessions...and life's meanings.  You may discover that much of what you held onto in the hopes that "this will be valuable one day" probably isn't, or won't be.  I found this out when I would buy an art print in my working years, a realistic painting of a wild animal, usually a tiger or a mountain lion or a pod of killer whales.  Artists whom I "collected" (in the sense of buying limited editions which were signed and numbered) decorated our walls, the framing often costing more than the art.  But my wife was quite patient, and had an eye for color, so I slowly shifted to subjects she enjoyed which were more along the lines of horses or artfully posed people, and even a Disney print.  And then she began to paint.  The point of all this is that my purchased prints came down as her paintings went up (she was quite the talent), adding to the batch of unframed prints already sitting in the basement closet.  And now that my wife and I are older, the question became, what to do with all those prints.  Many had accumulated in value but not astronomically so; and I was far from alone in having them.  A quick search on Ebay or Etsy showed many similar prints, some framed and some not, and many not receiving a single bid.  But prints aside, what does one do with such a collection?  Selling them off one by one clearly wasn't going to work.  Even my efforts at donating them to charity auctions each year (primarily local animal groups) rarely worked out (one charity was kind enough to tell me that art simply didn't sell at such auctions.  What??)  So the idea popped into my head of donating the entire collection to an animal welfare group (and here we're talking about 300 or so prints, with many, if not most of them, now long sold out from the publisher).  It has proven futile, despite the consultation of advisors and art folk.  Basically, my years of "collecting" such prints was for naught.  Which brings me to the ammo can...

    At some point I must have opened that clipped container when my parents passed away, and I must have seen what was in there when I put it in the garage somewhere, but obviously completely forgot about it for well over a decade.  You young ones need to trust me on this, such things happen.  So here I was clearing out parts of the garage, throwing out what I could and filling boxes with other things destined for the thrift store, when I come across this ammo can, a remnant from my dad's earlier years.  And as I moved it, I found that it was quite heavy.  What the heck was in there?  And inside, showing that genetics can pass down in different way, was a batch of coins, wrapped in cling wrap in small batches and labeled silver...Eisenhower "silver" dollars, "peace" dollars and a bunch of old worn quarters.  And a 100-oz. ingot of stamped silver.  What the heck?  I had never seen one before.  Was it real? (looked it).  Was it rare? (looked it)  Was it valuable? (looked it).  So off I headed to a coin dealer with a pleasant smile of my face because like you --and with the skyrocketing price of silver-- I thought, that they were going to be dazzled with this "find."  Alas, as with the art, this was not to be so.  Those "silver" dollars were among the millions clad in different metals and after some 50 years, had jumped up ten cents in value (go buy a Slurpee with these, the dealer joked). What about that (to my eyes) pristine 1921 Morgan silver dollar (the dealer even put it in a plastic sleeve to keep it from getting scratched)?  It was silver but not worth the spot price of silver (such as jewelers charge) and thus worth about $10 less, he told me (dealers legally cannot melt down the coins).  And that ingot?  Also quite common, he said, a known brand and something often collected back in the day (who knew silver also came in kilo ingots?)  As dealers, they saw one or more of those 100 oz. bars arrive every single day.  As I looked around, I saw bins full of my "valuable" collector coins, and I'm talking bins.  Nice shiny coins with dates in the 20s, 30s, and 40s, far better than the coins I had stored as a child in my old blue Whitman books.  I've got bags and bags of those coins in back if you're interested, he told me.  And whatever you do if you bring in more coins, he added, don't bring in pennies -- I could buy a new truck with the amount of pennies I have back there.  Bye, bye all those Indian-head pennies my parents had pulled aside (a bag of those are not much more than the cost of the coins).  Dang.  So here was the reality...that Morgan dollar was so common because it was actually used by folk back then.  And nearly 90 million of them were made (the population at the time was about 106 million). Basically everyone had one, or two, or a dozen back then.  But it's over 100 years old, I told him.  The dealer shrugged...

     So childhood.  It's different for each of us, not only in how we were raised but where and under what society or culture.  Puritanical or open, repressive or free,  abusive or caring, good or bad (however you may describe that).  Many of us can look back and feel that we had a childhood, a time of innocence and play and school and growing up and learning values and morals...and for the most part, growing up trusting adults.  But not every child had this.  Many can honestly say that they didn't have a childhood, that they either had to grow up quickly and become the adult, or they became a victim, a scarred individual that would struggle to heal, often still wondering if they could heal.  That parent-child dynamic is supposed to make us reflect on good times, whether we had them or not.  My era was that of functional, if fictional families, a time when problems were few: suburban, white, middle class.  Father Knows Best, and Leave It to Beaver.  The family had rules and a father was someone you could go to with your problems.  Thus it continues to pizzle me that many of my conservative friends continue to praise the use of the National Guard and sometimes military troops in blue-state cities, and continue to denounce the use of vaccines, even as they (and Trump himself) get them.  It's as if the old "do as I say, not as I do" catchphrase has moved from that of a daddy figure to that of a spoiled child.  And here we are full circle, trying to define what age defines a child.  From what photos have already leaked from the Epstein files, 12- and 14-year old girls are no longer children but are sexually mature adults "ready" to please their sexually immature adult patrons.

     If you've read or watched he Harry Potter series, you're likely familiar with the character, Dobby.  And it was only on reading a reflection by Australian writer and social historian, Sheila Fitzpatrick in the London Review that I found out that "dobbin" someone is to rat them out, to be a tattle tale, to grass someone (as they say in the UK).  The author wrote: Dobbing is the preferred Australian word for denunciation or snitching to the bosses, and it is taken to be a shameful betrayal of one’s fellow subalterns.  I’m quite sure that, as a child, I never sneaked to a teacher about other girls: that would have been contemptible in schoolyard culture and I would remember if I’d done such a thing.  For adults, it’s easier to obfuscate the act...ICE has an online portal for reporting on illegal immigrants and suspected criminal activity, and a hotline sponsored by the Department of Education calls for anonymous informing by ‘students, parents, teachers and the broader community’ on schools and teachers ‘perceived as promoting diversity, equity or inclusion’.  Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, a directive from the Office of Personnel Management led to emails being sent to employees of the Departments of Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs, Nasa and other agencies asking them, within ten days, to identify colleagues still persisting in work on diversity, equity and inclusion – in other words, snitch or be snitched on.  In April, the Department of Health and Human Services called for denunciations from health workers and the public of doctors who provide gender-affirming care to minors.  While there were some awkward problems with regard to patient privacy at first, these have now been circumvented, partly by classifying informers as whistleblowers.  Enter the Epstein files...

     Without going too deep into this issue that won't go away, Attorney General Pam Bondi was directly asked by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (real name) if it was true that photos of Trump with half-naked underaged women appeared in those files (Bondi had earlier admitted that Trump's name appeared in those files, only to later say that "there was nothing to see").  As one lifestyle reporter bluntly reported: What Bondi did not do?  Deny the existence of those photos.  She did not say, “Nope, that’s a ridiculous rumor, they do not exist.”  She did not say, “The FBI found nothing like that.”  She said...absolutely nothing.  Just smoke, mirrors, and political jabs.  Let us be real.  If there were zero sketchy Trump photos in the Epstein files, Bondi could have shut it down in five seconds.  Instead, she turned into a political flamethrower, dodging the question like it was a grenade.  Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, continues to resist opening the House back from recess because it would mean having to swear in the newly-elected Adelita Grijaiva, reported PBS (her vote on the bi-partisan petition now in the House, would provide the necessary number of signatures to require Johnson to release the Epstein files).  And now comes the report that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has broken pledges by the US to protect key informants.  Wrote The Washington Post: In the days before the Trump administration deported hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador, the president of that country demanded something for himself: the return of nine MS-13 gang leaders in U.S. custody.  Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a March 13 phone call with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, promised the request would be fulfilled, according to officials familiar with the conversation.  But there was one obstacle: Some of the MS-13 members Bukele wanted were “informants” under the protection of the U.S. government, Rubio told him.  To deport them to El Salvador, Attorney General Pam Bondi would need to terminate the Justice Department’s arrangements with those men, Rubio said.  He assured Bukele that Bondi would complete that process and Washington would hand over the MS-13 leaders...“Who would ever trust the word of U.S. law enforcement or prosecutors again?” Farah said (Douglas Farah, a U.S. contractor who worked with federal officials to investigate and help dismantle the MS-13 gang).  

     Are we entering a period of broken promises, coverups, and little or no accountability?  Here's just one update from The London Review on the ceasefire in Gaza partially brokered by Trump: The guards’ repertoire, though, didn’t extend past saying ‘Welcome to Israel’ and mimicking us in high voices: ‘Genocide, I was kidnapped – I don’t care, you’re here now.’...It was our twelfth day at sea in a forty-foot sailing boat, with medical aid and baby formula packed in the stern cabin and cockpit locker...Five elected politicians from the flotilla flew home that night, but everyone else was imprisoned whether they’d signed a release form or not...Nearly 2000 Palestinians, including about 1700 seized from Gaza since October 2023 and held without charge, were released from Israeli jails at the same time as us.  It is already well-documented that they faced far worse abuses than we did at Ktzi’ot...Thousands of Palestinians are still held prisoner by Israel with no prospect of release.  They remain behind bars without any of the protections that we had.  Israel has reported that 900 aid trucks were allowed to enter Gaza; the US reported that the actual number was less than 100, saying Israel considered any truck entering the area as an "humanitarian aid" truck.  

Editorial cartoon by John Darkow: Cagle

     How can this happen, this turning of a blind eye while seeming atrocities keep happening?  Take Christopher R. Browning's letter back to the editor on a piece which mentioned his book on Nazi recruitment: In late 1941 the maximum age for men owing some form of compulsory service during the war was raised from thirty-five to forty-five, and the rank and file of Reserve Police Battalion 101 was completely restocked not with volunteers but rather with conscripts whose average age was thirty-nine and a half.  Two thirds of them were unskilled working-class men.  These conscripts were the dregs of a diminishing manpower pool, and there is no evidence that they were carefully vetted other than to exempt skilled workers essential to the war economy.  There was not sufficient time for extensive indoctrination and training before the battalion was dispatched to Poland in late June 1942, where it carried out its first major massacre of Jews at Józefów on July 13.  In short, the men in the first two groups of police battalions fit Evans’s description.  But a third group of battalions like RPB 101 continues to pose the frightening proof that a group of randomly selected and ill-suited conscripts—truly ordinary men without careful selection, Nazification, training, indoctrination, or prior brutalization—can be transformed into mass killers in a shockingly short time.  RPB 101, though it did not come to the killing fields until the summer of 1942, a full year later than most of its counterparts, nonetheless became the fourth most lethal battalion in the Order Police...Kühne [Thomas Kühne]  shows how the notions of “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft) and comradeship, so powerfully resonant in German culture, were appropriated and transformed by the Nazis from socially inclusive to racially exclusive concepts.  The Nazis were thus able to preside over a “moral revolution,” in which the Western tradition of universalism, humanity, and individual responsibility based on a guilt culture was replaced by a shame culture that elevated loyalty to and standing within the group to the new moral fulcrum of German society.  Whether the “racial community” at large or a small police unit such as RPB 101, “the group claimed moral sovereignty.” 

     This time of year is one of ghosts and spirits coming to haunt you.  But as one writer talked about her father (a story featured in The Sun): When I was in the process of leaving my husband, he helped me split hostas, split rhubarb, split daylilies. See how easy they come apart? he asked. You have to do it at the right time, but you get so much more growth.  And maybe this IS a good time to separate, to break away from what we thought we knew and to form new relationships and ideas and friendships.  Most of my conservative friends have already done this and politically at least, are ones whom I consider unreachable (as they likely view me).  But as Crosby, Stills & Nash sang about what we should teach our children: ...their father's hell did slowly go by...Don't you ever ask them, "Why?"  If they told you, you would cry.  So just look at them and sigh, and know they love you.  Psychologist Willard F. Harley wrote a book on marital relationships titled His Needs, Her Needs.  It sold over two million copies, but here's what he found: Of the ten basic emotional needs, the five listed as most important by men were usually the five least important for women, and vice versa [but] every person is unique...In my effort to overcome my own personal failure, I made a crucial discovery.  I wasn't the only one failing to help couples...In fact, I learned that marital therapy had the lowest success rate of any form of therapy.  In one study, I read that less than 25 percent of those surveyed felt that marriage counseling did them any good whatsoever, and a higher percentage felt that it did them more harm than good.  Enter the world of "mankeeping."  Wrote The Week: Most terms that end with "-keeping" involve "inanimate objects or animals," like housekeeping or beekeeping.  Men are suffering from "a genuine problem" with social isolation...In 2021, 15% of men reported having zero close friends, up from 3% in 1990.  Today, just 20% of men say they reach out to friends to discuss personal issues.  That leaves women with the "unreciprocated" burden of meeting all of their partner's social and emotional needs, and planning get-togethers with friends like parents scheduling playdates for children.

     And there we are back to being children, or wanting children, just not in the Epstein-files way.  But noted psychologist Harley: I had discovered why I and so many other therapists were having trouble saving marriages.  We did not understand what made marriages work.  We were all so preoccupied with what seemed to make them fall that we overlooked what made them succeed.  The pull of family history so often shapes who and what we become, predator or prey, narcissist or caregiver, killer or savior, Donald or Dobbin?  And this was hauntingly brought to life in the debut book by Ramona Emerson, Shutter.  As a forensic crime photographer herself, she creates a character who does the same task, but also sees the spirits of those killed.  When a seemingly innocent victim's spirit latches onto her and refuses to let her believe that she had committed suicide but was in fact murdered, the author's investigative character wrote: ...no matter how strong I think I am, this thing --call it a gift or a curse-- is still a part of me, just like my veins, heart, and hands.  It is attached. It is a part of my voice and vision-- this visually enhanced speakerphone from some other place.  I can't turn it off.  

     Such ghosts may haunt us now or later, but I often think of the words of the 17th-century polymath, John Ruskin who wrote: What we think, or what we know, or what we believe, is in the end of little consequence.  The only thing of consequence is what we do.  Perhaps in separating ourselves from those whose user names are in Epstein's files or are doing things we morally disagree with, we can spend energy not on fixing them, but on righting ourselves.  Hate does not make great, as the No Kings protesters note.  Dionne Warwick echoed the voices of women when she sang: When did I stop feeling sure, feeling safe, and start wondering why; wondering why?  Is this a dream?  Am I here?  Where are you?  What's in back of the sky?  Why do we cry?  She could just as easily have been singing those words for those young girls caught in Epstein's web of clients.  But what better time than now to disentangle yourself from the rhetoric and stand up for your own side, defending your values and morals and humanity, because no matter what the men with ill-gotten power or money or influence so selfishly do, every child deserves a childhood.