The heavy rains are over for now. The Arkansas River is receding. I have had trouble keeping up with yard work. Yesterday, I weeded the peonies – 300 plants in all. An 83 year old friend helped. Betty has helped tend the plants since 1975. I was tired, but she was full of energy. No way I was going to quit before she did. I just wish she wasn’t out to outdo the Energizer Bunny.
PBS was airing a show on guns. One man stated that guns have been in the ‘New World’ since the beginning, and were necessary for survival.
That is an erroneous notion. It certainly wasn’t necessary for Native American survival. They had used knives, spears, and arrows for thousands of years. Western-styled weapons, such as firearms, were not essential to survival. One normally doesn’t fish with a gun or plant corn with a gun. Just saying/ Weaponry assisted with survival, but guns are not essential, even though they may be more accurate and efficient.
Much of what nonsense we use to justify a position is circumstantial. Today, one might think a car is essential. Perhaps some kind of phone is essential. As communities broaden, some things are certainly practical, convenient to the point of being thought of as essential. Wichita is approximately 18 miles across, east to west. The three major hospitals are almost in the center. The Social Security office is on the east edge of town. There are places where an automobile or some form of public transportation makes things easier to access, especially in a timely manner.
To confuse essential with convenient stifles our imagination. To confuse the way things are – have become – with being necessary is to limit our thinking about how things might be different than they are. To ignore the past also limits how we think.
I just re-read Bel Kaufman’s book, Up the Down Staircase. That book was written almost 50 years ago. Bel taught school in New York City, and recounts some of the anecdotes of that experience. Bel is now 102 years old. She certainly would not have contemplated school massacres when she was teaching.
We have a great deal of information regarding education – past and present – and to assume that the odd and occasional bout of school violence, and policemen patrolling the halls of our schools is the way thins ‘must’ be and must remain, limits our thinking of how we might make improvements.
Our modern cars are essentially the same as an early Reo or early Model T. Now we have computers and regulators and sensor, but they are regulating and sensing the same essential of crank, bang, suck and blow of a 1902 automobile engine. Sophistication in technology may over-complicate our thinking.
The film, Sling Blade, came out in 1996. Billy Bob Thornton played a character named Karl Childers. Childers was slow witted, thought of as being ‘retarded’. A group of men were struggling to get a push mower started. Finally they asked Karl to look at the mower. He did. It was out of gasoline.
As we study- and as we are taught – I wonder how often we forget the basics? I wonder if we are hyped into thinking in terms of the latest cell phone without asking why we even need a cell phone, and if we need a phone, why does it have to have internet access, the ability to take photographs and all but cook our dinner. And certainly, why does the new model cost so much when so often it is a minor tweaking that has been produced. Did someone invent an alternative to radio waves? Cyberspace? Magnets or whatever? Did any thing revolutionary or extraordinary occur to make a phone that can take an 8 pixel image rather than a 5 pixel image? In getting a clearer picture, did someone invent an alternative to say, gravity, that makes the new model cost more than last month’s model?
I would leave Kansas – IF.
If there were any place I the nation that was ay different. Unfortunately, there isn’t. We have the same problems nation-wide.
We are a nation with so much information that it impossible to distinguish fact from fiction. Something as simple as television commercials. Alex Trebek, a man most of us admire as the host of Jeopardy, shills – and that is the correct word – for Colonial Penn insurance. The company promises that no one will be denied, rates won’t change, and so on and so forth. The cost is a modest $ 9-ish per unit. What the fuck is a unit? We aren’t told what a unit is.
I think I’ll start a company and sell something – a product or a service – that is only $ 5 per gismo. What to buy some gizmos from me? They are only $ 5 per …!
News only to the brain dead – politicians lie. Politicians skew facts. Politicians are good at protecting us from facts, truth, reality.
News only to the brain dead – commercials in any form (radio, TV, print) may or tell the truth, may skew the facts, may mislead us deliberately.
News only to the brain dead – on-line education is the worst possible excuse for obtaining an education. It would be better if we just bought a box of Cheerios that had a diploma printed on the back, or that could be obtained by sending in 5 box tops and a dollar to the manufacturer I return for a diploma.
News only to the brain dead – privatization of major public services results in poor service and higher costs over the long run.
We are reduced to being concerned with only those things where we think we have a slim chance of making a difference. We can appeal to dog owners to pick up dog poop. We can campaign to have the city council enact an ordinance. I want to know if Jesus picked up his own shit. Most of the world, even I the 21st century, still don’t have plumbing. It would surprise us to learn how many millions of people still urinate and defecate outside. I wonder when we will require birds to wear diapers?
In Wichita, there are pro-lifers who are appalled by violence and pictures of aborted fetuses disturbing the minds of children. Who is showing those pictures? Who is creating the hatred and the violence by picketing certain clinics, showing those pictures, even committing violent acts, such as killing people such as Dr. George Tiller?
In my lifetime. People have hated Jews because the Jews killed Jesus. Thus, the Jews needed to be killed. Oddly, Jesus was a Jew, and had other Jews killed him, then logically those Jews would have be doing a good thing, even the right thing, by eliminating a Jew.
A 14 year old boy drown last Friday. He was showing off for his buddies, saying he could swim across the water in the Big Ditch. The Big Ditch is a canal that the city relies on to divert water from the Arkansas River when it is reaching flood level. The kid drown. They didn’t find his body until Sunday. He was driven to the ditch by his mother’s fiancé. The kid’s sister is enrolled in E-school. Such is the modern family. The day he went missing, the family gathered together and prayed for the safety of the boy. If prayer works, then god must have wanted that kid to be dead. That would have ultimately been evidence of ‘God’s Will’ for that lad.
I’m off to walk my neighbor’s dogs. They will probably crap in a public park, and I’ll be envious that they can go potty when they need to, while if I have a need to go to the bathroom, I’ll have to wait until I get home.
Woke up to rain. It has stopped for the present. I still have two yards to mow, but the grass is wet and there isn’t much wind to help dry it off.
Charles Koch has been running ads. He is using his hometown as a test area to see if the ads should be presently nationally. Basically, it is an appeal to dump regulations, reduce government, and let the free market make us a great country once again. He states that if you make more than $ 34,000 a year, you are in the top 1% of people in the entire world.
Here at home, Koch seems unaware of the poverty, the lack of jobs, the crooks who destroyed pensions, savings, property ownership because of the reduction of rules and regulations. He forgets that when there was a freer market – a market that helped form our railroads, for example, the robber barons ruled and the masses had no safety net, and scant means to dig out of the morass.
As I scanned the paper this week, there were many obituaries and most were for people older than 80. Two were in their 100’s. We are living longer, but if there are not sufficient jobs, incomes, and regulations that encourage people to save for the future without fear that a Supreme Court decision will wipe out their pensions, or banks won’t mismanage their investments, then we may have people living longer, yes, but in poverty.
We need to do more than listen to politicians who speak eloquently of flag and country and god. I am sick and tired of being ruled by people who believe in sky fairies; people who refuse to understand science and reality.
I have loved all my pets, but Mandy Katt was especially treasured. She was born four years ago. under the coffee table, sometime in the wee hours of the morning. She had a sibling that died a day or two later. Mandy was inquisitive, curious, mischievous, and loveable. She would look into my eyes as if she were reading my mond, telling me great mysteries that she had discovered. She died one day after her first birthday. I posted birthday pictures one day (July 20, 2010, and more the next day in memory of her). Mandy Katt is buried amid day lillies and Iris plants. She never far from my thoughts; my heart. If there is a heaven, then I should want it populated with all the pets I’ve loved who are no longer with me.
AFTER VISITING FRIENDS, A Son’s Story, by Michael Hainey.
I think that Gabrielle Hamilton, author of BLODD, BONES and Butter, critiqued Hainey’s book up exactly as I would have. “I inhaled this story. Everything you want and need in a book. I started chapter one with my coffee in the morning and then never lade it to work. A beautiful book.”
Hainey was a Young man when his father died. He was never content with the obituary reports. He set out to find the facts surrounding his father’s death. It is a journey of the heart and we are invited along.
I was enthralled from the opening pages., where Hainey explains an old Polish custom:
When a boy has his first birthday, his family sits him in his high chair, and on the tray before him they place three objects – Coin, Shot glass, Crucifix. Whatever the boys chooses, that will be his life.
Hainey learned this from his grandmother.
Recalling another episode, when his grandparents were discussing their ‘old neighborhood’ and when they actually lived in that area, his grandfather’s memory contradicts his wife’s memory.
“No, it was 1917. I know because it was the summer we hanged the Kaiser in effigy.”
“You’re right.” the grandmother states. “There was a parade throughout the neighborhood, and we strung him up on a streetlight in front of Saint Adalbert’s. Lit a big fire out of trash.”
Hainey adds: “And I’m sitting there, thinking: How many people remain who can speak the sentence “It was the summer we hanged the Kaiser in effigy”?
The flavor and pace of Hainey’s writing is reminiscent of Carl Sandburg. I say this in a general way, but also specifically as I recall Sandburg’s poem, CHICAGO (Hog butcher for the world, toll maker, stacker of wheat, player with railroads and the nation’s freight handler …”
Michael Hainey relates that his grandparents ran a corner store in a Chicago neighborhood that was mainly comprised of Poles, Germans and Austrians.
“…Canned good. Boxes of basics. Shelves of staples for the family who washed up on the block. Families of men who worked the slaughterhouses – the Chicago Union Stock Yards. For a good hundred years, there was nothing like it on earth. An entire square mile of Chicago, devoted to butchering cattle and hogs or any other beast a man could ship from America’s hinterlands – our prairies ands plains – turning into canned meat churning all of it into the bounty of America. This was the land of Swift, the Kingdom of Armour. Chicago as the disassembly line. Chicago – how fast and how efficiently a creature could be reduced. Rendered. Broken down.”
Here, I paused, thinking of Henry Ford studying the slaughterhouse disassembly lines and considering how that process might work in reverse – work to assembly an automobile. Speedily. Efficiently. Expertly.
These elements are mere background to the man Michael Hainey became. They aren’t really part of the back story, but they provide a rich example of the man’s writing style.
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