This treasonous son-of-a-bitch is still holding our nation hostage with his lying and gaslighting. Now 1/6 was a fucking love fest? Donald John Trump incited and instigated the violence that took place at the Capitol on January 6 of this year. He IS responsible for the damages, injuries, and deaths.
I know its fraught with political consequences, but Trump MUST PAY for his criminality. AG Merrick Garland needs to bring charges against him, as well as the people who stormed the Capitol. If he is not held accountable, it will happen again and again until they succeed in tearing this country apart.
I’m beginning to think nobody (at least not progressives) should use the word “socialism” any longer. We should replace it with the word “humanism.” This way it’s easier to point to the most important distinction between the two. Capitalism is concerned with capital, i.e. profit/money/wealth/things. Humanism is concerned with humans. Capitalism exalts things over everything else unless there’s a huge regulatory environment seeking to ensure capitalists don’t overreach. Humanism exalts humans over things, and seeks to ensure everyone has the basic things (shelter, food, clothing, healthcare, education) to become a fully realized, contributing member of society.
I know humanism is used differently, but socialism has been saddled with this connotation of authoritarianism, and too many people don’t see the difference between economic systems and systems of governance. Using the word humanism puts emphasis on who we want to benefit from our economic activity … the pipples.
I just realized … of all the ways in which this pandemic has changed me, the biggest difference between now and a little over a year ago is … it’s turned me into an introvert. Linda used to complain that we were always the last to leave a party, which was true as I loved engaging not only my friends and relatives, but anybody who was interesting and willing to discuss a huge range of subjects.
I’m one of those people who readily starts up conversations with strangers; at least I used to be that kind of person. I’m not so sure anymore. I’ve gotten so accustomed to staying home and reaching out through Facebook, Twitter, and my blog that I no longer feel much of a need to get out of the house and do something.
OTOH, there is a part of me that’s kind of chomping at the bit; anxious to get back to the way things were, at least in terms of being able to go grocery shopping or eating out, etc. I’m fully vaccinated and, as most of my friends know, was infected with—and recovered from—Covid this past January. I’m about as safe as I’m going to be. I will continue to wear a mask when grocery shopping, but will also be looking for opportunities to go maskless.
Me and Alyssa at the gym
I have returned to the gym, along with my buddy, Steve, and my daughter, Alyssa. I don’t wear a mask when I’m there and neither does anyone else. I don’t participate in classes and work out on my own. I stay away from others and the gym has several overhead fans which move the air downward. Right now I’m trying to get back to lifting the weights I was working out with before everything shut down, as well as doing the amount of different exercises I had the stamina for last year. I expect it will take a bit longer at my age than it would have, say, thirty years ago, but I believe it will add to the time I have left on this planet.
Inasmuch as I’m seriously working on a memoir of my experiences becoming a first-time father five years after AARP got me in their sights, I expect to continue spending a lot of my time where I’m sitting right now. I’ve begun communicating with friends we traveled and spent time with in order to get their perspective and to help jar my memory of things in which we all participated.
Now I find myself wondering if I’ll retain some of these introvert tendencies. I learned a long time ago how to be alone without being lonely, and I’m quite comfortable with who I am and the path I’m on, but I am looking forward to how things will change once both of my girls are more fully on their own. Time (the thing I don’t have a great deal of at this point) will tell. I’ve often said I needed to live long enough to get the girls to adulthood, but I’d really like to live long enough to enjoy them as adults for a while. I’m shooting for at least 90, giving me 16 more years. Who knows, maybe I can make it to 100, which nobody in my family has ever reached. Maybe I’ll start surfing again at 80.
Yesterday I posted an update to my GoFundMe campaign to raise a little money while writing my first memoir. I’m expecting it to take at least six months of gathering info/memories/photos and writing, proofing, and editing it. I may have to make several trips to the Bay Area and Bend, Oregon to interview some of the families who traveled with us in 2002 and 2006. The money I’m seeking is primarily needed to help me with those costs. What follows is my update:
Just wanted to share a little update for all y’all (such as there are.) My current plan is to make this work around 50,000 words. I have found a file with at least a dozen heartfelt emails I sent back to the states from The China Hotel, in Guangzhou, PRC, when we adopted Aimee.
I have also discovered an essay I wrote, as part of a personal ethics journal I was required to write for a comparative religions class at Cal Lutheran Uni. It is about the ethical struggle I went through regarding being a much older parent and how I thought that might affect an adopted child. It was written prior to our first adoption and I will be elaborating on it. I’ve had almost two decades to be faced with, and contemplate, that reality.
I’ve begun contacting several parents with whom we traveled and became somewhat close. For the first 12 or so years we had reunions every year. Not all the families were able (or even wanted) to make it, but there were usually at least ten of us. It’s been a few years since that happened and, of course, all the girls Aimee’s age are now pretty much adults and are striking out on their own.
I have begun contacting some of those parents in order to interview them for this memoir. I’ve always felt parenting was similar to flying in an airplane. Long stretches of boredom, intermittently punctuated by moments of sheer terror and anxiety. I intend on finding out if others have felt the same.
My plan is to provide an update each month until the work is done, after which my final update will be the memoir itself.
My deepest thanks to those of you who have contributed. You have no idea what that does for my commitment to get this done … and done well. I’m adding a photo taken just this past Mothers’ Day. Alyssa had admonished me in the past not to post photos of her, or tag her in any way on FB. While we were driving to pick up our dinner for us to enjoy with Linda, she informed me she wanted me to post more photos, which she now sees as documentation of her family life. Hence, the photo, which I really like (though I wish I was actually looking into the lens.)
Alan Watts suggested that belief is stagnant and unyielding to change, whereas faith is open and accepting of what is. I often say I have faith the universe is unfolding just fine no matter what any of us believe. We are such insignificant little tubes of matter, constantly ingesting, inhaling, and absorbing stuff that isn’t us, then exhaling, excreting, and sloughing off that which once was us but is now something else. We exist for a moment, comparatively so brief as to be virtually non-existent to anything but our pitiful little selves. Calm down and enjoy the ride. As Jim Morrison said, “No one gets out of here alive.”
Corporations, conglomerates, and industrial organizations aren’t the enemy, ipso facto. In fact, they make socialism not only possible, but necessary, IMO.
What is the enemy is unbridled greed, rampant cronyism, nepotism and, especially, the codification of deep income inequality. It is not good for a society when individuals can amass fortunes they can’t possibly spend. That they then turn some of that fortune into philanthropy and charitable organizations doesn’t change the fact that it should be criminal for one individual to take that much surplus value from the workforce that made their fortune possible. It’s estimated Jeff Bezos makes (not earns) around $2,500/second. Dafuque does he do, other than own Amazon stock?
I’m not saying inventors, creators, entrepreneurs, etc. aren’t entitled to profit from their efforts, but they shouldn’t be able to continue siphoning profit off an organization that has reached a point where it could easily survive without them. By the same token, intellectual property law has expanded patent and copyright protections way beyond their original intent, creating other avenues of indecent profit-making.
And getting back to what I said about making socialism possible and necessary, without large profitable organizations, we’d all be living off mom & pop’s and craft-making. Many of the products we enjoy, and that provide the grease that skids civilization as we know it, would not be possible without large factories, laboratories, and other institutions. By their very nature, though, they transcend the control and direction of any one individual, and I believe our pay/profit structure needs to take that much more into consideration, providing a larger share to the workers who have helped make the org successful.
Just came across this in one of my FB groups and had to share it. It makes so much sense and, truth to tell, it never dawned on me to do this. I think we should all start making lists so we have a fuller understanding of what policies we would like to see implemented.
This is my ID card, given to me by the Cuban government when I traveled there in 1973 with the sixth contingent of the Venceremos Brigade. I celebrated my 26th birthday around the time we returned, after two months of construction labor and educational presentations, and culminating in a one-week tour of the island that ended in Santiago de Cuba.
We weren’t actually allowed to travel there back then, but we flew Western Airlines anyway from LAX to MEX, where we transferred to an Ilyushin four-engine turboprop from MEX to HAV. We were met by the CIA in Mexico City, who insisted we pose for pictures before we were allowed to proceed. We were met with a television camera, celebration, and nation-wide coverage upon our arrival at Havana.
I came across this bit of prose poetry yesterday. Someone, can’t even recall if it was a friend or merely a random post that popped up on my news feed, posted it without attribution and I was a bit enthralled by it. I’m tempted to break it down so it looks more like a poem, but I’m just going to leave it the way I encountered it. I don’t even know if that part about their taste buds is true, but I like to think it is … and I love the subtle twist with which the author concludes. I just now highlighted what I thought was a sufficiently distinctive phrase and searched for it on Google, immediately discovering who the author is … so I will now add a citation below. I hope you enjoy this very short, highly evocative bit of writing.
Ever since I found out that earth worms have taste buds all over the delicate pink strings of their bodies, I pause dropping apple peels into the compost bin, imagine the dark, writhing ecstasy, the sweetness of apples permeating their pores. I offer beets and parsley, avocado, and melon, the tops of carrots.
I’d always thought theirs a menial life, eyeless and hidden, almost vulgar—though now, it seems, they bear a pleasure so sublime, so decadent, I want to contribute however I can, forgetting, a moment, my place on the menu.
I recently came across this simple graphic I put together and I took the opportunity to re-read this poem in its entirety. It hit me that I had neither heard nor read the complete poem by Emma Lazarus, entitled “The New Colossus,” before I had put this together (which was probably sometime last year) and, in fact, didn’t have much of a recollection of reading it back then.
So I then posted it on Twitter, which gave me the opportunity to read it a couple more times. Each time, I gained a bit more insight into the message Ms. Lazarus was attempting to convey, and each time I felt her message a bit more deeply.
It didn’t get that many likes, but it did generate enough feedback for me to pay really close attention to the poem, and I took the opportunity to read it several times. It finally brought me this image of my Bubbie, my paternal grandmother, along with my uncles Sam and Al and my aunt Sophie, arriving in New York from the Ukraine, where they had fled the pogroms. My grandfather, who I never knew, had made his way to Chicago and had worked to earn and save enough to send for all four of them to book “steerage” to the United States. My father was the first-born in the United States.
Reading her words and looking at this beautiful picture of the Statue of Liberty lifting “her lamp beside the golden door” moved me to tears as I thought of the struggles my ancestors must have endured, knowing as well that most of them never made it past their sixties, if they made it there. My father didn’t quite hit his 60th birthday before he died and, as I mentioned, I never knew my grandfather. I only saw my grandmother once that I can recall, as we lived in California and they lived in Chicago.
I also felt a deep sense of gratitude that my family was able to escape those pogroms relatively intact and they were able to resettle here in the U.S., where I was born a quarter century later. The more I read the poem, the deeper I feel that gratitude, though I’m disappointed to find things have been slipping backward in the struggle for justice and equality and in the level of welcome this country has traditionally shown (even if sometimes half-heartedly) to the ongoing flow of immigration.
I hope it moves some who read it as it moved me. This is the attitude I want my country to have toward immigration.
