Having never been particularly Christian (despite my mother’s assertion, when asked directly to which religion we belonged, that we were “Methodist”) or even particularly deist or theist--descriptions of “God” were, in my mind, anyway, virtually indistinguishable from descriptions of “Santa Claus,” right down to the beard--plus being aware of that whole First Amendment thing about our government staying the hell away from religion, I’ve found it fascinating that at least two of the Republican candidates claim to have been “called” by God to run for president.
Which, while leisurely free-associating this lazy and generally purposeless Saturday (it WAS my day off), led me to some more reinventing-of-the-wheel kinds of things, for instance why “under God” was belatedly inserted into the “Pledge of Allegiance,” and why “In God We Trust” was adopted as the nation’s “motto” three years before I was born, and about 167 years after the Constitution of the United States was ratified. “Epluribus Unum” seemed a much better fit, after all. "Out of many, one." Parse "united" and "state"--the latin describes what we, as a nation, have aspired to be infinitely more accurately than the "under God" thing.
But smarter people than I have raised these questions before, and smarter folks than all of us, wearing Supreme Court robes, have essentially dismissed them (gotta love what Justice Brennan said, in a 1984 decision about something or other: “ ...I would suggest that such practices as the designation of 'In God We Trust' as our national motto, or the references to God contained in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag can best be understood, in Dean Rostow’s apt phrase, as a form a 'ceremonial deism,' protected from Establishment Clause scrutiny chiefly because they have lost through rote repetition any significant religious content.” Basically, through sheer repetition, the phrases have become meaningless.
Certainly that was true for me in sixth grade, when Mrs. Henderson directed us every day in repetition not only of the Pledge of Allegiance, but also in something called “The American’s Creed,” which, by the way, was adopted by Congress as the “National Creed of the United States” back in 1918. (Who'd a' thought we ever had a "national creed"?)
Mrs. Henderson also encouraged us to “rat out” our classmates for various indiscretions. For instance, somebody ratted me and my friend, Steve Swords, out for only mouthing the words to the Pledge and the Creed, not actually saying them aloud. Mind you, we were NOT protesting having to recite them; we just both happened to be painfully shy, and speaking aloud didn’t come easily to us. So Mrs. Henderson made us stand up together, in front of the class, and recite the stuff aloud. Only in retrospect do I see how counter that punishment runs to the spirit of both the Pledge and the Creed.
Of course, Mrs. Henderson was also the one who made us memorize and recite for the Christmas play that year a section of the Bible (Luke 2:1-20, to be precise), and so indeed it came to pass that we stood together on stage, somberly reciting that great news or whatever to our assembled family and friends, who in some cases were as mystified by it as many of us were. Good thing for Mrs. (and, by the way, that was in the early 1970's--"Mrs." hadn't yet fallen into disfavor) Henderson that the ACLU never heard about it.
My life was not particularly disrupted by having to recite the Pledge and Creed and Bible passages aloud; nor was I particularly traumatized by it. And, in fairness, Mrs. Henderson was an enthusiastic teacher who helped us learn to love learning about other cultures, and a grammar fanatic, so almost everything I know about writing (which may not be much) can be traced back to her, and the way she shaped us.
I’m only guessing, but imagine that Mrs. Henderson was probably born sometime in the 1920s, a few years before my dad, basically was coming of age in the 1950s (after the uncomfortable interruptions of the Great Depression and World War II)--along about the time Joe McCarthy was doing HIS thing about “godless communists,” etc.
McCarthy “shaped” Mrs. Henderson, I think. Had he never existed, my sixth-grade class likely would still have learned a lot about English grammar and South and Central American food and Panamian golden frogs, but probably we would not have been forced to mindlessly recite a whole bunch of words that essentially meant nothing to us, every day of our sixth-grade lives.
“In God We Trust” was adopted as our national motto in 1956, just two years after “under God” was inserted into the “Pledge of Allegiance" (to the FLAG OF the United States of America, not the republic itself, which is interesting, but probably the subject of a whole 'nother rant).
If you listen to Republicans, our republic has been on a downhill slide ever since about the “Happy Days” era--the 1950s.
Coincidence?
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Friday, November 18, 2011
Tebowmania
As only a casual follower of the NFL--that is, I’ll read Peter King‘s “Monday Morning Quarterback” column in Sports Illustrated (online edition), skim through the scores, etc. every week--I’ve nevertheless somehow become fascinated by the whole “Tebowmania” thing out in Denver and, apparently, across the country. Tim Tebow, of course, is the Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback out of Florida who helped win the university two national championships, and who against “conventional wisdom” was surprisingly selected in the first round of the NFL draft in 2010 by the Denver Broncos.
None of this would be particularly interesting except that I’ve never seen a single player polarize so dramatically fans and experts and casual followers. Even people who never watch football games and don’t care one whit about the National Football League seem to have an opinion, seem passionately to want the guy to succeed--or fail--for reasons apparently having little to do with the game of football at all.
See, Tebow is an unabashed Christian. He doesn’t hide it, doesn’t downplay it, it’s just what he is, and he is comfortable enough, and sincere enough in his faith that he doesn’t apologize for it.
He is at once revered and reviled for that. The people who revere him call him “just a winner,” which, in fact, he seems to be (game last night bears, uh, witness to that); the people who revile him call him “Saint Timmy.”
I’ve never actually seen the guy play, and, in all honesty, am not enough of a football fan to be able to dissect and identify problems with his “throwing motion” or whatever. I sorta watched the Broncos-Jets game last night, or anyway the last six or so minutes of it--I say “sorta” because I don’t actually have TV; I was watching a Sports Illustrated graphic of it on my computer, which is a whole ‘nother story. When I tuned in after I got off work, the Jets had just punted, burying Denver back at their own 4- or 5-yard line. I looked at the stats real quick and saw that the Broncos had done virtually nothing on offense all evening, and at that point trailed 13-10.
Because of the Tebowmania thing, I found myself glued to the computer screen, watching the red line marking the line of scrimmage move inexorably from the right side of my monitor towards the left. It is admittedly weird watching a game that way, without seeing players or actual action or anything but a green cartoon football field with lines moving across it, yet it is fascinating at the same time, probably for the same reasons. When I was in high school and working every Sunday as a dishwasher at a local truck stop, I used to listen to Kansas City Chiefs games on the radio as I worked--watching the graphics last night was similar, but letting sight, rather than sound, trigger my imagination.
Anyway, that final drive of the Broncos just mesmerized me.
And, as I said earlier, I’m just a casual fan, but still read about the NFL. From what I’ve read about Tebow, his teammates believe in him. They will follow, however the season plays out for them as a team, because he is a leader.
His detractors, on the other hand, keep saying, “well, yeah, it has worked so far, but just wait--he’ll run into _____ or _____ or _____ and he’ll fall flat on his face.”
His fans, of course, want desperately for Tebow to succeed. His detractors want even more desperately for him to fail--so desperately, in fact, that even if he were to wind up winning a dozen Super Bowls, they would gloat that he had actually “failed” because he never managed to complete more than half of his passes, or whatever. He could become the winningest quarterback in NFL history, and STILL the detractors would be deriding him as “Saint Timmy.”
Which brings me to President Obama (believe it or not).
I’ve never seen so many people want so desperately for a president to “fail.”
And, as apparently is the case with Tim Tebow in an entirely different field, that desperation seems to stem less from Obama’s policies than it does from the fact that the president is black (“half,” the detractors remind us; “his mother is white, but he calls himself black, what’s up with that?” It would be the subject of a whole ‘nother post to respond to that one, although I have, in fact, responded to my dad on precisely that question).
Has any other president, or presidential candidate, been “forced” to produce his birth certificate?
Has any other president (aside from John Kennedy, who was Catholic) had to face inquisitions based on his religion?
Conservatives don’t like liberals, liberals don’t like conservatives, that is a given. But I have NEVER seen the level of utter hatred directed at a president as I have in the case of President Obama.
As with Tim Tebow, President Obama’s critics deride the equivalent of “arm motion” with the level of vitriol you might expect people to laser-direct at a confessed child-rapist. President Obama tries to work with the people “across the aisle,” and he is called “weak;” President Obama tries the other tack, “my way or the highway,” and he is called Nazi. Tim Tebow throws a pass and misses, he is called pathetic; Tebow runs it in from 20 yards out, people say he is “just not a pocket passer.”
What is heartening is that both Tebow and Obama seem to be riding their particular storms out with dignity, and even a bit of class.
I’m not a big football fan, I am not a Christian, and I am even less of a fan of politics--and particularly not of “partisan politics”--so maybe my perspective is skewed by the fact that, in my opinion, I don’t HAVE to have an opinion unless I so choose (and so research, etc.). From my more or less objective standpoint, though, many of the “haters” of Tebow and Obama nourish their hate ignorantly--that is, they won’t even admit the real reason they hate, even to themselves.
Interesting times, we live in.
None of this would be particularly interesting except that I’ve never seen a single player polarize so dramatically fans and experts and casual followers. Even people who never watch football games and don’t care one whit about the National Football League seem to have an opinion, seem passionately to want the guy to succeed--or fail--for reasons apparently having little to do with the game of football at all.
See, Tebow is an unabashed Christian. He doesn’t hide it, doesn’t downplay it, it’s just what he is, and he is comfortable enough, and sincere enough in his faith that he doesn’t apologize for it.
He is at once revered and reviled for that. The people who revere him call him “just a winner,” which, in fact, he seems to be (game last night bears, uh, witness to that); the people who revile him call him “Saint Timmy.”
I’ve never actually seen the guy play, and, in all honesty, am not enough of a football fan to be able to dissect and identify problems with his “throwing motion” or whatever. I sorta watched the Broncos-Jets game last night, or anyway the last six or so minutes of it--I say “sorta” because I don’t actually have TV; I was watching a Sports Illustrated graphic of it on my computer, which is a whole ‘nother story. When I tuned in after I got off work, the Jets had just punted, burying Denver back at their own 4- or 5-yard line. I looked at the stats real quick and saw that the Broncos had done virtually nothing on offense all evening, and at that point trailed 13-10.
Because of the Tebowmania thing, I found myself glued to the computer screen, watching the red line marking the line of scrimmage move inexorably from the right side of my monitor towards the left. It is admittedly weird watching a game that way, without seeing players or actual action or anything but a green cartoon football field with lines moving across it, yet it is fascinating at the same time, probably for the same reasons. When I was in high school and working every Sunday as a dishwasher at a local truck stop, I used to listen to Kansas City Chiefs games on the radio as I worked--watching the graphics last night was similar, but letting sight, rather than sound, trigger my imagination.
Anyway, that final drive of the Broncos just mesmerized me.
And, as I said earlier, I’m just a casual fan, but still read about the NFL. From what I’ve read about Tebow, his teammates believe in him. They will follow, however the season plays out for them as a team, because he is a leader.
His detractors, on the other hand, keep saying, “well, yeah, it has worked so far, but just wait--he’ll run into _____ or _____ or _____ and he’ll fall flat on his face.”
His fans, of course, want desperately for Tebow to succeed. His detractors want even more desperately for him to fail--so desperately, in fact, that even if he were to wind up winning a dozen Super Bowls, they would gloat that he had actually “failed” because he never managed to complete more than half of his passes, or whatever. He could become the winningest quarterback in NFL history, and STILL the detractors would be deriding him as “Saint Timmy.”
Which brings me to President Obama (believe it or not).
I’ve never seen so many people want so desperately for a president to “fail.”
And, as apparently is the case with Tim Tebow in an entirely different field, that desperation seems to stem less from Obama’s policies than it does from the fact that the president is black (“half,” the detractors remind us; “his mother is white, but he calls himself black, what’s up with that?” It would be the subject of a whole ‘nother post to respond to that one, although I have, in fact, responded to my dad on precisely that question).
Has any other president, or presidential candidate, been “forced” to produce his birth certificate?
Has any other president (aside from John Kennedy, who was Catholic) had to face inquisitions based on his religion?
Conservatives don’t like liberals, liberals don’t like conservatives, that is a given. But I have NEVER seen the level of utter hatred directed at a president as I have in the case of President Obama.
As with Tim Tebow, President Obama’s critics deride the equivalent of “arm motion” with the level of vitriol you might expect people to laser-direct at a confessed child-rapist. President Obama tries to work with the people “across the aisle,” and he is called “weak;” President Obama tries the other tack, “my way or the highway,” and he is called Nazi. Tim Tebow throws a pass and misses, he is called pathetic; Tebow runs it in from 20 yards out, people say he is “just not a pocket passer.”
What is heartening is that both Tebow and Obama seem to be riding their particular storms out with dignity, and even a bit of class.
I’m not a big football fan, I am not a Christian, and I am even less of a fan of politics--and particularly not of “partisan politics”--so maybe my perspective is skewed by the fact that, in my opinion, I don’t HAVE to have an opinion unless I so choose (and so research, etc.). From my more or less objective standpoint, though, many of the “haters” of Tebow and Obama nourish their hate ignorantly--that is, they won’t even admit the real reason they hate, even to themselves.
Interesting times, we live in.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Stuff, nonsense and charity.
The more I think about it--and I try to think about it as little as I can--the more I come to believe that when the final story of America someday is written, the final few chapters will be a lesson on the dangers of waste, redundancy, profligacy and arrogance, with a little greed, jealousy, suspicion and envy thrown in for spice.
We Americans like to think of ourselves as “generous,” and to a degree we are--individually we give to churches and charities and sometimes even panhandlers at intersections; as a country we scatter money all around the world. When we’re in the mood, of course.
On my grandparents’ old homestead there is a pear tree that has stood in the same corner of the yard for at least as long as I’ve been alive, if memory serves. My grandparents died in the late 1990s, in their mid-to-late 90s, and my sister wound up buying their house and the four or five acres immediately surrounding it (another “carve-out”). To get back to the pear tree, it still bears fruit, some years lots of it, but generally the pears just fall to the ground and rot there, given that nobody wants to go to the trouble of picking them up and preserving them, etc.
Well, almost nobody. A couple of years ago some Amish folk who live nearby stopped and asked my sister if they could pick up the pears. No, she said, she was going to use them. Of course she wasn’t--she just didn’t want to give the Amish folks “something for nothing.” Somehow it is “better,” in her eyes, that the pears just rot away on the ground, than to “give them away” to somebody who might actually get some use out of them.
I can’t take any moral high ground, here. In one corner of my yard stands an empty grain storage bin. For no particularly discernible reason, the former owner of the farm this house used to be a part of decided when determining the boundaries of the carve-out that the bin needed to go with the house, whether the buyer of the house and the 1.6 acres immediately surrounding it was going to be doing any farming or not. A couple of people have inquired about buying it, but when I name the price suggested by an “experienced” farmer my dad knows, they back off.
What I SHOULD do is just give the structure to the first person who is willing to haul it off--I have NO use for it, now or in the conceivable future, and it’s not like I would be “losing” something in terms of actual cost--it just came with the property. If I can’t use it, I should just give it to someone who can.
Of course, if I did that, “everybody” would be talking about how stupid or gullible or naïve I was, to give something away that I might (in some alternate universe; it’s a 5000-bushel bin, virtually obsolete when most people want bins three times that size) get a price for.
It all comes down to ego, I suppose, plus deep-seated fear of “being taken advantage of.”
So the bin stands empty.
In the corner of the yard opposite, or actually catercorner--”catty-corner“--from the bin I have two black walnut trees, one of them a truly magnificent specimen whose branches hang heavy with nuts every year (the other, not so much). I WISH some of my Amish neighbors, or anybody else, would happen by and offer to harvest them--certainly I never will, and I LOVE black walnuts, it’s just too difficult and time-consuming to get at the meat of them. More waste, although I suppose in this particular case it has less to do with ego or anything else I named, above, than it has to do with simple laziness on my part.
Wholly different, yet the same, situation: A bunch of years ago I helped my brother and his wife move a 24-foot truckload of “stuff” from two storage facilities and a basement to another storage facility nearer to where they were going to be moving. Among many other things, what we boxed up and packed into the truck were hundreds of toys their children had outgrown. The toys are probably still in those same boxes, but in another storage facility a thousand miles away since my brother and his family were uprooted yet again by work.
There are probably a lot of kids in this country who could have gotten a lot of joy out of those outgrown and likely now forever packed-away toys. (Yo! Bro!? Ever hear of “Toys for Tots?” It makes the news every Christmas.)
Now multiply me and my sister and brother by thousands, or millions, and you might get some idea of unnecessary waste.
Funny thing is, giving away stuff that you no longer need is not particularly painful, aside from maybe “missing” just having it around.
In the process of moving up here almost three years ago, I was forced by circumstances and finances to take a very cold look at my possessions and decide what to move, what to chuck aside. For instance, I had a veritable library of books still packed neatly in the same boxes I’d packed them in, last time I moved--I had never even unboxed them. Without renting a moving van, which I couldn’t afford, I had no way to move them. So I hauled them all down to the doorstep of a woman running a used-book store. I got nothing for them, of course (the store wasn’t even open when I dropped them off), but when I stopped by to say goodbye to the lady, whose name was Michelle, a week or two later, she told me that she had already sold several of them. “Maybe they’ll pay the store’s light bill for the next couple of months,” I said--and I really hoped they would. Michelle was managing the business on a serious shoe-string.
Yeah, I gave Michelle “something for nothing.” But those books had been stored for seven years by that point, doing nobody any good at all. How much did it really hurt me to give them away? And if it helped her keep her bookstore open a little longer . . . ?
Gave my admittedly worn bedroom set to a local women’s shelter. I haven’t gotten around to missing it, but know that other people are getting good use out of it.
Gave a whole huge tub-full (at least 200) of DVD movies to a friend who was then unemployed and without cable or satellite TV, and know that he filled a lot of otherwise empty hours with them before he, in turn, gave them to the women’s shelter.
A year or so ago I sent a barely-out-of-the-box super-zoom digital camera that I never could “bond” with to a camera-less friend, a new mother, a thousand miles away. I wasn’t using it, never would use it--I was happy to get it out of here, in fact. She has taken thousands of pictures of her now 1-year-old with it.
None of this was about “charity.” It was all about utility, really. If you own something but have no use for it, give it the hell away to somebody who CAN put it to use, who CAN use it to somehow improve their own lives, if only in a very small way. How hard is that?
We Americans like to think of ourselves as “generous,” and to a degree we are--individually we give to churches and charities and sometimes even panhandlers at intersections; as a country we scatter money all around the world. When we’re in the mood, of course.
On my grandparents’ old homestead there is a pear tree that has stood in the same corner of the yard for at least as long as I’ve been alive, if memory serves. My grandparents died in the late 1990s, in their mid-to-late 90s, and my sister wound up buying their house and the four or five acres immediately surrounding it (another “carve-out”). To get back to the pear tree, it still bears fruit, some years lots of it, but generally the pears just fall to the ground and rot there, given that nobody wants to go to the trouble of picking them up and preserving them, etc.
Well, almost nobody. A couple of years ago some Amish folk who live nearby stopped and asked my sister if they could pick up the pears. No, she said, she was going to use them. Of course she wasn’t--she just didn’t want to give the Amish folks “something for nothing.” Somehow it is “better,” in her eyes, that the pears just rot away on the ground, than to “give them away” to somebody who might actually get some use out of them.
I can’t take any moral high ground, here. In one corner of my yard stands an empty grain storage bin. For no particularly discernible reason, the former owner of the farm this house used to be a part of decided when determining the boundaries of the carve-out that the bin needed to go with the house, whether the buyer of the house and the 1.6 acres immediately surrounding it was going to be doing any farming or not. A couple of people have inquired about buying it, but when I name the price suggested by an “experienced” farmer my dad knows, they back off.
What I SHOULD do is just give the structure to the first person who is willing to haul it off--I have NO use for it, now or in the conceivable future, and it’s not like I would be “losing” something in terms of actual cost--it just came with the property. If I can’t use it, I should just give it to someone who can.
Of course, if I did that, “everybody” would be talking about how stupid or gullible or naïve I was, to give something away that I might (in some alternate universe; it’s a 5000-bushel bin, virtually obsolete when most people want bins three times that size) get a price for.
It all comes down to ego, I suppose, plus deep-seated fear of “being taken advantage of.”
So the bin stands empty.
In the corner of the yard opposite, or actually catercorner--”catty-corner“--from the bin I have two black walnut trees, one of them a truly magnificent specimen whose branches hang heavy with nuts every year (the other, not so much). I WISH some of my Amish neighbors, or anybody else, would happen by and offer to harvest them--certainly I never will, and I LOVE black walnuts, it’s just too difficult and time-consuming to get at the meat of them. More waste, although I suppose in this particular case it has less to do with ego or anything else I named, above, than it has to do with simple laziness on my part.
Wholly different, yet the same, situation: A bunch of years ago I helped my brother and his wife move a 24-foot truckload of “stuff” from two storage facilities and a basement to another storage facility nearer to where they were going to be moving. Among many other things, what we boxed up and packed into the truck were hundreds of toys their children had outgrown. The toys are probably still in those same boxes, but in another storage facility a thousand miles away since my brother and his family were uprooted yet again by work.
There are probably a lot of kids in this country who could have gotten a lot of joy out of those outgrown and likely now forever packed-away toys. (Yo! Bro!? Ever hear of “Toys for Tots?” It makes the news every Christmas.)
Now multiply me and my sister and brother by thousands, or millions, and you might get some idea of unnecessary waste.
Funny thing is, giving away stuff that you no longer need is not particularly painful, aside from maybe “missing” just having it around.
In the process of moving up here almost three years ago, I was forced by circumstances and finances to take a very cold look at my possessions and decide what to move, what to chuck aside. For instance, I had a veritable library of books still packed neatly in the same boxes I’d packed them in, last time I moved--I had never even unboxed them. Without renting a moving van, which I couldn’t afford, I had no way to move them. So I hauled them all down to the doorstep of a woman running a used-book store. I got nothing for them, of course (the store wasn’t even open when I dropped them off), but when I stopped by to say goodbye to the lady, whose name was Michelle, a week or two later, she told me that she had already sold several of them. “Maybe they’ll pay the store’s light bill for the next couple of months,” I said--and I really hoped they would. Michelle was managing the business on a serious shoe-string.
Yeah, I gave Michelle “something for nothing.” But those books had been stored for seven years by that point, doing nobody any good at all. How much did it really hurt me to give them away? And if it helped her keep her bookstore open a little longer . . . ?
Gave my admittedly worn bedroom set to a local women’s shelter. I haven’t gotten around to missing it, but know that other people are getting good use out of it.
Gave a whole huge tub-full (at least 200) of DVD movies to a friend who was then unemployed and without cable or satellite TV, and know that he filled a lot of otherwise empty hours with them before he, in turn, gave them to the women’s shelter.
A year or so ago I sent a barely-out-of-the-box super-zoom digital camera that I never could “bond” with to a camera-less friend, a new mother, a thousand miles away. I wasn’t using it, never would use it--I was happy to get it out of here, in fact. She has taken thousands of pictures of her now 1-year-old with it.
None of this was about “charity.” It was all about utility, really. If you own something but have no use for it, give it the hell away to somebody who CAN put it to use, who CAN use it to somehow improve their own lives, if only in a very small way. How hard is that?
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Compartments
Was watching yesterday the latest episode or installment or development in the Jerry Sandusky/Penn State/child-rape saga/reality TV segment, in which the charming Mr. Sandusky allowed himself to be interviewed and admitted that, yes, he would get into showers with kids after “workouts,” and, yes, he would touch their legs sometimes, but it was all just “horsing around,” nothing weird or perverted at all about a middle-aged guy engaging in that kind of behavior with pre-teen boys. “Innocent until proven guilty,” yes, I’m a believer in that. But when a now-late-middle-aged guy talks about romping naked in showers with 10-year-olds, I think that whole “benefit-of-the-doubt” thing kinda takes flight right out the window.
Jerry, Coach, whatever: Middle-aged guys do NOT shower with boys. Do the words “common sense” mean anything at all to you? Didn’t think so.
I wonder why Mr. Sandusky has not done “a Hemingway”--sat down, rested his forehead on the barrel(s) of a shotgun, and pulled the trigger.
A week or so ago, when the Sandusky/Penn State/etc. story broke, I used an anecdote about an unnamed relative and her reported treatment of her kids to illustrate the point that we never really know how we’re going to react in any given situation, no matter what we might like to imagine.
Anyway, after absorbing all that, I went to my current social media infatuation for a little respite from the Sandusky chaos, and found this post from the aforementioned relative‘s husband: i believe that our FC (foster care) lives are over, bull sh!t is gone no wonder their is a shortage....oh and by the way we are child abusers here so please keep your kids away lol.
I have no real idea what is going on up there, an hour’s drive away, but surmise that it is “really bad,” because in a later post the relative-in-law expresses hope that they won’t lose their jobs or kids (in that order). He also mentions that they may need “character witnesses.”
Hope they don’t ask ME to fill that position, not because of anything I “know” about them, but rather, because there is so much I DON’T know. I’m not around them all that much, and even if the relative in question is my “oldest and most favoritest,” I know nothing about what goes on in their house.
We all know so little about even those friends and family and coworkers, etc., whom we think we know so well.
It used to bug me, in my own case, that I seemed to be such a different person in each compartment of my life--home, family, work, friends, etc.--and in fact that if I could somehow meld or combine all those different “me’s” into one “whole” being, one Robert, only then would I truly begin to make my life mean whatever it was supposed to.
Years ago I read a very long book called “The Far Pavilions.” In it at one point, the main character, Ashton, was trying to explain the Christian Trinity to a Muslim friend who asked him how three distinct beings could be simultaneously one. Ash took a pan, placed three separate drops of water in it, pointing out each one individually to his friend. Then he tilted the pan so that the drops all ran together, forming one large drop. His friend nodded understanding.
In a way we are all like those drops of water run together: Our friends see one “drop,” our coworkers another, our family still another. There may be other “drops” unseen by others, as in my case there has always been the “writer” me or the “photographer” me or the “medical transcriptionist” (or whatever job I happened to be doing at the time) me, as well as another “me” or two that I will not describe here. But it is only a matter of focus, I suppose: Anyone around us COULD see those other water drops, if they looked, or, I suppose, if we allowed them to be seen.
At any given time, the people we encounter or spend most time with “need” only one specific “drop” of ourselves, and that’s the one we allow to be visible. The other drops are still there, of course, all wrapped up, however invisibly, in the “package” that we show our immediate world.
When a Jerry Sandusky’s (alleged) invisible “drops” come into view, or those of my unnamed “child-abuser” relative, people around them question themselves, wondering how they could have missed what must have been glaringly obvious “signs” or whatever. In a way, though, we are necessarily all social “chameleons,” subtly or dramatically altering our “appearance” so as to blend into our environment. This is not as insidious as it may sound. It’s more like picking a “costume” for a job interview versus one for a party or a camping trip, and it’s something we all do, every day of our lives, to one degree or another.
Jerry, Coach, whatever: Middle-aged guys do NOT shower with boys. Do the words “common sense” mean anything at all to you? Didn’t think so.
I wonder why Mr. Sandusky has not done “a Hemingway”--sat down, rested his forehead on the barrel(s) of a shotgun, and pulled the trigger.
A week or so ago, when the Sandusky/Penn State/etc. story broke, I used an anecdote about an unnamed relative and her reported treatment of her kids to illustrate the point that we never really know how we’re going to react in any given situation, no matter what we might like to imagine.
Anyway, after absorbing all that, I went to my current social media infatuation for a little respite from the Sandusky chaos, and found this post from the aforementioned relative‘s husband: i believe that our FC (foster care) lives are over, bull sh!t is gone no wonder their is a shortage....oh and by the way we are child abusers here so please keep your kids away lol.
I have no real idea what is going on up there, an hour’s drive away, but surmise that it is “really bad,” because in a later post the relative-in-law expresses hope that they won’t lose their jobs or kids (in that order). He also mentions that they may need “character witnesses.”
Hope they don’t ask ME to fill that position, not because of anything I “know” about them, but rather, because there is so much I DON’T know. I’m not around them all that much, and even if the relative in question is my “oldest and most favoritest,” I know nothing about what goes on in their house.
We all know so little about even those friends and family and coworkers, etc., whom we think we know so well.
It used to bug me, in my own case, that I seemed to be such a different person in each compartment of my life--home, family, work, friends, etc.--and in fact that if I could somehow meld or combine all those different “me’s” into one “whole” being, one Robert, only then would I truly begin to make my life mean whatever it was supposed to.
Years ago I read a very long book called “The Far Pavilions.” In it at one point, the main character, Ashton, was trying to explain the Christian Trinity to a Muslim friend who asked him how three distinct beings could be simultaneously one. Ash took a pan, placed three separate drops of water in it, pointing out each one individually to his friend. Then he tilted the pan so that the drops all ran together, forming one large drop. His friend nodded understanding.
In a way we are all like those drops of water run together: Our friends see one “drop,” our coworkers another, our family still another. There may be other “drops” unseen by others, as in my case there has always been the “writer” me or the “photographer” me or the “medical transcriptionist” (or whatever job I happened to be doing at the time) me, as well as another “me” or two that I will not describe here. But it is only a matter of focus, I suppose: Anyone around us COULD see those other water drops, if they looked, or, I suppose, if we allowed them to be seen.
At any given time, the people we encounter or spend most time with “need” only one specific “drop” of ourselves, and that’s the one we allow to be visible. The other drops are still there, of course, all wrapped up, however invisibly, in the “package” that we show our immediate world.
When a Jerry Sandusky’s (alleged) invisible “drops” come into view, or those of my unnamed “child-abuser” relative, people around them question themselves, wondering how they could have missed what must have been glaringly obvious “signs” or whatever. In a way, though, we are necessarily all social “chameleons,” subtly or dramatically altering our “appearance” so as to blend into our environment. This is not as insidious as it may sound. It’s more like picking a “costume” for a job interview versus one for a party or a camping trip, and it’s something we all do, every day of our lives, to one degree or another.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Quilting Bee
Yesterday was just one of those days, work-wise . . . Sundays tend to go very good or very bad, seldom anywhere in any kind of middle ground. Yesterday ran pretty much the gamut.
Weekends in hospitals aren’t the same as Monday-through-Friday. There are generally no scheduled surgeries or admissions for anything else, plus sometimes there are moonlighting doctors covering various services, etc. A transcriptionist therefore never knows what to expect when it comes to work on weekends.
You can square or cube or otherwise factor that, um, factor when you’re working for a company serving accounts all over the country.
My current primary accounts are in/on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. My secondaries are in Ohio (I think; sometimes it’s hard to tell). Yesterday I got a smattering from Cape Cod, a handful or a bit more from Ohio, two or three reports out of Pennsylvania (an account I’d never even heard of), and, I think, one from one Albert Einstein or another.
Looking at it from the outside, you probably would wonder why that makes any difference at all in my workday--medical is medical, it’s all the same, right?
Well, yes and no.
Number one, a doctor or other dictator in Cape Cod speaks with a different accent than, say, a doctor in San Antonio or even in Minneapolis or Pittsburgh.
Number two, something as seemingly simple as place or city names can baffle you (and “hurt” your production. Get bored sometime and pull out an Atlas, or look one up online. Look at a map of Massachusetts and all the place/city names there, then do the same for, say, San Antonio, Texas or Minneapolis, MN. “Medical” doesn’t exist in a vacuum, whether it believes it does or not. “Medical” is about people, first and proverbially foremost, or anyway it ought to be, and people come from everywhere. I once had a writing teacher (believe it or not) who was positively fascinated by the impact of “place” on a person/character, how it could shape them; in near 30-year retrospect, I think she was right on at least two or three levels.
Number three . . . Well, never mind--I never was good at numbers.
Somehow I managed to quilt together a solid, and even productive 8-hour workday from all of those patches, although, frankly, it sucked. I would rather get nothing but reports from my primary accounts, my work-place “home.” Yes, I have a tendency to settle into a “comfort zone,” don’t care much for bouncing all around the landscape.
There seems to be a whole lot of “quilting” going on, these days. My grandmother and one of my favorite aunts would approve, having been competitive quilters for much of their lives--and, to paraphrase Maxine Hong Kingston, that I can see their lives branching into my own, they do offer me some ancestral help.
I have a friend (to whom I used to be married, oddly enough), who is now a stay-at-home mom of a 1-year-old, struggling desperately to find some income to add to what the father of their child brings in. She is a writer, a pretty good one, and is trying to quilt together enough income sources, however meager they might each individually be, to give her and her little family a bit of warmth, comfort and hope.
I know other people who are trying to quilt together patches consisting of multiple part-time jobs into a “total” that will sustain them, but even that is tough when none of the part-time jobs will give them anything close to a consistent schedule.
This is not a “new” situation--there’s nothing new under the sun, after all. Heck, my father part-time farmed and worked full time at construction for a while, and at John Deere for a long time, just to provide for us and, hopefully, give us a leg up on our lives.
A lot of us are scrambling now.
“Job security” is pretty much a thing of the past--or a sliver of the past.
So now we go back to quilting.
Weekends in hospitals aren’t the same as Monday-through-Friday. There are generally no scheduled surgeries or admissions for anything else, plus sometimes there are moonlighting doctors covering various services, etc. A transcriptionist therefore never knows what to expect when it comes to work on weekends.
You can square or cube or otherwise factor that, um, factor when you’re working for a company serving accounts all over the country.
My current primary accounts are in/on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. My secondaries are in Ohio (I think; sometimes it’s hard to tell). Yesterday I got a smattering from Cape Cod, a handful or a bit more from Ohio, two or three reports out of Pennsylvania (an account I’d never even heard of), and, I think, one from one Albert Einstein or another.
Looking at it from the outside, you probably would wonder why that makes any difference at all in my workday--medical is medical, it’s all the same, right?
Well, yes and no.
Number one, a doctor or other dictator in Cape Cod speaks with a different accent than, say, a doctor in San Antonio or even in Minneapolis or Pittsburgh.
Number two, something as seemingly simple as place or city names can baffle you (and “hurt” your production. Get bored sometime and pull out an Atlas, or look one up online. Look at a map of Massachusetts and all the place/city names there, then do the same for, say, San Antonio, Texas or Minneapolis, MN. “Medical” doesn’t exist in a vacuum, whether it believes it does or not. “Medical” is about people, first and proverbially foremost, or anyway it ought to be, and people come from everywhere. I once had a writing teacher (believe it or not) who was positively fascinated by the impact of “place” on a person/character, how it could shape them; in near 30-year retrospect, I think she was right on at least two or three levels.
Number three . . . Well, never mind--I never was good at numbers.
Somehow I managed to quilt together a solid, and even productive 8-hour workday from all of those patches, although, frankly, it sucked. I would rather get nothing but reports from my primary accounts, my work-place “home.” Yes, I have a tendency to settle into a “comfort zone,” don’t care much for bouncing all around the landscape.
There seems to be a whole lot of “quilting” going on, these days. My grandmother and one of my favorite aunts would approve, having been competitive quilters for much of their lives--and, to paraphrase Maxine Hong Kingston, that I can see their lives branching into my own, they do offer me some ancestral help.
I have a friend (to whom I used to be married, oddly enough), who is now a stay-at-home mom of a 1-year-old, struggling desperately to find some income to add to what the father of their child brings in. She is a writer, a pretty good one, and is trying to quilt together enough income sources, however meager they might each individually be, to give her and her little family a bit of warmth, comfort and hope.
I know other people who are trying to quilt together patches consisting of multiple part-time jobs into a “total” that will sustain them, but even that is tough when none of the part-time jobs will give them anything close to a consistent schedule.
This is not a “new” situation--there’s nothing new under the sun, after all. Heck, my father part-time farmed and worked full time at construction for a while, and at John Deere for a long time, just to provide for us and, hopefully, give us a leg up on our lives.
A lot of us are scrambling now.
“Job security” is pretty much a thing of the past--or a sliver of the past.
So now we go back to quilting.
Monday, November 14, 2011
Traveling
When I was a kid on a northwest Missouri farm, eight miles out of town, sometimes I would see ads for pen pals from around the world and think that would be the coolest thing ever, to exchange letters with someone thousands of miles away, in a place you would likely never visit. For whatever reason I never chased that particular dream--probably I just got distracted, forgot about it, thought about it again, forgot about it again, got involved with something else. As John Lennon said, “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.”
A whole bunch of years later, more or less on a whim, I plugged one of those omnipresent AOL disks into my computer and went online, went into “chat” and was dropped into one of those generic chat rooms, and found myself talking to someone in England, another somebody from Germany, other people from all kinds of other places, and it just fascinated the hell out of me--and I was hooked, although I did wear out, when it came to “chat,” within just a couple of years (after it had taken me, physically, to Louisville and Memphis and New Orleans and New York City, among other places not so well known, like Natchez, Mississippi).
A decade or so after that, I found Flickr just a month or so after I had acquired my first digital camera. Pictures I posted there led me to friendships with people from Romania (my two “Romanian Lauras”), Sweden, England, Thailand, Australia, the Philippines, Japan, Canada, Montana . . . All over the place. (One of the proudest moments in my life came when one of the Romanian Lauras, an artist and a good one, told me that my photographs had inspired her to take up photography. She is in Italy now, studying photography at a school there.)
I could never have dreamed all that up, even as a pen-pal-dreaming kid.
For almost 10 years, I’ve been working at home as a medical transcriptionist for a Tennessee-based company. I’ve had supervisors from New York, Mississippi, Georgia and Pennsylvania, co-workers from nearly all over the country (as well as India, he says, grumpily).
Turns out the whole “pen-pal” thing was not a dream put aside, but merely a dream deferred.
It’s funny how life works sometimes, and funny how the world can shrink and expand, all at the same time.
Perhaps paradoxically, or maybe only contrarily, I’ve never had any particular desire to travel. In my distant youth I was stationed in Germany, saw a very little bit of that and loved it, and also got to visit Paris (France, not Missouri, although I’ve been through the latter as well). I’ve lived briefly in Kentucky, briefly in Indiana, for seven years in Montana, about the same in Mississippi, thought for a while about moving to Albuquerque, New Mexico, Knoxville, Tennessee, and Weatherford, Texas. I’ve admired photographs from all over the world, wondered at the sheer beauty and grandeur and desolation and squalor and everything in between, but nevertheless remain quite content to stay where I am, to explore and photograph my own back yard and the occasional wonders within it.
My neighbor a mile or so to the south, who has lived in this little corner of Gentry County, Missouri, once told me, when I asked if he ever took a vacation (the guy works 12-16 or more hours a day on his farm; “When you love your job,” he once told me, “You never have to work a day in your life”), he just said, “There’s no place I’d rather go.” Gotta respect, maybe even envy that.
Just another rambling day, here in paradise.
A whole bunch of years later, more or less on a whim, I plugged one of those omnipresent AOL disks into my computer and went online, went into “chat” and was dropped into one of those generic chat rooms, and found myself talking to someone in England, another somebody from Germany, other people from all kinds of other places, and it just fascinated the hell out of me--and I was hooked, although I did wear out, when it came to “chat,” within just a couple of years (after it had taken me, physically, to Louisville and Memphis and New Orleans and New York City, among other places not so well known, like Natchez, Mississippi).
A decade or so after that, I found Flickr just a month or so after I had acquired my first digital camera. Pictures I posted there led me to friendships with people from Romania (my two “Romanian Lauras”), Sweden, England, Thailand, Australia, the Philippines, Japan, Canada, Montana . . . All over the place. (One of the proudest moments in my life came when one of the Romanian Lauras, an artist and a good one, told me that my photographs had inspired her to take up photography. She is in Italy now, studying photography at a school there.)
I could never have dreamed all that up, even as a pen-pal-dreaming kid.
For almost 10 years, I’ve been working at home as a medical transcriptionist for a Tennessee-based company. I’ve had supervisors from New York, Mississippi, Georgia and Pennsylvania, co-workers from nearly all over the country (as well as India, he says, grumpily).
Turns out the whole “pen-pal” thing was not a dream put aside, but merely a dream deferred.
It’s funny how life works sometimes, and funny how the world can shrink and expand, all at the same time.
Perhaps paradoxically, or maybe only contrarily, I’ve never had any particular desire to travel. In my distant youth I was stationed in Germany, saw a very little bit of that and loved it, and also got to visit Paris (France, not Missouri, although I’ve been through the latter as well). I’ve lived briefly in Kentucky, briefly in Indiana, for seven years in Montana, about the same in Mississippi, thought for a while about moving to Albuquerque, New Mexico, Knoxville, Tennessee, and Weatherford, Texas. I’ve admired photographs from all over the world, wondered at the sheer beauty and grandeur and desolation and squalor and everything in between, but nevertheless remain quite content to stay where I am, to explore and photograph my own back yard and the occasional wonders within it.
My neighbor a mile or so to the south, who has lived in this little corner of Gentry County, Missouri, once told me, when I asked if he ever took a vacation (the guy works 12-16 or more hours a day on his farm; “When you love your job,” he once told me, “You never have to work a day in your life”), he just said, “There’s no place I’d rather go.” Gotta respect, maybe even envy that.
Just another rambling day, here in paradise.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Nothing like watching old movies . . . .
Watched again the other day an old movie, “Independence Day.” Okay, it’s not THAT old, but it has been around for a while. Anyway, there is one scene in it where the president of the United States gets locked into an alien’s mind and sees what the aliens have in mind for the human population of the planet. “Extermination,” he says, when he is finally freed from the alien’s telepathic grip.
Upon revisiting that movie scene, it dawned on me why listening to my company’s quarterly report the other day had so shaken me.
Our “bosses” have in mind for us, the American medical transcriptionists and editors who do the work the company sells and greatly profits from, exactly the same plan that the aliens in “Independence Day” had for human beings: Extermination.
That is not isolation paranoia-borne hyperbole or exaggeration, it is simply fact.
The more work they can send overseas, the better their profit margin. They were positively gleeful over the fact that they’ve managed to offshore 46%--up from 44%!--of transcription in the last quarter, and the picture only gets brighter (for them)!
They were equally happy that 77% of dictation now goes through speech-recognition programs before it gets to a transcriptionist. This makes them happy because they pay us much less, and in fact, unfairly less, for lines we edit than for those we transcribe. Anything that makes us, the workers, poorer, makes them richer--of COURSE they’re happy about that.
There was also some mention of a 19-million-dollar tax windfall of some sort or another, no specifics were provided although I suppose they are all still bowing and praying to Mr. Bush for that. Astonishingly, they didn’t use that tax windfall to enhance or create American jobs. Go figure.
I will never name the company for which I work, for a variety of reasons, some of them pretty obvious, and also because it doesn’t matter. The same scenario has been playing out in a lot of companies, a lot of industries, over a whole lot of years. If it hadn’t been, there would be no “Occupy Wall Street” movement--there wouldn’t have to be.
What I still have not figured out is what the corporate and political honchos, the 1%, think the result of all this will be. To me, it looks like, at some point, the misery will have to begin to trickle UP. Our economy is about 75% consumer-driven, last time I heard. What happens when you eliminate consumers by eliminating anything above a subsistence wage? What happens to the healthcare system (10% of the economy, I think I’ve heard), for instance, when only 1% of the people can afford healthcare?
I don’t know, I honestly don’t.
When I figure out some way to prevent what looks increasingly to me like the impending destruction of America, and not just economically, I’ll happily post it. Unfortunately, I’m just not that smart, so I suspect I’ll never have to write such a post.
Cheers!
Upon revisiting that movie scene, it dawned on me why listening to my company’s quarterly report the other day had so shaken me.
Our “bosses” have in mind for us, the American medical transcriptionists and editors who do the work the company sells and greatly profits from, exactly the same plan that the aliens in “Independence Day” had for human beings: Extermination.
That is not isolation paranoia-borne hyperbole or exaggeration, it is simply fact.
The more work they can send overseas, the better their profit margin. They were positively gleeful over the fact that they’ve managed to offshore 46%--up from 44%!--of transcription in the last quarter, and the picture only gets brighter (for them)!
They were equally happy that 77% of dictation now goes through speech-recognition programs before it gets to a transcriptionist. This makes them happy because they pay us much less, and in fact, unfairly less, for lines we edit than for those we transcribe. Anything that makes us, the workers, poorer, makes them richer--of COURSE they’re happy about that.
There was also some mention of a 19-million-dollar tax windfall of some sort or another, no specifics were provided although I suppose they are all still bowing and praying to Mr. Bush for that. Astonishingly, they didn’t use that tax windfall to enhance or create American jobs. Go figure.
I will never name the company for which I work, for a variety of reasons, some of them pretty obvious, and also because it doesn’t matter. The same scenario has been playing out in a lot of companies, a lot of industries, over a whole lot of years. If it hadn’t been, there would be no “Occupy Wall Street” movement--there wouldn’t have to be.
What I still have not figured out is what the corporate and political honchos, the 1%, think the result of all this will be. To me, it looks like, at some point, the misery will have to begin to trickle UP. Our economy is about 75% consumer-driven, last time I heard. What happens when you eliminate consumers by eliminating anything above a subsistence wage? What happens to the healthcare system (10% of the economy, I think I’ve heard), for instance, when only 1% of the people can afford healthcare?
I don’t know, I honestly don’t.
When I figure out some way to prevent what looks increasingly to me like the impending destruction of America, and not just economically, I’ll happily post it. Unfortunately, I’m just not that smart, so I suspect I’ll never have to write such a post.
Cheers!
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