An alien, never having experienced earth as you know it, walked into our world out of a Brazilian jungle wearing only a loin cloth and carrying some wood.
He took a look at some of our magic – lighters, cell phones and such, turned around and walked right back into the jungle to be seen no more.
America represented stability in the world, because our institutions were stable, our rule of law was stable, and our separation of powers was able to mute extremists. I believe that is how America provided the safest haven for secure investment and fertile ground for prosperity.
Now with our institutions, the rule of law, the separation of powers being dismantled and a tariff wars kicker, I wonder if the coming pain will root in time for a sleepy self-governing people, charged with running this show, to wake up and save their primacy?
The Founders, feared authoritarian government above all else, thus constructed a firewall against any possibility of an authoritarian government. Amongst those few who still know, it was the separation of powers splitting power between the three legs of a stool, that gave government balance and prohibited anyone leg from attaining absolute power over the people.
“If you got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will fallow,” a forecast that hung in the Nixon White House now cemented in a Congress where their leg of the stool has mortified into water fetching lackies.
Trump now goes for the second leg that bars absolute control.
Today, Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance condemned the judiciary, attacking their legitimacy, the final pillar of the separation of power’s protection against an authoritarian.
As the Vice-President said, “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” While Musk added, judges who oppose him should be impeached.
When the people finally get it, don’t expect Democrats to defend you. As Hakeem Jefferies, the House Minority Leader suggests, we need to wait for the pitches we can hit or Martin, the Democratic Parties new leader, who says we need to find more billionaires to keep up with the Republicans.
This is WAR, and opposition has yet to find a leader to enter the field of battle believing that The People can govern for themselves.
We never talk about our poo, do we? It is the goofiest of all human taboos. No other species on earth finds pooing the slightest concern or give it any afterthought. So absurd is the taboo that it is the first bit of humor every child picks up on. Who doesn’t remember the childhood line “Who smelt it delt it?”
Nothing like poo announces our animal nature. Yes, we poo too, but behind closed doors, stalls or bushes, as if we didn’t really do it.
The first time I had to raise my hand in third grade had nothing to do with a teacher’s question. I actually had to raise it 30 minutes earlier than I did, but didn’t, and I regret the memory to this day some 68 years later. In fact, if childhood relevance carried any weight in adulthood, I would say that I regret it more than any other single self-inflicted event in my life.
The quiet rumbles in my lower stomach started while we were saying the Pledge of Allegiance but being agonizingly shy and fearful of any attention decided the discomfort was minor, gave it little thought. Ten minutes later my view had changed somewhat, the early rumbles had become a bit gassy, but if I softly eased it out and looked busy and innocent, I could escape detection. Another ten minutes, I was out of gas, one leg here, move another there, put my weight on the right butt, then on the left, gave only seconds worth of relief. Another 15 minutes and I was in serious trouble. That is when my butt said, “Raise your hand or poop right here.”
I did not raise my hand, I launched it as high as I could stretch. The teacher looked at my sudden appearance like one would a stranger, not at all sure that she recognized me, confused and busy with more important matters she said, “not now.” Like stretching rubber, my arm went to unnatural heights. She took a second look, whatever sub-human quality she saw in my eyes gave me a reprieve. I told her, and announced to all that I, me, the invisible one, needed to go to the bathroom. She said, “Can’t you wait,” and then thought better of it, “OK go.”
I had so wanted to make it. With my first step into the hall, I knew it was now a race, but if I moved too quickly, I would not hold. Only thirty feet left, now twenty, at the ten mark it was over, out it came. Like a green horn just off the saddle, I waddled the last few feet to the boy’s room. It still would have been OK, no one was in the halls, but as I threw open the restroom door there stood Jerry Egerton, the toughest, nastiest kid on the planet.
I did not hear his hackling end even after the bathroom door closed behind him. I cleaned up pretty well and I covered up my underwear with a mountain of paper towels at the very bottom of the trash can, but the damage was done.
The humiliation should have been crushing, but as it turned out, only Jerry Egerton had been humored because everyone hated the bully as much as I did. If truth be told no one was that far removed from a poo in the pants at some point, and others simply thought, “Thank God that wasn’t me.” Within a couple of days, Jerry’s finger-pointing shoutouts of “poo boy” got old and ended. By week’s end no one remembered, no one but me, who still winces at the ancient memory of my final delicate waddling steps.
She broiled children’s brains over the fiery pits of Hell. It was the mid-1950s when Holy Sister Mary Margaret got her chance to imprint on the supple believing minds of six- and seven-year-olds.
She would be dead now, and the children of the world are better off for it. Should I think her still alive, I would have a moral duty to seek her out, rip out her tongue and stitch her lips closed forever. In the 1950’s, she and her ilk could cause serious damage to any child, not yet aware that some grownups grew down instead.
Back then and sometimes even now, religious instruction was not so much faith as it was fact. It was a fact that the “everlasting fires of Hell,” as Sister Mary Margaret put it, “was where your flesh would be consumed by fire, yet be continually reborn so that you would be in agony for all eternity.” God’s desire as she saw it, was to get you to Heaven through your fear of Hell.
According to the good sister talking to children, the great joy of Heaven was not to be found in mounds of candy bars, cookies, cakes, and endless feature cartoons, but the ability to “look upon the face of God.” To a six-year-old, my age at the time, I simply wondered how someone could possibly be so pretty, as to beat out a Root Beer Float.
Holy Sister Mary Margaret had much to offer, not the least of which was her informing us that it was not necessary to actually commit a sin in order to be guilty of the sin. All you had to do was think of a sin and you were equally guilty. This was very discouraging, my being guilty on so many layers of sin that I had no hope of escaping the fiery pits.
It was the stuff that put thinking and believing believers into insane asylums as they aged. At six, I had not yet come to realize that such nuns torturing children with their unforgiving, cruel nature of God should be imprisoned, if not themselves thrown into that everlasting roaster.
Holy Sister Mary Margaret understood that our minds were too young to comprehend such horror. To remedy this unacceptable situation, she would tell us stories that were sure to reach into our imaginations with lasting effect. One juicy illustration was her telling of the “very real possibility” that our classroom might be broken into by Nazis. Nazis, who would shove us up against the wall and then ask with a gun pressed against our heads, “Are you a Catholic?” The holy Sister Mary Margaret, thinking she would tempt a correct answer said. “If you deny that you are a Catholic, they will let you live.” But then quickly followed with, “If you love God and admit that you are Catholic, then you will be shot and experience the enormous joy of looking upon the face of God.” Again, images of Root Beer Floats danced in my mind.
Years later I would recall it all, thinking of all the children she must have tortured with that kind of question, and fanaticized entering her classroom, gun in hand, and offering her that very choice.
However, at six years old, I hung on every word she said and believed every story that horrid human being told. That was until she told us how God handled the dead guy.
The previous week she had gone through some pains to explain the difference between a Venial Sin and a Mortal one. With Venial Sin (a small sin), God would place you in Purgatory, a place much the same as Hell only with a possibility that at some future time, after you experience adequate flesh burning you would be given a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free-Card. However, Mortal Sin was a sin so egregious that you roasted for all eternity in the real Hell. She just loved telling a little story or two to make certain her little charges could understand.
All her stories kept us in frozen attention, but the story about the dead guy stands alone and still rots away in my brain.
The following, minus imperfections in my memory, is a fair if not precise representation of Sister Mary Margaret’s example for Thou Shall Not Kill.
“A long, long time ago there was a man suffering from a very strange disease causing him to fall into a deep, deep sleep where his heart quieted to a soft undetectable murmur. People thought he was dead. They dug a deep six-foot hole, took his body, and placed it in the tight confines of a coffin and nailed down the lid. They lowered the coffin into the pit and filled it over with dirt.
Sometime later the poor sick man woke up in the darkness. Alone and unable to move in the black tightness of his coffin, the man realized his predicament, was terrified and began to scream. But in the blackness, six feet under the ground, he knew no one could hear his cries for help. Unable to withstand the horror of it, the man drove the forefingers of his hands into the temples of his head to kill himself. Even he, today, is burning in the everlasting fires of Hell.”
That night when I went to bed I could not sleep. I was tired but every time I started to doze off, I woke with a start. If I slept, I was sure someone would think me dead. Finally, in the wee hours of the night I had an idea. I got up, stumbled over to my desk and switched on the light. Searching around in the drawers I found my drawing book and ripped off a little piece of paper and wrote out a short note. I then quietly crept down the hall to the bathroom where my mother kept the safety pins. A few hours later she came in to wake me up for Sunday church. Pinned to the middle of my pajama shirt, where no one could possibly miss it, was the note: “Pleese do not berry me, not dead.”
You must understand that I believed the Holy Sister Mary Margaret’s story, absolutely. I had not the slightest doubt that was exactly what God did. Only, the effect of the story was not what the Holy Sister hoped. That morning at church, sitting at my mother’s side as she dutifully focused on the word of God, I was staring above the alter where Christ was draped on his cross, thinking, “You Poo Poo Head!”
Today, I think a kind of God may exist but one that is wholly unlike the insanely narcissistic jackass preached by so many religions.
My best guess is if there is a God, it is far beyond any lowly human’s ability to comprehend its existence and would clearly be powerful enough to talk to me directly, without need of some self-anointed human middleman. The same middlemen so galactically arrogant as to presume to speak in God’s name that billions pay homage to and fund their nonsense.
If there is a God, and I hope there is, he already knows how to, and actually does speak to me directly through the guilt, shame, pain, and pleasures I feel with my every intention and action I take.
Don’t others think of the unimaginable, often inconceivable, grotesque agonies that consume the utterly innocence? No all-powerful God — not yours and not mine — can answer for the unfairness of life, the damnable repugnance of the hulking injustice that puts one existence in the convulsions of an agonizing death before a single step is had and another’s anointed with a passel of servants to care for their every need.
The line, “God works in mysterious ways,” exposes the poppy cock heart of much religious training for any willing to open their own eyes. What is the mystery in a child who has done nothing, can do nothing, unable to speak, raked with painful cancerous cysts, gasping a final breath in a struggle to whisper, “Please help me mommy?” Every conscious soul on this planet would struggle so to stop such a horror if they could, but the “all-powerful” God of organized religions does not.
The incomprehensible suffering of incalculable numbers of starved, enslaved, diseased, burned, bombed, drowned, murdered, maimed, tortured living things repudiates any notion of, or any need to be humbled before the nonsense of an all-powerful, “loving,” living God. I may have a good life, you may have a good life, and we feel compelled to thank our lucky stars, but we do not represent, nor can we poll the countless, faultless others who never asked to be born and now largely reside amongst the gratefully dead.
In a normal world someone standing at the apex of political power going to prison for 11 years would saturate the news. After all, Bob Menendez was charged with leading foreign-policy, and overseeing billions in foreign aid, the sale of arms to foreign powers, holding confirmation hearings, NOT the cash discovered stuffed in his boots and pockets or the gold bars anointing him with his nick name.
I have witnessed such sliminess at every level both as a Congressional staffer, State Senator, Corporation Commissioner, a non-profit leader, and as me.
Sometimes the payouts were enormous from those willing and able to dip the largest shovels into special interest public projects.
While others just getting started get their beaks wet with offers of free trips, premium seating or just some movie tickets. I loved movies, and although I refused all others, I went to see a few free films.
It is a cycle, little known, little written about, but contagious with those elected. You grow a big head; think you are somehow worthwhile and more deserving than those that voted for you.
He does whatever he can to do, what he said he would do, legal, illegal, everything and anything that can be done to do what he promised. Can you name a single other President willing to do so much for what he said he believed?
What a different world it would be if Obama, Bush or even Clinton had the mind set to be so craven and committed to their cause as is Trump.
If precedent, the rule of law, decency and conscience is going to be so thoroughly trashed, I wish it had been trashed by a President concerned with issues like global warming, an educated citizenry, health care, insurance companies, or just a love of people struggling to become part of this glorious achievement we call America, just as my ancestors and yours likely did.
It is as if a nincompoop stumbled into the Pitt of Endless Disenchantment where eons of candidate elected promises have gone withered and died and came out still simple and with a simpleton’s idea: I am going to bust ass, on my absurdities, right or wrong and see if we (or I) get traction.
He will find great success, his number of supporters will continue to grow as “America First” takes root and finds purchase, up and until Americans discover they aren’t part of his America.
Majestic elephants at a Colorado zoo do not have the legal right to pursue their release, Colorado’s highest court said.
The ruling from their Supreme Court follows a similar court defeat when Happy, Missy, Kimba, Lucky, LouLou and Jubo, pursued a long-held legal process for prisoners challenging their detention in an effort to reduce sentence and live in an elephant sanctuary instead.
The Colorado court said its decision does not turn on our regard for these majestic animals, but because an elephant is not a person, they do not have standing. Thus as Isaiah 46:9 suggests: For we are the chosen and there is no other like us on earth!
So, it goes for the 680 vertebrate creations that have gone extinct and the 4,300 others – mammals, fish, birds and amphibians that have declined from human greed these past 50 years.
“His work is perfect,” says the bible even as we dismantle it, setting ourselves on the throne of judgement.
If you are old, or as in the eyes of a teenager, about dead old, pitied, if cared about at all, you might remember stories from long ago parents: the miles walked to school, the starving children of China, the unfortunate pagan babies of Africa or just the garbage you could buy labeled, “Made in Japan.”
If you really get into those long-gone times, you might remember the joy found with an old board and a few nails making your palace in the trees, or one made from boards, sticks and rock dug into the dirt. You might recall playing chaises with marbles and capturing someone’s prized steely, maybe demonstrating your turn around skills at Hopscotch, jump rope, or being cast off a merry-go-round, or that time jumping off a titer toter that seemed a good idea, maybe that swing where your mind sailed you to a new Olympic distance record.
Perhaps you can close your eyes and think back when it was too cold or wet outside, so you made do with that cozy little in-door house your parents let you create out of cushions, pillows, sheets and towels.
Playing house, dressing up in parents’ clothes come to mind. Girls played hopscotch, jacks and jump rope while boys, if not playing football or basketball, found delight in who just farted or just some good long-distance spitting.
For me, I add a kitchen knife and a game of splits, or seeing what I could do to a stone with my dad’s eight iron.
There was kite flying, bicycling with playing cards clipped in the spokes or just being Robin Hood with a tree branch and OH GOD his bow and arrow. Stevie Bogard, my best friend and I couldn’t hit a living thing that wasn’t a plant that Christmas morning with our new bows. When frustration set in, I challenged him to who could send an arrow the highest without a thought of its return trip when we panicked slamming into each as the arrows plunked into the dirt.
Our childhoods were stuffed with our imagination, glories won and lessons learned in a cacophony of gregarious social interactions.
I always wanted to be her hero, her knight errant off on the road to right all wrongs, vanquishing any detractor, asserting my love month after month, year after year, to win her. I felt my efforts knew no end, no plan too distant, no event to extreme, just a perfect knight exemplar fighting her every foe to win her love. In all, a life well lived only to find at its end, I was no knight. To her I had been, always been, damaged goods. I was to her not a hero, but a grief.
LIKE TITANIC WE CALMLY SET SAIL WITHOUT BINOCULARS
Good people with thoughtful hearts seldom recognize how horrible an event can be and when they do, most sit frozen, drop jawed, as their heart is slowly eaten.
Titanic, The Gulf war, Deep Water Horizon, Pearl Harbor, Challenger, Chernobyl are amongst the many sufferings that could have been avoided if our better angels were heeded.
Now the most odious flight of all is about to take wing. As it has slimmed its way above to lord over us all, those saddened, thoughtful hearts hide in the cracks dreaming that lucidity and sanity will magically reappear.
No massive demonstrations planned, no public outrage evident, “Brownshirts” have won the day and there will be Hell to pay.
Like you, if you were lucky enough to have the perfect childhood, my young years looped around that one magical day. The days leading up to it were loaded with wonder and on the very morning of Christas Day an explosion of dreams come true.
But child time is short time and the day after came with thoughts of the eternity that existed before that day would roll around again.
Yet on the Christmas morning of 1960 my view was forever altered when I saw real magic.
Everything was as my years had come to expect: the glittering tinseled tree stretched to the ceiling, the felt, sequined Mr. and Mrs. Clause our grandfather had made hanging on the wall, the fireplace already aglow, and Mom and Dad in their robes holding cups of coffee. What was different was what was under the tree. The number and size of the packages did not fit under the boughs, and instead flushed out all about.
My eyes went big and wide at the wonder of it, unknowing that the biggest, best, most valuable lifelong gift I was about to receive wasn’t under the tree at all.
As always, I tore into the packages marked for me, and those marked from Santa or Mom and Dad were their normal great.
What blew me away and affected me more than any wrapped package was this: the most perfectly wrapped gifts, often the most expensive gifts, were all marked “From Billy,” my 16-year-old, oldest brother.
Turns out he hadn’t spent all that money from his double newspaper route on himself. He spent it on us.
I would spend the next 65 years lighting up others just the way he lit me up that one Christmas morning when I was 11 years old.
I would never again receive a gift that beat my heart as hard as my giving one.
My brother did that for me when I was very young, and his giving had no end. Later he would do it for his own kids, and much later he did it again for me, when he dragged himself out of bed in the middle of the night just to hand me a seat in my first political job as an Arizona State Senator.
I know it is an odd thing when I say Jesus talks to me. But somehow, he finds a way.
If I do good, I am kind, thoughtful and giving, he inflates my senses of self-worth and joy.
If I do bad, he loads me with self-doubt and roils my brain in the darkness of a sleepless night.
It is because of him, I never think of harassing, bullying, abusing or grabbing a woman by the pussy.
He talks to me about supporting the poor and needy, not judging or condemning others, or seeking revenge or retribution, or promoting conflict and division. All spot on with what he said and exampled in his life.
He also talks to me of the modern-day temple profiters pointing to their new leader who warps his every example into the most grotesque deformities persuading acceptance of a smothering of all he lived for.
I do not believe there has been a wholly original idea since someone said, “I think I will stop using my arms as legs and stand the fuck up.”
Those of us thinking today flow from that original thought and have merely borrowed from it and wrinkled it into an incalculable number of permutations over the ages.
Everyone copies, plagiarizes, and hopefully grows the efforts of others. If there were other wholly original thoughts, they are now lost to us, buried under the passage of time and the infinite number of embellishments that were born by it.
As a plagiarist and absolute center of all that I know, of every experience ever had and the few that remain to be had, the diminishment of my aspirations seems unavoidable. Aging has settled me into a slowing dance between spasms of desperation and quiet resignation. I’ve never had an original thought. A few good tweaks were the best I could hope for.
My ego has become an uncomfortable thing. Un-stroked by recognition, awash with influence or at least a lot of cash, it gnaws as I age.
How can a life that began with extraordinary good luck, mostly happy and honest, surrounded by love, be unfulfilling? I think it must happen to many of us as our lives are stretched out in the rear-view mirror, and we see the attainability of so much more that now the loss of time and energy has rendered unobtainable.
As a six-year-old I knew time was short. It was on that birthday that one of my always wiser older brothers informed me that life expectancy was 60. Just ten more, six-year birthdays and it will all be over I was told. I am fairly certain not a day has passed in all the days that followed that I have not thought about the time I have left. Time now left? Well, that past none fourteen years ago.
I now live on lucky time. In my youth I responded to that calculation with a spasm of discomfort but would quickly recover and head out for some more play, always thinking that I would make my life worthwhile another day. When another day finally arrived, I would be 31 and about to be born again but not in any Christian sense.
Everyone has a story to tell, and this is mine. No great drama, no epic events, no marks to be recalled by anyone but me. Telling your story in a way that would have anyone else give a damn seems farcical. I have no confidence that I will tell mine in a way you would give a damn, but it has some interest to me and there seems some value in thinking through all that has been me and imagining what might have been. So why not? Hell, now in the retirement I wish I had never attained, what else do I have to do?
In the end, what I see of human beings is what little it would have taken to make life so much better than it is for all of us. If only we would recognize and invest in the obvious, that one precious difference that sets us, as humans, apart from all other species: our ability to know.
In case you missed it, I am as close to a miracle as you will ever know, and so are you. If the teeniest difference in time or circumstance had changed in your line of ancestors from the very first time a cell split, 3.8 billion years ago, you would not exist. Having been given such a fantastically improbable chance, you would think we would make more of it.
If you are getting on in years, do you worry about having a bad ending, a long and painful one. Does it trouble you that you cannot find a peaceful means to pass on, on the internet? If you look, what you will first find is some message that amounts to “Don’t Do It!” followed by a jaw droppingly number of (cover my ass) equivocations, and finally a listing of the two gruesome options most of the 49,000 annual U. S. suicides are funneled into: blow your brains out or hang yourself.
This is due to the power of cults or what we think of as religious leaders. A power given by most of us seamlessly devoted to those claiming to be God’s representatives on earth, all of whom insist that regardless of your agony you suffer through it.
So silly is the notion that God is all powerful but cannot get it up to talk to each of us without some self-anointed mediator.
I for one hear God’s messages every day: pleasure, guilt, contentment, misery, happiness, sadness, anxiety, longing, pride, humility, jubilation, terror, sorrow, hope, on and on. Messages bounce off me like my tennis ball on the backboard.
But I digress. All I asked the internet was a simple answer to what are the most peaceful methods for ending one’s own life should one enter terminally agony.
NO! I have no interest in taking my own life, but many suffering do, and I may one day. Many elderly, such as I wonder about it, think about it and worry about it for a multitude of unselfish reasons. Do you know the answer?
It was the late 1970s, I think. Ed, Tim and I, college buddies, returning for our university’s Homecoming were just getting on with our careers in business, law, and politics. As we walked a street popular with college students a group looked at us and passed by mumbling to each other, we picked up on a single line, “Ugg, old people.”
That was 45 years ago. Now they, if they have been lucky enough to live as long as we have, are in their mid-sixties wondering where all the time went and wondering why their pee pees have to wee wee all the time.
Even with the wrinkles and sags glaring at them each morning they won’t yet get it with a brain insisting, “You’ve got this, you’ve always had this,” while their bodies cringe and mumble, “What the fuck were you thinking.”
After a recovery of a month or so that once took a few days, they might consider their brains inability to adjust to their bodies slow decay. Not likely yet, as they struggle to hold on to what they once knew.
It is not until the brain starts giving them hints, like the time at breakfast not long ago when my wife suddenly remembered that she promised to call someone. Not knowing the number, she jerked up from her seat went to the counter asking, “Do you by any chance have a phone book?” “Well no,” they responded but went into the kitchen to check. A few minutes later, delivering a small miracle, they had an old phone book and handed it to her. She fumbled through a few pages and then with that puzzled look known to all of us in our 70’s, she returned to our table to ask, “Who was I going to call?”
Or that favorite example of me, when I needed to rush to the bank before it closed to get a document notarized for a grant request.
I frantically looked around my desk. Couldn’t find it. I went up to the bedroom, thoroughly searched the car, the patio, the living room, the kitchen, both bathrooms and storeroom. Nothing! I then did it all again. When it was too late to make it to the bank even if I found it, I flopped down on the couch spewing every vile expression I had collected in life, just as the document appeared. There it was in the one place I had not looked, flailing in the air in my very own hand.
No, it would not matter if I ran into those youngsters calling Ed, Tim and I old and tried to tell them how their bodies and brains were trumpeting that the end was coming.
But it is, and I just feel lucky to have lived long, known many, enjoyed much, besides, like Mark Twain, “I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
A bit of time and patience and they will learn, and you will have what we all crave in life: loyal, devoted, adoring, loving friends. Even if others think you an ass.