Saying Goodbye to 2012

Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

I'm generally optimistic about things...and a little cynical, I guess. But, given the way 2012 went I can't be too excited about what's in store for 2013. Here we are waiting for Congress to begin acting like adults and work out an agreement on the tax hike/fiscal cliff problem that they created some time ago...maybe last year? Of course they missed the deadline even though they had months to work out an agreement. They are incapable of behaving like responsible adults. Hey guys...in case you didn't hear the news, the election is over and people are tired of this crap.

They are not the only ones. We also have the ever-present menace of the NRA. I was once a member of the NRA back when they were concerned with hunter safety. Those days are gone. They are now primarily so immersed in the gun rights insanity that they can't make sense out of the daily tragedies of gun violence. Their solution to mass killings in schools is to place more guns in schools. Yeah, arm the teachers. I can't recall a single teacher I had that I would want to be part of a teacher swat team.

I lived next to a gun club for over 25 years and during that time the "sportsmen" went from weekend skeet shooting and dog training to "enthusiasts" firing automatic assault weapons at all hours of the day. It was common to have people shooting automatic rifles at 7 AM and on occasion it sounded like machine gun firing. The situation seemed to get more pronounced as guys came home from Iraq and Afghanistan.

We have had several mass killings this year but the Newtown school shootings seemed like it may have pushed us over the edge and we may stagger forward to some kind of assault weapon ban debate. Yeah, probably just a debate, sorry to say. I don't think anyone is talking about repealing the second amendment but we need to be rational and restrict the access and sale of assault weapons. We went to war over weapons of mass destruction but can't seem to get control of what is killing hundreds of people in this country. The news has been reporting sky-high sales of assault weapons since the latest school massacre. I doubt that these are sales to new gun owners but are more likely to be people who already own an arsenal of weapons who want to stock up before the party is over...like last call at the local bar, the drunks need one more for the road.

Another disturbing development in the last month are the two instances of people being pushed into the path of subway trains. We have managed to be civilized, more or less, when using public transportation for generations but now we have to be worried about someone pushing people on to the tracks.

Oh don't forget Mother Nature. She is really pissed off and is making things very difficult. We had a devastating drought for almost half the year. The damage probably won't be fully recognized  for a while but when we have trees dying in the forests and crops burned to a crisp it can't be good. This was, once again, the hottest year on record. I think we say that every year lately. The drought was bad enough but then we have the super storm Sandy. Sandy seemed to be a new type of disaster...a hurricane that morphed into something altogether different...and worse. And still people claim that climate change and global warming are some kind of liberal pipe dream.  

I could go on but it's too depressing. Farewell 2012. I hope we don't someday see you as the "good old days".

Old Habits Die Hard

The post-election finger pointing is in full swing over at the GOP circus. They haven't figured it out yet. The circus turned into a freak show and most voters knew it. The GOP spent the last four years saying "no". They decided that the best plan was to play to their extreme base by trying to humiliate and degrade President Obama. The birther claims, the socialist/communist claims, the Muslim claims all were intended to degrade and dehumanize Obama. They only served to bolster the extreme elements who feed on that stuff and the party leaders did nothing to stop it. They claim to be righteous and God fearing but there is something about bearing false witness that they missed. This was finally manifest in the bizarre performance by Clint Eastwood and his empty chair. Obama had diminished in their eyes to a nonperson. They ate it up. But that didn't translate into votes -- it only made them feel good.  So now they wonder how on earth they could have lost the election... 

 

But after all of this, they are still at it. Old habits die hard. I've actually heard people saying that they lost because of Acorn.  Acorn went out of business in 2010. It's pretty sad if Karl Rove and the other fund raisers collected several hundred million dollars for Romney and were beaten by an organization that doesn't exist. Rove claims that the Democrats were engaged in vote suppression. How much longer until they figure it out?

In the end, Obama was not an empty chair. While they chose pandering and self-defeat, Obama and the Democrats worked to win. The GOP defeat was decisive. Not only the presidency but they lost ground in the senate. There are more elections in two years and they will lose more seats if they don't clean house and decide to work more productively with Obama.

The Meaning of Life

I assume that almost everyone has one or two memorable cemetery experiences. When we are little we get taken to cemeteries at times of sadness or solemnity and, while it looks like a park it obviously isn’t a fun place. I recall going to a cemetery as a child for the burial of one of my dad’s uncles – somebody I never knew existed until we got that late night phone call from Ste. Genevieve. We very rarely got a happy phone call from Ste. Genevieve. She was usually the bearer of bad news.

Cemeteries are places where people create monuments or markers representing how they want to be remembered after they are gone or, more often, how others want them to be remembered. This is an intentional relic of a person’s existence. The ruins at Pompeii or Tikal or Mesa Verde are unintentional relics of someone’s existence. I find them both to be interesting. But what about those folks in unmarked graves? My Irish immigrant ancestors are buried two to a hole in unmarked graves in the same cemetery that holds Tennessee Williams, William Tecumseh Sherman, Dred Scott, Kate Chopin and Father De Smet.  My ancestors left behind lots of grieving relatives but none of them had the resources to mark the graves.

I went to college in a very old town with a very old cemetery on a hill overlooking the Mississippi River. There were French folks buried there – the ones that settled the place. There were rows of unmarked graves identifiable only as a faint dimple in the grass. I recall one section of about forty unmarked graves that were known to be the victims of a horrific steamboat wreck. Only their date of death was known.

As college students with time on our hands and looking for something to do we would make our way to the cemetery and just ponder the meaning of life. We usually did this at night and with a few six-packs. One can come close to discovering the meaning of life at night in a spooky cemetery with a few six-packs. We were not disrespectful or up to mischief, we were just under age. We had to be careful where we stepped. The cemetery was riddled with large holes where the earth had subsided or local ground hogs had burrowed into some of the graves. The tree roots would reach out and grab your feet if you weren’t careful.

On one of these excursions we came across a woman’s headstone that made us stop in our tracks. The stone was by itself – not in a family group. It gave her name followed by the word “Spinster” and her date of birth: October 31, 1815 (yes, Halloween), and her date of death: December 31, 1899. The poor woman lived 85 years and almost made it to 1900 but instead, somebody decided to label her as “Spinster” and leave her there by herself. That's how they wanted her to be remembered.  She was certainly on our minds when we pondered the meaning of life that night. The next day, probably a Saturday or Sunday, we went back and made a charcoal rubbing of her headstone and another headstone we found of a Revolutionary War soldier. We taped the headstone rubbings up on the dorm room wall…for some reason. Not as a trophy but sort of a remembrance.

After a while, things started happening (of course). One of the guys was awakened during the night when he felt someone sit on his bed…there was no one there. Things moved around from place to place when no one was in the room. Other things that were hanging on the wall fell on the floor but not the headstone rubbings. Finally somebody saw the figure of a young woman come out of the dorm room closet and walk across the room and disappear. That was enough. She came down off the wall and the old soldier did too, just to be on the safe side. Was it just the power of suggestion? Once one odd thing happened, did we imagine the other occurrences? When the old woman’s headstone rubbing came down the strange occurrences stopped. This was followed by a self-imposed silence on the entire topic. I don’t recall it being discussed or mutually agreed to…just that none of us felt comfortable talking about it. We stopped going to the cemetery after that. We found other ways to explore the meaning of life

Experiment with sound

hmmm. didn't get close enough to pick up the sound -- whoosh...whoosh...whoosh
The sound is my shoes on the gravel but it came through loud and clear.