25 May 15

Memorial Day

My Lady had a chance to fill a long held desire this past week when she had an opportunity to be an escort for a Veteran on an Honor Flight and tour of Washington. For those of you who are not familiar with the Honor Flight project it’s a nationwide program that gives elderly veterans an opportunity to tour the military monuments in the DC area and to receive the accolades of those of us who are not of “The Greatest Generation”.

 

There were about 28 Veterans on the flight My Lady volunteered for and each one of them was accompanied by one or two escorts who sole duty was to take care of their charge and to assure that he or she (they were mostly male) came to no harm. It was a long day for all, with an airport assemble at 0400 hours (That’s oh dark awful time) and a return to the local airport at 0030 the following morning (that’s really oh dark awful), since the Veterans were all in in their late eighty’s and ninety’s it was a long, long day. And the escorts, although they are generally younger were more than ready to get home and get some rest. In one day they had visited the monuments, been honored by all the military services, attended a wreath laying at Arlington Cemetery and had suffered the indignity of a cancelled air flight and bus breakdowns that should never have happened.

 

On a side note, when the bus they were riding in expired at the side of the road, the Marines jumped in and not only provided a VIP bus, they staffed it with strong and willing troopers to help the Veterans. And the Marines were not alone, the Air Force provided an active duty member to accompany one old gentleman whose escort could not make the trip and the Army provided the Army Band and an Honor Guard welcome and the Metro government of DC gave the arriving plane a water cannon welcome. It was a long and busy day, but it demonstrated the reality that the people of this country appreciate the effort given by those who came before and fought to maintain the country we have.

 

My Lady is impressed by the resiliency of those who served in prior wars and their willingness to put up with the heat, humidity and the length of the day. These are not people who gripe and moan and complain about the minor events of the day, like the Timex watch they took a licking and keep on ticking. WW II and Korea made them into upright and resilient people who are today enjoying each day as it comes and we lose some of them each and every day. They will be missed by those who care.

 

This weekend is the Memorial Day weekend and it was created for us, all of us, to remember those who previously served and suffered in prior wars. It is not National BBQ day, it’s a day to give thanks for the Veterans and the liberties we enjoy. Enjoy a BBQ with friends and family, but when you say grace before eating remember the Veterans who made it possible.

LGBT

 

The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender community is a politically active part of our social structure because they see the only way to get social acceptance is by altering the political environment to their advantage. The LGBT community is a minority one, and like all minorities has been abused in varying degree by the majority population. In some parts of the world being “different” is a capital crime and I can’t fault any minority that wants to assure its wellbeing in any way it can.

 

The focus issue, for LGBT’s these days is to legislatively allow for civil marriage, and they are becoming increasingly successful on a state by state basis in meeting their goal of legal and social acceptance of their vison of a more equal social order. I applaud their success and would like to see all states, and the federal government accept the fact that people who have other sexual desires are free to engage if their actions don’t cause harm to other people. Recent studies indicate that as a portion of population the LGBT advocates comprise slightly less than 2% of the population and are certainly not a threat to the rest of the population. As a result the burden for the rest of us is to finally decide if marriage is a social, political or religious institution. The answer might also be “none of the above” but we must have finally resolve the noisy conversation that blinds us to more important social issues that face us.

 

If marriage between same sex couples is now ok I can’t help but look forward to a push to also allow polygamist and polyandrous families, and I anticipate watching, and listening to arguments why one individual should not have multiple spouses. It’s only a matter of time before someone from the Church of Latter Day Saints (the Mormons) advances the argument that allowing same sex marriage is no different in the eyes of the law than allowing one person to have multiple partners of the opposite (or even the same) sex.

 

As a people watcher the next few years will be very interesting!

PEOPLE

3 May 15

Over the years, we have lived in many homes, most of them larger than the home we currently live in. Because we are reluctant to just abandon “our stuff” we rent climate controlled space in a local storage facility where we keep excess furniture from previous years and new items we have purchased for the Staging business My Lady operates.  A typical week will find us utilizing the storage area several times and often at odd hours.

Yesterday we had to retrieve a refrigerator dolly from the unit prior to buying a file card cabinet we intend to convert to a small parts storage unit for her sewing room. A two minute pickup went away when I walked into the isle where our unit is located only to find the isle blocked by trash. A pile about 5 feet wide, 3 feet deep and 25 feet long was filled with empty boxes, broken glass and furniture and sundry other stuff the person obviously considered too unimportant for them to take care of.  Whoever made the mess just left it for someone else to clean up, since obviously they considered themselves too important to care about their trash?

What should have been a short visit turned into an extended effort while we cleared the way to our unit, informed storage unit management and finally got the dolly into the truck. By the time we arrived at the sale site for the cabinet it had been sold and we were out of luck.

If I could find the person who left the trash for others to pick up I’d most likely have some harsh words for him, but I know I’d be talking to empty air since the level of narcissism I see as a court mediator is increasing. So we will grumble about such people and write blog reports and get on with our lives in the hope we don’t run into such people too often.

We stand of many shoulders

I was young, still in elementary school and had not a clue which direction my future would take when I was asked “What do want to be when you grow up?” Having just read a book on cultural anthropology (although I think the title was something like Recent Discoveries in Archaeology) and the chapter that grabbed my attention was a discussion on flint knapping in the Stone Age. Without a clue as to what I was doing I decided to try to make a stone spear point, just for fun.

Little did I realize that the period of time between simply knocking two stones together and deliberately pressure pointing a flake was at least 40,000 generations of slow and painful development and all I got for my battering two rocks together was an abused rock and several smashed fingers. My respect for our long lost common ancestors was one of life’s epochal events that lead to my appreciation of history and understanding that we all too often forget the powerful shoulders we today stand upon!

From the Oldwan hand axes of 2.6 million years ago to the sophisticated Achuelean axes of 500,000 years ago reflect a development of the human brain to do strategic planning. The Stone Age hand tool tells us of an ability to see the final object within the lump (or later flake) of stone in the makers hand. This ability to visualize abstract goals reflects the development of the human fore brain (prefrontal cortex) and its capacity to see what you want and the proficiency to verbalize what your mind is seeing. An ability that many anthropologists did not believe our ancestors had.

Several studies have trained students to make Achuelean tools but rarely do the students produce an object that would meet the standards of the original makers of Stone Age tools. It has been surmised that given sufficient time and experience modern man could match the casual efforts of our Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon. Modern Neuropathology studies have determined that the mental effort required to visualize and make a stone tool actually alters the physical structure of the brain, which in turn made it easier to do it again and make it better this time.

We owe it to our remote ancestors who started out beating two rocks together for everything that we now know as modern society.

Maybe I shouldn’t have stopped when I smashed my fingers!

Easter Thoughts

5 April 2015

The day before Easter I was nonplussed to see that many local churches were having their Easter Egg Hunts on Saturday. Adding to my confusion was learning that the eggs were plastic and the contents were candy.

I feel that I must be alone in remembering that religious thought about Easter includes recognition that an egg is the perfect symbol for the rebirth that both spring and the Resurrection bring with them. Out of a closed container with no identity the germ of life flourishes and out of a simple egg a complex life emerges.

As an “older gentleman” I can remember churches having Easter Dawn services, in my case on the beach of the Atlantic Ocean shore and that a real “Easter Egg” was presented to church members in remembrance of the resurrection that is the sole reason for the day. Since those youthful days the Yuppie and Millennial generations have adopted political correctness that doesn’t allow for individual performance or attitude.

Real eggs might have Salmonella and grubby fingers might get the egg dirty while they take that awful shell off it and then they could make the innocent child sick! Anyway clean candy, stuffed into a plastic egg is always better for the kids and who cares about their weight and dental condition, that’s all in the future and we don’t think about that.

Call me a curmudgeon, but I believe that an honest appreciation of the historical and religious beginnings of our society, and an honest application of those beginnings to our social thought needs to happen.

Random Thoughts

8 Mar 15

While enjoying a soft spring like day by trolling through the Internet I ran across two “news” items that are joined by the narcissism of the actors, but are otherwise unrelated.

It seems that America’s most inept fugitive is not happy living in the workers’ paradise that is modern Russia and has applied for political asylum in Switzerland. Edward Snowden would “love to live in Switzerland”, but after being rejected by the 21 other countries he has requested asylum I suspect that his latest desire will be frustrated by the reluctance of yet another government to welcome a self-aggrandizing fugitive into its space. Mr. Snowden is reluctant to return to the United States because he claims he would not get a fair and open trial. My feeling is that he would get a most public and open trial (and one that is as fair as the legal system allows) but that he knows that if he does return to this country he would not get out of prison for many years.

The other news item concerns the continuing quest by the militant Islam State, the self-styled Caliphate to destroy anything they proclaim to be modern and contrary to their religious viewpoint. In addition to messily executing anyone they feel is even a minor threat to their squalid existence they have now taken on the task of destroying artifacts of civilizations that predate by millennia the “religion of peace” they claim to follow. After destroying Assyrian statues in a museum in Mosul they set their sights higher and are now destroying the large (by ancient standards) city of Hatra. A city that was founded in the 13^th century BCE, about 1900 years before Mohamad even thought of repurposing a nomadic moon god as the center point of a religion he created as part of his efforts to build a personal empire.

But ISIS doesn’t care that all of today’s people and cultures are built on the successes of past people and cultures. In their narcissism they seek only to destroy that which they cannot claim. I also find it interesting that they are using explosives and bulldozers to accomplish their goals. Their level of civilization is so far removed from societies of today (including other Muslim cultures) that in order to be true to their belief system they should be using stone hammers to batter the past into oblivion.

The common thread between Snowden and ISIS is that both are so self-absorbed that they fail to see that humanity views them as unworthy of respect and good only for the dustbin of history. Unfortunately it looks like tossing both into the past will be a long and painful process.