All the Glory to God

My inspiration for this essay occurred during the summer, but I never got around to it and wanted to see if I could complete it before starting another project. That inspiration was the Olympics and a golf tournament that happened close together, involving two attractive, talented and personable female athletes I follow on social media, Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone and Rose Zhang.

Both of the young athletes have had remarkable levels of success and have extensive promotional contracts, and, most important for this work, they are openly Christian. Their specific denominations of belief are not clear, but both of them employ the phrase, “All the Glory to God” after their numerous victories and successes. Let us set aside for a moment there is no god, certainly no omnipotent, all loving and omniscient being characteristic of the major Abrahamic religions. Instead we will try to understand what the phrase, “All the Glory to God” means to them, and why they say it so often in public. These and many other athletes are using it to praise their god and give credit for their talents and success to the will of that god. Their god cares enough about their specific sport and their success in it to intervene in their genome, giving them genetic advantages (often referred to as talent), guides them through their coaches and families to give them all they need to excel, protects them from injuries and other setbacks, helps them heal and recover when obstacles occur, and favors them over other humans in their various sports so they can be the very best in their most important competitions.

It does not require cynicism to see how selfish this is. A god who does not supply adequate nutrition to huge numbers of children, who allows (and seems to be a motivation for) many wars and acts of violence, who designed a world in which an earthquake in one area can trigger enormous surges of ocean water to inundate coastal communities in other areas and cause widespread death and destruction, is instead focusing on something as trivial and meaningless as a women’s golf tournament or a hurdle race. And that same god has decided to favor these competitors because they love and worship that god in ways that cause that favor. Their righteousness and obedience leads them to try to make the most of their “god-given” talent to serve that god and bring praise to that god from others so impressed with their virtuosity and humility, since they publicly acknowledge it was actually their god’s efforts on their specific behalf that helped them beat every other human competing against them in that moment. God favors them above all because they are that god’s humble servant. The same god that created a universe so vast we receive various forms of radiation from stars and solar systems so far away the signals are from billions of years ago, who created the eye of the eagle, the kidney of the rhino, the fungi that allow trees to communicate and defend themselves from parasites also created by that god, who has allowed entire solar systems to be sucked into black holes and the surface of our own sun to send huge bursts of electromagnetic radiation into our solar system to cause the lovely northern lights, is also helping one woman be better than all the rest at running at a steady, fast pace and jumping over hurdles because of certain ways she thinks and feels about that god.

In the end, their mantra, “All the Glory to God,” which on the surface seems so humble - their god really did it all - is actually supremely egotistical. God intentionally selected them to be better than everyone else and gave them all the advantages. They only trusted in that god and followed that god’s will to beat everyone else. Their obligation is only to try their best and give that god credit in order to promote the god’s powers to other humans, because this powerful force really cares what each person thinks and feels about everyone, even if they do not get enough nutrition every day, their parents are cruel, their government imprisons them unjustly, or they suck at sports because they have a list pages long of health problems for which there are no viable or affordable treatments.

Is it less humble to say, “I worked really hard and overcame some injuries to win today?” “I am really proud all my hard work, and all the efforts of my coaches and family helped me in this moment to achieve my goal?” Sports in any form are extremely selfish in nature. At best they provide a diversion to humans less talented, and maybe some inspiration to try harder to be better people, but they also lead to obsessions, eating disorders, chronic injuries, brain damage, gambling addictions, etc. all while taking enormous time from parents, siblings, volunteers, and officials. Their outsized importance through human history has been rightly linked to diverting the populace from activities like education and philosophy that would point out how much despair there is in the world because the rich and powerful care only about themselves and maintaining the status quo. Sydney won the hurdles in a world record time because she trained well and used her talents to be better than the other women who also trained to compete in that specific event. It was all her and her support staff. She should be proud of that, which I am sure she is in private, and not try to deflect praise from herself. Same with Rose Zhang. But if they will not, they should at least truly follow the teachings of their god and Jesus, give all they have to the poor, and truly follow them.

Exorcising Russia

Thought experiments are usually useless, but let’s for a few minutes imagine in the years after World War II Russia/The USSR deciding to use its resources to build a better life for its citizens rather than trying to spread its ideology across the world and trying to oppose the leadership and examples of the west. Sure Capitalism was brutal and unjust, both to the lower classes in the western countries and their colonies. Espousing socialism and its virtues in opposition, keeping corporations regulated, favoring equality, would have had its place, and the message would have been much better accepted if the Soviet Union had a government that functioned well and a populace that was well-served. It could have become Norway, with vast resources helping to fund progress socially and politically. Instead, it decided to become a total pain in the ass, causing trillions and trillions of dollars and rubles better spent on education, infrastructure and health to be wasted worldwide on defense, spying, and in proxy wars.

The world we have instead is no longer the bipolar us against them of NATO vs. the Warsaw Pact. Because nuclear secrets were spread by the USSR and Pakistan, we now have even tiny, otherwise ineffectual countries like North Korea making noise, and the Chinese more and more bellicose. This had the potential to be avoided, never more so than right after World War II. A reasonable Stalin and his lackeys might have realized the true horrors of war and changed their priorities. But reason was in short supply, especially in the mind of Stalin. No matter how deluded he was about his country and government, he had to know at that point, after the terrible famines and failures of most of the government policies in the 1930s, even about basics like feeding its people, he and his advisors did not know how to govern other than through fear and violence. His government was only good at spreading fear and violence outside its borders then. His armies had steamrolled a Nazi army stretched thin by overreach, and this gave him the false confidence they could keep that level of success against any adversary. There were just enough westerners disappointed with how their own governments supported systems of injustice and inequality, or narcissistic enough they would sell what they knew and could steal to the USSR spy networks, and the Soviets were able to parlay that to the state of mutual assured destruction to hold most feared western aggression, at least militarily, at bay.

The next chance was when Gorbachev presented President George H.W. Bush with the opportunity to significantly disarm and de-escalate. Bush passed, skeptical, and a huge chance was lost, as Gorbachev was not the typical Russian leader and might have been able to keep his word. When an impaired Yeltsin passed the torch to the man the leadership perceived as a puppet, Putin, all chance of progress was lost, and we have now the challenge of a man like Stalin, far too full of himself, far too self-righteous, prickly, paranoid and self-confident to ever admit he is wrong or change course from the destructive path the old Soviet leaders led his country on to its ruin, thinking he can avoid the mistakes they made. Propped up only by its fossil fuel reserves and the infrastructure to distribute them (mostly set up by western corporations), Russia in this iteration has the means to make enough trouble to threaten anyone.

But Russia is not the only threat. It has helped China assert itself and aided Iran and North Korea tremendously, both directly and by opposing any pushback against them through the United Nations and diplomacy. All of those governments would have failed long ago without Russian support, as they all share the same lack of ability to govern without force and intimidation, suppressing all dissent. The USA and its allies missed out on many opportunities to help each of those countries, always pushing unbridled and exploitative western corporations on them while failing to provide the appropriate governance, preferring strongmen who would be anti-Soviet to anyone who might want more equality and actual democracy (which might want to regulate or nationalize businesses and things like energy and water distribution, basic human necessities). The choice about who would run their lives and countries has almost never been there for most of the people of the modern world as a result.

The reason I am writing this is I have concluded Russia, historically and in its current iteration, has been the greatest scourge to humanity in its existence, surpassing even Nazi Germany, who certainly set a high bar in its brief run of horror. Germany, once it united its leadership and territory in the 1800s, was a destructive and disruptive force, but it has since redeemed itself admirably. Russia, from the treatment of the serfs through its revolution and terrible civil war, treatment of the Jews and the Ukrainians, its suppression of dissent, its near total lack of respect for human life, its horrible tradition of war crimes, its pervasive dishonesty, and its transmission and support of all of these terrible plagues to multiple other countries and cultures, has held back so much human progress over the past 150 years. Perhaps most interesting and threatening are its ongoing attempts to turn countries who have made progress and had success governing back into oppressors and authoritarian regimes, from Scandinavia, western Europe and to here in the USA, preying upon the authoritarian tendencies of leaders and their gullible supporters by using immigration and racism, propaganda from the fossil fuel industries and religion to divide citizenry who would benefit much more from working together. This has been most striking in the USA, where strident anti-communists now side with Russia even over our own government, congratulate and applaud Putin, and allow Russian propaganda and hackers to brainwash the supporters of the Republican party. There is more evidence people like Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, Michael Flynn, Marjorie Taylor Greene and many other Republican leaders are Russian assets than patriotic Americans, and the same can be said for the right wing in many European countries. The trend they all push is away from democracy, away from freedom and justice and towards authoritarianism and repression.

This is the greatest existential threat to the world right now. Climate change is going to cause tremendous disruptions, much worse than it already has, but the worst of that is 10-20 years down the road. Right now, we have a man who is trying to destroy the USA running for president with significant support, while those supporters are also trying to undermine our whole system through the Supreme Court and election rigging. They will not do anything about Climate Change and will only make things worse for everyone but the rich (who foolishly will also have to live in an inhospitable world with all their money) in every way, destroying our education system to create an ignorant and subservient underclass who will accept any terrible job offered in order to get less inadequate healthcare for their families, and to make whatever life they can. Russia would like the entire world to return to serfdom, and the leaders of the Republican party are all on board as long as they can get and hold power.

So, we must exorcise Russia. Stop its influence and propaganda, stop the leaders who side with Putin and his cronies, and most importantly right now, stop its aggression and war crimes in the Ukraine. If we all show even a tenth of the spine the Ukrainians show, we will keep Trump and Putin’s agents in the Republican party out of power, lasso the fossil fuel industry and put it under control and on its path to obsolescence, and give humanity the potential for a future it deserves.

The Rise of the Jerk

A common modern fallacy is believing things are really terrible now. Even with war in the Ukraine, inflation, climate change, and Covid-19 resurging, most of the people on the planet are doing better than ever. Poverty is at low levels, there is more justice, more wealth, and more ways to help others than ever before. BUT, and I think this is what is actually stirring most of the angst, all this progress could stop and even recede because of the RISE OF THE JERK.

Are there more jerks as a percentage of the population than before? Not likely, but I cannot cite any specific jerk percentage research. What we see now is a surge in jerkness worldwide, and what is infuriating the ones who note it and write about it is we all should know better by now. After Hitler and the Nazi henchmen were finally crushed (with surprisingly few exceptions), and Stalin died alone and paranoid, it looked like the world was on a strong upward trend: information moved better and better, as did communication; travel improved markedly; food production could keep up with population growth most of the time; and the threat of a nuclear holocaust was so terrifying it kept international conflicts to small proxy wars that devastated only the locals and seldom affected those outside the conflict zones. Governments became increasingly accountable, and some actually showed they could work well, especially in the Scandinavian region, where the focus seems to be primarily on improving the lives of the people who live there. What a concept.

All this time there have been jerks, but they were marginalized, and society looked unfavorably on them, shall we say, cancelled them? Your George Wallaces, Strom Thurmonds, and Jesse Helms did their worst to hold back human progress, but their sway only extended so far, and their malevolence was accompanied by enough incompetence people didn’t take them too seriously. Over the past 40 years or so, as my post before this one posits, the leaders of the jerks have been able to alter public opinion, making selfishness, which they conflate with “liberty,” the primary motivation of their principles. Unleashing selfishness during the Reagan era was the signal achievement then; there was a palpable change in attitudes. It was no longer enough to have a decent job where people were treated well, an adequate house, and a working car. The American dream morphed into getting whatever you wanted all the time and as much as possible at other peoples’ expense. It wasn’t enough for a person to do well; others had to be miserable.

I have also written about authoritarians and how much trouble they cause. It is quite clear a huge percentage of authoritarians have been activated by their leadership over the past 40 years in more and more socially unacceptable ways. Their once hidden or suppressed racism, greed, and feelings of victimhood are now encouraged and stoked. I am old enough to remember when jerks were looked down on; now the bigger jerk you are, the higher you climb in the Republican Party and many other parties in countries where jerks have risen to positions of power, from Turkey and Hungary to the Philippines and Nicaragua. The underlying problem in the USA is the current electoral system; only the greediest, the narcissists and most ambitious will put up with what is now required to be a politician and run for office (and keep it). There are a few shining lights, but they are few. I have also written about the aching need for election reform, including public funding and other corrections codified clearly by a constitutional amendment. It is my feeling that the American people, presented with a solution that would filter out the psychopaths, performance artists, conmen and corrupt, take the money out of politics, and severely limit how many ads we would have to see while watching TV, would gladly try it. The problem is any amendment would have to get approved by the very politicians who want to keep the status quo. Many people consider the founding fathers to be almost godlike, but they did a terrible job with many aspects of the republic, especially making it too hard to change the very flawed Constitution to make it more relevant to our times. What we need are honest, hard working people who understand government, compromise, and service, protected from lobbying and fundraising. This will not completely eliminate the jerk from our politics, but the appeal will be a lot less, and we will get a government that works for the people rather than the rich and corrupt. Until then we have an unfair fight against keeping the jerks from taking over everything and permanently rigging it all in their favor, which is definitely possible in the next ten years. The worst part is the fight is not fair; they cheat like crazy, and those who want a proper democracy and working government can never, ever let their guard down or think the jerks have changed. They will never admit they are wrong or give up trying to get their way.

Conservatism or Selfishness?

I often read the term “conservative intellectuals” and scoff. What is conservative thought in the 2020s? Low taxes? Free markets? Closed borders? No regulations? No unions? Religious Freedom? What deep thought lies behind any of those concepts? Very little. I have chronicled conservative economic doctrine before, but there is an overarching theme to conservatism, and it is not any technical, nuanced notion refined by years of scholarship. It is selfishness, one of the lowest of human feelings, one that destroys all it touches. “Conservatives” currently do all they can to empower the selfish urges of their supporters: anti-vaxxers, private schools, red lined neighborhoods, limiting immigration, protecting only the religious beliefs of those who support them, and trying to increase the gaps in wealth loved by the greediest. In the zero sum world of conservative ideology, only conservatives deserve anything, and they want EVERYTHING. I saw a headline today that said conservatives are happier than progressives. What BS! They are the most miserable of all humans, BUT they pretend they are happier better than anyone else while rejoicing mostly in the increased misery of others. They will continue to be smarmy, self-righteous and vociferous in spite of their ignorance, depravity, and cognitive dissonance. The rest of us should move on and leave them in the much deserved dust, not allowing them to ruin the world for the rest of us anymore.

Modern Trumpianity

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, science was making tremendous inroads into how the world worked: the physics of weather, currents, winds; the chemistry of nearly everything; the biology of infections, diseases, and health. At the same time, scientific methods were employed to look at religion: new documents were uncovered, and new techniques for translation, interpretation, and dating traced the sources of the scriptures sacred to Christians.

This textual criticism, as it came to be known, brought much of the meaning of the Bible into question. Passages crucial to modern doctrine appeared to be added well after the originals, including the stories of the Resurrection of Jesus, which, as any Christian knows, is the most important single concept backing the uniqueness of Christian belief: God’s own Son came to earth, was killed to pay tribute for our sins, and then arose from the dead to provide a way for those who accept this to have eternal life.

As all this transpired, Biblical scholars and ministers struggled with its implications. Should they take a step back and soften the idea of the Bible as the literal words of God, inspired through the Holy Spirit to be written down by the holiest of men? What if the Bible were but a portion of divine wisdom and guidance, and not the definitive source, a flawed collection of the musings of what may have been a few zealots with faraway looks in their eyes and spittle on their beards? In the end, they decided, in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, the Bible was inerrant, a flawless set of documents given by God to us, and all the doubts, contradictions, flaws, and nonsense it caused and contained should be ignored.

From this, the anti-science, anti-intellectual movement among evangelical Christians solidified. The line can be drawn straight through to the present: the predominance of anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, and conspiracy theorists among modern evangelicals. Ironically, it is hard to define the scientific basis for this tendency. There is an underlying gullibility baked into these thought patterns, with a grid of fear and need for a sense of control underlying it all, but whether it is genetic, epigenetic (genes activated by the environment, especially life stressors), or entirely learned behavior has yet to be understood.

Into this arena, beyond the understanding of anyone of any common sense, entered the most dubious of catalysts: Donald J. Trump. A lifetime as a con man, rapacious in his lust for money and women but devoid of any actual skills other than relentless self promotion and the inability to feel shame, should have immediately disqualified him from the support of evangelical Christians. He had no redeeming qualities, and he held no religious beliefs at all (he held believers in contempt). But as he asserted himself, first with the flaming falsehoods about the birthplace of President Barack Obama, whom the evangelicals almost instinctively (wink, wink) despised (remember how Trump said he had people in Hawaii investigating things? A complete fabrication. He made it all up.), then taking out, nearly one by one, the motley and disgraceful batch of candidates aspiring to the nomination of the Republican party (Ted Cruz, truly one of the slimiest men of the last 30 years in politics, was the last bit of resistance), something remarkable happened: the evangelical Christians chose him overwhelmingly, and onto this sorry sack of humanity they projected all of their hopes and dreams to bring about the America they all wanted: caucasians in charge, with deference to believers and gun owners; the country becoming more righteous, unforgiving, judgmental, with policies predisposed to generate prosperity for those who felt the same. Perhaps most important of all, Trump now claimed, after nearly 70 years of not caring at all about abortion, to be stridently against it. Pundits occasionally talk of Trump’s “genius,” but there was nothing going on beyond Trump reaching out for more attention and applause lines and finding he could not possibly go too low. Coarse, jerk-like behavior was his stock in trade, and that is what these people seemed to want instead of the Christian virtues of piety, forgiveness, and humility. Trump replaced Jesus for them in their lives with the endorsement of their leaders, lives which were percolated through with despair despite their toeing the Christian line.

There are quite a few surveys and studies of professed evangelical Christians that reveal some startling trends: many barely know anything about the Bible and hardly ever read it; many rarely attend church and mostly go for the socializing when they do; many rely almost entirely on whomever they have currently installed as their leader to guide them. That leader became Trump. What did he offer them? It turns out the teachings of Jesus and Christianity are hard. They include poverty, humility, service, embracing suffering, sharing your blessings with others freely, and lots of time trying to make yourself a better person. Trump, with the blessings of in inordinate number of pastors who should know better, replaced that with permission to openly express racism and a love for inequality; his blessing to rough up and mistreat the weak, the marginalized, the foreign; waiving any sort of ethics in favor of taking whatever you could get by any means necessary; and the wholesale embrace of a cult of personality with Trump at the center.

What will it take to bring an end to this deviance? As long as they can grasp some sort of explanation, Trumpians will likely let his crimes, as they are enumerated in what will likely be a wave of indictments for what they will see as trivial matters like tax and financial fraud, money laundering, campaign finance violations, election fraud (was there anything more ridiculous than the biggest election cheat in history raising hundreds of millions of dollars to “stop the steal” all while trying to steal the election for himself?), slide. One characteristic of your average Trump supporter is an extreme reluctance to admit they are wrong, but if enough of the charges stick, and Trump shows little capability of mounting a defense, I would guess their fervor will at least wane. The temperature overall has definitely been lowered by his barring from social media, something that should have been done long ago. Now if the regular media would simply ignore him, it would take away nearly every means for him to satisfy his narcissism. He is elderly and unhealthy and should then fade into oblivion and disgrace, things he has earned. That is if the legal system can muster the charges and get him to testify under oath about anything. If they fail to pursue charges against him and the the other traitors who supported him over the Constitution, we are likely to be in the same situation soon enough, but perhaps the next time with someone who actually knows what he or she is doing as they sell the nation down the road to the highest bidder. Those people will know they can tap into the 40% of Americans who have authoritarian follower traits, a vast percentage of whom are Evangelicals desperate to find a strong leader.

My Mother, Sandra O'Rourke

PART 1: The End

My mother died Saturday, the 12th of December, at 12:12pm (12:12 on 12/12). While it wasn’t technically a surprise, it was still an enormous shock. She had been in the hospital since Dec. 8th, having been found that morning sitting on the couch after being incontinent, slow to respond and unable to move well. My sister, Kelly, an LPN who had been doing wound care on new, massive blood blisters/hematomas on her lower legs, had come to the house around 6am to help with that day’s dressings, and my father had just come downstairs to help. They called the ambulance. The last time they saw her she was walking with a walker out the back sidewalk to be put in the ambulance in the back alley.

The initial diagnosis was not well conveyed, but it seemed to be a urinary tract infection and dehydration, and her blood thinner medication levels were very high. An infection and dehydration can cause delirium, so our hopes it might resolve were not foolish. Over the next few days, however, anyone who had a chance to talk to her found her confused and hard to understand. The hospital gave us little information and we heard nothing from them after Thursday afternoon. I called multiple times on Friday evening after logging into her patient portal site and noting there had not been a urine culture done and her urine looked more contaminated by the stool she had been sitting in than infected. She also had new onset of liver inflammation and gradually worsening kidney function. None of these were the signs of an easily corrected problem. I did not hear from anyone Friday and slept poorly Friday night. I finally gave up after tossing and turning for 2 hours and called the floor again around 4:30am. I got her nurse and she told me my mother was still talking, eating and was not too bad. She said the Cardiologists had seen her Friday. She was not sure if anything had been done to the huge blood blisters/hematomas on my mother’s legs. She told me the doctor would call me, and I said I would be the one to tell what he said to the rest of the family to limit calls, a deal we had arranged with her care manager before, but at that time the point of contact had been my dad.

I waited all morning, calling one other time, but didn’t hear anything. It is not fun to kill time while waiting to find out if your mother is going to die or maybe pull through and go to a rehab facility. Somewhere in there, maybe around 10 am, my siblings had been unable to reach her, but my brother, Chris, said the number was busy. I tried it. It rang and rang. Was she asleep? On the toilet? It continued to ring. Should I hang up? I was just about to hang up when the ringing stopped. I could hear her voice, very softly.

“Mrs. O’Rourke? This is your son, Terry Jr.” Often as a minor prank, I would call her Mrs O’Rourke or imitate one of her friends. She did not laugh. It was hard to understand her. I couldn’t tell if she knew who it was or not. I asked her how she felt. I could understand she felt a little short of breath. She remembered the doctors doing something to her legs that morning. I asked her about her breakfast - she was obsessed with food, so it would be a good gauge of how she was doing. She was able to tell me everything she ate, and drank, and included that she didn’t like oatmeal. This was at least something, but still, she was so hard to understand. I told her other people were hoping to talk to her, but she said she didn’t want any more calls as she wanted to take a nap. I tried to get her full attention and told her, “I love you very much, Momma.” She replied, mumbling a bit, “I love you, too.” I told her good bye and hoped she had a good nap. Later I thought I was the last person to talk to her other than the nurses, but my father called her around 11am and had a similar conversation with her then.

Finally, the phone rang at 11:42am, and it was the doctor. We had a good conversation where he was realistic about the outlook but thought she would be able to go to a rehab facility. I made sure she was DNR and told him it was OK if this was her time to go; she had an awesome life and had been dwindling over the last year but with a more rapid progression lately. I still hoped we could figure out why her brain wasn’t working right and fix it, but I suspected her heart couldn’t pump enough blood, with her hemoglobin at 7.7, to keep her brain working correctly.

I hung up and typed a quick email to my family about my talk and then got the first part of my lunch out: some yogurt and a banana, and had taken three or four bites when the phone rang again at 12:20pm: the doctor. I could tell right away it was bad, but when he told me she was dead, it was like someone had pushed me off a cliff. At one point my torso was on the table and my knees on the floor as I sobbed, listening to him tell me (he first asked if I was in a safe place and not driving) that the nurse had been in to help her get comfortable. She told them she felt tired and wanted to sleep. In just a few minutes her heart rate slowed down and stopped completely. She never appeared to suffer.

My mind, which is always in the fast lane, was now racing on the edge. I had to tell my family. I was pacing frenetically into my bedroom and back into the living room of my one bedroom apartment. I started to call my father, but I thought it might take a while, so I sent a quick group text to my siblings that said, “She just died. I am calling Dad.”

My father picked up on the second or third ring with a cheerful, at the time, “Hi, Bud!” I was in full meltdown, crying and barely able to speak. This was the worst 5 minutes of my life, telling my father his wife was dead. I said something like, “Dad, it’s terrible! Mom just died! It’s terrible!” He was shocked. “She’s dead! Oh my God. I didn’t even get to see her! I’ll never get to see her again! What am I going to do?”

We babbled on, with me far the worst, trying to relay information through my sobs, barely able to stand, and him trying to make sense of what I was saying. Meanwhile my sister, Candace, was calling repeatedly. I finally told him I had to hang up to take her call. It was awful.

Candace was a wreck and in shock. I did the best I could, and we calmed each other down enough to come up with a plan: I would call my brother, Chris, and Kelly, and she would call our older sister, Jennifer.

Around that time I got a call from the doctor wanting to know about funeral arrangements. Candace had said she thought it was for the Visneski funeral home, so I told him that. He said again how sorry he was.

Chris answered right away and said he was racing home from a mall where he had been Christmas shopping. I don’t remember what I said, but it was full of tears and sobs and we cut it short, both nearly screaming in anguish. I called Kelly at home, thinking she might be asleep. She had just started working in the Covid unit at her nursing home from 3am-3pm, but I couldn’t remember what shift she was on. No one answered. I called her cell phone, and she answered after only a few rings, annoyed. It took longer than it should have for me to tell her our mother had just died. She sounded gut punched. She said quickly, “I have to call my supervisor.” We hung up.

I called my niece, Chris’s daughter, Kelsey, who lived nearby and who would likely be my ride home. All of the grandchildren loved their Grammy with their whole hearts. I hated to do it, but Chris was driving and I didn’t think he would call her right away. She didn’t answer. I left her a text to call me as soon as possible. Then I called another niece, Madelaine. She had gone on three trips with me, including one to Spain with Kelsey, and I felt very close to her. Both of them were like daughters to me. Madelaine did not answer my call either, but she replied to a text that she contact me or her parents right away, with a text she was getting her hair done. “Is everything ok?” I replied, “No.” I asked how long she would be, and she guessed about 30 minutes. Then she called me, sure something really bad had happened, and I asked her if she was ready for some bad news. She said she was, and I told her Grammy had just died. She was still shocked, and she spent the rest of her hair appointment being consoled by her hairdresser. Kelsey called, wailing. I was able to determine she had already found out from her dad, who told her to come be with me because I shouldn’t be alone. Through my sobs, I told her to go to her condo instead. There were protests in the area and neither of us was packed and ready to go anywhere or do anything. We would talk in a bit once we figured out what to do.

From there I contacted as many other relatives as I could, including my father’s sister, Judy, and my cousin, Raquel, who knew most of the rest of my mom’s family’s whereabouts. It seemed like I had been at this for hours, but it was only 1pm. I noticed my uneaten lunch and sat down and ate quickly, going through the motions but knowing I needed to get something in my stomach in case we went home quickly. I got another message it was to be a different funeral home, so I called the floor and let them know. I got another message about 15 minutes later it was not that funeral home but Visneskis, and I called the floor again, and they had the doctor call me. I texted my family that if there were any more changes to the funeral home, they would have to call.

The most disturbing part was the finality. It wasn’t like we could cry her or sob her back. She was gone. She was dead. There was no chance we were going to see her alive. We might not even be able to see her again before she was buried because of covid. I couldn’t believe how much it hurt. In there somewhere I had also texted my fellow doctors who knew she was in the hospital. One of them, my medical director, Pat, had her mother die unexpectedly in the two years I had been working there. She called me and I bawled and babbled with her, but she said they would cancel my schedule for the week and I should keep her informed. She for sure knew how bad it felt.

My afternoon continued like this for a while longer, with lots of calls and texts. Kelsey and I decided to wait to figure out what to do and decided on leaving the next morning, early, a Sunday. We would figure the rest out later. I looked at my watch and it was 2:50pm. I’d made a reservation for the gym at 3pm. Should I go? I waffled a bit and then changed into my workout clothes, put on my mask and walked down there. No one else was there, which was good. I started my warm up and was going through the motions when suddenly my head cleared some and I felt good. I immediately thought of my mom; it felt like her spirit was there with me. I decided to do a good quick workout with her, to let her feel what it was like to be powerful and fit, and it went really well. It relaxed me a lot and helped me through the rest of the afternoon and gave me a model for how to manage without her.

I had pulled myself together. I’ve read a lot about grieving, death, and have seen far too many people die. One thing I was pretty sure of was the importance of embracing the pain, not running from it or avoiding it. I let myself cry, sob, and flail about. I talked freely of how bad I felt with everyone. I had several calls with my family the rest of the day, and a very nice call from Greg and Kathy Wright, both of whom had also had their mothers die and still had their fathers, and ate my normal meals. I had no hunger, but eating felt fine. Finally it was time to go to bed. I knew I probably wouldn’t sleep well, but that was ok. I didn’t. I was up a lot, but I did sleep a bit. There were, and still are, so many things to think about: the memories; what she had been through and felt; getting packed and ready, getting home, what to do then, etc. If there was one blessing about a loved one dying in the era of Covid-19, we did not have to pull together a funeral service, and I did not have to pack any nice clothes.

Kelsey picked me up a little before 8am, and I did not try to exercise before we left. I teared up often on the ride home, but we talked a lot about things. Traffic was light and we made good time. We got groceries in Danville and did not run into anyone we knew, which was good. When I walked in the door I did the thing I wanted to do the most since the call from the doctor: I hugged my dad, for a long time, telling him that having to tell him his wife was dead was the worst thing I’d ever done. I released him, but then wanted to hug him again and did.

We moved through the house and go the groceries stored, getting caught up on things. I think we ate quickly and then went to his favorite room in the front of the house and talked there. My brother and his family soon arrived, and we had a long and wordless hug. It was something you never wanted to have to do, console and grieve with your siblings, but we did, and then we had a pretty enjoyable conversation. It was really helpful to have his kids there; they were entertaining and diverting. Candace and her family came soon and more tears were shed. She was more emotional than the rest of us, which was fine, but still we got settled in and chatted. Kelly came at some point; some of the day is a blur. The doorbell rang, and I went to get it. I didn’t recognize one of my best friends with his face covered until I noticed his brother, also a great friend, standing on the porch as well. They brought a Subway tray, and while I was out talking to them, one of my father’s former co-workers and his wife, whom I had known most of my life, came by with three trays of food. Another friend of mine drove by and stopped, and I talked to him about it in the middle of the road. It was so nice to get this much support.

We agreed to meet the funeral director and his wife at the funeral home at 3:30pm. It was within an easy walk, so we headed down. The only one missing was Jennifer. We all thought she should not drive down from near Boston, but we tried to keep her abreast of what was going on. One thing we were not sure about as we walked was whether we would see her body. Chris wanted to; he had not talked to her before she died (I kept apologizing for not giving him the correct number). When we got there, it was very calm. We talked about things with the funeral director’s wife, and she assured us our mom looked great and we should all see her. We worked through the paperwork and arrangements and my siblings contacted their children to get them to come as well.

We warily walked into the room where her remains were. They had everything but her head covered in a floral quilt. I was surprised how beautiful and peaceful she looked. Her skin was shiny and unwrinkled. I moved to touch her feet while my father moved closest to her face. I remembered Jennifer wanted pictures, and I got my phone ready in enough time to catch my father saying goodbye and kissing her forehead. Chris went next, then I moved in.

I stared at her. What a human being she had been! I leaned over and softly kissed her forehead. Her skin was cold and clammy. I moved quickly aside. I was so glad I had come to see her and had kissed her, so glad I had hugged her hard before I left her the last time I had seen her alive in September, so glad I had tried to talk to her before she died, so glad I had told her I loved her. I texted Jennifer and let her know she had not missed much at the funeral home, but she was asleep. I sent her the photos once we got home.

There was still some weeping and hugging among us, and then the grandchildren arrived. They generally handled it with more calm, and it helped to see that. We closed up the rest of our business there, waiting for Madelaine to come. She left for her house and the rest of us walked back home. It was all so professional but also compassionate.

I ate the tuna wraps in the platter and ate some rice and salad as we hovered around the kitchen talking. My mom was a frequent topic of conversation as we looked at the jammed refrigerator she’d left behind and came up with a plan for Monday. I showed the pictures I had taken of their Grammy to Chris’s kids after they asked to see them and I got approval from their parents. That went ok. There was far more laughing than crying at this point. We were going to be all right. The next day everyone assembled again and went through her old clothes and things and took what they wanted. It had become a celebration of my mom rather than a mourning. There was already a lot of healing. Kelsey and I drove back the next day and I got reoriented to my world without my mother’s physical presence, talking to Mom now and then, imagining her watching me and spending time with me. We all shared the links to articles about her in the local papers freely. I was proud of all she’d done to help the people in our little town that fell through the cracks or never really had a chance otherwise, helping a lot of them get back on their feet. I went back to work that Friday and the day went ok. When I got home I finally felt able to open the office’s card for me: they had donated $230 for me to donate on my mother’s behalf to one of the charities she had founded. I had another good cry and shared the news with my family. I doubled their donation and sent a check with a letter telling that story to whomever received and processed it.

PART 2: Her life, and my memories

My mother grew up in the small town of Newport, PA as one of seven children. Her father worked for the railroad and was away a lot. It was the Great Depression and then the Second World War, so they never had enough, but they made what they had work. There were six girls, and my mother was the 5th in line; her only brother was the youngest. They entertained themselves and had lots of friends, but they also had a lot to do in the house. One of the most important aspects of my mother’s personality was her profound and enduring love and admiration for her own mother. My mother loved God and Jesus the most, but her mother was a strong second. Her frugality, her toughness, her obsessions with food and cooking, and her work ethic all came from her mother’s example. I didn’t get to see her mother at her best; at family gatherings she was always preoccupied with food preparation, and then she had a rapid loss of her mental faculties and long period of dementia until her death in her 90s.

Mom was the valedictorian of her class in Newport and joined the rest of her sisters by becoming a nurse. The timing is a bit fuzzy, but we are pretty sure she did her nursing training before she went to college as a way to help pay her tuition. She went to Juniata College, where she graduated with a degree in sociology. She apparently worked in the student health infirmary. One of the stories sent to us, from a friend of hers who also went to Juniata, told of a male student who was ill and staying in the infirmary who told his friends he wasn’t sure he wanted to get better because the nurse there was so much fun to be around.

She got a job as a nurse at Harrisburg Hospital and soon met my father. They fell quickly in love. He loved her beautiful eyes and, also, her legs, which wouldn’t get through her many pregnancies unscathed. After they were married, they worked at the Selinsgrove School, which was a place for disabled children, and then my father signed up for the Air Force. He went for training in San Antonio and on to Okinawa, then a U.S. Territory. My mother, pregnant with Jennifer, followed him there and had Jennifer there and then me. While there, she did not do much work outside the home, but she took cooking classes and learned how to make many Asian style meals.

When they returned to the US, my father started his residency in Radiology at Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, becoming the first doctor to work there who had been born there. We lived in a small house near the hospital, and my brother, Chris, soon joined us in May of 1965. We shared a bedroom and had a big back yard and the run of the neighborhood (we were forbidden to go into the nearby woods, as there were allegedly some rattlesnakes in there). It was a fun life. My mother knew how to have fun, and that was something everyone liked about her. An early memory was her watching the soap opera, “Dark Shadows.” I asked her who the strange man in the cape was and she explained he was a vampire. Until that point I had no idea there could be monsters, and it made it hard for me to sleep throughout the rest of my childhood. She soon stopped watching TV during the day, and we were not allowed to watch anything other than the morning news most days until 8pm. We still did get to see lots of cartoons and Sesame Street, so I know all the cultural touchstones of the average American kid from that era (one of the most exciting days of our childhoods was the first Saturday after school started, when all the new cartoons and shows would be on in the morning).

We moved to a much bigger house after Kelly was born and my parents set about getting it fixed up. We were close to my father’s parents, but it was farther to my mom’s, so we didn’t see them as much; mostly holidays briefly and maybe in the summer. Still, we liked our cousins and it was nice to see them and catch up on their lives and play with someone different. Otherwise, we went to a kindergarten right up the street run by three single elderly people in a huge Victorian mansion. We all had lots of friends and my mother shuttled us all over (no car seats, often no seat belts). Our elementary school was also in walking distance, and we got to come home for lunch. I am fairly sure I was walking to and from school alone a lot of the time as a 6 year old. She was tough about missing school, but she was also realistic. I was very smart and school was so boring at times I had to take an afternoon off now and then. She would let me just enough. I think she liked it when we were around some times, but other times she wanted us out of the house. “Get some fresh air!” she would tell us as we went out and breathed the fumes from the Merck drug manufacturing plant right across the river from us and inhaled all the lead from the gasoline burned by the cars going up the streets. We were generally trusted to be good and were most of the time. She was far from a helicopter parent; as long as we were out of her sight, she was happy. I don’t remember her coming to most of my basketball games, as I could walk to them (the big games, when we played for the championship, would get her to turn up), but she did come to my wrestling matches as a 7 and 8 year old because she had to drive me.

We also joined the local country club, Frosty Valley, as my dad loved to play golf. Once it got warm, he played golf every Saturday and Sunday, rarely missing a day, so we were still my mom’s to watch most weekends. We would go up there all the time to swim, play tennis, and try to play golf when the course was not crowded. My mother loved to be tan; she used only baby oil, and I don’t remember us getting much in the way of sun screen. We typically got a sunburn the first time out on our way to getting very tan the rest of the summer. She took up tennis and was fairly good. She once got on a good run and upset the usual champ one year. She was very competitive, and it rubbed off on all of us. She always cared if we won, a word she pronounced like you would the name, “Juan.”

This was all while she managed the remodeling of our house in the mid 70s. I was fascinated at her easy way with all the workmen and their obvious affection for her. She now had 5 children, Candace being the last, born in December of 1969. Even with all that going on: 5 kids, some of them old enough for piano lessons (we all took them, me probably the least), sports, a several year remodeling project, she started doing some work in the community. She worked with the American Heart Association and the Geisinger Auxiliary, and, in the mid 70s, she took up running once we were old enough to be left alone. It wasn’t enough for her to run; she started to organize races and a running club.

“Relax” was not a word used often in our house. Maybe just by my father, who preferred to be left alone after a day of work, reading and then watching a little TV. I loved to read, but there were few places one could go where it was quiet and comfortable. There was always noise, especially from the women of the house who chattered incessantly. My mother was on the phone most of the time she wasn’t talking with us or entertaining visitors. She had a loud voice, especially on the phone, and laughed and laughed while she talked. We were supposed to be doing something, anything, all day. The words she hated most were, “Mom, I’m bored!” She taught us all several solitaire games, so we could always do that on rainy days, and we had cupboards full of board games and puzzles, and we came up with our own games (apparently the floor of lava was a fairly common one in our era), had a swing set in the yard, and a nice hemlock tree to climb, as well as a dog or two and several cats. In addition to the fun things that we could do, she usually took us with her to work on her garden on the grounds of the state hospital or enlisted our help in her backyard garden as well. We all had some chores to do around the house, and she nagged and nagged us about all of them. It was a bit of chaos, but usually fun as well, and our friends loved to come over. We were allowed a cookie before 4pm, our last snack before dinner.

Meals were a mixed bag, bringing our family dynamics to critical mass as often as they bonded us. I have always been a big eater, and I liked most of what my mother made. Liver, which she liked to make us try once a year, was not a favorite, but with few exceptions, I was eager to gorge myself with whatever she put in front of us. My father, my brother and I all ate quietly and diligently (Chris called it “the eating mode”) while my mother and sisters insisted on discussing their days, most of which we had already witnessed. All of the girls were picky eaters; it was a fight nearly every night to get them to eat. My brother was somewhere between them and me. It was so annoying to listen to these arguments over and over. My father would only occasionally chime in on my mother’s side; there were a few occasions when what she made was too bad for him and me to even choke down, and then we cobbled something else together or got fast food. This was always a prelude to dessert, which was the highlight. My mother could bake! She cultivated a sweet tooth in all of us, but I like to say my sweet tooth is just slightly smaller than the vastness of the universe, slightly less than infinity. Her fruit pies were off the charts. They remain a great pleasure to try at restaurants to compare to my mother’s virtuosity with less sugar and “healthy crusts.” Pumpkin, lemon sponge, apple, cherry, blueberry, peach, and the treasured black raspberry with berries we picked ourselves in our garden were frequently consumed in mass quantities, with an assortment of cakes and cookies and cheesecakes, with my all time favorite of cherry pie filling on a cream cheese base with graham cracker crust. At Christmas she would make 30+ different kinds of cookies and treats, and my friends would come for “cookie tours” even into their 30s. This only captures a small portion of it! The freezer full of ice cream, the candy in jars all over were a test of our will powers; our active lifestyles, especially mine, allowed us to consume nearly as much as we could every day, and it never seemed to run out.

This wealth of food stood in stark contrast to her frugality and conservation measures. The completion of the remodeling coincided with the Oil Crisis in the 70s. We were trained to never leave a light on once we left a room. The house was kept at 60-62 degrees during the day in winter and turned down to 50 at night by the last person to go to bed. If you forgot to do that, you would hear about it more than once the next day, and for weeks after (same with leaving a light on all night). When I discussed this with her as she got older, she insisted I was not remembering correctly, but my memory was much better than hers! We had two space heaters that burned kerosene; one for the front, where my dad went often after dinner as it was generally warmer, and one for our big family room in the back. On the back patio there was a kerosene tank, and we would drag those heaters out to fill them on the coldest days (in addition to breathing those fumes much of the day, we also assisted her in scraping the lead paint off the walls and baseboards with torches with no protection. !!!!). We all wore lots of layers and had runny noses all the time. Our blankets were super thick, heavy comforters from my mother’s parents, and we wore thick pajamas. My bedroom had no direct heat (this is not technically true, as it had electric baseboard heaters, but I refused to turn them on) and was the coldest room in the house. I remember one bitterly cold night when I woke to ice on the INSIDE of my windows when I pulled the curtains up. Our couches and chairs all had blankets and afghans on them and we fought over the warmest ones (there was one golden, thick blanket reserved for when we were ill called “the sick blanket.")

Summer was just as peculiar. She refused to allow air conditioners. We had a few fans we would position strategically on the floors in the halls upstairs, and often the only place cool enough to sleep was on the floor next to them. Once we got enough fans to put in the windows in each of our rooms, it was much better, and I liked the white noise of them. She also insisted on leaving the doors and windows open all day with the curtains open (we would argue this made the house hotter, but she wanted the air moving and wouldn’t listen to us. My mother was not particularly reliant on logic and preferred how she believed things to be to reality and facts. She eventually allowed my father to put an air conditioner in a window of the front room, where he spent most of his time, but he had to keep the door shut. You would also be yelled at for having the door open to that room longer than it took for an escape artist to get in and out.

She relentlessly searched for bargains. She would drive 10 miles past our local grocery stores if she thought she could save a dollar or two on a few items, and then she would buy almost anything on sale. Our pantry was full of “bonus buy” labeled crackers no one ever ate. We would go out and pick our own fruit and vegetables at other people’s farms. We would drive to Reading, PA to go to the outlets there before school started to get our wardrobes. We collected green stamps and some of her favorite days were when we would cash them in on something that seemed practical but never really worked out.

She was about your average level of vain. She cared about her hair, but she finally gave up on dying it and gave in to her premature graying in her late thirties. Her running didn’t do much for her legs, which we (mostly me) referred to as “tree trunks,” certainly something I wish I had never said now. They were shapeless, utilitarian legs that developed bad arthritis and angled inward at the knees. My father would buy her lots of nice clothes, but she felt they were too good to wear and wore the same few outfits (sometimes several days in a row) until they were threadbare. She almost never wore makeup or used any kind of skincare product, and she eschewed jewelry except for a watch. She was naturally pretty, with beautiful, twinkly eyes and a lively smile, and she didn’t feel a need to look any better most of the time.

She was competitive, as I mentioned earlier, and she tried to get good at tennis with mixed results, but her running never got her anywhere outside of the end of the pack. I used to say she only beat the ambulance that followed the field in case someone was injured or passed out (no exaggeration: she often finished dead last in races). That said, she would have done quite well in this modern, participatory type of running scene. Her 10 minute miles kept her way behind in an era where only a bunch of geeks and nerds with a proclivity for suffering and endurance would put up with the jeers and ridicule one who ran would get back then. Now, she would finish in the top 50% in most races. She never got into golf, but she tried to win at everything else and was not above cheating, or at least stretching the rules (she would be famous for this with her grandchildren). She also wanted us to win at everything we did: her first question when we returned from any game was “Who won?” She griped about how her friends bragged about their children. She wouldn’t brag so much as hint when with her friends. We had to try just about everything, but she at least let us decide not to keep going when whatever she wanted us to try didn’t suit us well. I was that way with music and baseball - there was way too much sitting and standing around in each of those. She loved us all unconditionally, but we knew she also liked us to kick ass and take names, whether at school, in the band, or on the playing field.

She rarely took a vacation. When we went somewhere as a family, she dominated the agenda. At the beach she went early, chose the spot and set up. We were expected to spend most of our time there (by the time we were teens we did use sunscreen) and make the most of it. We knew it pleased her for us to go in the water or try something new. There was usually one beach vacation a year and a ski vacation in the winter. She was not a good skier but did it for us. She wrecked a lot, both on downhill and cross country skis, and we loved to laugh at her and she loved all of it as well.

She loved to entertain. She hosted many parties at our house once it was remodeled, and all the big shots from the hospital were there at one time or another. We were not always good, but we were never bad. I recall shooting whoever went to use the bathroom with ping pong ball guns, briefly escaping from our confinement in the front room. Her parties were fun, and even as teenagers and in college, we would spend New Years or other occasions with her and her friends, playing charades (she was ok at guessing but hopeless at acting out - it was always a highlight of any game to get her out there) or other games and eating as much as we could. She loved it loud, and she wanted lots of action; just this side of chaos. She loved to laugh at everything, and everyone loved to make her laugh. She had the best sense of humor about herself and loved to tell about dumb things she did or said (we all do that as well). The goal was usually to get her laughing so hard no sound would come out. That happened a lot, especially during games when her answer would be so ridiculous we would have to stop and all laugh until our faces were wet with tears. She was a huge fan of pranks. Early on, we had to pay close attention to everything on April Fools Day (even then she got us often), and she was fantastic at hiding our Easter baskets. One of Jennifer’s friends, Elizabeth Magill Billingsley, and Mom were always pulling pranks on each other, with fake letters, phone calls with disguised voices, “presents” mailed back and forth, etc.

Over all this hovered her faith. It was the most important driving force in her life. She loved God, loved Jesus, was devoted to Mary, and she was filled with joy by this love and wanted to share it with everyone so they could experience it as well. She did not do much preaching per se, but she brought it up a lot and we prayed before every family meal and before we left on trips. We were raised Catholic in accordance with documents she signed when she married my father, and Mom rarely went to church when we were young. She was “Born Again” in the early 70s and started attending the local Presbyterian Church with my sisters, including Jennifer, who had been confirmed in the Catholic Church by that time. She quickly rose to prominence there and did whatever forms of leading she could. We got involved in some of the earlier charity efforts she got herself into, and we would usually go to the service on Christmas Eve with her, jamming into one pew (she paid close attention to the families who brought the most people.). She was peripherally involved in the services for the most part, did not sing in the choir or do readings, but behind the scenes she worked to get the church involved in the community and trying to network with other churches to maximize the charitable impact. I remember going with her to drop off food at lots of old folks’ homes. As I got older I got more dedicated to Catholicism and read more about the saints and church history. I often joked with her that I went to the “One True Church,” and it seemed over time to convince her to look into the Catholic faith, especially after her trip to Medjugorje in 1986. She met the witnesses to the miracles there and came back even more motivated. Finally, in 1999, I sponsored her through RCIA classes and her joining the Catholic Church at the St. Joseph Parish in Danville. She quickly, with the fervor of the recent convert, moved into the leadership there. Her focus always was on the poor and suffering. She got a “Peace and Social Justice Committee” started and got St. Joseph more involved in the town and the world (they were very generous in supporting some of the charities I worked with in Africa as well). She often went to daily Mass and was a reliable attendee at even the least interesting services, trying to find something motivating. Toward the end of her life she did not waver; she still did Eucharistic Adoration, went to weekly Mass and other meetings. I am sure one of her most dispiriting aspects of the pandemic was not being able to go to Mass.

She was driven by this faith to always do what she felt was the right thing. That it was hard or no one else seemed to want to do it would not stop her. I was able to talk her out of a few of the more impossible ideas she had, but usually she would go ahead anyway. She was not just about the ideas; she wanted to work out all the details and still do more of the work than everyone else. I felt she went too far much of the time, making herself a martyr of sorts with all her challenges, overfilling her schedule and setting herself up for massive disappointments. But somehow she kept going; she would have been an able entrepreneur in modern times (except for her complete ineptitude when it came to technology). She was a visionary of sorts, able to not only see what was wrong but to find incremental solutions, to build on each small victory and figure out how to make things even better. As the culture of nonprofits became more settled, she would take care of grants and other submissions for funds, and she was very big on transparency and shared leadership, getting the best people to serve with her on the various boards (she was always talking about the boards!), but it was clear to everyone they should do things her way (with a few little adjustments here and there - she was not super rigid). In the end she wanted things DONE. There would be lots of talking and speculation, but results were what mattered to her. Kids with new socks and underwear to start school, winter coats to those who needed them, uniforms for the working poor, light and heat kept on, meals for the lonely and hungry, a place for the homeless. To see the programs as they run now is very gratifying after seeing how hard she had to work to get every one of them going. I was around enough to see a lot of it and help her often. While occasionally she would ask me in advance for help, she would usually come to me just when I settled in to read or watch TV (especially after I’d just come back from a round of golf or a hard workout) to ask me to come along to help move donated furniture, or to edit one of her letters or documents (her writing style often left out key things she figured everyone already knew). My biggest accomplishment was telling her early on not to get involved in medical bills or medicine purchases. It saved her a huge amount of hassles. There were plenty enough hassles as it was, but she almost enjoyed them. She certainly talked about them a lot.

My mother was not perfect. She did what she felt was correct all the time, but she wasn’t always correct about it. She could be a nag and be pretty annoying. She never hesitated to interrupt something we were doing, whether it was reading or looking at things, because to her it seemed like we weren’t doing anything important. She would always volunteer us for things without asking first. Her worst: She decided on her own to set up a job interview for me at a local convenience store (Willie’s One Stop) the day after I graduated from college #1 in my class and got all kinds of awards. We had a huge, fun party going on back home with all my friends when she told me I had to be at the interview at 5AM the next morning!!! The party went on most of the night but I had to go to bed just before it got really fun. I could have done the interview any other day, but she didn’t tell me until it was too late to call and reschedule. When she got a “bee in her bonnet,” it was hard to get her to let it go. She did things like come out to the front room while we were watching TV and stand in the doorway, talking very loudly on the phone with someone (all. the. time.). She would sit down and tear the plastic from stacks of envelope “windows” while we watched movies or sports to recycle the paper parts. She got chicken grease and peanut butter all over the phones. She once wore my running shoes and insisted they were hers (she had big feet like me), and I had a devil of a time convincing her otherwise. While we made it funny in her later years, she always tried to promote things: foods, games, tasks. She would go to all kinds of trouble to bring out more foods even after we were full and had stopped eating to try to get us to eat more (she was, like many mothers who grew up in the Depression, obsessed with food).

One of her greatest joys in life was spending time with her grandchildren. Though at times it was a burden for her, she embraced caring for them during the day while their parents worked. She did that for all of the older grandkids except Thomas and William Wentworth, who were too far away. The grandchildren got used to going on calls with her to see needy folks or to drop off things for shut-ins and some of her older friends. She kept them busy with projects and liked to play games with them. It made a measurable difference in all of their lives to have spent so much time with her.

This joy for the grandchildren was even stronger at “The Cottage.” In the mid-90s, my parents came up with what I thought was a crazy idea of buying a second home somewhere for us to use for our vacations, and they settled on a small, older house on a fairly big property at Keuka Lake, one of the smaller Finger Lakes in western New York. After a few rough goes at getting it set up for larger gatherings and packing too many people in at once, it turned out to be a fantastic place to go and spend time together. It was a lot of work, and she and my father did and paid for most of it. Her work ethic set the standard for all of us, and it was pretty much expected that every time you went there you would take on some kind of improvement project. I have no inclination to home repairs so I mostly worked on the grounds and bought things like kayaks, but over the years, all the money and sweat improved it. She loved being there and having projects to do, but even better was spending time with her children and grandchildren, especially playing games and eating too much. Even the simple things like sitting on the adirondack chairs by the water and listening to the kids talk about their lives and what they wanted to do enthralled her. Her face would glow. Even this past summer, our last family week there with her, under the strain of Covid-19 and her obviously failing health, she tried to get us all to pledge to spend at least 30 minutes pulling weeds on the beach, and I took a photo of her on her hands and knees pulling weeds next to the house (it all got done).

As she got older, her health got more and more fragile, but she bounced back each time to make the most of each day. Bad knees caused her to stop running, but she still walked and hiked regularly. The first time she nearly died was after coming back from volunteering in Honduras. She had gone there before for a week with a Catholic Church group and loved it. This time she didn’t feel well soon after getting home, finally confessing a fever to my father. She had an infection of her already damaged mitral valve in her heart (she probably had Rheumatic heart disease as a child from Strep infections), and she had a port put in place and got antibiotics at home through that for six weeks. The next time (I am aware of) was a bout of pericarditis, inflammation in the sack around her heart. I was in Africa at the time and made it home just after she got out of the hospital. My gestalt was she had been misdiagnosed with regards to her arthritis; her doctor thought it was run-of-the-mill, but she had a harder to diagnose inflammatory condition that required her to be on oral steroids for years to prevent pericarditis and a myriad of other consequences. She hated her rosy cheeks and the skin changes from the prednisone, and she had wound problems in her lower legs chronically after that. Then she had a massive gastrointestinal bleed related to her blood thinner for her heart (she had atrial fibrillation from changes due to the faulty valve). Fortunately her new doctors thought about the big picture with her and got her to have surgery to repair her damaged mitral valve. The cocky doctor who did it tried to do it a less reliable, but less invasive, way and it didn’t work (a testament to her toughness: despite heart surgery, after she came off the morphine IV she never took anything stronger than Tylenol for her pain). Her right hip then went bad. She got worse and worse, and I couldn’t see her going on much longer with it. Fortunately, tests showed her heart was now working well enough she could get the hip replaced. That went well, with my now retired father (he worked until he was 76) helping her and doing her exercises and rehab for her. Her knees were still very bad, and her heart continued to function worse and worse. It was obvious, after several other hospital stays for heart failure and even minor infections, she had little reserve capacity and every day was a physiologic mountain for her to climb. But she kept at it. This year the decline got sharper: she was losing weight, not able to get around well at all, focused on her weight. We tried to get her to eat better, and she started speculating about getting her knees replaced. Her heart was holding her back. We had one last hope: another heart valve was bad, her aortic, and if they fixed that, it might help her do better, and then, maybe, she would be able to get her knees fixed. Alas, the Cardiologist who had been following her for years felt the valve was beyond repair and said doing anything about it would likely make things worse. She died about a month later, resigned in ways to her fate and still trying to do as much as she could every day (she was working on a new charity to teach people to drive and find them cheap cars until the day she went into the hospital).

I last saw her in September, and we thought it best not to come home for what turned out to be her last Thanksgiving, a holiday she loved and obsessed about this year (as she did every year). Her last days still had her baking and making some cookies. She left a pie crust for one of her famous pecan pies to make for me for Christmas and a pumpkin pie, and we found a chocolate pizza on the porch she had not told anyone about. That she still wanted to do all these nice things for me, in addition to everyone else, with the last moments of her earthly life, meant so much to me.

I often laugh when I think of her impact on my life. I honestly can’t think of a single time she gave me any good advice about school/life/the world (maybe get out of the house?). My life would totally suck if I’d listened to her. Her ideas of what a life should be like and mine rarely synced up. I am sure my siblings would disagree on that point. Her deeds spoke to me much more than her words. I learned a lot from her about people, how to deal with them (everyone likes to be in on jokes, for example). I value toughness so much: not caring about the temperature, for example, which was a big thing with her, and coping with the difficulties of any challenge I knew I could handle (I am not sure where my self esteem came from, but I always felt like I could do almost anything better than anyone else - the main exception being sports - if I put my mind to it), and she was so, so very tough, putting up with so much in her later years but still going out there every day and not complaining much (though she did to me). Putting your own needs and wants second to the task(s) at hand was emphasized. That example helped so much with getting through my schooling and medical training, and even now getting through the drudgery of modern medicine. I had several other people who helped me learn how to make almost anything fun, but she was a big influence there as well.

I hope you can appreciate in this summary of her life and how dynamic she was. Determined; courageous; stubborn; steadfast; devoted to her faith, her family, and her community; a great friend; and super, super fun and funny. That was my momma. I will never forget her. She deserves all the rewards a human can get in the next life, but we still all feel her in this one and always will.

Who Is in Charge?

It would be hard to find a single American who thinks our government works exactly the way it is supposed to. It might work the way some want it, but they know in their hearts that is not the way it should. So, why do we put up with it?

The short answer is because there are a group of people who benefit tremendously from it remaining about the way it is, and they have the system so rigged in their favor it doesn’t really matter what we, the general public/average Americans, want. These system-riggers want only small changes, and those changes almost universally work for them and/or their clients.. But why has it even gotten to this point?

This little blurb is about one aspect of the current situation: the people we select to make our laws and run our government departments. The members of the congress, presidents, and cabinet members are overwhelmingly drawn from two career paths: the legal profession and business/finance. If you paint each path with a broad brush, it would be hard to find two professions where ethics take more of a backseat.

Lawyers certainly purport to be after truth and justice, but we know justice and truth are often the last things on their minds. They are working first and foremost in their clients’ best interests, and their ultimate goal is always winning. I hope you have been paying attention to the revelations about prosecutorial misconduct over the past few years: suppressing exculpatory evidence, using confessions made under unfair distress, refusing to rehear cases where exonerating evidence has clearly been found, etc. Yet, one of the big selling points of anyone running for office for the last 40 years has been the former prosecutor who is “tough on crime.” The win at all costs ethics of the legal profession rolls right into our modern government, where no one will compromise, where the “client” they want to win is not the American people but the lobbyists and campaign contributors. The legal path public servants also dedicate much of their efforts to opacity of language and terminology in order to perpetuate their place of importance.

Businesspersons choose a challenging path. They have an idea or goal and try to make it a reality. They usually must hire workers to help them achieve their goals, but they then encounter two ethical dilemmas they usually fail to decide well on: the less they pay the workers, the more of the money they get to keep; the more they charge for the product, the more money they make. While there are certainly fair and honest businesses, these constant dilemmas overwhelmingly result in ethical compromises and justifications for the most successful. Many of these ethically compromised people then move into government, and they conflate capitalism with patriotism and prefer to run the country in a way to benefit businesses of every sort over the workers and consumers. They fight workplace safety regulations, minimum wage increases, labor organization, and are always in search of competitive advantages in the laws, especially with regards to taxes for businesses.

I kept finance separate from business, as their roles are fundamentally different despite their goals being similar. You are going to see more of them in the cabinet, as they are otherwise unlikely to take a pay cut that immense to be a congressperson, though they will gun for a senate seat from time to time, as they can wield significant power in the Senate and easily recoup the chunks of their fortunes they commit to win an election. The rule, with few exceptions, in finance, is winner take all. There is likely no line of work with more contempt for the common worker. They have rigged it so people who move money, which is now just a bunch of ones and zeroes, around, get the most money of anyone, and they definitely want to keep it that way. As Calvin Trillon drolly observed, before the 1980s, the middle of the pack students at Yale and the other Ivies, who only got into the schools because their fathers attended and continued to donate, were the ones who followed their parents or other relatives into finance. It was boring, though you could make a decent living. That has changed with the liberalization of what it is now possible and the vagueness of the current regulations that allows firms to bring in mathematicians and the smart kids who used to go into the law or medicine (in order to make money, rather than help people) to ramp up the complexity of everything so no one can understand it (even them). They have a lot of the money, and when we say markets go up and down, money is always flowing to them either way (it doesn’t just vanish when it is lost - it moves into someone’s account).

The result is a government run by a few hundred people on behalf of a few thousand others with each of us picking up the tab, which has mostly been borrowed. It is stunning to see how much effort will go into making one or two businesspersons happy, while millions of others are just scraping by in perilous and unrewarding jobs (think of coal mine owners, for example). This same principle is also playing out in state and local governments, who allow businesses (for example, Frackers) to come in, rape and pillage the environment and endanger the communities and their employees along the way, while only creating a small fraction of the jobs they promise and hiding behind immense legal teams to protect them once their misdeeds come to light. It is encouraging more and more people are onto this, and leaders like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was never anything but a worker, are growing in influence and popularity and are unafraid to confront the realities of this system and try to tear it down and build something that will work best for all. We need way more of them and to vote for people like them who can make progress for us.

One Percent Power

Much has been written about rising economic inequality, but this fills in a few, rarely mentioned gaps and points out a few things from a different angle. A very important issue right off is a large portion of human beings does not want equality. It is part of their make up. They are special and other people are not. Otherness is something to be feared and kept away from them. This has been especially true throughout American history and is very prominent now with the Trump presidency, which played on this issue in order to win the election and to try to remain in power. White supremacy almost universally includes these people; all things considered, keeping their own relative power and influence is more important to them than the quality of life of anyone outside their spheres.

This fear of otherness, which occurs in roughly 40% of any population (I will call them, in accordance with social scientists, authoritarian followers - see my earlier essay about them in this same section), is shared by those who have attained positions of power, influence and wealth. This is exemplified by the preponderance of white males in corporate, government, and religious leadership positions throughout the country, and it leads the authoritarian followers to consider rich and powerful white men (and their obedient wives) part of their tribe. The 40% thus align with the whims of the 1% on the vast majority of issues, with the 1% willing to exploit this in order to maintain their power. Thus you get the Republican party in 2019: the 1% calling the shots and the 40% doing the rest of the needed dirty work (both legit and illegitimate) to keep them in position to do so.

I am writing this now because I have been reading Jill LePore’s monumental, fantastic history of the United States called “These Truths.” In the build up to the Civil War, she mentions something I had not heard prior: the number of slave owners in the USA at that time was ONE PERCENT. One percent of the population of this country was able to cause and sustain one of the worst conflagrations in the history of humanity. They were able to do so through the same sociological and political methods we are seeing now, applied with the the fervor of people of power and influence with nearly everything to lose. Because of their power and influence, they were able to compel poorer and less resourceful white men to fight for their cause (the penalty for desertion was generally death).

In my opinion we are near another tipping point of the same magnitude. Our government is held in sway by the rich and powerful, the 1%, and our potentially great nation is being run into the ground to further their enrichment on a scale rarely seen. Our environment and the working class are being exploited at considerable risk to them by the ruling class purely for the ruling class’s benefit. It is growing increasingly obvious to the rest of us this is happening, and we are fed up. Clearly the next few years will see a different kind of populism take over: the rise of the common person, with their interests in better education for their children, better and safer work, preserving and improving our environment and health, and improving our shattered justice system while treating every person with dignity and respect. This will have to be done at the expense of the rich: they have nearly all the money, having benefited from our rigged economic and tax system far beyond any legitimate intentions. This 1% will be as difficult to put to heel as the slave owners of the 1800s. They will not go quietly, nor will the rest of their tribe, which is armed to the teeth and also prone to violence and victimhood. It has to be done: we must get the influence of money out of politics in order to preserve our future. I think we are nearly ready to do what it takes. We must no longer let the 1% have their oversized influence hold sway - they never make things better for the rest of us and never will. A higher tax on the wealthy, more regulation of the financial markets (with a tax on trades on the exchanges), a carbon tax, and taking the national security state down several notches will benefit the vast majority, and diverting the huge amount of money we all invest into health care into a more efficient, not for profit system unhitched from employment will free up this new economy from that burden. It is all there, but we will have to take it; it will not be given to us.

My Proposal for the 28th Constitutional Amendment

My 28th Amendment

            Arguments about whether the United States is a republic or a democracy notwithstanding, it is hard to argue against the intent at its founding to make it a government of the people. This country was not to be governed by a king or queen, but by representatives of the people from all over, with the famous checks and balances of the three branches of the government to make sure the will of the people (true, this originally was only land-holding white men) was foremost while also protecting the rights of all, especially those in the minority.

            What has arisen over the years is a nearly unidentifiable morass, poisoned by money and authoritarian personalities and their followers, where discrimination still is widespread, waste is beyond conception, and little progress is made, and what does get accomplished is under constant threat of destruction. Clearly the system is broken; it is currently only held together by the rule of law and a free press while under the extreme stress of the current administration.

            What needs to happen? First and foremost, money needs to be taken out of politics, and because money is currently held to be equivalent to speech by our court system, that will take a constitutional amendment to accomplish. So, what should that amendment say?

1.     All federal elections: Congress, Senate, President, will be federally funded. No outside money of any kind, even from the candidate’s own pocket, or his family’s, can be used except in order to qualify initially to run for office. The funding for qualification must be disclosed fully.

2.     Every candidate must qualify by having an independent mental health evaluation that will be made public; by submitting a reasonable amount of signatures attesting to his or her fitness and qualifications for office; by submitting to an independent background check that will also be made public; by submitting the last 7 years of their tax returns that will also be made public; any potential conflicts of interest must be exposed in detail. Any false information supplied would result in immediate forfeiture of the campaign and repayment of funds received and/or the removal from elected office if the candidate won (the runner up would immediately take over). Party affiliation is not necessary in order to qualify for funding or to be put on a ballot.

3.     Each campaign will be limited to 8 weeks prior to voting (candidates may put in the qualifying work at any time before the cut off date). All primaries will be held within the same 2 weeks time period, with 8 weeks of campaigning allowed before that. Party conventions would then be 1 month after that, and then 8 more weeks of campaigning before election day. This way, the price of the elections will be controlled and the public will not be as tormented by the campaigns.

4.     Outside agencies, such as corporations, unions, media outlets, and private individuals may endorse candidates publicly, but they may not pay for advertisements or campaign materials of any type. Endorsements may be mentioned in advertising and campaign materials.

5.     Terms of service will be limited to 3 4 year terms (so there are less elections overall to be paid for) for Congress and 2 6 year terms for Senators. Those running for reelection must still submit to the mental health evaluation and the background checks, etc. Any retirement benefits would last only the duration of the service (12 years for 12 years). Job benefits would be the same for all federal employees.

6.     Lobbying, and its equivalent, is limited to meetings with elected officers and information exchange. No money or gifts may be exchanged. No travel may be provided.

7.     Polling places must be accessible and available to all registered voters, but early voting by mail or, if suitable security measures can be in place, electronically, should be ENCOURAGED whenever possible. Failure to vote will result in a suitable fine, which would be used as part of the funding for the next elections.

8.     There will be an independent elections committee formed of 3 qualified non-partisan and/or independent board members appointed every 6 years by 2/3 majority of senators, and staffed by federal employees they hire that will be fully funded at all times (budget not in the control of congress or the president) in order to monitor elections, monitor funding, and monitor behavior in office. It will have the power to revoke office in cases of illegal behavior, abuse of power, sexual harassment, etc.. They will set up the pay scale, and keep it at a suitable level to attract qualified candidates and avoid as much as possible the temptations to illegally augment pay. They will also monitor district borders and local and state voting requirements and have the ability to punish any behaviors that suppress the right to vote or any fraud.

9.     The Electoral College is abolished in the Presidential election. The nationwide popular vote is the only measure of meaning and winning. The largest number of votes, no matter how many participants, wins. A majority is not required.

Jerkocracy

America: Not Democracy, But Jerkocracy

            Since the last presidential election in the United States, many have been wringing their hands at the threat the Trump presidency holds over democracy. The lack of respect for norms of behavior ethically and legally and strong tendencies to authoritarian rule are perceived as an existential threat. Add to this many natural disasters, threats of nuclear attack by North Korea, and ongoing struggles with terrorism and it is easy to think the present age is as terrifying as it gets.

            That is, of course, a common misperception. The present can be frightening, but it is easy to lose perspective because things have honestly and factually rarely been better, with the exception of the near completion of the change, via the election, to a pathologic form of leadership that moves America more fully from a representative democracy to what I call a Jerkocracy. The greatest existential threat to the United States, and by definition to the world at large, as U.S. influence and actions affect nearly everyone, is the vast majority of people seeking elected leadership positions at all levels of the U.S. government are jerks. There is perhaps no greater jerk than Donald J. Trump, but there are a staggering number of people challenging his supremacy (the Republican candidate for the open Senate seat in Alabama, Roy Moore, may actually be worse).

            “Jerk” can mean many things; it is even a verb. For the sake of my argument, I will define it two ways: first as persons who are absolutely sure of themselves and their ideology, unyielding to opposing views (even those backed by incontrovertible data and facts), and who will defend themselves relentlessly. For them, ideology is more important than anything (but that ideology may include the concepts of national and political party superiority) except their limitless self-regard, and they will never admit they are wrong. There is a second kind of jerk that is less common, overall, and these are the persons who seek to obtain maximum publicity and power, but don’t care all that much what they do with it as long as they keep it for as long as possible. Trump is clearly the latter, Roy Moore the former, and Ted Cruz both (though more the former). These people, who comprise every elected Republican (yes, there are Democratic jerks, but they do not possess the defined qualities in such obvious ways) except perhaps one or two of the female senators, cannot govern. They cannot get along unless they are united against a universal foe, usually someone far better at life than they are whom they would like to tear down (Obama was a dream come true: a somewhat progressive black man – incredibly easy for them all to hate. Similar for Hillary, a progressive woman with good ideas). They thrive on keeping things from getting done or changing, not on getting things done or making progress, with the exception of making sure their rich donors get more than their share of government funds (and they get rich themselves). Once they get power, they will never relinquish it and will do anything, absolutely anything, to keep it, deploying levels of hypocrisy, self-delusion, and cognitive dissonance difficult for normal people to comprehend.

            What remains to be seen is whether the tide can be turned. We’ve seen a mobilization of feminine political power since November of 2016, but is that enough? Reasonable people need to take back the government and put in place election reforms like public funding for campaigns and at least some level of nonpartisan psychologic or psychiatric scrutiny of potential candidates to keep the psychopaths and double high authoritarians who aspire to power away from it. At some point we will need to overhaul the constitution, either with several amendments or maybe a full rewrite, to bring it up to 21st century standards of human rights and decency and remove the vagueness that allows jerks to push the rest of the world around.

Is Donald Trump the Antichrist?

I am adding this part in December, but I will leave the rest untouched. The unthinkable happened and Trump won the election. I still can't believe it. Anyway, the notion he actually is gains some steam, though not much.

The answer to the headline question is clearly no. First, because there will be no antichrist: the Book of Revelation is the made up ravings of a mentally ill person that barely made it into the Bible over the protests of most of the experts at the time; second, because Mr. Trump is destined to fail because he is a terrible person and just enough people are on to him to keep him out of public office.

The purpose of this post, though, is to point out how easily evangelical Christians fell in line with a lying, racist, misogynistic demagogue who threatens the existence of all human kind. All it took was vain boasting, a fraudulent (and easily disproved) success story, and pretending to care about abortion and appointing pro-life judges to the Supreme Court. If you changed Hitler's name and summarized his ideas about the world and added that he was pro-life, they would support and vote for him to be president of the USA. They are that easily duped and that racist.

I have said for years this would occur; any theoretical antichrist would surely be a pro-lifer (with the exception to that term being the death penalty, the ultimate hypocrisy of evangelical Christian thought). An antichrist would be stupid not to be pro-life, as it is the easiest way to gain common ground with the roughly 40% of the American electorate who are right wing authoritarians easily manipulated by people who pretend to think like they think. Any would be dictator in search of the most power in the world wouldn't behave like a Bond super villain but a right wing Republican, especially now with our unprecedented national security apparatus in place. Many writers have commented we are only a few steps from a totalitarian state, and our surveillance abilities would easily top that of the Soviets and East Germans, heretofore the experts on locking down dissent and mandating conformity.

People have given the last rites to the Republicans several times in the last few decades. While their flawed ideologies and economic policies need to be buried, they will keep coming back because enough people are wired that way and they have tremendous persistence and an unwavering belief they are correct despite all evidence to the contrary.

Republican Economics: Their Not So Secret Secrets.

Republicans have long had the support of small businesses, and it is clear that many of their nuts and bolts policies appeal to business owners small and large. While they make a big fuss about abortion, immigration and terrorism, making many terrible missteps along the way, they still have the back of businesses, but that is only a good thing for the business owners and not for their employees (other than giving them a job).

It is not widely reported, but several journalists, most notably Chris Hedges ("American Fascists"), have attended lower level, grass roots rallies for Republicans. What they saw and heard is frightening to me, but it is clearly the basis for much of their economic policies. These are things they will deny to their deaths, but they are all too true.

First, you will rarely hear a Republican official encouraging higher education as a right, or working to increase college attendance. The Republicans want the vast majority of citizens/potential employees to be ignorant/poorly informed. Education is fine for the management class/ownership class, but it is better to limit how many ideas employees and laborers are exposed to. It is not as extreme in the US now as it was in the USSR after WWII, when Stalin sent large numbers of Red Army servicemen to the gulag or killed them because they saw how well people lived in Germany and western Poland as they stormed across them, but it is an underlying principle of Republicans. One huge reason is the religious right is very worried their children will see their beliefs as the bullshit they are once they are educated (especially at the "leftist, secular humanist universities"). Another reason is an uninformed voter is their greatest goal. It is much easier to convince someone unlikely to read the New York Times or the New Yorker the Republican way is the best for them. Third, and most important for business, is poorly educated workers are felt to be easier to control and manipulate, and they will also have fewer options for employment and will likely stick with a less than optimal job rather than take a chance on something new.

So, that brings us to the next Republican platform plank on economics: keep wages low. They will NEVER support an increase in the minimum wage. All the benefits of any hard work by people should be reaped by those who manage them or own the business in the Republican world. This aspect of capitalism, the aspect that makes workers want to unite in order to bargain for better wages and conditions, is kept in place by making it very hard for them to unionize, another economic plank.

You will also rarely find a Republican leader in favor of any environmental or workplace regulation. There are really only three targets of environmental regulation: 1. businesses that make or destroy things, including power generation, the military and loggers; 2. farmers; 3. People who kill animals. I would be willing to wager you wouldn't find more than 20% of any of those groups who would vote Democratic routinely. It is a lot easier to make huge profits if you can just throw your waste in a nearby stream, as GE did routinely in its ascent to the top. You can raise even more hogs for the money if you don't have to worry about where all their waste goes (they make a lot of waste). So, businesses like Republicans because they care way more about profits for their donors than the environment.

Republicans are always in favor of tort reform. Without regulations or proper enforcement of regulations by underfunded government agencies, the only recourse to bring a problematic business or polluter in line is the judicial system. While frivolous suits abound, there are way more very serious attempts to hold bad citizens and corporations responsible for the terrible things they do to their workers, the environment and their customers. A successful lawsuit can be the end of a business, especially before it gets big enough to afford lobbyists.

That brings us to the next point. While both parties are guilty of rewarding their donors with favors (it is estimated that donating to and lobbying politicians and political parties is one of the most lucrative investments, with a return of 100:1 on most efforts through changes in policies, especially tax protections and loopholes, avoiding regulations, and protections from imports), Republicans are notoriously susceptible to lobbying from businesses and the influences of very conservative business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is almost always on the side of businesses small and large.

Finally, Republicans can hardly be bothered about the poor. Sure, an individual case will touch their heart strings, and they tend to donate to charities (primarily their churches) and rely on them to care for the poor and hungry, but the mass of people in poverty is much easier for them to ignore as Republicans are almost uniformly right wing authoritarians, people who share certain thought patterns and beliefs (it is not technically a personality type, but it is easily tested for - see Bob Altemeyer's research - and reference my short but thorough essay about them a few articles down in this website). Among these patterns and beliefs is a lack of concern for inequality and a fear of people different than them. They actually prefer inequality in most cases, with the most glaring recent example the struggle of Republicans to keep any form of universal health care from passing. Even the bill that passed, which was basically a handout to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, both big Republican donors, was a massive affront to the Republicans because it helped people who otherwise couldn't afford it get access to health insurance, something they felt should be a reward for being a good, obedient, hardworking citizen who supported Republican interests rather than a human right.

So, The Republican party has as its backbone policies on economics keeping a large segment of the population poorly educated, poorly compensated, working in potentially dangerous and difficult settings for businesses and employers who don't have to worry about their effects on the environment or safety, and having the government do as little as possible to help them advance or even survive, all in order to maximize profits for business owners and the management class. That is what it means to be "pro-business" in the U.S.A. in 2016. Policies like these make people angry. The smart and well-informed will gravitate to someone like Bernie Sanders, who points all this out and wants the system changed, and the less well-informed and authoritarian will gravitate to someone who places the blame on someone else, like undocumented immigrants, President Obama, and maybe even the Jews.

What Hillary Clinton Should Say

No one has ever run for President of the USA with the background and experience of HIllary Clinton. She was a super smart student who fought from the start for civil rights and better rights for women, was the first lady of the US for 8 years, living in the White House, served part of two terms as an elected Senator of the notoriously corrupt state of New York with not even the whiff of a scandal, working often in a bipartisan way with Republicans in the Senate, and served as Secretary of State in an era where the US needed to rebalance and reestablish its reputation in a very complex world, working well and closely with the man who defeated her in her attempt to be the first female president in 2008. She undoubtedly knows her stuff. She is calm under pressure, and her every word has been picked over and manipulated for decades. Anyone who has seen her knows she is funny, smart, and has more than her best interests on her mind. Yet she may not even get the nomination to run for president as a Democrat.

People say she doesn't connect, she changes her positions to suit the audience, she isn't trustworthy, she is too militaristic, but she really isn't any of those things. Look at the people she is running against, and then look at her again. Not so bad now, is she? Look at Barack Obama. Who has anything good to say about him at this point? But he will go down as one of the greatest presidents ever, overcoming huge opposition and racist hatred to have diplomatic breakthroughs across the globe and landmark changes for the better here. There is no one of his caliber in this election, but of those who have stood up so far, Hillary Clinton is by far the best. The bonus with her is her husband is one of the smartest, best-connected and wisest politicians in the last 40 years, and he will be there when she needs him.

So, what should she say? In order to get the nomination, she need not pander, but she needs to be honest. Bernie Sanders has a lot of good ideas: she should say that, again and again, and she will work closely with him after she gets the nomination to craft realistic and passable legislation to change things for the better: raise the minimum wage, improve education, help people pay for higher education, continue to reform health care and allow a single payer-type option for those who would rather be on a medicare-like system than using private insurers (they would then pay their "premiums" as higher taxes to the government). Cover everyone with chronic diseases with a government funded program that can negotiate lower prices, so their insurance premiums and those of everyone else will come down. Emphasize that she has accomplished a lot with her life, more than she ever dreamed, and now is her opportunity to make the lives of others' better with her experience and her connections. Diplomacy over war. Easing refugee crises by helping to improve the areas from which they are fleeing - it will cost less to do that in the long run - by working with the international community and the U.N. in Syria, Libya, and Iraq. Continue to open the doors to Iran, Myanmar, and North Korea, and be realistic with Israel: they cannot do whatever they want and expect us to back them up. Be positive, and emphasize how she worked with the other party while a Senator.

If she gets the nomination, she will win, but that is not enough. She needs to get a majority back in the Senate and get a turnaround in the House. Those are the absolute keys to improving America and changing it for the better, and both she and Senator Sanders need to keep saying that at every chance: turn up to vote and turn out those in the way of progress.

What Bernie Sanders Should Say

Bernie Sanders, whose candidacy when announced in front of a few people in a park seemed like a joke, has caught a wave of public opinion, some of it delusional, and he threatens to push HIllary Clinton to the side again in her attempts to be the first female president of the USA. With most pundits writing how America has shifted to the right, an avowed Socialist getting this far is quite surprising, but he has tapped into the resentments of the young and well-informed, mostly around the fact that our government works much better for you if you are extremely wealthy than if you are poor or a minority.

Many political writers have a slightly mocking tone as they discuss the youth who support him (especially young women), as if they are naive. Perhaps they are, as they only know the government doesn't work the way it should, but they don't really know why, how deep the rot that money and racism has gotten into the paths of power. That is where the "delusion" comes in: the government is rigged for the rich, but is there anything anybody can do about it? The press in general doesn't think so, and certainly doesn't think the elderly Mr. Sanders can, but the young and idealistic say, let's at least try, and they feel Senator Sanders is their best hope (it would be much better for him if he were young and handsome and saying the things he is saying) to make it happen, even if, in the end, he pushes his agenda on the more likely nominee, Ms. Clinton.

That said, Mr. Sanders has to be somewhat careful in his pursuit of the nomination, as he cannot allow the Republicans to get the White House. A Hillary presidency would be inevitable over the absolute loser she will be running against representing the Republicans, as none are even close to being as palatable as a chump like Mitt Romney was four years ago. A Bernie Sanders presidency would be more in doubt. He cannot tear down Ms. Clinton in order to buoy himself. In the end, it must be about the direction the president can take the country, and we do not want the Republicans with the map and the keys to the car.

So, rail against inequality, encourage more access to higher education and improving education overall, promise to improve the infrastructure, to continue to reform and improve both access to health care and making it more affordable when disaster strikes, but do not make Hillary Clinton seem any less appealing than she already is. Remind everyone, at every possibility, of how qualified she is, and how she would make a fine president and would be much, much better than anyone the Republicans come up with. Explain your differences with her, but without denigrating hers. Her ideas are really good, but yours are the best, that sort of thing. That Senator Sanders has gotten this far and has had the success he has had is remarkable, but he should not let his ego get in the way of changing America for the better.

Divine Assumptions: or What Is God Really Like?

Divine Assumptions, or What Is God Really Like?

            The vast majority of thinkers approach God in the wrong ways, trying to define Him according to their beliefs, be it Atheism, Christianity, Judaism, etc. For example, why do we use the pronoun “Him?” Does God have a penis? Is it just better than “It?”

            The problem is humans can only understand God on human terms, as a wise old man throwing lightning bolts, jealous of our propensity to be distracted by bright and glittery things, spiteful and angry when we don’t follow God’s own rules. But what/who is God?

            Thomas Aquinas starts out on the right track, proving the existence of God with the relatively simple notion there has to be some sort of force behind everything, the force that started everything, the initiator of the Big Bang or whatever theory about the beginnings of time you adhere to. Aquinas quickly went off track by confining God to the Judeo-Christian concepts and then your author put his book down.

            But what or who did start everything? Something, call it the laws of physics, a supernatural force, or God, made it all happen. Something came up with quarks, electrons, protons and neutrons, the “God Particle,” all of it, and set it in motion. The egos of humankind being nearly as big as their notion of a God, humans naturally think it all points to us; God created a nearly infinite universe of trillions of heavenly bodies governed by laws of physics of nearly incomprehensible perfections with enough exceptions to every rule to keep humans eternally clueless, just so the guy who lives next door to a Baptist family will burn in eternal hell fire because he can’t see where Jesus clearly forbade homosexual unions but can tell Jesus thought very little of judging the behavior of others.

            It is more obvious in the minutiae where religions and their theologians go wrong. Jesus had to be born without sin and never sin because He died for our sins as a perfect offering. So, for Jesus to be born without sin, He had to be born of a woman without sin who was also born without sin. Because otherwise we are born with the stain of sin on our (usually) sterile bodies, making Baptism for the forgiveness of those and all sins necessary, so we can go to confession to tell a priest all our other sins. Who was Jesus an offering to? God? And isn’t Jesus God? So Jesus died a cruel and otherwise useless death to prove to Himself that humankind could be justified by God’s grace through their faith in His death securing salvation from Him for us.

            This all begs the question: How dumb do we think the Creator of the Universe is? Here is the force that brought about the first drips of life by combining genetic material with just the right enzymes and nutrients and surrounding it with a beautifully functional membrane that kept just enough out and let enough in so it could function and grow and then DIVIDE and create two beings from one! Wrap your neurons around that likelihood. Statistically it is possible that occurred only as a matter of chance over many billions of years, but what chance? Science can put all the basic instruments and components of life in a nutrient broth and they don’t form life. Do those components just need millions of years mixed together? Maybe, but the components are also always degrading to even lesser building blocks as well as forming bigger blocks over time.

            Am I advocating for Creationism? Far from it. Nothing even remotely close to what is described in Genesis happened. The astrophysicists of today are much closer to the realities of the world than the admittedly clever tellers of the first creation myths thousands of years ago. The force that started everything made life possible and also made it happen, and the force has since been intervening just enough to keep life evolving and changing. Why?

            The why is the biggest question. If we knew that, we would know the purpose of our lives, the reason to go on despite hardship and suffering. It is in the lack of obvious answers to the why that atheists draw their greatest ammunition. Is this why God tolerates religion in all its errors? Religion does at least try to explain the why, even though it is not even close to getting it right.  And religions almost always have some good to them: charity, selflessness, pacifism, and morality for a few examples. In the hands of the kinds of men (yes, men mostly) who take charge of religions, the “goods” of religion are lost amidst the urge to control and create orthodoxy and obedience in people so they may be more easily governed/exploited. No religion’s good qualities can fully withstand the onslaught of those who try to organize and administer it.

            Theologians and pastors everywhere claim things like the Bible explain the why. Maybe, but the Bible does it in a pretty crappy way. I am supposed to worship an omnipotent God who loves everyone, but Who, on many occasions, has ordered the genocide and complete extermination of multiple towns and ethnic groups down to the last child and goat? A God Who rewards those who serve God most loyally with brutally painful deaths at the hands of God’s enemies (though possibly by miraculously assuaging their suffering in some mysterious way)? A God Who gives laws to the people so complex hardly anyone can get them correct and then punishes them for every mistake?

            Are these insights remarkable? Most, if not all, have been promulgated throughout history by atheists and heretics, often while under threat of death, but seldom as succinctly and with such an understanding of cellular biology. God created everything. God made life start, and God has subsequently controlled the changes to the environment and life to lead us to this event, an odd combination, even a paradox of detachment and micromanagement only possible from an omnipotent force.

            Does God love us, all of us? This requires some parsing. Clearly, the force that is God often does not intervene to protect enormous numbers of people from terrible fates. God could, with mountains of evidence, be accused of having almost no mercy. There is little evidence God has ever shown any mercy at all; perhaps a ratio of 1:10 of mercy to no mercy would be ambitious. Yet I feel God has protected me many, many times from disasters great and small. Was that just luck, or fate, or are luck and fate actually God? Does God love me more than others? I would have to say it seems so, and I consider myself to legitimately be one of God’s Chosen Ones, but scores of others could analyze my life and say God doesn’t seem to like me at all (“You’re bald! Unmarried and alone at 51! You just found out you had thyroid cancer! Hardly anyone cares what you think or agrees with you!”). Nearly every religious person, in nearly every religion, has had a connection outside the physical realm with the force that seems to be God. We feel something odd is going to happen, and then it does. We need some help, and it arrives. This is the life of the religious. What then of the starving who go on to death, or the person hit by a stray bullet on the street? The religious say they will be welcomed into the next life with love, and at the moment of their greatest need, they received mercy and relief of their suffering. The skeptical see only an unforgiving planet in which luck, fate or faith are merely names for chance given to events that work out for the best, while all the times things go wrong are forgotten or ignored (or felt to be just punishments).

            What of this next life? What is the proof it even exists? Are there any consistent stories? Near death experiences? I would argue there is at least some evidence of additional realities to those experienced by the five senses, but there is no consensus, and I have no idea what, if anything, exists for humans on the death of our physical bodies. If there is nothing but darkness, if death is the end, everything to do with organized religion is flipped on its head. The lack of an afterlife does not preclude the existence of a God; it only means we have gotten nearly everything wrong. But the central tenet of religion need not be an afterlife for the faithful. It might not be as nice, but we could come close to a kingdom of God on earth now. What would the world be like if we worked together with rather than fought with each other for more than our share? What if we helped others reach our level, if we held our best ideas in common, if we allowed all beliefs without conflict, if we banished all weapons, raised children without violence, with love, and helped every child to avoid the hardships that damage young brains and lead to so many future problems? Yes, there would still be cancers in infants, death would still always win, but every life would be lived to its fullest and have value and meaning. It is hard to argue something like this was not the intent of Jesus, Buddha, and other founders of the peaceful religions. It is far from an impossible scenario, but there are plenty who would never let it happen, if for no reason other than that is not what they want, and they are currently the people in charge, people who wrap their evil and cowardly ways in the blanket of religion.

Introduction to the Realities of Politics

Intro to the Reality of Politics

Part 1. Authoritarians

I first heard of the notion of authoritarians by coincidence. Sure, I’d heard the word before and even used it in conversation (usually in reference to a type of government), but never with the meaning this article will discuss. While flipping through the channels late one night, reluctant to go to bed, I happened on the repeat of the earlier episode of Olberman on MSNBC, and, before I could change the channel, heard someone discussing something that instantly galvanized me. It was John Dean, a somewhat notorious figure from the Nixon White House era who has redeemed himself admirably, and he was talking about the work of a psychologist in Canada by the name of Bob Altemeyer. Mr. Dean had written a book he was promoting on the show called Conservatives Without Conscience in which he reviewed Dr. Altemeyer’s extensive research into a behavior pattern referred to as authoritarians or, more precisely, right wing authoritarians (RWAs), and using that research to analyze the behavior of the American populace and, more specifically, certain political leaders in the U.S. (it is an EXCELLENT book – highly recommended).

I was very religious at that time and also very well informed about American politics, especially in a real world sense (I’d recently read American Fascists by Chris Hedges), and it sounded like Mr. Dean had found the pieces of the puzzle I had been missing. I could not understand things like why poor people would vote again and again for politicians who clearly favored the rich in all their policies, and why Christians would also do the same. They were obviously all manipulated in some way, and Dr. Altemeyer (and others he cited) had begun to figure it all out.

I bought Mr. Dean’s book soon after and read it a bit later. To me, it explained everything about American politics and, really, the history of civilization; why the world is the way it is today despite the wise teachings of Jesus, Buddha, and most other founding religious leaders about how to get along and make the world a better place for ourselves and everyone else. I later read Dr. Altemeyer’s book, The Authoritarians, online for free, and I again felt the scales fall from my eyes. His research, spelled out in humble (and often humorous) prose that could be read in a day, made perfect sense, and he crucially mentioned something I either missed while reading Mr. Dean’s book or that Mr. Dean glossed over (I will clarify that later). I immediately ordered nine copies of the book and sent it to friends and family I thought would find it instructive. It was a gift met with a collective yawn (for the most part – one reader really liked it). I had not anticipated they might just read parts and especially would focus on his discussions of religious belief. It turns out authoritarians don’t like to read about the qualities of authoritarians, and religious people don’t like problems with the fundamental principles of their beliefs, especially the belief in the inerrancy of scripture, brought into clear view. When I started to think about blogging, this was high on my list (along with criticism of football) of things I wanted to write about, but when it came time to write it, I couldn’t find anyone who still had the book! My key political and social reference was cast aside without blinking by many of the people I’d sent it to. Fortunately, as I was planning to finally go back and read the online book, a good friend found it and brought it by.

So, who are Authoritarians in the sense used by Dr. Altemeyer and others in the Psychology field, and why should you care about them? Allow me to list a few of the accomplishments of authoritarians over the years: 1. Built and maintained the institution of slavery in the U.S. and started the Civil War; 2. Conceived of and carried out the Holocaust; 3. Beat the civil rights activists on the bridge in Selma; 4. Executed Jesus of Nazareth; 5. Drove the Native Americans from their lands; 6. Caused WW1 and WW2; 7. Run Al Qaeda, ISIS, and every other violent religious movement; 7. Burned Joan of Arc at the stake; 8. Continue to encourage settlements in the West Bank in Israel; 9. Covered up the massive amount of sexual abuse carried out by priests and religious leaders of the Catholic Church. That is just the tip of the iceberg for authoritarians. You might already be thinking, well, some of those things were done by psychopaths and people who were just plain evil. While that is possibly true, psychopaths and evil people can be authoritarians and vice versa.

There are a group of behaviors and tendencies that are usually found in authoritarians, specifically authoritarian followers (we will talk about the leaders later). The following are personality characteristics that can be seen in both left and right wing authoritarians: 1. A high degree of submission to the established, legitimate authorities in their society; 2. High levels of aggression in the name of their authorities; 3. A high level of conventionalism. As Dr. Altemeyer points out, in North America, the people who possess these qualities most often are political conservatives, but people like strict vegans or members of organizations like PETA may, within their groups, be authoritarian followers (it is also easy to find authoritarian behaviors in supporters of communist or socialist governments, which would be considered left wing). The majority of the authoritarian followers, however, are politically conservative, and they cause the most trouble. There is a scale, called the RWA scale, that is a well-tested and verified measure of authoritarian personality traits. Scores can vary from 20 to 180, and the higher the score the more authoritarian someone is. I got a 67, but I knew what I was up against. Average is about 90.

Dr. Altemeyer explains the submission in #1 above generally as “Daddy and Mommy are always right.” Submissive authoritarians will tolerate things like NSA surveillance, electioneering dirty tricks (in favor of their side), the malfeasance of police officers, and torture, and they are very reluctant to punish their authority figures when they do wrong (while being excessively punitive of those not in positions of authority). Their aggression tends to occur when they think, “right and might are on their side.” The right comes as orders or suggestions from their established authority, and the might comes from an overwhelming sense of strength on their side. They tend to attack women and children, for example, or when they strongly outnumber someone, such as in a lynching, or for a bigger example, the Rwandan genocide. Conventionalism refers to authoritarians believing EVERYONE should believe as they believe and behave as they behave. Remind you of anyone you know or have read about?

What are the other defining tendencies and behaviors of right wing authoritarians? They are more likely to blame the victim of misfortunes, are more prejudiced compared to other people, are more likely to carry out orders to bully or threaten (and kill), are more fearful of others (especially those that are different, i.e. homosexuals, foreigners, other races), think they are a lot better than other people (very self-righteous), and they tend to keep with their own kind. One of the absolute keys, though, and I indicated I would discuss this earlier, is authoritarians often display impaired thinking. This does not mean they are stupid; many of them are actually quite intelligent, able to memorize piles of information and regurgitate it well, and crunch numbers like crazy, but they tend not to think logically and have trouble telling whether evidence actually proves something or not, jumping to conclusions that support their beliefs whenever possible. Their minds tend to be organized differently, being more compartmentalized, allowing them to have no problems with supporting conflicting ideas, double standards, and hypocrisy, and they seem to be less aware of their own flaws (back to self-righteousness). Finally (for this section), they are highly dogmatic – unchangeable, with unjustified certainty. You can then see how problematic authoritarians can be, drawing incorrect conclusions and then sticking with them no matter what. Again, remind you of anyone?

Let us now discuss authoritarian leaders. Altemeyer and others classify the people who tend to lead authoritarians as social dominators.  They are authoritarian, but in a different sense. Social dominators have a very large desire for power (in contrast to most RWAs). They tend to be intimidating, ruthless and vengeful, scorning such acts as helping others, being kind, charitable and forgiving. Social dominators have very little empathy, don’t care much for religion, and they don’t feel it is wrong for them to lie and manipulate others. Their aggression and their hostility come from a different place than RWAs: they like to dominate, and all they really care about is themselves. Their thinking differs from RWAs as well. They do not have issues with compartmentalizing or keeping their facts straight. It is often hard to tell what they are thinking, though, as they are willing to say or do anything to get ahead. Their hypocrisy comes from another place: they are fully aware of it and don’t care (RWAs are not aware of their flaws in this regard, as I wrote earlier). One of the most dramatic qualities of a social dominator is their disregard for equality. They don’t care at all about it. It is very scary to realize this, as they are very similar to the common definition of psychopaths. But there is even worse news.

There is a small area of overlap between high scoring RWAs and high scoring social dominators, people Dr. Altemeyer calls “Double Highs.” Fortunately there are not many overall, but they tend to try to find their ways to the highest echelons of power in business and in politics. They are often so disgusting they cannot achieve what they want so badly. Double highs are extremely prejudiced, but they also have a more religious background than the usual social dominators. They use religion, though, as a cover, going to church to project a good image and to make advantageous contacts, but their religious beliefs are in accord with RWAs. Because of their religious beliefs, it is much easier for them to gather followers among the RWAs and advance their own agenda and profile. The other trait they share with RWAs is fearfulness.

So, what does this all mean? Some of you have already drawn your own conclusions, but this knowledge has HUGE real world implications. Dr. Altemeyer has studied all levels of RWAs and social dominators in an exercise called the “Global Change Game” which has groups of people assigned to world regions, allocated resources and tasked with dealing with various problems that arise. When done with only low scoring RWA testers, the participants work well together, utilize resources fairly, and engender peace and cooperation. Groups of high scoring RWAs showed little imagination, got very little done, but overall didn’t do too much harm (other than let the populations get out of control – no birth control). But when double highs played, most of them immediately took charge, quickly developed adversarial relationships with the other double highs’ regions and threatened nuclear war after massive military build-ups that sacrificed social welfare. Now, let me also tell you that Dr. Altemeyer’s research suggests a concentration of double highs in state and federal legislatures (many of them from the south). Now if you read the papers or watch the news (I doubt anyone who watches Fox News has made it this far), you can see how the double highs have been and still are causing trouble around the globe, but most obvious to us in the U.S. Congress at present. The George W. Bush administration probably had the highest concentration of double highs in history (this gets a little hard to argue since there was widespread slavery and publicly accepted bigotry in the country’s first century, though the latter has not gone away in many areas still). What could be the greatest nation in history instead is a hornet’s nest of double high malfeasance and treachery.

We have the largest and most expensive military by far with only imagined foes for the most part (likely double highs on those sides as well), huge problems with inequality and poverty/hunger, and inadequate infrastructure, but most days are spent arguing about abortion, natural selection, the separation of church and state, and crime (the levels of which have almost never been lower). We will always have this until we choose as a people to stop electing trouble-making double highs, but unfortunately in this day and age, they are the only type of people lining up to run for election. They are, fortunately, easy to spot: Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, Marco Rubio, Benjamin Netanyahu, etc.(speaking of Ted Cruz, most writers refer to him as some sort of genius. He went to Princeton and Harvard Law school, but when he talks, it is like his speech was translated from English to Japanese and back into English and then read by a smug, overly lubricated but flabby robot). President Obama is far from perfect, but he is also far from being a double high, and he shows very little tendency to be a social dominator or RWA. Not every leader has to be a social dominator, and President Obama is not. He is, first and foremost, a reasonable man. They are in short supply in modern politics, because RWAs don’t want reason, and social dominators don’t care about it, and they both are the most motivated people to keep the status quo or set progress back 50 to 60 years, and the most motivated to vote and volunteer for election and campaign work. The challenge to overcome their tendencies starts with each of us doing our part to recognize this and disseminate it to as many people as possible who care about how things work and the betterment of us all.

Part 2: Henchmen

            The title of this could be a lot of words, including henchpersons. Synonyms abound: apparatchiks, accomplices, siloviki; you get the point. The bigger point is seldom discussed when the press and government officials rail on about a leader, maybe of a terrorist organization, maybe of a country, they find problematic. The issue they dwell on is that getting rid of that leader will straighten everything out. The leader is the problem, and killing or imprisoning him (usually a “him,” but) is the solution. But it almost never is, and that is because of henchmen. Do you think Vladimir Putin is in charge of Russia because he is the strongest or the smartest? No, it is because his henchmen were able to get control and keep control; same thing for Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Robert Mugabe, and Assad in Syria. Kim Jong Un, in Korea, is vilified, but it is because he is the public face of a leadership of otherwise anonymous henchmen: military leaders, political fixers, smugglers, etc. who all benefit tremendously from him being in charge. Might they benefit from someone else taking over? That is their challenge on a daily basis: where do they stand: is their leader serving their purposes, and what would happen if someone else replaced him?

            Putin is a well-documented example. He was a low level political official with no national reputation, but Boris Yeltsin had lost his usefulness and someone was needed to take his place. The henchmen chose Putin. Putin’s ego took care of the rest (there is plenty of evidence he is a psychopath), growing into its role of making him think he merited the position of President or Prime Minister of Russia, rather than lucking into it, all coinciding with a boom in oil prices substituting for good governance in helping the Russian economy benefit some people.

            If Putin were to be unseated, who would do it? His henchmen, who are rich beyond their wildest dreams (Putin himself may have squirreled away a fortune that would make Bill Gates blush.)? Only if they think someone else could do better for them. Now with sanctions causing them trouble, Putin has to be more careful to mind his minders, though he likely never takes his eye off that ball. If the henchmen think it best to pull out of the Ukraine and Putin disagrees, he will be history. A leader’s power is only real if he or she can get things done. If Obama orders the military to strike at Damascus or Moscow and they refuse, Obama doesn’t have that much power. Same for Putin. If he decides to follow a policy no one else wants, he is powerless to do it himself. The thing is, most times the henchmen will follow, because they know what they have in Putin now (they didn’t when they put him in power), and they are very afraid of change when they have the system rigged. To unseat him would require outsiders who are not benefiting from Putin’s actions, and that is why politicians and their henchmen, once they go all in on helping themselves to all they can get from their positions, prioritize conformity and order and punish harshly any dissent, making highly visible examples of anyone who may show qualities of a worthy adversary who can’t be co-opted. We see the same thing in miniature in Congress and in more local politics here. With a willing press and bad enough motives, no one can stay beyond reproach, and the most able dissenters can be outcast or silenced still, mostly because of what we will find out about people in Part 2.

We have also seen what happens when the henchmen and leaders are cast aside or killed by invaders or popular revolts, most obviously in the aftermath of the second Iraq war and the Arab Spring. When the henchmen have near total control of everything, the vacuum of leadership and organization when they are tossed aside is difficult to fill well and quickly. So far only Tunisia is showing any signs of progress; all the other sites of revolt show ongoing civil war that has resulted in overwhelming devastation (Syria, Iraq, and to a lesser extent the Ukraine), the rise of a new dictator and henchmen (Egypt), and something resembling chaos (Libya). It is possible some of the countries where the leaders no longer serve the people (what Aquinas defined as tyrants), if spared outside intervention and influence, would be able, after rebellions, to assemble working governments on their own, but the world and regional powers are usually intervening in their own self-interest, complicating matters even further. Transitioning from authoritarian states to full-fledged democracies has never gone well; we shouldn’t expect much better now, but we shouldn’t help them go worse. Choosing the henchmen wisely is everyone’s best first step, and it is not something the USA/CIA is very good at (batting average hovering at 0.000).

The Culture of Violence in the USA

I have often said our society is marinated in violence. How often is sucker punching someone portrayed as cathartic and gratifying in movies and TV? That is the tip of the iceberg of violent imagery. Why is such negative, useless and harmful behavior condoned/admired/nurtured? This cynic thinks it boils down to our government needing young men and women to volunteer to commit endless acts of violence on people they neither know nor understand all over the world for little or no reason (just following orders…) and convince parents this is a good and honorable decision. The fact there are so many willing to do this (because they see no other alternative?) in a society otherwise full of complacency allows our leaders to be feckless and lazy: the answer to every crisis is more arms, more killing, more destruction, all done by someone else, rather than sitting down with others, trying to understand them, and working out compromises. And while I’m at it, why are the American people the ones paying the full bill (yeah, most of the money is borrowed and we’re never going to pay it back, but…) for our armed forces policing the world? Every country we help, every sea lane we keep open, should be forking over a large percentage of the cost of our operations (assuming the operation worked and made things better – on second thought…). Our military budget is ridiculous and at best only serves as corporate welfare (at exorbitant costs) for the military contractors, and at worst destroys entire generations of young people and burdens us all with the survivors’ problems (it is usually closer to the worst). The amount of budgeted foreign aid this country does is often overestimated by the public, but that is because most bean counters do not include all our military does for free (for everyone else but us). It is not hard to point out that the present is one of the least violent times in human history, BUT it could easily be much less violent and everyone could be doing much better than we are. Even Pervez Musharraf, the former leader of Pakistan, bemoaned the reality that immense military spending deprived the people of so many improvements in their day to day lives. This is yet another example of how unimportant the welfare of the American people is to our government leaders, especially in comparison the the monied special interests.