8/26/12

I used to get many of my best ideas while listening to the Sunday morning talk guy on the popular local radio station. He was what you might call a raving liberal, not simply because of his immoderate communistic ideas, but because he liked to deliver said ideas as ill-tempered rants. Ostensibly a few hours dedicated to talking religion, the show generally slid instead into the same issues and arguments I like to engage. But rather than promoting his own agenda and arguing against other ideas, this guy preferred instead the vicious attack aimed at insulting those evil folks who harbored the opposite view. He was a nasty fellow. And of course his argument was always delivered from his perception of the moral higher ground, as this was a religious talk show. 

A former priest whose apparent only claim to fame was his abandonment of his former church, he left the radio station abruptly when he had to go to jail. Something about that huge stash of kiddie porn on his computer. I guess his apple hadn’t fallen all that far from the tree. And with him went a major inspiration for my moral outrage.

Now on Sundays I listen some to the NPR talkers on the radio as they preach to the choir. They are at least polite while they talk down to those of us who are too slow to figure out their obvious truths. I’ll listen to arguments presented politely, particularly when they are clearly researched and delivered, which you certainly can get from the NPR folks. I don’t have to agree with them and I actually enjoy listening to how they’d solve the world’s problems, since we all are inevitably headed down that persistently failed path and I’d like to see where I’ll soon be unwillingly herded.

This morning I encountered an interesting lecture on the radio. A clearly intelligent and educated young woman was pointing out the obvious need for a food source for all those folks living in great cities, since they don’t produce any on their own, and yet they still need to eat. Somebody somewhere else must create food, preserve it, transport it, and often prepare it, or those city folks are quickly gonna come up short. And amazingly enough, this has been going on ever since personkind (see how nice I can be to these people?) first set up cities and farms many thousand years ago.

According to this woman, most folks haven’t noticed that all the great civilizations, each born from large cities, sent out their armies to capture empire, onna count of the food they could steal from those other folks to feed their own. Today’s talker mentioned Rome, and its empire. A logical choice since they were successful for some long while. She forgot to mention the Nazis and their motivation to invade east into Poland and Russia during a time early in WWII when they should instead have been invested to the west. Nobody seems to remember that the main motivation here was the grain producing land over there, and the peasants who could be enslaved to farm it for the benefit of the winner of this war, and its people living in large cities. Too bad the Nazis lost, for they would have been set for life.

This dilemma of farms over there and cities growing larger and hungrier over here continues. The point of this kind lady’s talk concerned her concept of the corruption of the free market by large corporations that are messing with her food supply and forcing everyone in big cities to eat fast food and other evil concoctions. She of course, favors living in a city, and she finds herself at the mercy of said free market. Apparently she lacks the will it takes to move out of a city, or fend for herself, or simply avoid MacDonalds. And she suggests that many have the same handicap. So she assumes that someone else must take the reins and correct this travesty.

Not surprisingly, she figured a solution, which would be government regulation and control to keep the crooked corporations from harming the helpless people.  Utopia can be created with the proper orchestration.  According to her, government could control all this, the production and distribution, and all that which sounds vaguely of communism, and make it work out to the benefit of her friends who live in those cities. Heard this one before of course. On NPR, along with other sources. So did those folks who let the Nazis rule. Didn’t work out all that well for them.

Not all government is a bad as the Nazis of course. Most are simply bloated, inefficient, ineffective dumps that eventually just make things worse for the governed. Our speaker was hoping for this thing she calls “Good Government”. You know… a fairy tale government that actually works to the benefit of the people, rather than simply a self-perpetuating black hole that sucks the life out of a society. With the election coming up we will be hearing lots of lies from people who wish to rule us by promising “Good Government” yet again, which will fix all our problems. 

Funny how one side can watch its favored candidate make millions every year, yet they find fault with the other side’s guy because he makes millions every year. I saw one of their political ads the other night, attacking that other rich guy. That rich guy, or so the hatchet job states, paid only 14% of his twenty million income in taxes last year. Suppose this is accurate, which in a rare deviation from the usual hatchet job might actually be true, then this guy paid some 2.8 million dollars in taxes. That’s some considerable more than I did. You too, likely. This ad is aimed at folks who pay NOTHING in federal tax, to make the guy look bad.  He is taking advantage of the system cause he only pays 2.8 million. 

I love this kind of thinking. He should be forced to pay even more, so more folks could benefit from government largess rather than their own efforts, or lack thereof. Somebody is suggesting that the government needs a greater sacrifice from the successful so it can do its job, whatever that is. This is logic? Or is it emblematic of the greed manifested by every government, in the guise of helping us?

The coming election won’t be the last word on whether we turn everything over to yet another overreaching government. It is far from that. But the notion that we really should turn everything over to government eventually is the clear goal of one side, and only a significant goal to the other. There will be no winners among the us out here. It’s only a question of how quickly we choose to lose.

I’ll be eating from our garden, and chewing on the grass fed buffalo I killed, and I’ll dine at MacDonalds or not, based on my choice. My dollars and choices, along with many others can help change the corruption of the free market, for it will go where the demand, demands. Haven’t found a way yet to fix the damage done by “Good Government” except by limiting it, or eventually turning it out. As usual, shortly I’ll have to vote for the lessor of evils, but that is all the choice “Good Government” ever leaves you.

Reviving and Old Column

Change what you can…the rest you have to let be.

Once upon a time, a very long while ago, I strode away from my usual world. People talk of folks who were last seen walking away on a trail, and they just got swallowed up by the mountains. Well, that's kinda what it feels like. Jonah was gulped down by the whale. I disappeared into the mountains. All Jonah saw for a while was whale, and I all saw were mountains, for three weeks. For that short period of time, the outside world ceased to exist.

Two deer awoke and tiptoed away in the predawn darkness. They had been napping next to my car in the Camp Curry parking lot. No one else was around. I had checked and rechecked  my backpack the night before, so it was ready. I pulled it out of the trunk. The trick was to balance it on my knee, and then wriggle into the shoulder straps. Once I cinched down the waist band, I was ready to go. The old bamboo ski pole felt familiar to my hand. So did the weight on my back.

An old wood sign listing places along the trail, and the mileage to said places, leaned against a tree alongside the burbling river where the paved world ended and the trail began. Vernal Fall was first on the list, a mile or so up the trail. Then came the summits of Half Dome and Clouds Rest, Tuolumne Meadows, and then several others. At the bottom was Mt Whitney, a distant 217 miles.

The photograph of the sign is too blurred to read. The light was still too faint for my camera, but it was the first I took on the John Muir Trail, so it sits first in the slide carousel. Many photos followed. The last captures Dan and me at 13,700 feet, crouching out of the wind at the trail junction leading to the summit of Mt Whitney, munching on granola bars. We have our parkas on, but our legs are bare below our shorts. Remnants of the previous night's snowfall cling to the rocks. The snow is not melting. We are grinning like madmen.

The scribbling in my journal grew longer as each day in the mountains passed, a futile attempt to capture feelings inspired by such a journey. The little notebook records the anguish of facing all those miles in spite of those leg cramps that arrived on the first afternoon. It recalls the frustration when the bear took the food. And it tattles on a mind perhaps too prone to introspection when left with too little distraction.

My journal also talks of skies so blue they hurt the eye, and the glory of mountains stacked upon yet more mountains stretching as far as that eye could see. And it talks of friends made on the trail and others who walked in to join me and help celebrate the last days of this adventure. It tells of a time and place so detached from my usual day to day reality, that I paused to talk to a tree, and the tree talked back.

The trail took on its own routine, one different from the outside world. Sunrises came, and then sunsets, and always miles to go before I slept. Day, after day, after day. Unlike the world out there, instead of trying to shut down my brain to protect it from overwhelming oppression, I worked to keep it receptive to overwhelming beauty.

This journey, as all good things eventually do, came to its end. Dan dropped me off at my car in the Curry parking lot. It was covered with dust, but it started right away.

I felt I had been out of touch for a while, so I turned on the radio. Nothing had changed while I matriculated in the mountains. Nothing in the world anyway. Crime and corruption, anger and violence, insurrection and war continued unabated. Regardless of what I did, or didn't do, or how good it felt just doing it for those three weeks, I hadn't really affected anything out there. But inside…well that would be a different matter.

Stupid

I have in my small collection two 50 caliber cartridge cases that I found lying on the ground in the Mojave Desert. The headstamp on one has a W and A, and the number 43. I’ve always figured this identified the manufacturer and year made. And since I knew that General Patton trained his troops in this area before sending them to Africa and eventually Europe in 1943 and 44, I guess we can conclude that the rounds were fired around that time. So I found them more than 50 years after they were used in those exercises.

I was with a small group hiking the open desert when we came across a track on the ground left by an armored vehicle. An old track. You can tell when desert soil has been undisturbed for a long time. It gets this patina called desert varnish. Walk across it and you crack it. The varnish blending the old track with the rest of the surrounding soil was unbroken. 

Shortly, we found an old field telephone wire stretching across the land, and then a scatter of rifle cartridge cases on the ground, and these two larger ones. I had become the resident expert once I began identifying these things for the group, so they were brought to me when found. One lady on the periphery of the group had missed most of this, and when she caught up she asked what was happening. I smiled and held out my hand, holding a cartridge case, and I told her what it was.

The poor lady screeched, and ran away in abject terror. I tried to calm her, explaining that this cartridge had been fired 50 years earlier and thus represented no harm to her or anyone. I was wasting my breath, for this object had something to do with guns, and thus in her mind it represented a lethal threat to her. 

Any, even the most superficial knowledge of firearms would have negated this fear, but this woman was utterly uninformed in this subject. So for no rational reason, this harmless object terrified her.

Now, let’s step back for a moment and study why this last paragraph is totally erroneous.. .. 

This woman was not ignorant regarding firearms. She was in fact, thoroughly and effectively educated about firearms. Indoctrinated might be a better description. Since she was a babe in arms, she had been taught to fear and loath guns, by her parents and teachers, her political leaders, and her news and entertainment media. She knew all about firearms. They kill ya. They were to be feared. So she ran away from a harmless piece of 50 year old brass, simply because it was associated with firearms. Just shows to go ya that you don’t have to teach the truth in order for the teaching to be effective.

Now, the temptation here is to call this woman stupid. One 50 year old cartridge case does not represent a threat to anyone, and reacting as if it would climb out of history to harm this one woman does fail the likely test. I’ve a bunch of friends who would call this stupid. And I can assure you this woman has a bunch of friends who have implied that I am stupid because I harbor some notions they have been taught to disregard. 

I’m a rabid proponent of our Second Amendment rights, and it does toast me when most of the opposition arguments are tainted by misinformation. But that is how things are done in this world. Nothing new here, folks…keep moving. 

I’ve grown tired of being called stupid just so someone can disregard my arguments. But it’s gonna happen. I have enough faith in my own brain and my own arguments that I don’t fear losing these rights due to better arguments. But I do wonder how to counter all the lies and misrepresentations, and the indoctrination of so many. A lot of people want me to lose those rights. And a few of the others.  

With an election looming, the stupid word is flying around, sent from both extremes toward the other, and it is getting old. Both extremes are out to reduce our rights, so they should be recognized and opposed.

The first rule in debate is to address the issues, and not to denigrate the arguer. I’m tired of hearing that Bush was stupid, or Obama is stupid, or pick one. Stupid is what you pull out when you cannot counter an argument with a better one of your own. Why cannot we argue the issues, on their own merit, honestly, and leave the stupid word to those grade school bullies who have grown older, if not up? They still want to ruin our lives, and we don’t need to let them.