Wednesday, April 16, 2025
D+161/87
1962 Walter Cronkite began anchoring the CBS Evening News
1993 The jury reached a guilty verdict in the federal case against police officers (two convicted, two acquitted) who beat Rodney King.
2007 Virginia Tech massacre: The deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. The gunman killed 32 people and injured 23 others before committing suicide.
In bed at 9:15, awake at 3:30, and up at 3:45.
Prednisone, day 361; 3 mg., day 20/21; Kevzara, day 2/14; CGM, day 14/15; Trulicity, day 5/7. 2 mg. of prednisone at 4 a.m. and 1 mg. at 5:25 p.m. (I missed yesterday's afternoon dose, distracted by picking up Lizzie at 5.) Other meds at 5:10 a.m.
Last year on this date, both Geri and I were in a great deal of pain and incapacitated, Geri with "water on the knee" as diagnosed at an Urgent Care, and I with the as-yet-undiagnosed PMR. Geri's half-ton of rocks was delivered, later to be placed by Steve and Nikki.
When will we wake up to what is happening NOW and has happened? Mike Barnicle yesterday on Morning Joe:
"This is a real mom ent for us as a country. We're 80 days into the Trump presidency. . . We have a president who wants to make Canada the 51st state, who threatens to invade Greenland because he wants it. A president who literally claims never to have made a mistake. 95% of the problems he has today he blames on Joe Biden, but he is perfect. I have the awful feeling for the first time in my life that we are seemingly slow-walking ourselves towards autocracy. . . . We have a potential conflict between between a piece of paper that people died for 250 years ago. The piece of paper is called the Constitution of the United States of America and it seems to me now we are hours maybe days away from a confrontation Doanld Trump versus the Constitution of the United Statess, What do you think, Jon Meadham.
John Meacham: I think you're right.
Slow walking? 'Potential' conflict? Days away from a confrontation?
I Have Never Been More Afraid for My Country’s Future is the title of Tom Friedman's column in this morning's New York Times. It is also its concluding sentence. In between is a (partial) litany of policies of Donald Trump's and his government's errors, overreaches, and outrages in just the first 3 months of his tenure. I read most of his columns and usually agree with him. It frightens me to see someone as intelligent, insightful, and level-headed as he validating the great fear I have been feeling ever since Trump emerged as a powerful political force. What will life be like for our children and grandchildren?
Geri and I are in our 80s. Our children are in their 50s. Our grandchildren range from age 10 to almost 18. What will be left of America when Peter completes college? When Lizzie finishes high school? When Drew and Ellis get to high school? Once it becomes clear that a president whose party controls both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court can ignore court orders, we will know the answer to Ben Franklin's warning about "A republic, if you can keep it." Once Trump gets away with' executive lawlessness, the constitutional system of 3 separate branches of government and checks and balances will be broken. I suspect that that system is like virginity - once it's gone, it's gone.
Daniel Kahneman's assisted suicide. In the New York Times two days ago, there was an op-ed piece by Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer titled "There’s a Lesson to Learn From Daniel Kahneman’s Death." It's about life, death, old age, and assisted suicide. Excerpts:
On March 19, 2024, we emailed the psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, inviting him to appear on our podcast, “Lives Well Lived,” and suggesting a date in May. He replied promptly, saying that he would not be available then because he was on his way to Switzerland, where, despite being relatively healthy at 90, he planned to die by assisted suicide on March 27.
oIn explanation, Professor Kahneman included a letter that his friends would receive a few days later. “I have believed since I was a teenager,” he wrote, “that the miseries and indignities of the last years of life are superfluous, and I am acting on that belief. I am still active, enjoying many things in life (except the daily news) and will die a happy man. But my kidneys are on their last legs, the frequency of mental lapses is increasing, and I am 90 years old. It is time to go.”
The article discusses, in not great depth, when "it is time to go."
We do not deny that a belief about being a burden on family may be a reason for some older people to choose to end their lives, but one should not assume that it is typically the principal reason. In Oregon, where assisted dying is legal, the state annually reviews cases that comply with the legislation: Feeling like a burden was a concern for 42 percent of the terminally ill patients who died by physician-assisted suicide last year but was less significant than losing autonomy (a concern for 89 percent), being less able to engage in activities that make life enjoyable (88 percent) and loss of dignity (64 percent). Nor is it unreasonable for people whose quality of life has declined to a level that is only marginally positive to take into account whether they are a burden to those they love. (Emphasis added.)
Professor Kahneman signaled concern that if he did not end his life when he was clearly mentally competent, he could lose control over the remainder of it and live and die with needless “miseries and indignities.” One lesson to learn from his death is that if we are to live well to the end, we need to be able to freely discuss when a life is complete, without shame or taboo. Such a discussion may help people to know what they really want. We may regret their decisions, but we should respect their choices and allow them to end their lives with dignity.
Russian cluster bomb attack on Ukraine kills dozens on Palm Sunday. I note that Vladimir Putin, who professes to be a believing Orthodox Christian, has caused his military, in a war sponsored and encouraged by the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox church, to drop cluster bombs (who knows, maybe purchased from U.S. manufacturers in what many insist is a Christian nation) containing hundreds of bomblets designed to kill hostile soldiers, in the middle of a Ukrainian city on Palm Sunday as Ukrainian Orthodox believers walked to Christian services. I noted also that Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump's personal envoy, visited Putin and reported that Putin said that, when he learned of the attempted assassination of Trump, he went to church and said a prayer for him, not as the leader of the U.S., but as a friend. Pares cum paribus congregantur. So it goes.
My Facebook entry on Mom's birthday 2022:
Mary Norma Healy was born 100 years ago today in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, at the south end of the Mesabi Iron Range. 1922 was the year that saw Hitler’s Brownshirts, the SA, becoming violent in the streets of Germany on their long march to power 10 years later. It was the year that 30,000 of Mussolini’s Blackshirts marched on Rome and seized control over the Italian government. Mary was born just a few months after Crown Prince Hirohito became Regent of Japan on his way to becoming Emperor of Japan in 1926 and just a few weeks before Frances Gumm, later to be better known as Judy Garland, was born in the same hospital as Mary. Mary’s mother, Catherine O’Shea Healy, had two other children, Cornelius and Donald, and had had a third son, Daniel, who died at birth or in infancy, for Mary’s birth registry listed her as Catherine’s fourth child. In 1928, when Mary was 6 years old, her mother died of pernicious anemia, an autoimmune deficiency causing non-absorption of vitamin B-12 needed for red blood cell production. Her father never remarried and Mary grew up motherless. Mary was 7 years old when the stock market crashed in 1929 and she lived most of her youth in the Great Depression. She attended Catholic schools in Englewood on Chicago’s south side and on August 3, 1940, she married Charles Edward Clausen, a co-parishioner at St. Bernard’s Church. She was 18 years old, he several weeks shy of his 20th birthday. In August of 1941, she gave birth to her son Charles and 3 years later, to his beloved sister, Catherine, named after Mary’s mother, and always called by her nickname Kitty. In 1944, her husband was drafted into the Marine Corps and sent off to kill or be killed by Emperor Hirohito’s soldiers on a small island called Iwo Jima. Her brothers were likewise conscripted and sent off to kill or be killed by the soldiers of Hitler and Mussolini. Charles survived the battle, unlike 6,800 other Americans and more than 20,000 Japanese who died on the island, but he returned to his young wife emotionally shattered, damaged in ways that lasted throughout his life. In September 1947, a 15-year-old neighbor of Mary and Charles broke into their basement apartment while Charles was at work, threatened Mary’s 6-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter with a knife, and slashed and sexually assaulted Mary. The investigating detective described the crime as ‘sexual torture.’ Mary survived the crime against her and her children, and though she suffered her own PTSD, she never allowed herself to become embittered by the many hurts and injuries she experienced in her life. Like her mother, she died young, at age 51. Her husband and her daughter are gone now, too, and her son is in his 80s. He remembers her today on what would be her 100th birthday for the love and kindness she shared with a world that so often abused and neglected her, for the love and loyalty she gave to family and friends, for the compassion she showed for all of ‘our fellow man,’ and for the strength and integrity and goodness with which she lived her too-short and too-hard life. Requiescat in pace, Mom.
Whoops. I forgot the hardest lesson to learn: when to stop. The green glaze doesn't work.
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