12/22/24

 Sunday, December 22, 2024

D+47

1894 Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of treason and sentenced to life in prison

1984 Bernhard Goetz shot 4 black muggers on NYC subway train

2001 British Islamic militant Richard Reid attempted to ignite explosives hidden in the soles of his shoes aboard a passenger airplane.

2010 Barack Obama signed the legislation repealing the military policy of "Don't ask, don't tell', clearing the way for gay Americans to serve in the military

2023 UN Security Council voted to speed up delivery of desperately needed aid for Gaza 13-0 with Russia and the US abstaining 

In bed at 9, had a low glucose alarm at 2:55 cured with a cough drop, up at 4:50.  Did a load of laundry.  

Prednisone, day 222, 7.5 mg., day 37.  Prednisone at 5:00 and other meds at 10:30.

I'm running out of steam, thinking I've lived too long, wondering how long I've felt this way.  How often I have wished that I were not alive, going back to my childhood, back to 6th grade, age 11, when I was so miserable, so depressed, from the combination of my father's depression and PTSD and the grim picture of Life painted by the Irish Catholic, which is to say American, Church, with its images of Hellfire and sin, the Last Judgment, and the nasty part of Matthew 25: “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels."  From my memoir:

In any case, most of my elementary school days are a blur to me.  I do remember, however, being completely miserable in the 6th grade and wanting to leave home.  I was often miserable at school and miserable at home.  I remember walking home along Emerald Avenue and passing through the 75th viaduct, under the train tracks, and wishing I could run away.  It seems melodramatic to describe an 11 year old as profoundly and persistently unhappy, but so I was.  My Dad was still a heavy drinker, chronically crabby and living with his own demons.  My mother was waiting on tables and struggling to keep my Dad from going further over the edge, the family together, food on the table, a roof (and hot water pipes) over our heads, and the tuition paid at St. Leo’s.  When my father would act particularly badly, my mother would “let him have it,” and the air in our semi-subterranean abode would be charged with anger and vitriol.  This must have been the year when I started consciously longing for my mother to leave my father, to take Kitty and me away from the drunkenness, the chronic crabbiness, the fighting and unhappiness.  This was also the year in which I had to consciously deal with the notion of Sinning Against Faith, of the need to confess religious Doubt.  Some of what I was taught at St. Leo’s seemed to be to be unbelievable, bullshit, but it came from adult authority figures I had been taught to revere: nuns in black robes and priests who wore laces and brocades and spoke a mysterious language at Mass.  This was also about the time that my Temple of the Holy Ghost was developing a mind of its own.  There was no one to talk to about these matters.  Discussing it with a priest or nun was unthinkable.  My father was no help.  Kitty was too little and she had her own sadness to deal with.  My mother would have told me to listen to the priests and nuns about the religious stuff and about my father, she would have reminded me, as she often had occasion to, that my father loved Kitty and me, “he just didn’t know how to show it.”  That she had to assure us of his undemonstrated love so often in those years was evidence of the shakiness of the assurances.  Even without using magic words, however, love can shown with a kiss, a hug, a smile, a twinkle in the eye, a wink, a pat on the back, a handshake, a thumbs up, an arm around the shoulder.  It can be shown by reading or telling a story, singing a song, rocking to sleep, a trip to the park, a piggyback ride,  a fishing or baseball outing, a game of catch, a sharing of humor or in any of a million other ways.  Kitty and I saw none of that.  One who has little love for himself has little love to share, even with his children.

Not surprisingly, I suppose, I had recurrent terrible headaches in those years.  When one would strike, all I could do was lie in bed with a pillow or blanket over my eyes and wait for it to go away.  The headaches were accompanied by nausea and vomiting so aspirins did no good.  My mother called them sinus headaches, but I suspect they were ordinary migraines or cluster headaches.   

 It wasn't until about 70 years later that Kitty told me that she had the same desire that I had in those days, i.e., that my mother would leave my father and take us away.  It was from our long, daily, early morning conversations that I came to understand that she was at least as miserable from living with my father as I was, and probably more miserable.  I moved away to go to college at age 18 whereas she lived with his emotional stinginess until she married and moved out from under his roof, though never far from their home.   Her theory was that he was jealous of us, that he saw us as competition for our mother's attention and affection.  That seems pretty sick to me, but he was indeed very sick after the war, for years after the war.  In any event, it's clear to me now that both Kitty and I 'caught' his PTSD.  "Military personnel who have seen or participated in abusive acts of violence have been found to transmit the trauma they experienced to their children. . . Children whose parent was diagnosed with PTSD had a higher rate of anxiety as well as aggression when compared to children of civilians or non-veterans  These children can also have increased depressive symptoms and other PTSD symptoms."   In the case of Kitty and me, we also had PTSD caused by the sexual assault and torture of our mother in 1947, its effect on both our parents and the fact that we continued to live in that crime scene for several years thereafter.  We were like the lines apocryphally attributed to or said about W. B. Yeats: "Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through temporary periods of joy."

That 'abiding sense of tragedy' has stuck with me, certainly when I was dumped by my 'first true love,' Charlene, when I returned from my summer of active duty on a Navy destroyer.  There have been times I have wondered whether I ever got over that shock.  The year or years after I returned from Vietnam were also, in different ways, shocking to me, not only the culture shock of seeing America through different eyes but also personal shocks.  Loss of innocence? What innocence did I have to begin with?  In any case, I did not endure the wish not to be alive that accompanies deep depression.  There was no suicidal ideation.  That would come with chronic severe pain that I had for years in and about my bladder and then with PMR.  Now I have a different pain, not prompting suicidal thoughts but making me wonder whether I have lived too long.  A mixed blessing.

On the other hand, as I type these words, a young whitetail doe walks past my window on the world followed by a young buck, both only a few feet from me and I am delighted.  I see that not only are their tails white, but also the insides of their alert ears.  The doe (or is it a young buck?) and buck linger for quite a while.  Now a fawn has also appeared and I experience not a thrill but rather a deep, deep delight.  I think back to my first neighborhood at the intersection of West 73rd Street and South Emerald Avenue in the Englewood/Auburn/Gresham district on the south side of Chicago.  How would I have reacted to three (or to one!)  elegant, graceful, whitetail deer in my front yard, just a few feet away from where I sat?  In such an impossible event, I would indeed have been not just deeply delighted but truly thrilled, beside myself,  overjoyed.  How would I have reacted if I had seen a red-breasted nuthatch land just inches from my nose, as one did on Thursday?  Or if I had even seen much less known the species of a red-breasted nuthatch? of any nuthatch?  When he was a child growing up in Englewood, my Dad thought goldfinches were canaries, probably because the only birds he saw in Englewood were sparrows, robins, occasional blue jays and cardinals, and perhaps canaries in cages.   I got a thrill out of feeding peanuts in the shell to gray squirrels.  That was pretty much my encounter with wildlife outside of the Brookfield and Lincoln Park Zoos.  That and the horses that pulled the milk trucks, vegetable trucks, and "ragsalion" or rags and iron scavengers at the end of the big war.  I mention all this just to remind myself that I still derive much pleasure from being alive and have much for which I am very grateful, starting with Geri.   My body parts are failing me and one of these days will shut down completely.  My mental functions are slowing down and diminishing too as I am almost halfway through my 9th decade, 'playing with house money.'  Despite my current grief, I know I have much to be thankful for.

A journal entry from two years ago this date:

Sarah Smarsh, What Growing Up on a Farm Taught Me About Humility  "Even as a child, I understood that families like mine, poor rural farmers, were low in the pecking order. Television shows and movies portrayed us as buffoons and hicks, always the butt of the joke.   We didn’t need those cues to know that society held us in low esteem, though. All we had to do was look at our bank accounts.  We worked the land and killed animals so that others would eat, so that we would afford propane for the winter, and so that the rich, rigged industry we supplied grain to would become a little richer. . . The profound humility instilled in me by my upbringing left no room in my worldview for exceptionalism of any sort. It also left me troubled by the ways that most humans calculate the value of things — animals, plants, land, water, resources, even other people — according to hierarchies that suit their own interests.  From there, near the bottom of the proverbial social ladder — where women drove tractors and people of all races lived in single-wide trailers — I began to see through the many false narratives of supremacy that govern our society. That men are better than women. That white people are better than everyone else. That the rich are better than the poor. Even, yes, that human beings are better than animals. . . . But guilt for crimes committed against other species and against the earth is not equally shared. Wealthy corporations and the governments beholden to them, choosing profit over sustainability and moral decency, created and fortified the food systems with which the average individual has little choice but to engage."

I highly admire Sarah Smarsh who wrote Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth.  I loved the book and read it near the same time I read Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover, another remarkable memoir by another remarkable young woman.  I journal portions of Smarsh's essay from this morning's NYT because (1) Smarsh wrote it, and (2) because of her references to social classifications and categorizations, and (3) her references to corporate capitalist hegemony in the food industry, and (4) her reference to the challenges of complicity in the world in which we live.  There are times I am weighed down, in rare and not particularly welcome moments of moral clarity, by thoughts of my own complicity in so much of modern life that I purport, in moments of high moral dudgeon, to hate.  When I get too uncomfortable with my own complicities and hypocrisies, I remind myself that we live in the dystopic world we live in, not in utopia.  'Two pounds of ground beef, please, and 6 links of the veal sausage.'

A journal entry from one year ago on this date:

Why keep a journal?   I've wondered about this many times and I've written about it a few times.  In this morning's NYT, Frank Bruni has an essay titled "Our Semicolons, Ourselves.  Excerpts:

Good writing announces your seriousness, establishing you as someone capable of caring and discipline. But it’s not just a matter of show: The act of wrestling your thoughts into logical form, distilling them into comprehensible phrases and presenting them as persuasively and accessibly as possible is arguably the best test of those very thoughts. It either exposes them as flawed or affirms their merit and, in the process, sharpens them.

Writing is thinking, but it’s thinking slowed down — stilled — to a point where dimensions and nuances otherwise invisible to you appear. That’s why so many people keep journals. They want more than just a record of what’s happening in their lives. They want to make sense of it.

Bruni's comments remind me of the Flannery O'Connor quote in a letter she wrote, a comment that I believe to be true of me: ". . . .  I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again."  I don't expect anyone but me to read my blog/journal and so far I haven't been disappointed nor do I expect to be.  That being the case, I often tolerate my run-on and otherwise awkward sentences to remain uncorrected. I'm also a fan of non-sentences, part sentences.  It seems to me that we often, maybe usually, think in non-sentences and talk that way so why not when the occasion permits write that way too.  My biggest fault is wordiness, way too many unnecessary words which my good friend, now deceased, David Branch would line through ruthlessly with his red editing ballpoint.  Often I would follow his writing advice and often I wouldn't.  Sometimes I would like the words too much to excise them, even if they were a bit redundant and unnecessary.  David was a graduate of Yale undergraduate school and Harvard law, a very bright and well-educated guy.  I always took his editing advice seriously, even when I eschewed it.  He would probably advise me to eschew the word eschew.  I daresay he would also find troubling my frequent use of hyphenated words and occasionally random use of capitalized initial letters in words that oughtn't be capitalized, yes in German but not in English.  Nonetheless, one of the advantages of writing that has no readers other than the author is that you can do stuff like that.   Dear David Branch would run out of red ink going over my writing in this journal.  How I wish he were still with us. 

12/21/24

 Saturday, December 21, 2024

D+46

Winter Solstice, shortest day of the year

1948, the State of Eire (formerly Irish Free State) declared its independence

1956 Montgomery bus boycott ended after the Supreme Court ruled segregated buses unconstitutional

1970 Oregon v. Mitchell Supreme Court case was decided, lowering the minimum voting age in U.S. federal elections to 18

1978 Police in Des Plaines, Illinois, arrested John Wayne Gacy for murder

1988 A terrorist bomb destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 mid-air over Scotland, killing all 259 passengers and crew on board and 11 people on the ground

1991 Soviet Union formally dissolved as 11 of 12 republics signed a treaty forming the Commonwealth of Independent States

2016 Carl Icahn was announced as Special Advisor to the President on Regulatory Reform, under President Donald Trump

2017 UN General Assembly voted 128 to 9 to denounce US decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital

In bed at 9, awake at 11:50, unable to sleep and up and out ,at 1:10.  Did the dishes, tidied up the kitchen, emptied the garbage, read the NYTimes & WaPO.  Lights out at 4:50 but not sleepy, fingers crossed. . . . Lights on oat 5:40, unable to sleep, cold.  Dozed off at some point and awake at 8:10.   10° outside, wind chill of -1°.

Prednisone, day 221, 7.5 mg., day 36.   Prednisone at 4:45 with 3 slices of Dave's Bread & blueberry preserves.  Other meds at 8:15.   

Pass the basin, please.  Yesterday was the anniversary of Pope Pius XI's 1935 encyclical Ad Catholici Sacerdoti.  I read as much as I could in the middle of the night while I was unable to sleep.  It reminded me of why there is abroad such contempt for religion generally and for the Roman Catholic Church in particular.  Excerpts:

   1. By the inscrutable design of Divine Providence We were raised to this summit of the Catholic priesthood.¹ From that moment Our thoughts were turned to all the innumerable children whom God entrusted to Us.² Yet, in a special way, We have felt an affectionate and earnest solicitude towards those who have the commission to be "the salt of the earth and the light of the world," for those who have been signaled out and adorned by the priestly character. In a still more special way Our thoughts have turned towards those dearly beloved young students who are being educated in the shadow of the sanctuary and are preparing themselves for this most noble charge, the priesthood.

1 He humbly starts out with the claim that it was God Himself, the creator of the universe, who selected him to be Top Dog in the Church.

² He follows up by calling his followers "children," reminiscent of the other infantilizing metaphor "sheep," as used in his predecessor Pius X's encyclocal Vehementer Nos: 

It follows that the church is by essence an unequal society, that is, a society comprising two categories of persons, the pastors and the flock, those who occupy a rank in the different degrees of the hierarchy and the multitude of the faithful.  So distinct are these categories that with the pastoral body only rests the necessary right and authority for promoting the end  of the society and directing all its members toward that end; the one duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led, and, like a docile flock, to follow the pastors.

11. The Old Law, inspired by God and promulgated by Moses, set up a priesthood, which was, in this manner, of divine institution; and determined for it every detail of its duty, residence and rite. It would seem that God, in His great care for them, wished to impress upon the still primitive mind of the Jewish people one great central idea. This idea throughout the history of the chosen people, was to shed its light over all events, laws, ranks and offices: the idea of sacrifice¹ and priesthood. 

¹ It was the idea, and command, of the creator of the universe, to kill doves and sheep to please him. 

 20. But among all these powers of the priest over the Mystical Body of Christ for the benefit of the faithful, there is one of which the simple mention made above will not content Us. This is that power which, as St. John Chrysostom says: "God gave neither to Angels nor Archangels" - the power to remit sins. . . 

31. Most sublime, then, Venerable Brethren, is the dignity of the priesthood. Even the falling away of the few¹ unworthy in the priesthood, however deplorable and distressing it may be, cannot dim the splendor of so lofty a dignity. Much less can the unworthiness of a few cause the worth and merit of so many to be overlooked; and how many have been, and are, in the priesthood, preeminent in holiness, in learning, in works of zeal, nay, even in martyrdom. 

 ¹ We now have some idea of the real numbers of "the few."  

As of May 31, 2019, information published by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) indicates that the conference has counted 7,002 clerics "not implausibly" and "credibly" accused of sexually abusing minors in the period 1950 through June 30, 2018, with three gaps in the USCCB data. Out of the 118,184 priests who have worked in those years, the 7,002 priests accused of abusing children are 5.9% of the total. The USCCB reports also show that the conference has counted 20,052 victims who are known to the bishops in the period 1950 through June 30, 2018.  

40. It is impossible to treat of the piety of a Catholic priest without being drawn on to speak, too, of another most precious treasure of the Catholic priesthood, that is, of chastity; for from piety springs the meaning and the beauty of chastity.¹ Clerics of the Latin Church in higher Orders are bound by a grave obligation of chastity; so grave is the obligation in them of its perfect and total observance that a transgression involves the added guilt of sacrilege.

¹ "Chastity" here seems to be coequal with celibacy. Pius later oting that there is no requirement of either chastity or celibacy in the uniate Eastern church.

 47. Notwithstanding all this, We do not wish that what We said in commendation of clerical celibacy should be interpreted as though it were Our mind in any way to blame, or, as it were, disapprove the different discipline legitimately prevailing in the Oriental Church. What We have said has been meant solely to exalt in the Lord something We consider one of the purest glories of the Catholic priesthood; something which seems to us to correspond better to the desires of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and to His purposes in regard to priestly souls.

And on and on.  Pass the basin, please.

Geri and Ellis are off to IKEA to pick up some items Geri ordered online.

12/20/24

 Friday, December 20, 2024

D+45

1935 Pope Pius XI published the encyclical Ad Catholici Sacerdotii on the importance of priestly celibacy

1983 PLO chairman Yasser Arafat and 4,000 loyalists evacuated Lebanon

In bed around 9:30, awake around 3:00, up at 2:20 unable to sleep.  Awale most of the early hours but nodded off at some point and woke up on the recliner at 9:30.  About 6 inches of snow yesterday and last night.

Prednisone, day 220, 7.5 mg., day 35.    Prednisone at 4:50.  Other mds at 9:40.     Trulicity injection at 10:50.

The Widow’s Lament in Springtime by William Carlos Williams

Sorrow is my own yard / where the new grass / flames as it has flamed / often before, but not / with the cold fire / that closes round me this year.

Thirty-five years / I lived with my husband.

The plum tree is white today / with masses of flowers. /Masses of flowers / load the cherry branches / and color some bushes / yellow and some red,

but the grief in my heart / is stronger than they,

for though they were my joy / formerly, today I notice them / and turn away forgetting.

Today my son told me / that in the meadows, / at the edge of the heavy woods / in the distance, he saw / trees of white flowers.

I feel that I would like / to go there /and fall into those flowers /and sink into the marsh near them.

 .  . . . . 

Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις; respondebat illa: άποθανεῖν θέλω.

. . . . .

Come Up from the Fields Father by Walt Whitman

Come up from the fields father, here’s a letter from our Pete,

And come to the front door mother, here’s a letter from thy dear son.

Lo, ’tis autumn,

Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder,

Cool and sweeten Ohio’s villages with leaves fluttering in the moderate wind,

Where apples ripe in the orchards hang and grapes on the trellis’d vines,   

(Smell you the smell of the grapes on the vines?

Smell you the buckwheat where the bees were lately buzzing?)

Above all, lo, the sky so calm, so transparent after the rain, and with wondrous clouds,   

Below too, all calm, all vital and beautiful, and the farm prospers well.

Down in the fields all prospers well,

But now from the fields come father, come at the daughter’s call,

And come to the entry mother, to the front door come right away.

Fast as she can she hurries, something ominous, her steps trembling,

She does not tarry to smooth her hair nor adjust her cap.

Open the envelope quickly,   

O this is not our son’s writing, yet his name is sign’d,

O a strange hand writes for our dear son, O stricken mother’s soul!

All swims before her eyes, flashes with black, she catches the main words only,

Sentences broken, gunshot wound in the breast, cavalry skirmish, taken to hospital,

At present low, but will soon be better.

Ah now the single figure to me,

Amid all teeming and wealthy Ohio with all its cities and farms,

Sickly white in the face and dull in the head, very faint,

By the jamb of a door leans.

Grieve not so, dear mother, (the just-grown daughter speaks through her sobs,

The little sisters huddle around speechless and dismay’d,)

See, dearest mother, the letter says Pete will soon be better.

Alas poor boy, he will never be better, (nor may-be needs to be better, that brave and simple soul,)

While they stand at home at the door he is dead already,

The only son is dead.

But the mother needs to be better,

She with thin form presently drest in black,

By day her meals untouch’d, then at night fitfully sleeping, often waking,

In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one deep longing,   

O that she might withdraw unnoticed, silent from life escape and withdraw,

To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son.

          

12/19/24

 Thursday, December 19, 2024

D+44

1946 War broke out in Indochina as Ho Chi Minh attacked the French in Hanoi

1971 Stanley Kubrick's cult classic "A Clockwork Orange" based on the book by Anthony Burgess premiered

1988 Unexploded WW II bomb found in Frankfurt, Germany - 5,000 evacuated

In bed    Fell asleep on the recliner around 8, woke up and went to bed around 9:30, awake at 2:30, and up at 2:50. 

Prednisone, day 219, 7.5 mg., day 34.  Prednisone at 4:45 with banana bread.  Other meds at 6:15.  

Bird behavior.  We are supposed to receive between 3 and 5 inches of snow today and tonight.  I went out this morning to fill our sunflower/safflower tube which was only about 2/3rds full.  While I was filling it, a red-breasted nuthatch landed on the shepherd's crook not more than 12 inches from my face.  Then she flew to the nearby suet cake and kept looking at me.  When I said 'good morning,' she flew away.  I have wondered if our neighboring birds are aware of my filling the feeders as I do so.  They seem to flock to them soon after I leave.  I see that now, after perhaps 15 to 20 minutes away from it, the sunflower/safflower tube is already down 20%.  A couple of goldfinches are working on the niger tube while the s/s tube is busy with house finches and sparrows and the ever-hungry chickadees. . .   By 2 o'clock, about one inch of snow has fallen and the s/s tube is half-consumed. 

A. E. Housman

Good creatures, do you love your lives

  And have you ears for sense?

Here is a knife like other knives,

  That cost me eighteen pence.

I need but stick it in my heart

  And down will come the sky,

And earth's foundations will depart

  And all you folk will die.

 

3/18/24

 Wednesday, December 18, 2024

D+43

2023 Pope Francis allowed priests to bless same-sex couples, though not when connected to a civil or same-sex union

In bed at 8:45, awake at 12:50, and up and out at 1:15, unable to sleep.   Lights out at 2:30 but unable to sleep, back on at 3:40.  

Prednisone, day 218, 7.6 mg., day 33.   Prednisone at 5:00.  Regular meds at 10:30, wondering why I religiously take my diabestes, blood pressure, and daily full-strength TIA aspirin if I don't want to grow older, feebler, and more miserable day by day.  Why do I wear an AppleWatch on my wrist and a medalert device around my neck?  Who am I fooling?  Why?  Resumé by Dorothy Parker:  Razors pain you; Rivers are damp; Acids stain you; And drugs cause cramp.  Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live.

"Women are better than men."  I've often said this because I believe it.  My dear departed friend David Branch used to get worked up when I would blithely say this.  He would point out what a gross generalization it it.  Cordelia Munroe laughed at the two of us.  But I do think that, overall, men are much less admirable than women.  I don't know to what extent this may be different in different cultures, but I think it holds true in the U.S.  Men are more competitive than women, more into machismo, less stupid, dangerous sports like boxing, football, and rodeo events.  They're more into needing to signal that 'my dick is bigger than your dick' with things like cowboy hats and muscle cars.  Thomas B. Edsall has a column in this morning's NYTimes on gender differences, titled "If Men Are in Trouble, What Is the Cause?  Some excerpts support my bias against my own gender.

The reality is that on many measures, some negative, others positive, men tend to dominate the extremes, a phenomenon known as the greater male variability hypothesis.

Take, for example, violence. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that in 2022 men committed 78.6 percent of violent crimes, nearly five times the 16.5 percent of violent offenses committed by women. (In the remainder, the sex of the offender could not be determined.)

In 2023 men committed 14,127 homicides, women 1,898. Men committed 35,304 aggravated assaults, women 10,866. Men committed 16,230 robberies, women 2,407. . . .

“Across many real-world domains, men engage in more risky behaviors than do women,” Christine Harris and Michael Jenkins wrote in their 2023 paper, “Gender Differences in Risk Assessment: Why Do Women Take Fewer Risks Than Men?”

Women, they found, reported a “greater perceived likelihood of negative outcomes and lesser expectation of enjoyment,” factors that “partially mediated their lower propensity toward risky choices in gambling, recreation and health domains.”

One consequence of men’s lower level of risk aversion, they wrote, is that “men are three times as likely as women to be involved in fatal car accidents.” 

[T]his research has proved consistently illuminating, including from a political perspective. In contemporary America, the more one learns about male and female propensities, the more one understands partisan hostility — the currently male-heavy Republican Party, today’s female-freighted Democrats and the understandable but increasingly hopeless impossibility of reaching productive compromise or finding common ground. 

"Abundant Life"  In this morning's WaPo:

There have been 34 school shootings this year, according to a database maintained by The Post; 13 people have been killed and nearly 50 injured. They account for just a small fraction of the country’s gun violence epidemic, but they occupy a particularly terrifying place in the national psyche, as tens of millions of children have been subjected to lockdowns and active-shooter drills since Columbine in 1999.

The Post, which tracks shootings on K-12 school properties during class hours, has tallied 426 incidents since 1999. Just 4 percent of the suspected shooters have been female.

Agard, the county chief executive, whose son attends school in Madison, said many of the area’s campuses were forced into lockdown Tuesday after several false threats. That jolt, coming so soon after Monday’s tragedy, made the day even more difficult.

“The world our kids are in now,” she said, “is very different than the one I grew up in.”

 There is something so wickedly, perniciously and incisively ironic about the name of the school where the doomed girl abruptly ended two lives and her own - Abundant Life.

USA, USa, u

                     s

                       a

Anniversary thought.  Pope Francis and same-sex couples - pathetic.

12/17/24

 Tuesday, December 17, 2024

D+42

2012 10 girls collecting firewood are killed by a mine blast in east Afghanistan

In bed at 9:30, up and out to the TV room at 10:30, unable to sleep.  Big solo stag with antlers eating berries under the County Line trees. It was barely visible in the dark, unlike this doe enjoying berries during the day.  I was awake until 2:30 when I returned to bed, unable to sleep on the recliner.  I woke at 5:30ish, up at 5:50.  I went back to bed some time later and got up at 10:30.

Prednisone, day 217, 7.5 mg., day 32.   Prednisone at 6:00. Other meds later.

United States of Dystopia.  83 school shootings in 2024 alone, the latest in Madison by a 15-year-old girl student.   An unlikely suspect: Of the shootings on school grounds so far this year where gender was identified, only nine suspects were female compared with 249 who were male, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database, an independent research project.  I don't know why there is a disparity in the total number of shootings.

Why is the mass killing of school children so common, ordinary, predictable, what is the right word, in America?  Of course, the ubiquity of firearms is one of the reasons but that doesn't answer the question of why they are used specifically against children in schools, often by other children.  Sometimes a history of bullying or peer abuse provides a motive, but not always.  Why should anyone in 'the greatest country on Earth, in history' go into a school building and shoot kids?  Why so many?  So often?  Ditto church shootings.

England is a cup of tea.

France, a wheel of ripened brie.

Greece, a short, squat olive tree.

America is a gun.

Brazil is football on the sand.

Argentina, Maradona’s hand.

Germany, an oompah band.

America is a gun.

Holland is a wooden shoe.

Hungary, a goulash stew.

Australia, a kangaroo.

America is a gun.

Japan is a thermal spring.

Scotland is a highland fling.

Oh, better to be anything

than America as a gun.

Brian Bilston

I read a reader's comment on this poem:  "This makes me so sad. I can 76, and I weep for this country. I am grateful that I have no grandchildren. I have been sad since the Viet Nam conflict."

 

12/16/24

 Monday, December 16, 2024

 D+41

25th and Vine

1969 British House of Commons voted 343-185 to abolish the death penalty

In bed at 9, awake at 3:15, up at 3:45.  I put a load of laundry in the washer.    

Prednisone, day 216, 7.5 mg., day 31.   Prednisone at 5:00   Other meds around 11:00.

Pariah.   Israel has closed its embassy in Ireland.  It has also recalled its ambassadors to Spain and Norway,  Each country has recognized a Palestinian State.   Ireland has announced that it would file an intervention in support of South Africa’s case against Israel in the International Court of Justice in The Hague. South Africa has accused Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.  Ireland said that it was intervening in the case against Israel in The Hague to ask the top international court “to broaden its interpretation of what constitutes the commission of genocide by a state.”  Cindy McCain, executive director of the World Food Programme, said on "Face the Nation" yesterday that Gaza is "near famine."  My take is that it may be that Israel's combined defensive and revenge war on Gaza may be sui generis and come to be recognized as its own form of genocide predicated not exclusively but in large measure on Israel's interference with humanitarian relief for the Gazans and the destruction of virtually all of Gaza's life-sustaining infrastructure.  That is my best guess of what will happen at the ICJ.  If I am correct, the decision will be denounced by Israel's government and by many Jews as "anti-semitism" because of the inevitable conflation and confusion of the State of Israel and its government with all of Jewry.  It seems to me that this conflation and confusion is itself a pernicious form of anti-semitism.  I should consult again the writings of Yeshayahu Leibowitz. 

Sadness is an emotional pain associated with, or characterized by, feelings of disadvantage, loss, despair, grief, helplessness, disappointment, and sorrow.  Wikipedia.

Come, come thou bleak December wind,

And blow the dry leaves from the tree!

Flash, like a Love-thought, thro' me, Death

And take a Life that wearies me.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 

The Debt

This is the debt I pay

Just for one riotous day,

Years of regret and grief,

Sorrow without relief.

Pay it I will to the end —

Until the grave, my friend,

Gives me a true release —

Gives me the clasp of peace.

Slight was the thing I bought,

Small was the debt I thought,

Poor was the loan at best —

God! but the interest!

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR

 

There's an old joke - um... two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of 'em says, 'Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.' The other one says, 'Yeah, I know; and such small portions.' Well, that's essentially how I feel about life - full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly.  Annie Hall 

We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful than any other.   Sigmund Freud 

Failure, then, failure! so the world stamps us at every turn. We strew it with our blunders, our misdeeds, our lost opportunities, with all the memorials of our inadequacy to our vocation. And with what a damning emphasis does it then blot us out! No easy fine, no mere apology or formal expiation, will satisfy the world's demands, but every pound of flesh exacted is soaked with all its blood. The subtlest forms of suffering known to man are connected with the poisonous humiliations incidental to these results.     William James  

The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt.   Thomas Merton 

Two Years Ago this date:

Mickey the Mope.  This is a term my mother used to use, disapprovingly.  She, who had so much to mope about in her short life, chose not to mope through her life and to discourage it in others, including me.  I feel some real shame in moping but nonetheless wallow in it whenever Geri is out of town.  Today is no different.  I'm so happy that she gets to spend a few days with her dear niece Katherine and husband Jordan, and perhaps (I don't know yet) with nephew Steve and his beautiful wife Maggie, a favorite of mine.  And of course with her beloved brother Jimmy who, Katherine's reports tell us, is sinking deeper into the mire of Alzheimer's.  On the few occasions when Geri is out of town I'm unavoidably aware of how empty my life is without her.  I'm like the Jackie Gleason character 'The Poor Soul," or in my mother's words, Mickey the Mope.