Consider this a progress report, in a slice-of-life sort of way.
There are far too many interesting things going on in the world for me not to blog about them, but it looks like it will take me a couple of weeks more before I can reclaim my old files, resurrect my old ideas for blog topics (nothing really changes, sadly) and regain my computer sanity.
So, let me tell you where I have been and where I am going with my blogging. It will make you almost as much an insider into my blogging as I am.
I used to have lots of files on my desktop, all of them in highly visible folders. I could click each one to check on their contents, with a lot of data carefully selected from various sources, and regularly updated. Of course, I was mocked by my computer-savvy children, for wasting memory and display space.
Still, it worked for me.
None of this means very much when it comes to talking about the fast-growing suicide of the Republican Party’s leadership or the growing “every man (and woman) a King” attitude among some Democrats in Congress. Still, those were two subjects I had created thick files on. After all, history is an interesting thing.
Now I can’t get to them, and that very much effects how I blog.
Let me show you what I mean.
I recently wanted to do a blog on the use of language by Congressional Republicans - particularly the crowd that declared the assault on the Capitol to be nothing more than a walk through a park on a nice summer’s day.
Now, when I start to write, I usually look up some facts. It’s nice to know what I’m talking about.
So I started looking up Republicans who denied there actually was an attack on the Capital (more than you would think), and the number who have made that denial important to their fund-raising and their political future. And, one of my files contained lots of other denials, and how they ended badly. Ever hear about Neville Chamberlin and his assurances he had successfully negotiated with Adolph Hitler for peace in our time.
Of course, another thought immediately popped into my head - an old saying: Nothing is harder than getting a man to realize something is false when his well-paying job depends on his not knowing it. Or words to that effect. If only I could find my file.
I started looking for the quote again, and it turned out I was close, The author was Upton Sinclair, and the exact phrase was “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Normally I would have put that in a working file, along with the blog I started to write, and then thought about it some more. Instead, I started trying to create a new working file on my desktop, spent about 15 minutes trying, then went out and watered the lawn.
When I came back to the blog, I was thinking of other people who talked about political conflict, and naturally Will Rogers came to mind. For my younger readers, I have a very old mind.
(That comes from dealing with a teenage granddaughter who really doesn’t know who Cary Grant was. Black and white movies don’t exist in her world, and she never discovered North by Northwest. Her loss.)
Anyway, Will Rogers.
I realize that a lot of people don’t know much about him, since he was born in 1879 and died in 1935. They do recognize the name in Oklahoma, where about two million people a year fly out of Will Rogers Airport.
Anyway, he was popular. Stage and film actor, columnist in more than 100 newspapers, radio host before television was invented, humorist and what today would be called a social commentator. And a Cherokee Indian. A political influencer for decades.
Two of his observations are still with us, even if he doesn’t get credit for them - “I never met a man I didn’t like,” and “I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat.”
Some of his other observations have been forgotten.
- "A Congressman is never any better than his roads, and sometimes worse."
- We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others."
- "If we ever pass out as a great nation we ought to put on our tombstone 'America died from a delusion that she had moral leadership'."
As French journalist and critic Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose”. (Just showing off. I had to look it up. It translates as "the more things change, the more they stay the same".
Well, naturally, I would have put this all in a folder on my desktop, something I am painfully learning how to do. That effort led to a healthy debate in my family about Macs and PC’s, and which ones are better.
But leaving that aside, the thoughts about values naturally led to the question of just what we value as a nation. Five more folders about Black Lives Matter, Coronavirus and government-ordered shutdowns, the fact that millions of people have lost money over the past year while the top 10-percenters have been raking money in, financial and health care inequality and the real meaning of infrastructure in the 21’s century.
Don’t think that last one is worth looking at? Well, I have really missed searching the internet for some topics I want to write about, even though I actually can do it on my tablet and smart phone, just not as easily. And, I can’t put the things I learn in a convenient desktop folder. I know I am repeating myself, but it’s still true.
Even today, about six percent of the United States population - around 19 million people - do not have fixed broadband access at adequate speed, and an estimated 14.5 million of them live in rural areas, which is certainly not equal opportunity for all. Want to live with dial-up for your modem?
Getting broad access to internet for the entire country is, at least for me, as vital as getting our interstate highways and bridges back to functioning condition. If you doubt how big a job that will be, just look it up.
All this was supposed to be the run-up to the main point of the blog I was working on before some barely-visible speck in a tiny part of my computer failed to work the way it should. A hardware problem that required the replacement of a board. Which was done very easily, so thank you Genius Bar.
Now, to the point I have been building up to. We, as a nation, seem to be worrying about the wrong things. I’ll tell you why later.
How do I know what we worry about? Well, I talk to people. I listen to politicians stroking the flames public anger. I watch the news. And I look at how much we spend on things.
Worry about Covid? Well, we spent more than $5 billion in the past year on medical research involving coronavirus, and it killed about 600,000 people out of the 33 million cases reported in the United States. Worldwide, there were 164 million cases and about 3.4 million deaths.
We spent about the same amount in research on heart disease, which killed twice as many people. Getting everyone to exercise, cut back on fatty foods and lose some weight would save a lot of money - in the U.S about one person in three is clinically overweight and another one in three meets the medical definition of obese.
What else do we worry about? Well, a lot of people get upset when they fly or take a train, even though the safety record for those modes of transportation is far better than driving. That’s because they feel they have no control once they are in a passenger seat.
The same thing could apply to police shootings of blacks and other minorities. Whites just don’t have the same reason to be concerned when they are stopped by police officer, because you rarely hear of a police officer killing a white driver who was pulled over for a traffic stop. It’s a racial control thing.
There is a deeply bitter joke that whites involved in a mass shooting are more likely to commit suicide than be killed by police. It’s actually hard to know how true this is, since different police departments handle statistics in different ways.
Well, we can always look to our political leaders to help us figure out what to worry about. After all, the things we care about the most show what we value as a nation. I think Will Rogers said something like that.
So, the fighting and killing in Israel and the Gaza Strip, or the still-spreading Coronavirus across much of the world. Or maybe the economy, or the growing national debt? Health care for all, infrastructure, when will we be able to stop wearing masks?
And what’s this about those bamboo ballots in Arizona? I don’t even think that bamboo grew there.
Just wait until I recover my files.
