Philosophers & Poets

Silence. Would be nice. All this craziness. 

Some blogs may be about history. Others prognosticate about the future. 

This blog is based in the present. Ostensibly about reminding myself to have fun, but also to be a record of history in my time. The context behind and around my experiences. May be of interest someday. Probably not, but the process is good for me. 

At present, we find ourselves in very odd, very difficult, maddening, frustrating times in our little corner of the world. 

As we try to unravel how we got to this exact moment in time, two things dawn on me. 

First, we have created a society that values money and social status above anything else. Money elevates the worst among us to positions of envy and worship. Crooked politicians, mob bosses, cutthroat businessmen – if they have money, they are admired by the masses regardless of all the terrible things they might have done to accumulate that wealth. 

Collectively, we’ve failed miserably at understanding what all philosophers and poets have been trying to tell us for years.

Next, in America, we have learned to monetize everything. Everything. There is literally nothing we won’t package and sell. I saw an ad today for a device that literally picks locks. That’s good for society.

We subsidize energy companies to drill for oil which destroys our planet. We subsidize corn production for HFCS, which is killing us, and which makes healthy food far more costly by comparison. 

You get the idea. 

And this brutal experience we are living through now is the natural result of this two-pronged approach to the collapse of society. Simply that. Our greed and our lust will be the two that gets us. The other 5 are incidental it seems.

It seems too much sometimes. The constant stream of vile, hateful, lunacy from DJT and Elon. It has gone so far beyond anyone’s imagination, the pure chaos, that we remain mostly paralyzed. Each day is some new crazy thing to attack our sensibilities. Some thing designed specifically to do hard by humans. To make them suffer and feel the wrath of these two ding dongs. Directly. Full-on. Confrontationally. Challenging anyone to come to their aid or to stand against the massive power of the executive branch. I really hate those mother fuckers. 

Formal opposition from within the elected members of congress is almost completely non-existent. Bernie, AOC, and Chris Murphy and a few AG’s from different states are starting to mobilize. What weapons do they have? What weapons do we have? 

All those years of conservatives crying about their worries the government would infringe on their right to own guns and push their religion onto the rest of us and to pollute the planet at will and make their children learn real historical facts and get vaccinated. Now, we liberals, in just a few weeks, have seen all our worst fears falling down on us like acid rain. 

Not being directly affected almost feels, in a way, worse than if I was taking some beatings. Watching others be traumatized and oppressed creates a guilt complex. I’m not asking to be randomly fired from my work, or shipped off to Nicaragua without my people or my dog, but I do feel powerless to help and that has its own sort of complicated feelings. 

It’s relatively uncommon in the United States to attend the funeral of a child or a young person while the parent’s are also there — grieving over the absurdity of outliving your children. It wasn’t always uncommon here. But science and medicine and OSHA and child labor laws and rule of law in general has made it the rare exception. All these advances are now being pulled back for the ridiculous assertion we can no longer afford to protect our children and vulnerable people.

Of course the #1 killer of children is gun violence, and this is a battle we have no stomach for apparently.

But in Africa, it is still quite common to see young children die. According to estimates, somewhere around 15,000/day die of hunger or easily preventable diseases. Before the world’s richest asshole decided to feed USAid ‘into the wood chipper‘, the United States did a semi-respectable job of trying to keep some of those children alive. But less than a month after installing Trump as President, the US is now consciously allowing thousands to suffer and die that we could save. That bare minimum amount of less than .2% of our federal spend that was dedicated to helping others around the world, families with income less than $2/day, has been withheld at the insistence of a man worth several hundred billion dollars. 

There is always confusion around how much money the US traditionally has spent on foreign aid. Most Americans believe the answer is around 25% and they say they would be comfortable if it were scaled back to 10%. The truth is that there are 2 numbers. 

If you only count money used to advance true humanitarian purposes, the number has traditionally been around .16% or so. The difference between the .16% and the ~ .95% (widely reported) is that money that goes to countries for military support and security protocols for the US. So money we give to Israel to be allowed to use their airfields is considered ‘foreign aid’. The US gives a lot of money to other countries to buy weapons and pay for their militaries. This may or may not be important to our security, but it definitely does not in my book count as foreign aid. It is more likely a good fit in our defense budget chart of accounts.

When I was young, the Vietnam war played out each night on the news. Body counts were read off and videos of dead and wounded soldiers were shown being loaded onto choppers that gently flew off into the distance. We saw the dead bodies of Viet Cong strewn around on the ground like a modern war movie – except those were real children, men, women and old folks. We were not meant to feel sorry for them — they showed the images to try to convince us we were winning the war. We were meant to feel proud that our brave warriors killed these poor people now lying bloody and lifeless around their grass huts amid a few farm animals. They were commies we were told, and so they hated America and Americans. 

They expressed this hatred, apparently, by living a quiet life in a jungle on the other side of the world. How dare they. 

We were also inundated in those days, far more so than now, with graphic commercials pleading for support to various aid agencies to assist famine stricken countries. ‘Just a quarter a day saves a life‘ etc. Sally Struthers, from All in The Family, was prominent.

Tens of thousands of children dying every day. The images were there. The protruded stomachs of severe malnutrition. Babies lying lifeless in their mother’s arms. And children don’t die suddenly of malnutrition. The mercy of death comes only after days, weeks, months, years of pain and intense suffering. For most, their entire lives.

These images and this messaging put me into semi-serious angst and depression for many years of my youth. My anxiety manifested as breathing problems. Multiple times each day I would feel as if I was not able to get enough oxygen. I would take deeper and deeper breaths and finally felt like I got over the top and was okay for a few minutes. And then it would start again.

I simply could not reconcile all the sadness, especially juxtaposed against my weekly Sunday school and church training and god is good bullshit. What was god doing over there? What was our church doing? I saw the money basket going around, filling up with ones and fives and loose change. Why wasn’t anyone helping? Why did it fall on me? That’s how it felt. It took years for me to learn to bifurcate. Not forget exactly, but place that sadness away where it was far less visible. That is the trick to allowing yourself the opportunity to pursue your own happiness, even while you know millions of babies and young kids are in severe physical and emotional trauma. Even knowing that our own country was part of the killing.

So I finally learned to suppress those images and feelings — and mom and dad breathed a sigh of relief that their kid was indeed super emotional, but not a complete freak. That and a secret promise to myself that when the day came when I could help, I would try to do that. Find a way to provide some relief. Maybe not enough to move the needle, but enough to feel relevant in the world. Enough to assuage the guilt of riding out life on a yacht atop an ocean of death and misery.

Now, the immediacy and visceral hatred and callous indifference emanating from our government seems to be digging up those old skeletons that I thought were buried. The sadness and grief of all the people we are deliberately harming now has to be heard. And not just those fighting for survival in developing countries, but the immigrants here who are afraid to leave their homes, who go to bed at night not knowing if they will see their children again, and even the federal workers who have invested in their careers and now see their efforts swept away in a second by an idiotic lunatic who thinks he’s the smart one in the room. This ridiculous man-child who makes a vast amount of his wealth from our own government but jealously wants no one else to benefit. All for his dream of going to Mars. 

I’d gladly pay a princely sum to see him strapped to a rocket and put onto the Mars trajectory. God speed Elon. Don’t hurry back.

Trump has given the middle finger to Europe, our most important friends and allies for the past 100 years, and now has his mouth firmly on Putin’s ass. He is tearing apart NATO and throwing Ukraine under the bus. He is actually trying to monetize Ukraine’s predicament. Imagine that. What kind of cocksucker does that? Trump, a draft dodger who has repeatedly insulted veterans, along with his supremely weird VP Vance, viciously attacked Zelensky in the White House. This man who is standing up to a bully, is attacked by another bully, for putting his life on the for his country.

You simply can’t make this shit up. And all the Republican pol’s stand by and bury their shame and do nothing.

There is no area of responsibility that Trump has not dismantled or is attempting to corrupt. He has not a single redeeming quality. 

Readers of these pages know I’ve been a frequent critic of our government. I’ve always chosen to highlight our difficult and violent past because I always felt that was an important step in creating a more peaceful and inclusive future. We may never know if I was correct or not because not only did we never fully come to terms with our past, admit our mistakes in enslavement, genocide, social manipulation, political malfeasance etc., we chose to go forward doubling down our most aggressive and abusive sentiments. Trump has done this, taken us in this new direction, almost single-handedly, while thousands in positions of power who could have deterred him, have watched like wide-eyed baby seals as the clubbing continues.

My point is that perhaps by acknowledging and fully manifesting our violent and racist past, we would have been more inclined towards a more gentle future. To treat other humans with more compassion. To use our ill-gotten wealth to help those most in need. 

So now we watch and wait. Protest as we are able. In person. Economically. Boycotts. Social media posts. Call our elected officials. Call them liars and petty, cheap, criminals who should be taken outside and pistol-whipped for their cowardice and sycophancy. Alas, I do not have a pistol. At least not for now.

Anger is rising. As it should. We blew so quickly past the outward edge of acceptable behavior from the Oval Office that by the time we looked up we are now staring down a point of no return. Trump has fired the heads of so many key departments and installed stupid loyal puppies in their place, that if he guts the Federal Election Commission and bribes a few state governors, we may well find that Congress is lost to us forever. Then of course we will have also lost the Supreme Court forever, and America as we have known it for the past several centuries will no longer exist. 

I got home from Spain last Monday and straight back into the breech. Work is busy but fine. Charities are also busy. Seems a renewed glimmer of hope for TOOM. We’ve kicked off some development in India.

On the long flight home from Madrid to JFK I spent some time looking back over the years to figure how many times I have flown over the Atlantic. Probably more than 50 I would guess. Maybe as much as 75. 2 or 3 times a year for 30 years and there it is.

Irrationally I still get a little nervous flying over oceans. The guy sitting behind me looks like a stone cold terrorist so that isn’t great. I’d prefer if I were behind him where I could slap the shit out of him if he tried any funny business.

Interestingly, my first approach to Europe was by boat. A navy ship. We docked at the NATO base near Naples and I set foot on what I consider my real home for the first time. 

Since then, I’ve filled 3 complete passports, each with extended pages. I started coming before the Euro, when EU was still in infancy. I’ve got around 1.5 million miles on Delta and around 300,000 on United, from my time living in San Francisco and Chicago. 

I’ve never joined the American team, although I did fly them a bit when I had my home in Mexico. 

I’m upgraded to Delta’s version of First Class, so a lie-flat seat. Which mades a really big difference in comfort. I also have space enough for my books, magazines, laptop, and iPad. Wine flows freely. I skipped the meal but not the dessert — a cheese plate and chocolate Sundae. 

What was I talking about before? Some sort of problem with the government?

Friday night. Just on my flight back to CMH from TPA via DTW. Monday I fly to Boston to meet Andris and introduce him to Bryan and the MIT conference. I will also get to see Pierre and his kids while I am there. Then on Thursday, Brittany and I head to New Orleans for  4 days. 

Today is 2/28 and we are fully supporting the economic blackout. I had a few olives and a bit of cheese from the Delta Lounge. We will have our martini and dinner tonight at a small, locally-owned, restaurant near Brit’s house. 

It will be fine. We will be fine. Most of us.

No more news of note.

Humbly Submitted,
Robert Myres, Flanker — Portneuf Valley Rugby Football Club (ret.)