Last week, a locally important two-lane highway was closed for several hours, due to a two-car collision which killed an 86 year old woman. It caused a lot of congestion, being the only east-west highway in the area.
Apparently, the accident occurred when the driver of a west-bound SUV inexplicably crossed the center line and smashed head-on into a minivan. The elderly victim was a passenger in the van; she was not wearing a seat belt.
The driver apparently at fault, according to Forbes magazine, is the seventh richest woman in the world, a former corporate president and a noted philanthropist.
One hears this story and must invariably reflect on the nature of our existence, on how the tiny choices we make can have enormous consequences, of how little importance so much of what we measure counts when facing mortality.
Had whatever caused the millionaire to swerve across the road - a moment's distraction, a moment's inattention, an error in judgement that on another occasion might have been of seemingly no consequence - not occurred, a tragedy would have been averted, the lives forever changed would have continued unchanged instead., enduring senses of loss and guilt would never have been engendered.
A moment's pause to fasten her seatbelt may well have saved the elderly victim. Who was she? The mother of the driver? The grandmother? Almost certainly somebody important to him or her, for they were all assembled to attend a wedding. One suspects the driver of that minivan will forever regret not having required that special passenger to buckle up.
What of the driver who crossed the line? Most of us would probably envy her riches - the seventh wealthiest woman in the world! - but all those riches will do nothing to extinguish the sense of guilt that momentary mistake must surely have engendered within her.
In the end, we are frail beings; in the end, we are all slaves to the caprice of chance, and we live, feel and die as the frail beings we are. Our material possessions are of little effect in comparison.
09 October 2013
02 September 2013
Reflections on an international tragedy
The New York Times yesterday published an article describing an "international adoption" of a Russian child by an American family which went horribly wrong, "World of Grief and Doubt after an Adoptee's Death," and the paper asked families with their own international adoption stories to comment.
As an adoptive parent, the article hit hard, and I have mixed feelings about the article and, more broadly, about the process.
Don't get me wrong: adopting my daughter was the best decision of my life, and I have never regretted bringing her into my life, not even during those darker moments of adolescence which bring angst to nearly every parent. She has enriched and enlarged my life in ways I could never have imagined; the journey has been - and continues to be - a wonderful journey.
When I met her twenty years ago she was 18 months of age, living in an orphanage in northeast Moscow; she's now starting her senior year at a good, small liberal arts college in the mid-Atlantic region. It's been a long road with more than a few potholes along the way, but it's been a good journey. There were thirteen years of ballet and several years of softball - oddly, the love of baseball endures the more. There was an assortment of the other sorts of activities typical of a bourgeois American child, too, from gymnastics to scouting to horses; you name it. She was a high school cheerleader who earned praiseworthy academic awards. Her social life was probably a little cloistered but not terribly unusual for her day and age. All in all, a childhood seemingly typical of her community. Through it all, she's always known - and been proud - that she is Russian.
Some of those potholes along the way were my fault. There really is no school or standard text for parenting; for such an essential task one is remarkably dependent on extemporized, seat-of-the-pants learning, and I certainly made my mistakes along the way. Still, I think the worst of the potholes stemmed from those first eighteen months. The staff at the orphanage were clearly loving care-givers, but they were overwhelmed by the numbers and she naturally didn't get the sort of parental care and nurturing that every infant deserves, and that has echoed down through the years as she's dealt with feelings of rejection, abandonment and loneliness, as well as delayed intellectual, emotional and even physical development. Her road has been the harder for that, and she has had to work hard and continues to work diligently to overcome those shortcomings. Perhaps she never ill, although I am optimistic that she's been developing the coping skills to manage the problems she can't overcome. Still, by this point in her life, I do believe that she's on a par with her "biological" peers, and she (rightfully!) feels loved by her parents.
For her, I think the "bottom line," such as it can be stated now, is that her future looks good, and she'll be ready to face what it brings. Moreover, it can safely be said that her life to date and her future are immeasurably better than the prospect faced by the scores of children she left behind at that orphanage.
But her and my very positive outcomes should not blind prospective parents to the dangers involved in international adoption, and probably in adoption generally.
Let's face it: babies born into loving families capable and willing to raise them as they should be raised simply are not placed for adoption. No, they become available because their birth parents cannot or will not care for them (think: the pernicious effects of poverty, or nonexistent prenatal care, or simple abandonment), or because their own shortcomings, habits and failings carry consequences that reach far into the children's futures (think: fetal alcohol syndrome or physical abuse).
So the children who do become available for adoption come with onerous baggage that will impede them all along their journey, and their parents will need to reach deeper into themselves - and to develop a larger repertoire of parenting skills, and require greater emotional reserves - than they will ever have imagined. Quite probably, more than most "biological" parents ever need.
That is most definitely not to say that the rewards aren't there, for they are - more than I ever imagined. But would-be parents who in their naivete or ignorance never bother to learn these realties and honestly assess their own ability and willingness to deal with them will do themselves and their children real and lasting harm. The parents will face disappointment, frustration and failure, and their children will suffer for it through the rest of their lives.
As an adoptive parent, the article hit hard, and I have mixed feelings about the article and, more broadly, about the process.
Don't get me wrong: adopting my daughter was the best decision of my life, and I have never regretted bringing her into my life, not even during those darker moments of adolescence which bring angst to nearly every parent. She has enriched and enlarged my life in ways I could never have imagined; the journey has been - and continues to be - a wonderful journey.
When I met her twenty years ago she was 18 months of age, living in an orphanage in northeast Moscow; she's now starting her senior year at a good, small liberal arts college in the mid-Atlantic region. It's been a long road with more than a few potholes along the way, but it's been a good journey. There were thirteen years of ballet and several years of softball - oddly, the love of baseball endures the more. There was an assortment of the other sorts of activities typical of a bourgeois American child, too, from gymnastics to scouting to horses; you name it. She was a high school cheerleader who earned praiseworthy academic awards. Her social life was probably a little cloistered but not terribly unusual for her day and age. All in all, a childhood seemingly typical of her community. Through it all, she's always known - and been proud - that she is Russian.
Some of those potholes along the way were my fault. There really is no school or standard text for parenting; for such an essential task one is remarkably dependent on extemporized, seat-of-the-pants learning, and I certainly made my mistakes along the way. Still, I think the worst of the potholes stemmed from those first eighteen months. The staff at the orphanage were clearly loving care-givers, but they were overwhelmed by the numbers and she naturally didn't get the sort of parental care and nurturing that every infant deserves, and that has echoed down through the years as she's dealt with feelings of rejection, abandonment and loneliness, as well as delayed intellectual, emotional and even physical development. Her road has been the harder for that, and she has had to work hard and continues to work diligently to overcome those shortcomings. Perhaps she never ill, although I am optimistic that she's been developing the coping skills to manage the problems she can't overcome. Still, by this point in her life, I do believe that she's on a par with her "biological" peers, and she (rightfully!) feels loved by her parents.
For her, I think the "bottom line," such as it can be stated now, is that her future looks good, and she'll be ready to face what it brings. Moreover, it can safely be said that her life to date and her future are immeasurably better than the prospect faced by the scores of children she left behind at that orphanage.
But her and my very positive outcomes should not blind prospective parents to the dangers involved in international adoption, and probably in adoption generally.
Let's face it: babies born into loving families capable and willing to raise them as they should be raised simply are not placed for adoption. No, they become available because their birth parents cannot or will not care for them (think: the pernicious effects of poverty, or nonexistent prenatal care, or simple abandonment), or because their own shortcomings, habits and failings carry consequences that reach far into the children's futures (think: fetal alcohol syndrome or physical abuse).
So the children who do become available for adoption come with onerous baggage that will impede them all along their journey, and their parents will need to reach deeper into themselves - and to develop a larger repertoire of parenting skills, and require greater emotional reserves - than they will ever have imagined. Quite probably, more than most "biological" parents ever need.
That is most definitely not to say that the rewards aren't there, for they are - more than I ever imagined. But would-be parents who in their naivete or ignorance never bother to learn these realties and honestly assess their own ability and willingness to deal with them will do themselves and their children real and lasting harm. The parents will face disappointment, frustration and failure, and their children will suffer for it through the rest of their lives.
20 July 2013
Running dog, trotting
I had a long ways to go, no need to get there fast, and wanted to save a few bucks. Will admit to some curiosity, too; maybe I just wanted to go looking for America.
So I booked on Greyhound to cross the country. Boarded in Flagstaff, Arizona at 8:00 p.m. on a Tuesday, to arrive in Washington D.C. at 3:50 a.m. on a Friday. Packed a bunch of books and a Nook reader, and brought along a lot of food (though none of Mrs. Wagner's pies), some bottles of tea and a gallon of water.
Downsides
For reasons which escape me, but probably reflect the short-sighted perspectives of the company's bean-counters, Greyhound seems committed to emulating the airlines' seating innovations. As in, ya gotta love your knees. And your neighbor's breadth. I rode on two different designs of buses. The older had a lot more leg room than the newer; the difference was between reasonable comfort and acute pain. At 6'1" I'm taller than most, but shorter than many; I cannot imagine how somebody half a foot taller than me can cope (but, of course, that's true on airliners too, although the agony there is admittedly of far shorter duration). The seat backs on the older model also reclined more, and it seemed to have slightly wider seats. (One little mystery: both types had useless little footrests whose only function seemed to be preventing one from sticking cramped feet into the space beneath the seat ahead.)
The company needs to focus on their customers' needs a lot more attentively. Airports and train stations routinely have informative displays giving arrival and departure times, gates and on-time status. Not so at Greyhound terminals. Nor do they have circulating staff enlightening confused travelers. Result? Crowds of confused passengers milling about, hearing rumors, wondering what's going on, alternating between anger and resignation. Aggravating the problem, many drivers ignore the PA microphone at their elbows, preferring to make important announcements in conversational voices totally unintelligible to passengers rearward of the front few rows.
For a little extra credit, Greyhound could even arrange to have spare drivers and buses available to quickly respond to breakdowns occurring out on the road. I did not particularly appreciate standing on the side of Interstate 376 just outside of Pittsburgh for an hour and a half while our bus leaked coolant into a ditch along the shoulder as semi-trailers roared by scant inches to our left.
My bus arrived too late to make connections in both St. Louis and Pittsburgh. Well, that's a bit of a mis-statement; we arrived in St. Louis three minutes before my connection was due to depart ... but there were 120 ticket-holding passengers trying to board a bus seating just 46. Meaning I couldn't board that bus - first-come, first-served, after all - or the next, so I didn't board a bus bound for my next connection until four hours later. In this day of computerized ticketing, it is impossible to comprehend how that happened. I understand the concept of over-booking, but by a factor of three? Not too surprising, therefore, but after that I missed my connection in Pittsburgh, too ... and then came the joy of the roadside breakdown. Needless to say, I arrived in Washington long after I should have.
Upsides
It's cheap. Far less than airlines, much less than Amtrak. Less than one's own car, too, if one is realistic with assumptions about cost. There's simply no other way to travel long distances for as little. My complaining aside, Greyhound does the job pretty well; at their worst, the buses were reasonably tolerable; the air conditioning always worked; we did arrive where we were heading, and we arrived there safely.
Most important, Greyhound serves a very real need. The proof was in the occupancy: all of the buses I saw were full, or nearly so.
It does that in part by serving a lot of little towns - especially in the west and on the Prairie - that aren't served by any other form of long-distance public conveyance. (I found the same thing to be true of Amtrak even in California, where the train serves as a valuable conduit between the small towns of that state's central coast.)
More than that, the bus offers affordable interstate travel to people who could not afford it otherwise. I've traveled a fair amount by air and train, and the folks on these buses come from a distinctly different public. It's a pretty varied population, but I got the sense that most were employed somewhere but worked near the bottom of the ladder ... or, if not, were riding their hopes to someplace where they might find work. Among my fellow travelers, I met a very personable, generous young truck-driver heading home to Pittsburgh from Phoenix for his first vacation since starting his career. There was a middle-aged couple who obviously fit together like an old pair of gloves, with lots of unspoken tenderness for each other but probably not much money, traveling from Arizona to New York. There were a bunch of early-twenties, bound for distances short and long. No gabardine suits. Or spies, that I could tell. In the west, the ethnic mix was pretty varied, but further east the west's Hispanics seemed to be replaced by African Americans. A substantial proportion of whites the whole way. Always, though, it was quite a mix ethnically. But apparently not economically; these seemed to be people with the same need or urge to travel as their more affluent fellows, but without the means to use the same (more convenient) modalities, so the bus is the only way I suspect they can meet those needs and wishes. To me, that seems pretty important.
Recommendations to Greyhound:
Treat travelers as customers, not cattle. Emulate Amtrak's practice of providing comfortable amounts of space to compensate for the lengthy time the passenger must spend there. It wouldn't take much - maybe remove one row of seats and boost prices by a compensating 8% if need be - traveling with the running dog would be a lot more comfortable yet still a bargain.
Provide riders with the same sorts of information airlines and railroads routinely offer. The desk clerks have schedule and boarding information at their finger-tips, so it wouldn't be difficult to devise a system of monitors dispersed around the terminal to display it to the traveling public.
The company (and Amtrak, for that matter) could take another page out of the airlines' book (excepting Southwest) by giving folks an opportunity to select seats when they purchase tickets. That shouldn't be difficult; obviously the necessary software has been around for a while.
Greyhound could also teach drivers to use their PA system effectively. Some do, but others don't, and that suggests the problem is one of training. Easy to correct.
Additional lessons:
1. The drivers don't seem to care what size bag of groceries one brings, so I could have - should have - brought a bigger, stronger bag for provisions. And chosen a better, more interesting supply of food.
2. Wish I brought a pillow. A must: the seat backs just aren't formed quite right, and the window glass vibrates too much. Need that pillow.
3. Load more books on the Nook. Easier to carry than a paper library, and the only way to read at night. And trust me: the nights can get long.
The future?
Yes, I would travel by Greyhound again. It is cheap, and it does provide a different view of America than air and rail travelers see. But don't plan on getting there quickly or all that comfortably.
Beyond that, I would like to try the new bus lines serving some of the denser corridors, like MegaBus.
So I booked on Greyhound to cross the country. Boarded in Flagstaff, Arizona at 8:00 p.m. on a Tuesday, to arrive in Washington D.C. at 3:50 a.m. on a Friday. Packed a bunch of books and a Nook reader, and brought along a lot of food (though none of Mrs. Wagner's pies), some bottles of tea and a gallon of water.
Downsides
For reasons which escape me, but probably reflect the short-sighted perspectives of the company's bean-counters, Greyhound seems committed to emulating the airlines' seating innovations. As in, ya gotta love your knees. And your neighbor's breadth. I rode on two different designs of buses. The older had a lot more leg room than the newer; the difference was between reasonable comfort and acute pain. At 6'1" I'm taller than most, but shorter than many; I cannot imagine how somebody half a foot taller than me can cope (but, of course, that's true on airliners too, although the agony there is admittedly of far shorter duration). The seat backs on the older model also reclined more, and it seemed to have slightly wider seats. (One little mystery: both types had useless little footrests whose only function seemed to be preventing one from sticking cramped feet into the space beneath the seat ahead.)
The company needs to focus on their customers' needs a lot more attentively. Airports and train stations routinely have informative displays giving arrival and departure times, gates and on-time status. Not so at Greyhound terminals. Nor do they have circulating staff enlightening confused travelers. Result? Crowds of confused passengers milling about, hearing rumors, wondering what's going on, alternating between anger and resignation. Aggravating the problem, many drivers ignore the PA microphone at their elbows, preferring to make important announcements in conversational voices totally unintelligible to passengers rearward of the front few rows.
For a little extra credit, Greyhound could even arrange to have spare drivers and buses available to quickly respond to breakdowns occurring out on the road. I did not particularly appreciate standing on the side of Interstate 376 just outside of Pittsburgh for an hour and a half while our bus leaked coolant into a ditch along the shoulder as semi-trailers roared by scant inches to our left.
My bus arrived too late to make connections in both St. Louis and Pittsburgh. Well, that's a bit of a mis-statement; we arrived in St. Louis three minutes before my connection was due to depart ... but there were 120 ticket-holding passengers trying to board a bus seating just 46. Meaning I couldn't board that bus - first-come, first-served, after all - or the next, so I didn't board a bus bound for my next connection until four hours later. In this day of computerized ticketing, it is impossible to comprehend how that happened. I understand the concept of over-booking, but by a factor of three? Not too surprising, therefore, but after that I missed my connection in Pittsburgh, too ... and then came the joy of the roadside breakdown. Needless to say, I arrived in Washington long after I should have.
Upsides
It's cheap. Far less than airlines, much less than Amtrak. Less than one's own car, too, if one is realistic with assumptions about cost. There's simply no other way to travel long distances for as little. My complaining aside, Greyhound does the job pretty well; at their worst, the buses were reasonably tolerable; the air conditioning always worked; we did arrive where we were heading, and we arrived there safely.
Most important, Greyhound serves a very real need. The proof was in the occupancy: all of the buses I saw were full, or nearly so.
It does that in part by serving a lot of little towns - especially in the west and on the Prairie - that aren't served by any other form of long-distance public conveyance. (I found the same thing to be true of Amtrak even in California, where the train serves as a valuable conduit between the small towns of that state's central coast.)
More than that, the bus offers affordable interstate travel to people who could not afford it otherwise. I've traveled a fair amount by air and train, and the folks on these buses come from a distinctly different public. It's a pretty varied population, but I got the sense that most were employed somewhere but worked near the bottom of the ladder ... or, if not, were riding their hopes to someplace where they might find work. Among my fellow travelers, I met a very personable, generous young truck-driver heading home to Pittsburgh from Phoenix for his first vacation since starting his career. There was a middle-aged couple who obviously fit together like an old pair of gloves, with lots of unspoken tenderness for each other but probably not much money, traveling from Arizona to New York. There were a bunch of early-twenties, bound for distances short and long. No gabardine suits. Or spies, that I could tell. In the west, the ethnic mix was pretty varied, but further east the west's Hispanics seemed to be replaced by African Americans. A substantial proportion of whites the whole way. Always, though, it was quite a mix ethnically. But apparently not economically; these seemed to be people with the same need or urge to travel as their more affluent fellows, but without the means to use the same (more convenient) modalities, so the bus is the only way I suspect they can meet those needs and wishes. To me, that seems pretty important.
Recommendations to Greyhound:
Treat travelers as customers, not cattle. Emulate Amtrak's practice of providing comfortable amounts of space to compensate for the lengthy time the passenger must spend there. It wouldn't take much - maybe remove one row of seats and boost prices by a compensating 8% if need be - traveling with the running dog would be a lot more comfortable yet still a bargain.
Provide riders with the same sorts of information airlines and railroads routinely offer. The desk clerks have schedule and boarding information at their finger-tips, so it wouldn't be difficult to devise a system of monitors dispersed around the terminal to display it to the traveling public.
The company (and Amtrak, for that matter) could take another page out of the airlines' book (excepting Southwest) by giving folks an opportunity to select seats when they purchase tickets. That shouldn't be difficult; obviously the necessary software has been around for a while.
Greyhound could also teach drivers to use their PA system effectively. Some do, but others don't, and that suggests the problem is one of training. Easy to correct.
Occupations of the bored
No matter how good or how bad the service and accommodations, bus travel means sitting in one place for a long time. Anticipating that obvious condition, I brought a small library of books, both hardcopy and electronic. I was surprised to see that I was pretty much the only reader ... and after the lights went down at night, the only reader. A lot of passengers had smart phones and small electronic game players. A few had laptops. Some were quietly listening to their MP3 players. But nobody seemed to be reading. Maybe that has something to do with class, or its handmaiden, education; I don't know, nor do I much care. The key was that just about everybody brought along something to while away the hours.
1. The drivers don't seem to care what size bag of groceries one brings, so I could have - should have - brought a bigger, stronger bag for provisions. And chosen a better, more interesting supply of food.
2. Wish I brought a pillow. A must: the seat backs just aren't formed quite right, and the window glass vibrates too much. Need that pillow.
3. Load more books on the Nook. Easier to carry than a paper library, and the only way to read at night. And trust me: the nights can get long.
The future?
Yes, I would travel by Greyhound again. It is cheap, and it does provide a different view of America than air and rail travelers see. But don't plan on getting there quickly or all that comfortably.
Beyond that, I would like to try the new bus lines serving some of the denser corridors, like MegaBus.
24 June 2013
Not America's national pastime? Not even remotely?
There's a curious silence in the major media when it comes to college baseball.
They love college football. Dwell on it, obsess on it.
Ditto college basketball.
Sweet sixteen. Bowl games. National rankings. BCS National Championship. Traditional rivalries. Cinderella teams. Even recruiting scandals and sexual assaults. All you can read, or watch, or hear, or stomach - day in, day out; in season and year 'round.
But not baseball.
Today, for instance, the finals of the NCAA Division I Baseball World Series will begin. UCLA vs. Mississippi State, in a best of three struggle.
Look for it in the New York Times, for instance. Look hard. I just did, and no mention of it at all. Okay, an occasional AP wire service feed, but nothing about UCLA making the finals, let alone the match-up for the finals. Not even today, with the game scheduled to start in just four hours. No discussion of the teams, or their players, or their chances.
But the Times does have an article in today's paper about how the Wallabies are suffering from three injuries as they prepare for the "all important" second test in the British and Irish Lions series in Melbourne. That's Melbourne, as in, Australia. And I think the game is rugby. Which I've never heard described as America's national pastime ... although perhaps I've missed something the Times editors have grasped?
Not in the Washington Post, which does, however, have an article on the "under 20 World Cup" in Turkey.
Not to the single out the Times or the Post: you won't learn much about the CWS (College World Series, lest you not recognize the reference) from any other major media source, either.
Why is that? College ball has become a major training ground for major league baseball, just as it has for football and basketball? Why the silence?
Strange.
P.S. For the record, I'm rooting for the Bruins ....
They love college football. Dwell on it, obsess on it.
Ditto college basketball.
Sweet sixteen. Bowl games. National rankings. BCS National Championship. Traditional rivalries. Cinderella teams. Even recruiting scandals and sexual assaults. All you can read, or watch, or hear, or stomach - day in, day out; in season and year 'round.
But not baseball.
Today, for instance, the finals of the NCAA Division I Baseball World Series will begin. UCLA vs. Mississippi State, in a best of three struggle.
Look for it in the New York Times, for instance. Look hard. I just did, and no mention of it at all. Okay, an occasional AP wire service feed, but nothing about UCLA making the finals, let alone the match-up for the finals. Not even today, with the game scheduled to start in just four hours. No discussion of the teams, or their players, or their chances.
But the Times does have an article in today's paper about how the Wallabies are suffering from three injuries as they prepare for the "all important" second test in the British and Irish Lions series in Melbourne. That's Melbourne, as in, Australia. And I think the game is rugby. Which I've never heard described as America's national pastime ... although perhaps I've missed something the Times editors have grasped?
Not in the Washington Post, which does, however, have an article on the "under 20 World Cup" in Turkey.
Not to the single out the Times or the Post: you won't learn much about the CWS (College World Series, lest you not recognize the reference) from any other major media source, either.
Why is that? College ball has become a major training ground for major league baseball, just as it has for football and basketball? Why the silence?
Strange.
P.S. For the record, I'm rooting for the Bruins ....
04 June 2013
People Power in Istanbul
I'm watching with great interest and concern the current developments in Istanbul and elsewhere throughout the Republic of Turkey.
I have long distrusted the government of Turkey's prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Turkey's Justice and Development Party (AKP). Most of that comes from my general wariness of politicians who exploit conservative, religious populism, and not from any personal knowledge of Turkey.
But following the increasingly alarming news being reported in the better press outlets available in the U.S., I have become more and more troubled. It has seemed to me that much as rich American ideologues pull the strings manipulating both the seemingly similar strains of right-wing, religious populism in the Republican Party, so it is seeming that Erdogan and the corporate interests and investors backing him are using pious conservatives and traditional to advance a political and economic far removed from the interests of the masses providing the AKP with its votes.
That said, it is extremely heartening to see the multitudes mobilizing to resist Erdogan and the AKP, and I wish them well. (I also wish we saw their like in the U.S.!)
But don't listen to my views. Turn to the reports flowing from Turkey, from the people challenging the autocracy of the AKP ... flowing, it must be said, through social media; the AKP controlled and intimidated formal media of Turkey have been all but ignoring what is happening under their very noses, while the mainstream press of the west is only beginning to pay attention.
On that note, I recommend recent postings by a dear friend who brings intimate personal knowledge of Turkey combined with considerable wisdom and scholarship, in her own blog, Reflections and Meditations on the Path.
I have long distrusted the government of Turkey's prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Turkey's Justice and Development Party (AKP). Most of that comes from my general wariness of politicians who exploit conservative, religious populism, and not from any personal knowledge of Turkey.
But following the increasingly alarming news being reported in the better press outlets available in the U.S., I have become more and more troubled. It has seemed to me that much as rich American ideologues pull the strings manipulating both the seemingly similar strains of right-wing, religious populism in the Republican Party, so it is seeming that Erdogan and the corporate interests and investors backing him are using pious conservatives and traditional to advance a political and economic far removed from the interests of the masses providing the AKP with its votes.
That said, it is extremely heartening to see the multitudes mobilizing to resist Erdogan and the AKP, and I wish them well. (I also wish we saw their like in the U.S.!)
But don't listen to my views. Turn to the reports flowing from Turkey, from the people challenging the autocracy of the AKP ... flowing, it must be said, through social media; the AKP controlled and intimidated formal media of Turkey have been all but ignoring what is happening under their very noses, while the mainstream press of the west is only beginning to pay attention.
On that note, I recommend recent postings by a dear friend who brings intimate personal knowledge of Turkey combined with considerable wisdom and scholarship, in her own blog, Reflections and Meditations on the Path.
03 June 2013
Limits
Limit.
Noun. A prescribed maximum or minimum. Websters.
Not a difficult concept.
Except, perhaps, when used as in the photo above.
Well, folks, that's meant as a maximum. Definitely not a minimum.
No matter what a lot of drivers believe.
Okay, the numbers. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that in 2009 there were 10,951 speeding-related traffic fatalities in the U.S. That's roughly comparable to gun-related homicides (CDC reported 11,078 of those in 2010).
We've heard a lot about guns and homicide, but the tragic reality is that speeding is just as deadly. That means trying to get to that next red light a little quicker. Using the gas pedal to express your frustration with the complexities of life. Or your failure to deal sensibly with schedules. Or voicing your contempt for some other driver by leaving them in the dust. Or doing the same thing, to stroke your ego.
Speed kills. It really does. Often. Much too often.
More numbers. Traveling one mile at 45 mph takes 1 minute, 20 seconds. The same distance at 55 takes about 14 seconds less. Fourteen seconds - worth raising the risk of killing someone?
Even over a longer distance, is the difference that important? A hundred miles at 60 mph takes an hour and forty minutes. Seventy saves less than 15 minutes. That's maybe the time spent dawdling over a cup of coffee, knowing the clock is running but pretending it's not. Is the life of that stranger in that Chevy, or maybe your lovely spouse sitting next to you, worth that little time management faux pas?
How much time is your life worth? Your spouse's? Your kids? Somebody else's kids? Believe, me, they're all worth a lot more than the few seconds you're trying to shave.
Driving a school bus, I see it all the time. Drivers rushing to get around me, and up to that red light moments before I do. Racing to get ahead of me before the road narrows to two lanes. Or running up behind me, flashing their lights to speed me up. (Sorry, a single speeding ticket would cost me my job, to say nothing about how speeding might endanger "my" kids.) Even cursing me for going "too slow" (yes, it's happened).
Slow down, you move too fast. You got to make the morning last.
That, and the lives of the people you endanger. Including your own.
Oh yeah, and you'll also be saving money, a lot of money -- on the tickets, on your auto insurance, on taking the taxi after your license gets suspended. Maybe on repair costs, medical bills, lawyers' fees and court judgments, too. Speeding can cost you a lot, an awful lot, and I'm not talking just money.
Besides, do the limit and driving becomes so much easier, 'cause all the fools passing you by invariably leave the lane empty in front of you. And you can listen to your music in peace.
P.S. One more set of numbers. In 2010, 197,616 drivers got speeding tickets in Virginia. That's three and a third per cent of all Virginia drivers. Why chance being one of them? Especially when running all the risks won't gain you much?
02 June 2013
I Like Ike
There's been a lot written by the punditry on the Republican Party's generation-long lurch rightward and the bankruptcy of their ideology. But few have said it better than the last Republican President to seek consensual governance, Dwight Eisenhower.
Commenting on his party's right wing, Ike said ....
"The Republican Party must be known as a progressive organization or it is sunk. I believe that so emphatically that I think that far from appeasing or reasoning with the dyed-in-the-wool reactionary fringe, we should completely ignore it and when necessary, repudiate it."
"I don't know why anyone should be a member of the Republican Party."
Such a tragedy that the Dwight Eisenhowers of our era don't exist, having been replaced by the likes of Ted Cruz whose fealty is to their radical ideology and personal fortune, and not our common nation.
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Source: Quoted in Jean Edward Smith, Eisenhower in War and Peace, Random House, 2012, pages and 672 and 649, respectively.
23 May 2013
Robbed by the bulldozer
I live in an area now experiencing the emergence of Brood II of the mid-Atlantic's famed 17 year cicadas.
Or, to be more accurate, I live in an area that should be experiencing Brood II's emergence.
I hear them in the forest behind the school where I park my bus. I hear them in what's left of the forest near the local elementary school. I suspect I'll hear them if I go hiking this weekend. But I'm not hearing them where I live.
Why not? That's a good question, but I'll be it has a lot to do with the fact that this community (if I dare use that term) didn't exist in 1996, when they last emerged. This area was mostly farm and forest back then, but nearly all the farms are gone, and only vestiges of the forests remain. All else has been churned up by bulldozers, transformed into a landscape of cookie-cutter townhouses interspersed with variations on the McMansion theme.
Did the bulldozers wreak so much havoc that they annihilated Brood II? That's my guess.
Sad. I miss the beady-eyed little critters. Along with their incessant song. And the farms and fields that have disappeared, too.
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Update: A wayward cicada flew into an open window on my bus and landed near a first grader. She wavered between disgust and fascination, so I leaned overand asked her age. "Six." I mentioned that the next time she saw one, she'd be 23. She looked puzzled, as though the very idea of ever being that old was utterly incomprehensible. To me, that's fundamental to the sense of wonder these insects engender; they stretch our sense of time beyond the constraints of the ordinary.
Update: The photo above replaces the "borrowed" original; this one was shot in the forest remnant bordering the lot where I park my bus.
10 May 2013
The best of it, and otherwise
School's nearly over, and a lot of elementary kids mark the fact by giving their teaches and their bus drivers little gifts. On my morning run today, one gave me a little cup full of candy, and a note:
Thank you for driving me to and from school safely! You are the best bus driver ever!
Makes you feel good, y'know?
As for the otherwise .... Substituted on a kindergarten run for a colleague who was out today. Looked back in the mirror to see two boys rolling on the floor, one holding the other in a hammer lock. Ugh. Separated them and asked them if their teacher lets them do that in class.
"No."
Does their bus driver let them do that on the bus?
"No"
Then why were they doing it now?
No answer.
Assigned them seats some distance from the other, but a couple of minutes later they were in the same seat, punching each other.
Sigh.
So sometimes I wonder why I ever step into that big yellow box. But that "best bus driver ever" note, and kids like the one who wrote it, answer the question ....
Thank you for driving me to and from school safely! You are the best bus driver ever!
Makes you feel good, y'know?
As for the otherwise .... Substituted on a kindergarten run for a colleague who was out today. Looked back in the mirror to see two boys rolling on the floor, one holding the other in a hammer lock. Ugh. Separated them and asked them if their teacher lets them do that in class.
"No."
Does their bus driver let them do that on the bus?
"No"
Then why were they doing it now?
No answer.
Assigned them seats some distance from the other, but a couple of minutes later they were in the same seat, punching each other.
Sigh.
So sometimes I wonder why I ever step into that big yellow box. But that "best bus driver ever" note, and kids like the one who wrote it, answer the question ....
08 May 2013
Sure wish a real Democrat would step forward
Virginia's gubernatorial race has two Republicans entered, but no Democrats.
The right wing Republican, Ken Cuccinelli, wants to lower taxes on corporations and the more affluent individual taxpayers. He proposes to cut the personal income tax from 5.75% to 5%, but this won't affect low-wage workers at all. He also proposes to cut the corporate income tax from 6% to 4%, which would be better news for stockholders than stockboys.
The "moderate Republican," Terry McAuliffe, will be listed on the ballot as a Democrat, but he isn't one. His tax proposal calls for eliminating or reducing a variety of business taxes. Again, nothing for low-wage workers, or even moderate-wage workers.
If there were a Democrat running who wanted to cut taxes, she or he would be looking at cutting the taxes that burden low-wage workers. Like the sales tax on food. Like extending upwards the lower income tax rate ceiling and floor, providing a break to low income Virginians without much affecting the rich ones. A real Democrat might also propose providing a property tax benefit for renters. After all, renters do pay property tax, if only indirectly; landlords certainly aren't paying such taxes out of their own pocket.
But no, there aren't any Democrats running in the state's gubernatorial contest.
I sure wish there was a viable third party who represented the bottom 80% or so.
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