Reinventing Yourself

July 24, 2013

I have an unusual talent. I have periodically reinvented myself during my lifetime. Let me explain.

I grew up in a small town in segregated Louisiana. School was not challenging, and none of the teachers or counselors took any particular interest in me. I was average, and my family was quite poor. My only extracurricular activity was band, and even there, I could only play an instrument that the school provided.

I was something of what would become known as a nerd later, although I didn’t see myself as such. My fellow students did. I didn’t find this out until my 50th high school graduation reunion. But my grades were not good enough for a college scholarship.

My family were unable to provide any support for further education. And I had no idea of whether I could do college-level work. My school was not known for academic achievement post-high-school.

I had worked for a number of people around that small town. My last job was working for an old man. I did a number of jobs and clearly he liked what I did; I could see a future working for him, unlike the clerk-style jobs I’d had before. I was happy and I began an effort to really learn how to do the jobs I was hired to do. I went to the local library and checked out books on the subject.

And then he died. My job died with him when his estate became tied up in the courts. His children fought over his various businesses and they closed down while the infighting went on. This occurred during my senior year of high school. I was out of school and out of work.
And the draft was waiting. Usually that ‘friends and neighbors’ greeting card arrived in the 20’s. But I saw no reason to wait. I tried the Navy and the Air Force, but I am color-blind, and both rejected me. The Marines weren’t interested either. The Army was not so choosy.

I became a soldier. I did not realize it until later, but when I joined the Army I reinvented myself for the first time.

For the first time in my life, I now associated closely with people of other races. My horizons expanded. After basic combat training, I went to a course I’d signed up for before enlisting. I would work on rockets, because I had been an avid reader of science fiction. After BCT in Arkansas, I was sent to Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas.

El Paso was a city. I had no car, but that didn’t matter. There were buses. Even taxicabs, but they were expensive when your income is a private soldier’s pay. My first paycheck was $77.10. The Army took $20 of that for haircut and required supplies.

Change? I resisted for a time. The desert was strange and lifeless after growing up in Louisiana. The people were dark-skinned, and they freely crossed the bridges back and forth from Texas to Mexico. They often spoke Spanish, and some on the streets and in the shops barely spoke English if at all. But I adapted.

Within a few months, my best friend was a Black man. I learned something of his problem, trying not to be different within a society that wouldn’t admit you. Not all of it, of course. But when we went out to have a few beers in Juarez, we learned to be very careful which bars we went into. Some wouldn’t accept him, some wouldn’t accept me, even though we were together. Friends and drinking buddies that we were, patrons of some of the bars simply didn’t want one or the other of us around.

I was aware of the life I left behind, but it no longer meant much. The things I’d been told were obviously false. I left the old life and barely looked back. Just as a snake sheds its skin, I shed my past.

We finished school, and now I had a basic education in things I’d barely been aware of before. Pneumatics. Electronics. Hydraulics. Mechanics. Basic nuclear weapons design. And logic; how to diagnose what was wrong with a missile by looking at symptoms. If this, then that. And not just missiles, but launchers, complicated test sets, high-pressure air compressors, generators that produced 45 kw of 3-phase electrical power. This, to someone who had grown up and never had electricity beyond that provided by batteries in a flashlight until I was a teenager. It was a long way from that huge diesel-powered generator back to the kerosene lamps I’d depended on when I was learning to love reading.

I became a soldier. Except for a short break for two years, living and working in El Paso and then California as a civilian, I remained a soldier for the next 20+ years.

I lived in Chicago for a couple of years and married before transferring. I found that Chicago, despite what I’d believed, was as racist as anyplace I’d been. California was a model of tolerance compared to Chicago. My future wife and I shared a distaste for that; we went on one block-busting expedition together to try to find housing for a young Black woman, a friend of my wife, in a ‘neighborhood’. Chicago is famous for them; they’re ethnically isolated. And racist.

I emphasize the racism because that’s the greatest illustration I can think about to show how I had changed. My life didn’t revolve around race relations, far from it. But when the situation intruded, that was my mindset now and so I acted not as I’d been taught but as I had learned.

That willingness to totally change outlook based on what I learned, and then move on in a new direction, is what I call reinventing myself.

More tomorrow; the Internationalist.

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Fiction

July 23, 2013

A departure from my usual topics, all non-fiction.
I started writing fiction about three months ago. I finished a novel, posted it in serial form (to keep myself writing! I work best under pressure.), began a second one halfway through, and then posted a chapter of each ever week. No writer’s block! The first novel is now running as a serial on another free site, much expanded, rewritten, and edited. If you’re interested, it’s Combat Wizard (Speculative Fiction, SF, under a pen name) on a site called Beyond the Far Horizon. I’ll post the second novel there, totally different, when it’s finished. Meantime, I’ve begun book three, a sequel to Combat Wizard, called Wizard at Work. Got all that?
This is chapter one of that last book; if SF, psi stuff, isn’t your interest, skip this.
XXXX

Chapter One

T and Shezzie had toured the Southwest. They spent a week in Las Vegas and then moved on. California had been fun and they had enjoyed San Francisco. By mutual agreement, they avoided southern California. Surfer had spent much of his too-short life there before dying in Mexico and finally being cremated. T had attempted to recover the remains but had not been able to prove family connections, so the request had been rejected. Surfer’s remains had finally been buried in a cemetery in Juarez, just another among the many unknown and unwanted dead in a city and nation with too many such.

They traveled up California through Big Sur and then to Seattle. The city had engaged their attention for three days, but they had left before it began to pall. From there they had driven down through the Utah desert and marveled at the erosion all around. The Grand Canyon had fascinated, but only for a day. In the end, it too was erosion, and they had seen much of it by that time. A reservation had been made so that they could visit Yellowstone, but again only a day was needed. Finally, by mutual consent, they had headed home.

New Mexico was gripped in drought. The Rio Grande was nearly dry, and in fact was dry in stretches. Conservationists were worried about the wild populations of the endangered silvery minnow. A captive breeding program might provide a restocking resource when the rains finally came again.

Wildfires had broken out in Arizona and Texas, and of course in New Mexico as well. The state ranked as the worst-hit among all states regarding damage from drought. The tall pines and firs in the mountains, normally so cool and damp in the summer, baked. The standing trees, the ones that still lived, were as dry as kiln-dried lumber. Bark beetles infested and then killed the weakened trees. Great swathes of them then fell victim to lightning-sparked fires.

Shezzie was clearly worried when they returned to the Jemez Mountains. The village of Jemez Springs was located in the mountains, just north of the Jemez Pueblo and south of Los Alamos and the Bandelier National Monument, a preserved ruin from the days before the Spanish invasion. Their cabin lay north of the village and was surrounded by the dry forest. Some stretches of the forest had been closed to visitors because of the extreme fire danger.

A short distance away lay the Valles Caldera, a super-volcano that had been a part of the process that formed the mountains. There were still several hot springs scattered through the mountains showing that the area was still not extinct but only quiescent.

T drove back to New Mexico in near silence. He had again been troubled by nightmares. Night sweats, panicked look in the morning, exhausted and wrinkled face when they ate breakfast together, sour smell of sweat from the night’s terrors; if it all wasn’t as bad for Shezzie as it was for T, it was still bad enough. She feared that his PTSD might have returned and had no idea what to do about it. Whatever had happened in El Paso, T refused to discuss it. Ray was quiet as well regarding this topic. The nightmares had returned soon after the two had split up, with Ray going home to see about developing his relationship with Ana Maria and T vanishing into the small town in the mountains of New Mexico.

T disappeared the morning after the two of them arrived at their cabin. Shezzie noticed that his side of the bed was damp from the sweating he’d done and that his truck was missing. She had heard nothing. Perhaps he had allowed the truck to drift quietly downhill, only starting the motor after he was some distance away from where the two parked their cars in front of the cabin.

T blamed himself for allowing Ray to become involved in the murderous outcome where the two had confronted a street gang in South El Paso. Ray did not blame T; far from it. He had lost no sleep over the deaths of a murderous gang of thugs. T neither knew about this nor would he have cared. Logic played no role in his depression.

Sleepless, he had unlocked his truck and left the cabin. He drove aimlessly through the backroads and finally through the eastbound Interstate 40. He had tired of the sameness of the road and had headed south through Tijeras after gassing up the truck. He had stopped where he found something of interest. In one of the small towns, he had found surprising amounts of graffiti. It was a moment’s work to erase every bit of it that he could see as he drove slowly through the town. An infuriated gang of taggers and a bemused group of residents would wonder what had happened. For the first time in days, T let a smile crinkle his face.

He found a pull-off and slept for a time in the truck. He ate a late breakfast in Mountainair and then pulled off to investigate a ruined Indian construction. Abo ruins had once been a thriving pueblo, but had fallen into disuse and finally had crumbled after the native inhabitants had moved on. T wondered why they had settled here, so far from the river that other Puebloans had sought to water their crops. Clearly, they had. Perhaps they had fled from enemies. The oldest ruins were quite primitive and were now partially blocked off and hidden by drifted sand and dirt.

T hiked the short trail through the monument but avoided the ranger’s station. There were no visitors as yet on this day. The solitude suited T’s mood.

A warning buzz announced a large western diamondback rattlesnake. T could clearly see the reptile, loosely coiled in the shade of a scrubby bush. The snake might have been waiting in ambush for a mouse or rabbit to hop by.

Motivated by impulse, T used his Talent to softly grasp and lift the big snake. It was as thick through as his forearm and was nearly six feet in length. Did the numbers of rattles tell the age of the snake, as legend had it? Or did a successful hunter need to shed the skin more often and therefore add a new rattle every time it discarded the old skin?

The snake coiled frantically in the air in front of T’s face. He took control of the forward end of the snake and brought the head up until it faced him, mouth open, tongue flicking out. The eyes were poised a few inches forward of his own eyes, and he studied them. A membrane flicked across the eyes and the mouth opened. The fangs erected from their resting groove in the snake’s mouth. T tried to read any thoughts the snake might have. He picked up nothing. No thoughts at all, not anger, not hunger, nothing. Perhaps the snake functioned not on thought but solely on instinct.

The snake found no purchase to support a strike or an escape. Frustrated, it coiled and uncoiled in the air, heavy body knotted with muscle under the scales.

Finally, T tired of looking at the snake. He floated it away and gently released it near a partly-concealed dwelling that was marked as off-limits to visitors. The snake rapidly disappeared into a hole that was there in the drifted dirt. Perhaps a western pocket gopher would not appreciate the new tunnel neighbor. Very likely, the angered snake would have folded on its own length as it disappeared into the hole. The gopher, organic digging machine that it was, would quickly wall off the snake by throwing up a barrier of dirt. The snake would eventually crawl out and resume it’s hunting.

T walked back to his truck. He nodded at a family of four and watched them nod back. One of the children called to him in greeting. He smiled and went on.

The drive, or perhaps the incident with the snake, had reminded him that his troubled mind was not alone. Many others had troubles and some of them might be much worse than his own.

T took state highway 47 north, gassed up in Los Lunas, and caught I-25 north past the Isleta reservation. The casino was apparently busy, judging from the cars parked out in the several parking
lots.

T took the time to comm Shezzie and let her know he was heading for home. He had worked his way through the worst effects of the shock and nightmares, and he had done it himself. Ultimately, that falls to everyone who finds themselves troubled. Combat veteran dealing with shock, any veteran or police officer who finds that the demands of duty have broken a marriage, even a prisoner or drug addict; rehabilitation does not come from others, it must come from within. By your own bootstraps, you lift yourself.

T drove north and arrived home by late afternoon, depression ended.

For now.

That night, another murder was reported in Ciudad Juarez. The bodies hanged from bridges, decapitations, those things the city had learned to take in stride as gang warred with gang. The usual victims were at the bottom of the gang hierarchy, soldiers in the wars who could be sacrificed without worry by those at the upper levels. There were always more of them. Money from the drugs sold to the norteamericanos and poverty among Mexicans ensured that recruits would not be hard to find.

This, however, was different. Even jaded Mexicans who still survived the gang-fights and the unsolved murders of so many young women felt a sense of shock.

The victim, unusually, was from near the top of the Zeta Cartel. No stranger to violence himself, he had trained at the School of the Americas and then an advanced course for selected soldiers conducted by special operations forces. The courses had been designed to enable Mexican and other Latin American military leaders to combat guerillas and drug gangs. Instead, many had turned that training around and used it to make the drug operations and anti-government efforts more effective.

None of that had helped him. Nor had the weapons he carried on his person.

Like five before him, he had been simply ripped apart. Blood, body parts, all scattered around the hotel room where he’d reportedly gone to meet with another of the series of young women that found it exciting to mingle with the drug men. They were celebrities in Mexico! Songwriters and musicians even sang songs celebrating their activities!

In the streets of Juarez, the graffiti had begun to change. Now, there was a line drawing that frequently appeared among the stylized lettering. Spare, an animal’s head, sometimes the pointed ears were upright, sometimes they were laid back. The eyes were mere slits, denoted by single curved lines. There was a black nose the suggested dog ancestry, and improbably long and sharp teeth below that.

The well educated Mexicans knew that the murders were human caused. Some speculated that whoever was doing it was engaging in terror to cause the drug gangs to leave and find a less-dangerous place to set up operations.

But not all were well educated. The sketch sometimes had a label, now. And people whispered the name and looked over their shoulder.

Chupacabra. The legendary ‘goat-sucker’ had found a new taste he liked.

The taste of human blood, and in particular the blood of drug bosses.

XXX

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Comment, and Reply

July 3, 2013

1wanderingtruthseeker
apulliam50@yahoo.com
184.41.145.20
Submitted on 2013/07/03 at 2:46 pm

It is not the government’s job to Nanny sit and the military is not for patrolling the United States. That violate posse comintatus. Free medical health care is not a right. That takes money from hard working people to pay for health care for able bodied people that refuse to work for a living. And for people that broke the law by the way of getting into the United States and we should pay them for it? We the people are supposed to run the government not the other way around,.
Select comment jlknapp505
jlknapp505.wordpress.com
jlknapp505@msn.com
174.28.102.136
Submitted on 2013/07/03 at 5:23 pm | In reply to 1wanderingtruthseeker.

I approved your comment, even though I disagree. It’s precisely the government’s job to take care of citizens, what you call nanny-sit.
Only government can rein in the excesses of corporations. Their task is profit, not the wellbeing of people. They also have no interest in the economy other than to extract the maximum possible profit.
Only government can, or is willing, to do those things, because there’s no immediate profit involved.
As for hardworking people who refuse to work for a living, many of those same people work two or even three ‘temporary’ jobs for minimum wage. Others continue to apply for jobs, day after day, week after week. Post an opening for ten jobs and there are likely to be hundred applicants, perhaps as many as a thousand. And you cavalierly dismiss these as people who refuse to work for a living?
As for people who ‘broke the law’ by entering the United States: I’ve known some of them. They risk the lives of themselves and their families crossing that desert, and some of them die. They’re looking to become those ‘hard working people’ you’re so fond of, and they take the jobs that ‘real Americans’ refuse. Installing roofs or repairing them in the heat of a southwestern summer. Picking your vegetables for the owners of farms who won’t provide even minimum wage for workers. Get the idea?
They’re not ‘illegal immigrants’, at least not at first. Instead, they’re economic refugees. They don’t come for welfare, they come to work, to find a job that isn’t available where they were born. They may later apply to become citizens. And sometimes they serve in the armed forces even before they receive that citizenship. Some of them die before that happens.
You, of course, insist that this is YOUR nation, even though we simply took much of the land and built the nation on the backs of people who came as slaves and indentured servants. Irish people, also economic refugees. Chinese people, come to work on building the railroads. You conveniently ignore that the people who actually built this country were often the people you now disparage. Economic refugees, back in their time.
Or immigrants, just as your ancestors were.
I hope you’ll begin to think for yourself rather than simply adopt a bumper sticker as your source for ‘truth’.
And one thing at least you got right: we the people, ALL the people, are supposed to run the government. Not the artificial majority that Republicans have built and maintained through gerrymandering of districts and restricting of the right to vote. One person, one vote. Ever heard that? Not from a TeaPublican, you didn’t. You might also have heard of something called taxation without representation? Such as, for example, Republican elected officials who consistently ignore the wishes of a majority of citizens, the people who pay their salaries and expenses? Such that the Congress has the lowest approval rating of any agency, or even of cockroaches? Really. Cockroaches.
But do you defend that gerrymandering and vote-restricting? It’s not Constitutional, but it serves your purpose, so what say you? Is your complaint really moral or simply a self-serving sham? It’s so much easier not to think; just believe whatever clown from Fox News pollutes the airwaves.
Interesting name you have, wanderingtruthseeker. I wonder where you find the ‘truths’ you espouse? Really. I have no idea if any reputable economist or even politician can claim all those things without his pants catching fire.

A final addendum: the comment writer wrote that he won’t read or comment on my blog again. OK

But he made no effort to refute the things I’d written in my response to his comment…

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Responsibilities, Political Leaders and Citizens

July 3, 2013

I’ve been thinking. Somehow, our political ‘leaders’ have managed to forget their jobs and how those jobs should be done.

The job is to care for the American people. Period.

Included within that is the need to provide protection for those people. Protection from invasion by military forces, but also protection from natural disasters such as wildfires and floods and wild weather. And where protection isn’t possible, assistance in recovery should be available. Protection from criminals, too, people who prey on others.

And after you’ve identified the needs, it’s then necessary to pay for those solutions. It’s necessary to raise money, through creation of money or taxation.

If the land and water and air are not being protected, our political leaders aren’t doing their jobs.

If old people, sick people, people who have become jobless because of economic fluctuations, veterans, and citizens in general have no medical care or support structures in place for protecting citizens from the economic criminals we call multinational corporations, our political leaders are not doing their jobs.

If our foods are not the healthy sorts that we expect, if our medications aren’t free of tainted drugs, if banksters steal a lifetime’s work due to foreclosures, if gamblers rule the markets that define capitalism, then our political leaders are not doing their jobs.

And if we keep electing these ‘leaders’, then we citizens are not doing our jobs.

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On Government, Government Workers, and Trust

June 24, 2013

In the light of what Snowden’s leaked to the media, how do you feel about your own government? Are you approving of what they’ve done to head off attacks, or do you feel suspicious of their motives? One respondent to a recent comment of mine accused me of wanting it both ways. So I wrote the following response, and I hope you’ll find it helpful in perhaps clarifying your own thinking.
My thinking is mine; yours may well differ. But please accept that I put a lot of thought into the question.
And I stand by what I wrote, Kevin.
As for wanting it both ways…I don’t see it that way.
I trust ‘government’, but not the people who make up government. Government is a huge amorphous mass and tends to level out excesses, but people have their own agenda. I don’t know if there’s ever been a single person who was totally devoted to the ideal of governing fairly and honestly to the point of subordinating his or her own interest. That kind of dispassionate approach is certainly not present now.
Most government workers do as they’re told and keep their head down. That’s the middle group who have a vested interest in keeping their job and maybe retiring someday. They have a mortgage, kids in school, car payments. As for doing what they’re told, that might not mean receiving new instructions every day. There are usually printed guidelines, standard operating procedures, office memos, and only rarely verbal instructions. Nonetheless, they don’t exercise independent judgment. For the great majority of these, I trust them to follow those instructions.
Above them are the ones who decide. At that level, my distrust comes into play. They have separate agendas, personal sometimes, institutional in others.
The president is at the top of this chain. Congress is there, and the Supreme Court. And as for the latter two, I think it’s not necessary to point out that they consider their personal agenda first, party second, and if the national interest even comes into play at all it’s in a distant third place. The institution is corrupt, and so therefore the people who inhabit that institution are corrupt. As for SCOTUS, ideology rules; they can manage to interpret the Constitution pretty much as they will. That document, written to limit a government such as that of England when England ruled the colonies, is now sadly out of date. It’s been over-interpreted and laterally-interpreted so much that now past judicial findings in the form of precedence exercise as much influence as the Constitution itself. It’s not a question of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, but interpretation. It was written by legal scholars, administered, and now interpreted by lawyers.
The president is far too chummy with big money for my liking. If I were in his position I might be the same, but I hope not. He is interested in building a presidential library after he leaves office, and he expects the funds to come from financialists. He also is interested in the legacy he leaves, and must keep that in mind as he negotiates with Congress. And then there are all the subsidiary interests that he balances. My biggest disagreement with him is that his emphasis is not were I think it should go, national interest first, personal interest and the competing interests of the people around him second.
I expect him to be a responsible steward of the nation. I hold him responsible, as I do Congress and the SCOTUS, for the oaths they’ve taken. If they attempt to fulfill those oaths without personal interests becoming dominant, then yes, I trust them and will support their decisions. If they’re looking at who-calls-whom in order to protect citizens, then I’m prepared to approve that. If they’re looking to sell me something, as Amazon does when they gather data, then I’m wary. I understand that my desires in such a transaction have no bearing, only their own profit counts. If politicians attempt to understand my thinking so as to change that thinking, perhaps change how I vote or who I send money to, I’m wary of that. Even though virtually all of them now do that sort of tracking.
I think I have a balanced system of trust and wary distrust. Government in abstract, yes. People in government, not so much.

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Rapes in the Military, Added Observations

June 17, 2013

I think that perhaps the central thing of what I wrote yesterday is the different expectations from military and civilian populations.
As to assaults and brutality: it wasn’t common in the kind of unit I served it. There may well be more of that in other branches. But having been in that position, responsible for making the initial decisions, I can only say that there’s no checklist. At best, you don’t know what to do but you expect that if you do your best, your superiors up the chain of command will support you. I had that. But at worst, there may be pressure to suppress. Career-ending pressure, for officers. The pressure that will negate the investment in time and money and past decisions such that suddenly, through no fault of your own, you incur a black mark that will blight years of your remaining life. You go in one second from respected member of a profession to pariah.
The usual presumption you make, at least initially, is that your troops are innocent. You live with them, work with them in a closer environment than civilians know, and if it’s a close-combat unit such as infantry the bonds become as great or greater than family.
And you have no choice, none at all, in who the members of that family are. The great father in Washington puts the machinery in motion and it spits out a soldier. The rest of the people in the unit must then try to integrate that soldier into a profession where even in peacetime you must depend on the person next to you.
And if that soldier is a junior officer, say a lieutenant, they get tossed in to sink or swim. The people they now have ultimate responsibility for are likely not people they would have ever associated with before entering the military.
Rapes do happen in families; it’s not surprising that they can happen in military units. And it’s not surprising that a soldier might not know how to handle the closeness of a member of the opposite sex or even someone who might be homosexual. Or if a homosexual, being surrounded by a population that’s still mostly male. Or if lesbian, female.
Society tends to foster separation, even alienation. Military society insists on tight integration. Men have an association of like-minded men. You golf together. Play poker. Chase women (or men). Derive support from others who are basically like you are. Women do the same. OK, they may not be fans of playing poker.
The bully and the prospective victim now can’t escape each other. The pressures mount.
And so all the tensions of society get played out under physical and emotional pressures. By people who are young and untested and uneducated and inexperienced.
And untested officers, learning the job themselves, become the authority figure, the ‘parent’ in a sense. But not the parent of an infant. The parent of someone who might well be as old or even older than they are.
You may not, as an officer, closely associate with your troops. You are expected to associate only with your own kind, other officers. That breaks down in isolated units, but that’s still the ideal. And yet, you’re expected to know everything and to solve all the problems for a platoon of 30 people or perhaps a company or battery of perhaps 150. You have a staff of assistants, of course, but even so, it’s an impossible task. It’s a remnant of the days when nobles raised their own armies and commanded them in battle, and when soldiers were literally cannon-fodder.
But none of this can be taken into account, even though it should. Officers must always make the correct choice. Must decide if that ‘brother in arms’ is a rapist. Or a bully who’s bullying his own comrades to the point that they commit suicide. Or who will form a gang or similar loose association to do the same thing. Must decide if that complainant was innocent or somewhat complicit, and what that degree of innocence might be. As men work out society’s tensions, so do women. They work our their place in their tiny society, the pecking order if you will. Dominance, submission, the degrees of those things that will define their relationship. Soldiers, at bottom, are just people. Soldiers don’t have a checklist to follow either.
So the commander has to decide, how bad was the incident. A one man or woman jury, they decide who to believe and what to believe. There may be evidence, or not.
And a single misjudgment means that the judge and jury and prosecutor and evidence-gatherer can suddenly be the accused.
For officers up the chain, the lieutenant colonels and higher, they have much less of an excuse. They have the experience and education to make better decisions. But even generals can make misjudgments…or for that matter, even presidents.
The standard is perfection. For better or worse.
It might be better for society if our own civilian officials were held to the same standard.

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Rapes in the Military

June 17, 2013

I’ve been following this story, and it’s time for me to comment.
I don’t know the facts of any individual case, but I’ve been a soldier. Twenty one years, as a matter of fact, now retired.
And now senior officials, politicians and some uniformed politicians, all are wailing and gnashing their teeth and probably beating their breasts to a chorus of mea culpa.
It’s not at all what the media would have you believe.
Not just the military that has a problem with this; I was duty officer when a rape occurred in the barracks, in Germany, and I reported the victim’s statement, took other statements, all the things I was expected to do. But because the victim was a German national, the two rapists (soldiers) were tried in German courts. And found not guilty, because the traumatized victim had not wanted to wait for police, she had just wanted to go home. So after initial reports were taken, I drafted a driver from the unit, gave him my keys, and he drove her home in my car. I had no grounds to keep her there and simple humanity made me understand that I would only make matters worse if I insisted on her remaining. FWIW, my CO concurred in my decision; I informed him, made a recommendation, and he concurred.
And because she hadn’t waited for the police to arrive (they didn’t get there for six hours or more), that was enough. A German court released the two rapists despite the physical evidence that I, and the unit commander, had collected after he arrived.
There was no question that we’d attempted to subvert justice in any way. Indeed, the Polizei were quite complimentary about the actions we’d taken. They were understanding and even friendly to those of us who had done the investigations we’d done.
It’s not as straightforward as reports would have you believe, and military officials who have to follow due process aren’t really sweeping things under the rug in nearly as many cases as media reports say.
The fact that the victim says she reported an incident and nothing happened doesn’t make it so. Sometimes, the story she tells later isn’t the one she told initially. Sometimes the evidence doesn’t support her story. Or there is no evidence. Sometimes when due process is followed and evidence is gathered according to rules, those rules don’t support a charge or conviction. And of course, sometimes justice isn’t done and coverups probably do happen.
But it’s not always black-and-white as to which course of action should be followed. Reports to the media don’t have to follow the rules of evidence that a court demands.
Do you really think every complaint to civilian authorities or police results in a charge or conviction of rape or sexual assault? What percentage of rapes that get reported to your local police go to court? How many of them result in conviction?
Based on what I’ve read, I’d guess that military officials are just as efficient as civilian authority in most cases. Even when, as in my case, we’ve never been trained to act as cops. We act as best we can while applying our best judgment. And no one, not the Supreme Court even, can do more than that.
But somehow, military officers or officials are held to a standard of perfection. If a civilian woman doesn’t get the justice she demands in a statement to the local TV station, do people demand the mayor and chief of police resign or be convicted of dereliction of duty?
Nonsense. That only happens if the officials are military. Civilian women cannot blame the mayor if he fails to protect them, but military women CAN and DO blame a commander for just that failure. Different standards apply due to differences between civil and military organizations and authority. Few if any recognize that fact. Certainly no media organization or reporter will ever include that in their report.
I think this needs to be explained. I am not condoning any misbehavior that might occur nor any effort to conceal anything. Certainly not. But before you issue a blanket condemnation, you should know what the facts are, as much as any nonparticipant ever can know.
Journalists will do that, the blanket condemnation. They have a vested interest in sensationalism.
But the rest of us should think first.
We owe that to our military, the same ones who interpose themselves between our enemies and our citizens. We have a duty to them just as they have a duty to us.

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Utopia Now

June 14, 2013

From Paul Krugman in the NY TImes of Jun 14, 2013:
“So what is the answer? If the picture I’ve drawn is at all right, the only way we could have anything resembling a middle-class society — a society in which ordinary citizens have a reasonable assurance of maintaining a decent life as long as they work hard and play by the rules — would be by having a strong social safety net, one that guarantees not just health care but a minimum income, too. And with an ever-rising share of income going to capital rather than labor, that safety net would have to be paid for to an important extent via taxes on profits and/or investment income. ”

I’ve gone deeper than this article does, and so I don’t think Mr Krugman’s analysis goes nearly far enough.

Modern society simply has too many workers and not enough jobs. Automation has displaced, and will continue to displace ever more human workers. Machines are cheaper than people. A farmer with perhaps 2 or 3 helpers on a 500-acre farm can feed hundreds of people. A factory with a comparative few construction workers can turn out houses for a hundred…or two hundred. Military forces now are developing a camp-in-a-box. This includes not only housing for as much as a battalion but also necessary security to emplace it in a war zone. But the housing is the important part; a small efficient kitchen, climate control, shower, bedrooms and dining rooms. Cramped…but no homeless person would consider it so. And it could be adapted to house perhaps a hundred people. And wouldn’t have nearly the problems that stuffing a thousand or more people into a high rise causes in terms of crime and drugs and hopelessness.

Consider, for a moment, the Mediterranean nations. They’re not starving even though half their young people and one in five adults is jobless. The stores aren’t empty. Building supplies aren’t becoming unavailable. Food is being grown. Clothing is sewn. Cars are for sale. Roadways are maintained.

The fact is, developed economies can produce all that’s needed with perhaps 3/4 of their work force employed. It’s been that way for a long time. It’s only going to get worse.

Advertising convinces us to buy something new even when we don’t need it. That employs a few workers. Exports and tourism/travel employ a few more, which essentially keeps people of one nation employed while the money to pay them comes from another nation. It’s essentially exploitative and circular, hence a temporary solution to a developed economy’s ills.

Government employment that goes to develop internal infrastructure is probably the ultimate answer in the 21st Century. Build better road systems; certainly we know how. But usually we don’t build the best, we build the cheapest that’s practical for immediate needs. Build better power distribution systems, and distributed power rather than concentrated. Better communication systems. Better housing. Water distribution systems that collect excess fresh water (floods) and pipe it to the Great Lakes or reservoirs across the country. Better airports in places that aren’t served. More green parks and havens for wildlife, such that we accept a policy of living with nature. Such things as the ‘green skyscrapers’ that grow plant foodstuffs in cities and that won’t require transport to market and won’t be subject to disruption. Get the idea?

Paying for it is the problem. That’s going to take imagination, the kind of imagination that invented money in the first place. It’s quite likely that we’re going to need a system of exchange that either replaces money or changes how it’s generated and used.

But as a principle, if we conclude that no human being should go hungry or homeless or be unclothed in the 21st century, and accept that as a goal, we as a species can do it. Humans should have clean water and unpolluted air to breathe, and a place to walk with family unmolested by criminals. A place that provides security from crime. We can do that too.

Utopia is really, finally, within our grasp, but the idea of most of the wealth we create going to a select few and others starving while living under a cardboard box or being driven away by armed gangs and marauders from ancestral homelands…That’s not something we can sustain. The idea that some have nothing, no security, no medical care, no one to assist them in their old age, no education or hobby or socialization or arts or what have you, because they can’t afford it, while a single family disposes of 30% of the wealth of the richest nation on Earth…that’s unsustainable. The idea that a child born into poverty can never escape that poverty, will turn to drugs or criminal enterprise because there’s nothing else…that’s unsustainable.

And the idea that our political leadership continues to drift and generate ever more weapons and then to find a place to put them into the hands of soldiers, chessmen for the powerful to kill while playing at power games…that too is unsustainable.

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Weather, and Climate: Can We Do Something About Them

June 12, 2013

European floods…
Nothing to ‘like’ about this natural disaster…so I won’t.
I suspect there’s some place in Europe that could really use that water, right? Maybe one of the Mediterranean countries?
I mention that because all of us stand by helplessly and watch the water rise. And try to save lives, and then rebuild after the water level drops.
Not too smart of us as a species, is it?
But let’s consider Holland. The Netherlands.
What happens there when too much water falls? Or in New Orleans?
Large pumps happen, that’s what. The pumps collect the water and pump it into the sea.
But could we not connect those pumps to a distribution system that could store excess water until needed (in reservoirs or lakes), then send it to where it’s needed when it’s needed? Would this not be cheaper in the long run than constant cycles of drought and flood and crop failures and rebuilding? And cheaper than desalination?
It’s a failure of imagination, I think. We already collect mountain water and send it to desert communities and farms that need it. Currently, we Americans are running low on that water. And at the same time, in our northern or eastern or sometimes southeastern states, floodwater is being wasted.
Surplus here, shortage there. How much imagination is really needed to understand the concept?
Famously, we all talk about the weather but no one does anything about it. But we CAN, and should, do something about the weather effects.
I think it’s also within our capabilities now to begin doing something positive about climate as well. If we can lay down surfaces that absorb heat, we should be able to do the same thing in reverse, design surfaces that reflect heat back into space without being absorbed. Of sunlight, some is absorbed, some is reflected. We’ve been increasing absorption. Now we need to increase reflection.
We’ve been affecting climate for years. We build cities, which have been identified as ‘heat islands’ because they absorb unusual amounts of solar energy. We lay thousands, even millions of km of asphalt around the world, recognize that this increases heat absorption from sunlight, and blithely assume that all the increased weather variation we’re experiencing is possibly due to an increase in CO2 concentration.
I think that greenhouse gases are only a small part of climate modification due to human activity. We’ve also cut rainforests (and temperate forests, too), reducing shading on ground level. And many more things, too; farm more land, reduce plant cover from weeds. Glider pilots and birds know about this; they ride thermals, rising air currents, to gain height when flying or migrating, thermals rising from plowed fields. More heat for the greenhouse effect, and eventually for global warming. A few notice; no one integrates all the different effects into one big change.
OK; I do. Not that anyone is listening. Except you.
We are transforming the planet in multiple ways. And not usually for the better.
And because we lack understanding of this process, we’re not ‘Terraforming’ our planet (as the science fiction term is used, to change a new world into a copy of our old one that could support humans), we’re kind of ‘anti-Terraforming’ it. We are transforming it, but not for the better.
The significance of that multiple-cause effect is not considered when global warming is discussed, I think.
And no effort is being put forward to counter any of the effects.
Imagination, some of us have that. Understanding, we can all understand at least some of what’s happening.
But political will to actually DO something? Leaders who will begin the process?
Sadly, those are missing.

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Birds

June 8, 2013

My closet vice, not so closeted: I feed wild birds.
So does my wife, although she limits her involvement to preparing sugar water for hummingbirds.
A 50-pound bag of sunflower seeds is $25 and lasts for a couple of months.
So why spend money and time (the LBB’s, Little Brown Birds, will empty two bird feeders in just slightly over one day, and the doves and pheasants won’t keep coming unless I spread the seeds out in my field) to feed wild birds that will doubtless do very well for themselves without my attention?
By feeding them, I buy their habit and change it to suit myself. Because food is always there, and because they aren’t molested or endangered, they can choose to live part of their life just outside my window and I can pleasurably spend a part of my life observing them. No need to tramp through the weeds and brambles; camera and binoculars are close by, and there’s always something to learn.
They aren’t like people. And yet, in some ways they are. Territorial. Prone to squabbles even when resources are plentiful. Playful. And interested in humans, just as humans are interested in them.
The littlest ones, the hummingbirds, are true masters of flight. The LBB’s are second, but still able to come to a near-hover and then maneuver in order to claim a perch on the feeder from a resident they’ve just displaced. And the bigger doves, ground-feeders, are able to make long flights but not maneuver as the smaller ones do. Crows come around in the winter, often accompanying the cranes, and they’re intelligent and observant. If one of their number is killed, they appear to grieve, or at least pay noisy attention to the passing. The cranes dance; there’s no other word for it. And they’re very curious, too, observing what people and cats and such do.
The hawks will tend to prey on the doves rather than other types. Frightened doves fly straight in their panic, sometimes head-on into windows or walls. A Cooper’s hawk finds it easy to grab a dove rather than one of the LBB’s. More of a meal, too.
The sunflower seeds are a good investment, methinks.
Robins and Baltimore Orioles are not attracted to the seeds, but the robins like the irrigation in fields and lawns. Worms come to the surface, and the early-bird robin preys on earthworms and bugs. The roadrunner is a carnivore, too. A roamer, he has no fixed path but he’s always around. I spotted him in a tree yesterday with a lot of the robins and LBB’s, Was he trying an arboreal stalk? I don’t know. It looked like that to me, but I would think that a futile enterprise. Maybe the roadrunner is an experimenter, too.
A few mockingbirds are around, and from time to time, a northern flicker.
Recent unusual observations have included parents continuing to feed young after they’ve mastered flight and left the nest. And defensive moves by a hen pheasant to convince a Cooper’s hawk not to attack; successful, too. Two cock pheasants who couldn’t decide if they wanted to fight or be buddies; a bit of bluffing, and then they went their separate ways.
A good investment indeed.

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