Daylight Savings Time

 The Old Curmudgeon: I’m a progressive liberal. I believe in the ability of a well-managed government to benefit our lives. I believe in the efficacy of carefully regulated restraints on capitalism. I believe that the U.S. Constitution is wise when it separates church and state. I believe the females of the species are genetically wiser than the male and should be left to decide decisions relative to their bodies. But to allow something as universally despised, palpably ineffective, physically debilitating, and easily scorned as changing the time by an hour twice a year stretches my support structure to the limits. Tell me who is to blame and I’ll know who to castigate.

I've only heard one group in support and that consists of  highway departments. That begs the question: When is the last time you saw your highway department make a decision that benefited the planet as a whole? Why, let them rule and you'd have 12-lane freeways running through residential neighborhoods.

Uh.

Let me get back to you on that one. In the meantime, if half the population of a political party can refuse to wear masks that might save lives, couldn't we refuse to abide by the time change?

Just asking.

The End

 My military career ended on November 11, 1970. I had started the four-year experience a bitter, hostile, unwilling participant. Why four years and no accepting the draft? They were sending Army draftees to Vietnam. Besides, if I had to go, there was no choice but he U.S. Navy. When I was fifteen years old, a cousin came home from the Navy and, oh, the stories he could tell. Gunnels awash! I spent that year collecting all the info I could, just waiting for the day I turned old enough to enlist.

 Time past, my fervor for the military dwindled, but not my sense that sailors were just a step above and the sea as a siren still called. Why enlist? Found out to my dismay that I couldn’t pass some of the color blindness tests. The Navy didn’t take too willingly to line officers that couldn’t distinguish some shades of red. Oh, and that Vietnam thing? I learned not to piss the Navy off. They had ways.

 Anyway, I ended in a much better frame of mind, having decided along the way that I could change my attitude much easier than I could change my circumstances. So, I spent the night of the 11^th in a cheap motel in Starkville Mississippi with an old Gibson guitar and a commendation from my Fleet Admiral, daring the future to meet me on my own terms. All my belongings in the world fit in a 1967 Chevy Impala. I was ready.

 It’s been a roller-coaster ride since, mostly ups. I’m somewhere between a mediocre fish in a large pond and a second-tier fish in a small pond. I’ve seen lots, but I never thought I’d see a United States of America in the condition that I, personally, feel it is in today. We have a leader of a party that has deeply dishonored two of my Navy’s best, John Kerry and John McCain. We have a leader of a party that has branded all my brother and sister veterans as “suckers and losers.” Because of my personal experience, I was a bit used to it, but the young ones who have come after didn’t deserve it.

 I have seen the leader of a party mock a disabled person, an act that hit close to home. I have seen a level of discourse sink to depths that would have embarrassed some of my fellow Bosun’s Mates. I have seen us turned against voice of reason, then decency, then one another. I have seen the statue’s torch grow dim, evil called to readiness, and the “madding crowd” inflamed with lies and chants. I wonder if I dare to call a friend.

 I think the low point came early in this administration when the leader of the party addressed a group of police officers. I have, do, and will support the vast majority of fine men and women who serve as public safety members of government, both the police officers and fire fighters. They do the jobs that we are afraid to do and then hang crucified for actions of a few. These include actions that are misguided to say the least, but easy to condemn by those who have never ridden the mean streets of America at midnight or sat in terror expecting the unexpected.

 I have lost friends over my support for the police officers and former police officers I have known.

 But when the President of the United States told an assembled group of officers “not to be so gentle with suspects,” i.e. those who are presumed innocent until proven guilty, told them it would be okay to bang their heads against a car door opening, it made me nauseated. When the group, in their blue uniforms and dainty white gloves laughed and clapped, I felt a sadness overcome me like a cloud of the stinging grief. I’m sure they were hand picked for the occasion and they weren’t the fine men and women I’ve known. Still, it broke my heart.

 That’s what the current leader of our county has done for me. I want everyone to vote. I want everyone to vote for the candidate they believe will bring dignity to this country that I and so many others have served. I will abide the outcome. It may, as some of the more divisive stickers suggest, make me cry, but I won’t cry for myself. I’ll cry for those who are still young enough that they will have to live with bad choices.

 For me, I’ll survive. I won’t say that I’ve survived worse, since I wasn’t around for the Civil War, the two World Wars, or the Great Depression. I have faith in my ability to function. As they used to say in one of my previous lifetimes, “It ain’t no bigee.”

Primal Fear

Fear is an odd thing. Webster defines it as “an unpleasant often strong emotion caused by anticipation or awareness of danger.” The genetic condition of fear must have been helpful to our ancestors who lived on the Savanah alongside predatory creatures. I remember it from dark nights in a foreign land.

American neurologist and physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon added, in the early 1900s, a condition known as “flight or fight response.” It describes a response to an acute threat to survival that is marked by physical changes, including nervous and endocrine changes. It may prepare a human or an animal to react or to retreat.” This one I remember well from an encounter on a winter’s night with a stranger who stopped me on a city street and placed a hand inside his coat. To my relief he produced a note with an address, and asked directions.

The most fascinating member of the family of fears, to me, is called “primal fear.’ This is the highest level of fear that most people do not experience, usually related to the feeling of impending doom. Anyone raised in a rural protestant church knows this as evidenced by the lifelong and unshakeable terror that their precious body may burn in an everlasting fire for eternity upon their death. I personally consider this as a form of child abuse but will save that thought for another day.

Today, it is the “Gotterdammerung” facing the country I love and have tried to serve faithfully during my adult life that darkens my hope. I see it now as a great ship headed directly into an iceberg as friendly passengers dance around me. It is my tragic and primal fear that we may lose America as we know it in two more days.

How did this happen? Better minds than mine wrestle this question daily. Unbelievably to me, the country may re-elect a man whom I believe, based on my upbringing, education, experience, and reflection, to be the most evil and degenerate president in American history.

The question is not how nearly one-half of Americans support what may occur. Over half of that percentage contains the group of Americans, almost a reliable percentage, who believed Elvis was alive 20 years after his death and that professional wrestling is conducted under strict rules. This segment contains the ones who would be dead today if it were not for the Affordable Care Act pushed through by an African-American president. (Not the term they use.) This segment is largely immune to reason or factual data.

Of the remaining 20 percent of Americans are the “single-issue voters” who would vote for Charles Manson, brought from the dead, for president if he promised to make abortion illegal, allow citizens to use bazookas to settle arguments, or banished anyone to whom nature had provided a different genetic makeup. They may be educated but have used their education merely to sharpen their weapons of bigotry.

We can shave off another ten percent of those who believe that unlimited wealth and no restrictions placed on how to obtain it will produce a perfect society. This society would be, one must suppose, much like, the American South of the 1850s. Some use their education to create false doctrines supporting this goal.

Then there is a layer of supporters who somehow believe their profession is best protected by a liar and false prophet. Some are educated and some are not. All reject any internal logic that doesn’t support their need for self-preservation. They are loyal to a man who thinks loyalty is a one-way trait.

That leaves the remaining sliver of supporters who augment the primal fear that haunts my sole and interrupts my sleep. These include many old friends who are educated, some highly so. They don’t carry any apparent burdens that would tarnish their thoughts. In a crowd they would appear normal. Individually, they appear fully capable of critical thinking, until the subject of politics emerges. What logic have they neglected?

Some may have even read William Shirer’s masterpiece The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

Some, I know, have seen the film Schindler’s List.

A few may have read It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis.

A few have attended the Holocaust Museum in our nation’s capitol.

Some attend church and worship the man who told us to love another and not to judge.

Some have read The Grapes of Wrath. I know this for they attended college.

Almost all know the words to This Land is Your Land.

In short, and in conclusion, these friends matured under the same conditions as I but have developed diametrically opposed beliefs as to what is right and what is wrong. I may be guilty of illogic. They might be.

That’s what scares the living hell out of me.

Affordable Housing

 The answer to affordable housing for service workers may require much broader lateral thinking than we have attempted thus far. It may require cooperation from sources not engaged to date in our analysis, to wit:

The military: It must have hundreds of thousands of helicopters it doesn’t need due to the pressure from legislators representing areas where they make the darn things.

Government Archives: Surely there is some hidden corner of some warehouse where one can find the plans for the internment camps and homes where displaced Japanese families were interned in 1941.

Employment Agencies; They should be able to standardize the shift times of entities employing service workers.

Famers: They will make more money with far less effort by renting plots of farmland to the government.

Highway Construction Departments: A dollar saved by not building commuter lanes is a dollar that can be used for transportation.

President Trump: He will certainly throw his political weight behind a program that will help his make good on his promise to protect the real estate investments of wealthy homeowners.

 By now, the hyper-astute among you can see where this is headed,

Yes.

1. Obtain large segments of vacant land downwind but near major employment centers.
2. Use archived plans to rebuilt exact replicas of the internment camps of WWII.
3. Move service worker families into the camps.
4. Construct multiple helicopter pads adjacent to the camps.
5. Standardize shift schedules at plants, service outlets, retail outlets, etc.
6. Build helicopter pads located within walking distance of major employment centers.
7.  Confiscate, say, 50 percent of the largest helicopters the military has but doesn’t need.
8. Confiscate funds wasted on building commuter lanes.
9. Obtain a couple of presidential executive orders.
10. Tear down any existing low-rent housing near suburban enclaves.
11. Schedule pickup and delivery times.

 Problem solved.

Orphans in a Storm

 Sometimes there just isn’t anything you can say about a situation. In fact, I have come to realize that for some situations, it’s just better to say nothing. Saying something you had to think up that might fit the moment just sounds like a self-serving plea for absolution. I found that out years ago.

Two days after James Earl Ray murdered Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968, the I – Corps area of the then Republic of South Vietnam was tense, almost as tense as it was the previous January during the Tet Offensive. Bars were closed and all access to alcohol stopped. American military bases were on “lockdown,” and nobody was saying much, not much at all in our compound just outside Da Nang. Events halfway around the world had our little universe on the brink of explosion.

That morning, they chose me—perhaps because I was a little older than most in the Naval Security detachment—and another sailor because he was an unofficial leader among what everyone called “the brothers” back then, to guard the far back gate of our compound. We knew one another as shipmates, nothing more. We were just two wary souls thrown together in the face of a storm we neither chose nor caused. They told us that no one was to leave, and no one was to enter.

I strained my brain for the six hours while we stood the watch for something to say. Nothing came. So we did our duty and stopped anyone from leaving and joining some fracas or other. I stopped the white sailors and he stopped the black sailors. Had any of them refused, I have no idea what would have happened. We, of course, would have been fully authorized to fire upon them. To this day, I don’t know what would have happened. We stood our watch and turned the post over to our reliefs. It was dark by then and tensions had cooled. We nodded to one another and parted. I was sent up to a mountain compound shortly thereafter and I don’t think we ever saw one another again.

I’m not African American, so I cannot even imagine what it would be like to be in constant strife with the authority around me. I cannot image what it would be like always to stand guilty whether innocent or not. I cannot imagine what it would be like to be viewed as a lesser form of citizen. I have endured curt glares and some caustic comments, but only because of some service ribbons given to me “by a thankful nation.” Those looks and comments mostly came from fellow servicemen, so I had to overlook them.

I’ve never been a police officer. Those I have known personally have been honorable people. I have no idea how it would feel to drive the mean streets of a city on the midwatch, with suspicious eyes staring from every windshield and every bedroom, not knowing which car seat contained a loaded pistol. I do know that I’ve been alone during those same dark hours with the safety of my comrades in my hands, so scared I would have shot my own mother had she burst out of the jungle and ran toward me.

So I’ll pass no judgement on the community of police officers. Neither will I condemn those who riot. I have no idea what I would do if my genetic improbabilities had developed differently. I’d probably be rioting, but who knows?

I’ve witnessed and watched, though, and I’ve lived a long time. I feel entitled to make some observations, not judgments mind you, just observations.

Sadly, there is a percentage of Americans who simply don’t like people of color. It may be from ignorance, lack of communion, radical nurture, tribalism, a penchant for homogeneity, shortsightedness, fear, racial prejudice, bigotry, xenophobia, or some social disorder. We used to call it all those things. We’ve now collapsed them, and linguistically elevated them to the simple “racism.” Wars on nouns are always dicey, but this one sets a particularly high bar.

Now I don’t know what the percentage of those to whom I referred is. I suspect it’s around 30 percent of white Americans, larger in the South. It's not enough to determine elections if the righteous and pure of heart wish it otherwise. I do know something about white Americans of righteous bearing. It is good to have them on your side, or at least in tacit support of one’s fundamental rights as a human being. That tacit support can be a strong ally. Ask the American Freedom Fighters of the 1960s. I also know that it is subject to being added to or taken from, sometimes becoming a welcome ally, at others a missing friend. Ask Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, both affected by the margins. Increasingly, it seems to me, those increments determine our elections.

I'm not talking only about those who sit out elections. I'm also talking about those who may base a vote on the fact that a freeway was blocked by protesters while they tried to get their sick child to a hospital. Unfocused retribution falls on the just and the unjust.

Adroit politicians and those whose primary purpose is to win first and be right later, will avoid actions that effect the tacit support that can determine revolutions as well as elections. I know that elections increasingly turn on small increments of support.

I also know that Donald Trump is an expert at manipulating the support and moving the flexible fringe toward his side.

He needs no help whatsoever.

Duty

Anyone reading the news today must be concerned. Groups of thugs are descending on state capitols that have Democratic governors and are demanding that the Covid 19 protections end. Members supposedly include neo-Nazis and other anarchists. The president of the United States of America is encouraging them to follow their worst instincts.

One thing, among many, scares me about these people. It is that it would only take a message from the Russian trolls, or someone they follow, to: "Grab your gun, put on your brown uniform, and meet us in the town square" for the America I served for four years to be at risk.

One thing, among many, dismays me. That is that people I’ve known and loved for years, some for most of my life, and some with post-secondary educations would, it appears from their FB posts, join the thugs. I don’t know what makes these people so mad. I know many of them to have been decent, loyal Americans for most of their lives. Somewhere, the Dark Side prevailed. The transformation started years ago, but seems to have taken on unprecedented strength in early 2009.

One thing, among many, nauseates me. I have seen many things in my long life, but I’ve never seen the president of the United States of America spew venom and incite resurrection toward states not governed by his political party. It is worse still for a president to include tirades about gun ownership in his exhortations. Even Dick Cheney didn’t stoop this low during his eight years as president.

I worry. I’m old enough to last out a normal life, so why speak out and risk my reputation and standing? It’s just that when I saw the blue waters of the South China Sea out the window of that eastbound airline, I could never have imagined an America like this. I never imagined an America that was run like a pro wrestling show. I never imagined that someone close to me who lives with a disability would suffer mocking and disrespect from a candidate for president of my country. I never could have imagined a president who sides with dictators and criminals over decent Americans. I am worried and nauseated in equal shares.

Silence translates to some as approval. I will speak out when I feel it is necessary, even if it is futile. I’m sorry if I offend anyone, but I will violate the oath I took in 1966, for which there is no
Statute of Limitations, if I don’t take a stand.

No, on second thought I’m not sorry. It’s time, actually past time, for us to make our voices heard concerning this insanity.