This year, for the first time in twenty years, I’ve been going to the gym to lift weights in order to strengthen my upper body. Occasionally, I drive there, but it’s a short enough walk that does me good, going through Alton Baker Park, along the canoe canal, under I-5, into Springfield, through a quiet neighborhood, to the gym. In summer, there is shade and wildflowers, and in fall there are some of the most beautiful colors in town.
The workouts have helped me; I can do 20 push-ups now, rather than barely 12 a year ago. It is said that the 60s are the time to build yourself up, the 70s to try to avoid damage. I forgot what the 80s were for— probably making lists to avoid forgetting. In any case, the workouts have helped me, as a member of the High Cascade Volunteers, do the 2-man crosscut sawing of large blowdowns, some of the more difficult work I have done. Somebody has to hike into the woods with tools to clear wilderness trails, and its not like the Forest Service will be funded to do it. It is good to be with a bunch of folks who like being in out of doors doing good work helping the land and serving people, the USFS motto.
On my way back home, I passed by some neighbors who were looking at grandchildren pictures. I wonder what they think about how climate change will affect their grandchildren. Do they care about it? This is my generation’s legacy, their legacy, and I am ashamed of it. Are they?
While I’m at it, are they worried about their own future? What’s going to happen when Medicare is privatized (read: destroyed) and SSI disappears? Voting mattered, you see, and well, those who didn’t vote, or played silly games with their vote, made sure the House and Senate went Republican back in 2014. It mattered a lot at the state level, but down ballot candidates may be ignored. Each day part of me hopes that if the country goes the wrong direction far enough, maybe many will be hurt so badly that they will finally decide that voting matters. That of course assumes that they still have the right to vote, currently in jeopardy, and they vote for the right candidates.
A guy I hike with, who voted for Jill Stein, so he could remain pure, I guess, decried the state of the country, too. He didn’t like the fact that the Oregon congressional delegation pushes logging. I don’t either, but they are a damn sight better than the “scientist” who runs every other year for Congress, who solicits people’s urine, because he is convinced he will cure a lot of disease with the knowledge. Or Greg Walden, who wrote the monstrous Republican health care bill. I told my friend that if he wants perfection, he should run himself. Perhaps if his VA disability check stops coming, he will realize that voting really does matter. The perfectionism required by some Democrats is arguably as bad as any Republican.
Then I felt better when I remembered I have no skin in this game. We have no children and no grandchildren. I volunteer at the community college, and I strongly believe in education, but if those with kids and grandkids aren’t worried about the climate, well, why should I be worried? The country going in the wrong direction? Yep. But my kids aren’t going to suffer, because I don’t have any.
Since, we don’t have any daughters or grand-daughters, the fact that there will be loss of abortion rights and birth control leading to a lot of poverty, homelessness, and more stress isn’t directly going to affect me, only my email box, which gets a dozen requests daily to do something. I’m no longer signing, marching, or calling. Somebody else’s turn.
I’m not a union member, nor is anybody in my family. Not my problem. None of my small family is gay, queer, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. A sixth of the gay population voted for Trump in 2016. A sixth!! That is when I ceased worrying about their rights. I wonder how many states that cost. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is not at all friendly towards gays, which ought to be of major concern to that sixth.
Michigan can’t sell beef to China, now. Wisconsin-based Harley is threatening to build factories in Europe, South Dakota farmers are complaining about where their soybeans will no longer go, and those are all red states. Not my problem. They made their bed. Hell, the president sided with Putin against our intelligence services. For my entire adult life—nearly half a century—I have heard how the Democrats were soft on communism. Now the Republicans have cast their lots with the Devil so they can get a conservative agenda—except on Russia, apparently.
This administration destroys; the only thing it creates is chaos. There’s a lot of that these days, hiding the real harm that is happening.
My wife and I are planning on visiting Vancouver this year. Sure, the climate is going to get worse there, too, just as it has in Oregon, but most of the predictions are for 2050 and 2080, which is a bit beyond my timeline I don’t want to move, but if after these past eighteen months people won’t vote in Democrats, even with voter suppression and cheating that is going to require more votes than normal, then I don’t want to live in a Christian theocracy where a treasonous, morally bankrupt president gets a free pass from boorish slobs who still are fighting Hillary Clinton, blame Obama for every ill, worried about a deep state, guns, and UN conspiracies. I don’t want to live in a place where people complain about migrants but don’t believe in the climate change that is fundamentally behind much of the reasons for the migration. I don’t think the 4000 member attended National Prayer Breakfast, where a Russian spy found connections by the way, is something we ought to have. I don’t want to live in a country where Christians are pushing their agenda in my local newspaper, which recently ran an ad from Hobby Lobby about “Blessed is the nation whose Lord is God.” Hobby Lobby was a Supreme Court case basically saying that the for-profit company should not be required to provide birth control coverage to their employees, because they thought birth control is immoral. We may be headed for no Affordable Care Act, no birth control, and no abortion. I wonder what that is going to do to the infant mortality, childhood development, and the death rate in general. I know what will happen to bankruptcies.
I am at the age where “That was too young” won’t be said when I die. It is always a shame when people die too young. But so long as they weren’t aborted, then it really doesn’t appear to register to many in this “Blessed Nation” that a death is still a death.
In short, the country I served in uniform 40+ years ago, the country in which I have lived for nearly 70, is rapidly becoming a country that doesn’t fit me. But as I said, I’ve got no skin in this game. I can take my marbles elsewhere, and I may do just that..
Tags: General writing, Philosophy
Boreal B[l]og 
Leave a Reply