Boreal B[l]og

In 1967, when we began heavily bombing North Vietnam, we called it a “protective reaction.”  Doonesbury asked “what are the casualties?”  The answer, in the same cartoon, was, “On language, very great.”  The following year, we heard, “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”  We use derogatory terms I won’t write here to de-humanize an enemy, since it is easier to kill somebody one doesn’t think is human.

In many instances those somebodies are women and children.  Let’s start with circumcising women, which I will call by a proper name: “Genital mutilation.” This has no medical reason, unlike male circumcision, which completely prevents penile cancer and makes HIV less prone to be transmitted.  I don’t remember mine, and I don’t believe it caused lasting harm, but I am open to evidence on the latter, just not the former.

I read recently that Reuters refuses to use the term “Terrorists,” and the Associated Press now refuses to use “Islamic terrorists” or “illegal aliens.”  This is equally bad as dehumanizing an enemy.

I’m a liberal, but I am a strong believer in using the proper word to describe a situation or condition.  An improper word or phrase, used frequently, can become harmful if it becomes ingrained in the vocabulary.

Examples of the latter include “The Death Tax,” which is the estate tax.  There is a threshold over which the estate is be taxed at about 40%.  The threshold varies and is now $5.25 million. The proper term is “Estate Tax.”

“Death Panels” were used when during the debate on the Affordable Health Care Act (called Obama Care, another misuse of the language, since the Congress passed the law, and the Supreme Court upheld it).  One part of the bill was to have Medicare pay for counseling on End of Life planning.  As a neurologist who dealt with end of life issues, often when no other physician was willing to do so, I found that lack of advance directives was a significant impediment to decision making families had to make, when a member had irreversible brain injury.  I saw families torn apart over the issue.  Paying to have these discussions with competent people in advance seemed to me to be a good use of money, since the amount was 1-5% of the cost of one day in intensive care, and many of these people languished, and that is the proper word, in intensive care for days, weeks, or in some instances months. I saw this often.  Many elderly want their estate going to their offspring, not for futile, unwanted care. ICU beds are in short supply, so having them used to house patients who were going to die soon, when seriously ill people could benefit from those same beds, made no sense.  I made sure neither of my parents lingered.  They made me promise not to let it happen to them.

I practiced in a Catholic Hospital, and the Church had no problem with discontinuation of futile care.  Nor should anybody else.  I used terms like “die,” and “death”, hard words, but final in meaning.  “Expire” is too soft, and “pass on” implies something I don’t believe in.

Some of the terms we use would be funny if they weren’t so pernicious in their ability to dress up a pig in such a fashion that people forget it is still a pig.  “Pre-owned” means “Used”, half the letters and twice as easy to understand.  “Fastest growing” is another term for “smaller,” since large firms need proportionately more money to grow a given per cent. If my firm grosses $1 million a year, and next year it grosses $1.1 million, it has grown 10%.  If my competitor grosses $100 million a year and next year grosses $105 million, his has grown 5%, but his share of the market has increased nearly 4%, from 100/101  to 105/106.1.  The amount of new business in the market has increased $5.1 million, and nearly 98% of that increase went to my competitor.

We can say “undocumented immigrants,” and the term is correct.  But people who cross borders without going through customs and immigration are violating the law.  That is why we have the word “illegal.”  There may be all sorts of reasons for the person to do so, and there may be appropriate words for those reasons–fleeing a repressive regime, starvation, an epidemic of disease.  But the person is still performing an illegal act.  Whether the act is immoral is another matter altogether.  We saw during the last financial crisis that people did immoral acts that were not necessary illegal.  We should not confuse immoral and illegal.

Beheading a British soldier in broad daylight and saying that his country is responsible for killing millions of Muslims daily is a gross act of religious terror and exaggeration.  [Mathematical note:  “millions of people daily” would require about 5 years to have no Muslims on the planet, using a minimum number of “2” for the plural and 2 billion for the number of Muslims.  This error was not brought out in any article.]  Terror scares people, and that act scared the hell out of me.  Since this was a brutal act carried out in the name of religion, both the act and the modifier belong. I fail to see why Reuters won’t use the term.  Indeed, a mullah interviewed on British television refused to call the beheading an “abhorrence,” using only the word “shocking,” which is far milder and has many different meanings.  Abhor is very clear, and the man refused to use the word.

My liberalism has limits.  When I saw Corregidor, the American Cemetery in Manila, the prison where men drowned during high tide, I felt strongly that we had a place in the world that we had earned through the blood of men who fought and died in places not many people know of today, like Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Leyte and Lingayen Gulfs, Bataan, Kwajalein, Enewetak, and Saipan.

The issue we face as a country is how we deal with a very nasty world without compromising our values.  For if we become what our enemy is, then we have lost.  But if we allow the enemy to proceed without resistance, then we have lost as well.  The world is not black and white but a large shade of gray.  Any time the gray hides something evil, we need to shine a spotlight on that evil and address it.

With a carefully chosen word or phrase, because it is proper, regardless of who may be offended.

“Each man’s death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind. Therefore, send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” John Donne

The sign read, “It hurts to be hungry”, and it was carried by a man walking the “804,” part of the Oregon Coastal Trail system, north of Yachats.  With him were several others, including two women in long skirts, with backpacks, not looking at all like hikers.

It was cold and windy on the Oregon Coast, as it usually is in February, and what was a pleasant walk along what I think is the most beautiful coast in the US was a difficult hike for these people, who were hungry.  They walked by the memorial to two young high school students from Eugene, who 2 years ago, almost to the day, were on the rocks in the ocean when a “sneaker wave” caught them, and threw them into the ocean.  With incredibly rough seas, slippery steep, sharp rocks, they could not be helped by their 4 companions.  In three minutes, they were dead.  I stared at the rocks for awhile, wondering how probably 4 minutes earlier, the boys had no clue that in 240 seconds, they would no longer exist.

We saw the hikers about 6 miles up the coast the next day, one of them hitchhiking from a bridge, the other two on the other side.  We figured they were hitchhiking one at a time, since their size and their equipment would have made it impossible to fit into most vehicles.  We were only going to Waldport, two miles further, where we walked the beach south a couple of miles.

When we left Waldport, the group was sitting on a bench near a fast food restaurant on the south side of town.  I don’t know where they were going.  I do suspect they were sleeping outdoors, maybe with a tent, probably not with one.  And they were eating, although probably not a great deal.  They did not look like hikers or even people trying to lose weight, which they needed to do, by hiking.  They looked like the homeless in America.  They looked like those who sleep in the parks in downtown Tucson, or those who sleep under bridges in Eugene, Oregon.  Many are homeless veterans, who served the country during the past decade in Iraq and Afghanistan while the 99.5% of us who didn’t were either protesting the war in vain or else assuaged our guilt with yellow ribbons.  Some of the yellow ribbons had a cross inside, which really galled me, as it invoked the idea of a Crusade.

Mind you, I have no love lost for how many Muslims treat women and Christians who live in their land.  Read Sabatina James, or go on her Website, and you hear horror stories of forced marriages, Todesstrafe, which is a death sentence on young women who become westernized, some converting to Christianity, rapes, beatings, acid thrown into the face, stabbings.  Most of this occurring in Europe is from Islamists, not Christians.  Europe has a problem with integration of these people into society, and I think eventually the problem will cross the ocean, and we will have it, too.

But right now we have homeless, hungry people in America, and they aren’t all drunks or lazy slobs.  Many lost their jobs when the rich folks on Wall Street wrecked the economy and got paid large bonuses for doing it.  Many lost their homes which they never should have had, but we don’t educate people very well in dealing with numbers, math, economic circumstances, debt or critical thinking.

Many are bankrupt because they didn’t have health insurance to cover major medical bills, the largest cause of bankruptcy, but we sure held the Democrats responsible for the Affordable Care Act, which turned the House over to the Republicans, who now are grappling with the Tea Party, which is a minority, but seems to think it is their right to obstruct any sort of laws they don’t like.  Were it the Democrats doing this, the Republicans would be howling.  Right now, the Republicans are trying to figure out how to deal with the likes of Rand Paul, who was about as rude as one can be to the Secretary of State, and then showed his ignorance by proffering a theory that there were arms shipments from Libya to Syria.  Ms. Clinton’s body language as well as her verbal language during that exchange defines the word “incredulous,” for those who want to brush up on their English.

The greatest country in the history of the world can’t deal with homelessness and hunger.  We have the means, we have people who can think, develop complex systems, and we have volunteers to do this.  We lack the will, and a few are hung up on the deficit, which Mr. Obama inherited from Mr. Bush, back when Mr. Cheney said “Deficits don’t matter,” which seems to have been conveniently forgotten,  A third of the deficit came from the wars that were off budget and unnecessary.  Probably another sixth, if not more, came from the loss of tax revenues from the crashed economy.  If the stock market plummets, capital gains taxes disappear; indeed, capital losses decrease taxes.  If interest rates fall to zero, one gets a lot fewer 1099 forms in the mail, because there are none for interest payments of fewer than $10 in a year.  Last I checked, the economy crashed mostly before 20 January 2009.  If the sequester continues, we may see it crash again.

Instead of dealing with hunger in the US, we spend time still investigating Benghazi, even though we never did anything to Condoleeza Rice, who ignored the famous 6 August 2001 memo about imminent attacks in the US.  We ignore what is going on in Egypt, Mali, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, all time bombs ready to explode.  Many Americans couldn’t find any of these countries on a map.  We don’t take a stand on what is happening to women in Muslim countries, which is absolutely appalling.

I’m guilty, too.  I rationalize my way out of it and write stuff that few read and changes nothing.   I rationalize by saying “I can’t fix this problem,”  “I can’t save the world,” or I turn my head, when somebody wants money by saying “I’ll wash your car’s windshield,” which happened the other day in Eugene.  But the next time I’m in Market of Choice, I will buy a $10 coupon that goes to stop hunger in Lane County.  And maybe I will do that every time I am in there.  Darned if I know how I will deal with the homeless; mostly, I am more concerned about homeless animals, since not one of them had any say whatsoever in their plight.  And I have done something about that problem.

But I am human, and I remember what John Donne wrote.  Much as I despise much of what my species does, there is a certain poignancy about seeing a sign that says “It really hurts to be hungry,” not far from a 5 star hotel on the Oregon Coast.  I can rationalize all I want, but the sign and the people existed.  Time for me to stop writing and stop rationalizing.  I’m not sure what I will do, but it is time to do something.

I’m hungry for change.  These people need change to deal with their hunger, not money change, but a country change.

Near where the boys drowned, 2011.

Waldport, Oregon