Boreal B[l]og

My wife noted a magazine from The Hermitage, an Arizona organization that rescues cats, animals near and dear to me.  The Hermitage had adopted 61 “unadoptable” cats from Animal Control in southern Arizona, finding homes for 42….so far.  My wife supports The Hermitage, which unfortunately had bad press several years ago from conflicts from within.

For once, I said the right phrase:  “Sounds like two groups, equally passionate about animals, couldn’t find agreement.”

I am not sure what the issue was, but it hurt the organization, which I doubt either side wanted.  Indeed, I am certain both sides had feline welfare as a priority.  It is possible for people to love something and have strongly differing views on how to best help it.  Not only is it possible, it is likely.  The irony is that squabbling hurts both sides and the issue they support.

This statement applies to the country at large.  I know people whom I call “friend,” in the true meaning of the word, with whom I have significant disagreements about what ought to be done by America.  Somehow, we usually manage to sort a lot of it out, usually with humor, sometimes by finding common ground where we do agree.  Too often I remain silent, because I could hurt them verbally.

Americans disagree, which should be expected, given that there are a third of a billion of us.  What bothers me a great deal is the idea that one side “owns” patriotism and love of country.  My detractors don’t own patriotism, nor do I.  Waving the flag everywhere is like two people in love who insist upon smooching in public.  It gets a bit tiring.  You love something or somebody far more by your behavior than by public showing of affection.

I don’t like stock phrases like “land grab,” when a national monument is created.  Yes, there are rules that now apply to that land that once didn’t apply, but much land has been taken over privately, and it is no longer able to be used at all by people who once could use it.  I think Mr. Bundy had a land grab of his own.  Had I decided to use the land on which his cattle were grazing, I reckon he might have been upset.  I don’t like “useless bureaucracy.” If a person suddenly wants the FDA to check on the origin of meat that comes from abroad, the FDA is suddenly not useless.  Nor is the CDC, when it tries to deal with a new viral infection.  Nor are the police and other first responders, paid by the public to protect the public. Nor was FEMA, when Governor Christie needed help after Hurricane Sandy.  A wise psychologist told me long ago that “all” or “nothing” statements are an entry into depression.  Are ALL governmental workers bad?  Are ALL politicians bad?  Is NO Democrat good?  Really?  NONE at all?

It is normal to contradict one’s own beliefs.  We all do at times.  It is also normal not to like laws or government except when it suits us.  I do, however, have a different take from those who think the Confederate Flag honors a “rebel” heritage while simultaneously spread the American flag out over an entire football stadium to show their patriotism.  Secession was treason, and rebel is a poor euphemism.  The Confederate Flag flew for four years over eleven states which seceded from the Union.  Had it not been for nearly three million Union soldiers, one-third of whom would become casualties, one-eighth of whom would die, we would have remained a fractured country.  That is the truth. The states have many rights, a problem for those of us who travel from one to another, be it with local taxes, customs, speed limits, medical care, or odd laws.  There are many things in the country that need standardization, and 50 states each doing it differently is not wise.  As for that flag, it can sit in a museum.  I don’t wish to see it.

Ironically, many who want States’ Rights have no use for “socialist” Europe, which to me is a classic example of States’ Rights taken to the extreme.  I’ve been to Europe eleven times.  We could learn a great deal from Europeans about health care, transportation, education, fluency in languages, and efficient energy use.  Europeans could learn from us about unity.  Are any of the 8 federated entities from the former Yugoslavia a player on the world stage today?  No way.  I can count 40—yes, forty—different countries west of the Black Sea and north of Turkey.  The European Union has had trouble with one currency.  The cultural differences alone should have negated Greece’s ever joining the EU, although the Greek statistician who was honest about the country’s finances was jailed.  I don’t find multiple languages, cultures, defense, and currencies a strength, but rather a weakness.  Make America 50 different countries, and our influence would be profoundly degraded.

We need mandatory national service by the young, to relearn that “civil servant” is an honorable career, the way it once was, denoting respect for one whose life was public service and whose service did not make him as rich as one who worked for a privately owned company. We don’t pick and choose which laws to obey.  There is a Constitution, and the states have many rights, all that are not specifically granted to the Federal government.

Many squabbles are ultimately arbitrated by the Supreme Court.  The Justices are appointed for life by the President.  Many who don’t vote for president, “because there is no difference,” might be chastened to realize what can happen to the Supreme Court for the next fifty years by a presidential election.  The law can be changed if the Court changes.  That may or may not be good.  Given the Citizens United decision, 5-4, where money was allowed to flood politics, I am worried about this Court.

But the law is the law.  If I don’t like it, I must work to change it, through words, active protests, economic boycotts, but always through legal means.  If I don’t like staying here, I have the choice to leave.  I don’t have the choice here to do what I want without regard to the law.  Nor does anybody who has the “Stars and Bars” on his pickup.

I was disturbed at the outcry about the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell vs. Hodges.  I fail to see how love of another person who has the same variant of human sexuality is wrong.  Citizens United and Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby were both horrible decisions, far more reaching than gay marriage, which doesn’t affect me a bit.  In the final analysis, of the two decisions that momentous week, the Affordable Care Act was by far the most important, while Obergefell vs. Hodges was part of civil rights.  It was a week where two flags will soon be relegated to history for very different reasons: one because it was a sign of treason and failure, the other because it symbolized a wish that came true.

When I graduated from high school, 49 years ago, I got compliments from people whom I respected a great deal, my parents, and my homeroom teacher when I was a junior.  The latter wrote in my yearbook, “having grown up in the public eye, I know how difficult it can be.  You have emerged as your own person. I’m proud of you.”  My father was superintendent of public schools, sending me to one of the high schools in his district, for going to a private school, while perhaps offering a better education, would have been hypocrisy.  It didn’t hurt that his son was valedictorian.  He told me that my not getting into trouble made his job immensely easier.

Too many live in the public eye and refuse to deal with the big downside of such: everything you do is scrutinized.  I wasted three minutes of my life listening to “The Sarah Palin Channel,” as she opined about the California drought.  She advised them to build more dams, but in fairness, she did offer a water source, the ocean.  “There’s all that water around ya’.”  I don’t like “ya” in this context.  I know it sounds folksy, and she appeals to many, especially men, but she is now in her 50s and long since should have left the airwaves.

Let’s discuss desalinization.  It works.  I drank ocean water that went through the boilers on my ship, that took salt water, heated it to steam, and then let the steam power the ship.  Some of that steam was allowed to condense, and that was our drinking water and cleaning water, but not our toilet water. Desalinization requires converting water to steam, an energy-intensive process, because one needs to make steam and let the fresh water condense out.  I’m surprised Ms. Palin, important and tellin’ the truth, didn’t discuss the number of calories it takes to turn water into steam.  Heating water from freezing to boiling is not difficult.  It takes 100 calories/gram.  From boiling to steam is called vaporization, and it requires 540 calories/gm, nearly five and a half times the heat needed to get to boiling.  That, incidentally, is why sweat cools us, because body heat is used to convert water to water vapor, cooling us.  Evaporation cools, condensation warms. That is why when there is dew, the temperature stops falling, because condensation releases heat, limiting radiational cooling. In the sky, when clouds form, heat is given off, and if the atmosphere is unstable, the water tends to rise into cooler air, condensing and releasing more heat.  This is why we get convective thunderstorms.

Ms. Palin didn’t like the idea that the government should tell people what to do, although she would have had no problem as vice president telling people what to do.  I heard that in the first week of October 2008, when she debated then Senator Joe Biden, who schooled her in exactly what power the Vice President had.  Why, she said, government would dictate how long showers might last.  She didn’t mention that most of the water use in California is for growing heavy water consumers, like almonds, pistachios, alfalfa for cattle feed, and pasture.  Nor did she discuss the 250 different water companies and patchwork regulations, which is what happens when there isn’t a strong state government.  Nor did she discuss that voluntary measures had failed to help California save water.  Or the “blob” in the Gulf of Alaska, that may be changing climate on the West Coast.

She didn’t mention that many municipalities do not meter water, using far more than such desert cities as Phoenix, Tucson, and Santa Fé.   Government is bad, she said, taking her own advice and resigning governorship of Alaska after thirty-one months in office.  She has two children with out-of-wedlock pregnancies, which normally I could care less about, but had this been from a Democrat, people would have been screaming moral decay.  Even Mike Huckabee gave her daughter a pass on her out-of-wedlock baby, the couple later never marrying.  Lot of adults have out-of-wedlock pregnancies, but to tout abstinence only as the form of birth control we should use as a nation, as Ms. Palin once did, might first have begun in her home.

The problem with being in the public eye is that one has to behave to a different standard than the rest of us.  I knew that, and I am a nobody. I also don’t get into fights at parties where my children (not that I have any) rip off their shirt, flip people off, throw punches, while I yell at (other) jerks, “Do you know who I am?” That’s a shame, because another guy at the party yelled, “This isn’t some reality TV hillbilly show.”  Damn, I would have loved to have said that. I wouldn’t have been the first, however, as her family was referred to during 2008 as “Wasilla Hillbillies.” Ms. Palin denied having been at the party, but there were eyewitnesses.  She could have apologized for her behavior and that of her family, and slunk away quietly.

Palin didn’t read books, couldn’t name one major Supreme Court case (other than Roe vs. Wade), apparently forgetting Brown vs. Board of Education, along with Marbury vs. Madison or even Dred Scott.  She drew targets on the pictures of Democrats whom she wanted removed from office.  When Gabby Giffords, one of those targeted, was shot 4 miles from where I lived, the comment came back to haunt Ms. Palin, who replied that she didn’t mean gun.  I believed her.  “It wasn’t in good taste, and I apologize,” would have shown class.

Too many don’t like smart men and women; they don’t trust them.  They figure that if somebody is smart, they probably can’t ride a horse, camp outdoors, in a tent, or read the weather, things that real men and women can do.  Well, Ms. Palin, I can ride, camp, and read the weather, the latter two really, really well.  I also understand heat of vaporization and fusion.  I thought school was a good place, and I learned a lot.  What I learned much later was that people want an attractive somebody who will tell them what they want to hear.

Sarah Palin is one of those people. Most assuredly, I am not. I tell people what I think is right.  Then I prove it or open myself up to compelling evidence that will change my mind.  Ms. Palin would do well to follow my example. I’m not as pretty or as young, but I’m a lot wiser and more open to change.

I’ve hiked places in her state she can’t even pronounce.

Far more importantly, for the few times in my life I was in the public eye, I didn’t become a jerk.  And I was a teenager at the time, not a former governor and nearly Vice President.

A few years back, we drove over to LA for the wedding of my youngest niece.  The other two had had their weddings on the East Coast, but we aren’t close to our families, and we didn’t go.  LA was a day’s drive away, and we thought we ought to make at least one of the weddings and see the family.  We both felt it was a duty, so we did it.  Family visits, of course, have a down side, but that’s families, and that’s duty.  You pick your friends, not your family.

On the plus side, I could get to see Channel Islands National Park, which was on my “See all the National Parks” list.  We drove over on a Thursday, mistakenly believing that staying up in Ventura would make the travel easier.  It didn’t.  We entered freeways where speed went from 75 to zero in a half mile.

We had a great visit on Santa Cruz Island the next day.

On Santa Cruz Island. Hard to believe 10 million people are right across the water.

On a big plus side were some whales.

Anacapa Is. from Santa Cruz.

We thought we could easily make the rehearsal dinner that Friday night, but well, the boat bringing us back from Channel Islands was a little late, so we got to the hotel a little late, and check in was a disaster.  The first room had luggage present which wasn’t ours, and when we went back to the reception desk, a good walk in its own right, they looked at us with disbelief.  We did get a second room, except the room card didn’t work.  Back we went.  Bottom line was that we could get into the third room with about as many swipes of the card. We took it.  The hotel was deemed 10 stars; I wondered aloud whether “10” was binary notation.

Somewhere along the line, my observant wife noted both the clock and a Trader Joe’s next door, announcing to me that we weren’t going to the rehearsal dinner.  I had a brief moment of “we can’t do that,” followed by visions of driving in LA on a Friday night, which in my 45 years of driving in several countries, was in the top three for difficulty (Toronto and Cádiz, Spain are the other two). After the “we can’t do that,” came “wow, we could just relax and start the visit early tomorrow morning,” which is exactly what we did.

Saturday morning, we went to the bride’s house, offering our services for whatever she needed.  We weren’t part of the wedding party, but we had a car, which is a total necessity in LA.  My niece desperately needed a few things at a pharmacy and a store, and we got them with no problem.  She was grateful.  I thought that nice, given that what we got was easy to do.  For us, it was.  We then took my sister-in-law (SIL) out for coffee.  That got her out of the house, for which both she and my niece were appreciative, albeit for very different reasons.  We went to a coffee shop for about an hour and a half, and for the then 42 years I had known her, we had the best conversation I can ever remember.  I think the fact I was fairly relaxed, aside from being in LA, and my SIL really stressed had a lot to do with how well things went.

We went to the wedding early.  I hadn’t been looking forward to meeting my SIL’s estranged husband.  I didn’t like him on several levels, not the least was how he had treated her.  He had crossed Jerk Junction so many times that it no longer had a “Stop and Think” sign.  A short time after we arrived, a few older men showed up, and my wife and I went down to meet them.  Sometime after I shook hands with all, my wife commented, “That was xxxx, you know.”

I didn’t.  I don’t have prosopagnosia, or the inability to recognize faces, but I am not exactly good at placing faces on people, especially those whom I have not seen for 16 years.  I hadn’t a clue that I had just shaken hands with the estranged husband, which meant that I treated him like a stranger, which in many ways he was, politely, without giving away my dislike.  Wow, I couldn’t have scripted that better if I had tried.

The wedding went well, and at the dinner, I volunteered to sit between the parents of the bride, her near-ex’s voice booming out loud and clear, as he was the Master of Ceremonies.  It wasn’t a big deal, after all, sitting between the two of them.  I had to deal once with his trying to bring up Navy days, for we both served in very different ways, but I had no desire to talk either to him or about my time in the service 35 years earlier. I ignored him.  I made sure I turned towards my SIL, listening carefully to her and my wife, talking when I could, and somehow getting food into my mouth without looking at my plate, in order to avoid any further interaction with her then-husband.  When husband got up to make a toast, I shoveled food into my mouth.  The rest of the time, I kept the two of them away from each other, possibly avoiding a scene. When things were winding down, we left, got back to the hotel, and were on the road early the next morning, eastbound to the Colorado River and Arizona, LA in our rear view mirror.  Mac Davis in reverse, for those who go back to 1980 in their music.

We weren’t at all important in the wedding party.  Yet, I have fond memories of what I did that day.  We were the two most relaxed people present.  We had time to run errands, we had time to separate mother from niece, woman from husband, and we made good use of the time.  We did it quietly with no fanfare, no raising of voice, nothing at all.  We were there.

Maybe I was important.  For years, I gave my SIL and our nieces gifts during the holiday season.  The biggest gift I ever gave them, however, was that day in Los Angeles.  Maybe they remember it, maybe they don’t.   No matter.  I do.  Like most gifts, the giver gets a lot back in return.

My SIL still sends me e-mails.  I cringe when they come.  Family.