The Regeneration of 2020

We, humanity, were adrift.

Men abused women. Caucasians oppressed Blacks and nearly everyone else. The rich and powerful had forgotten noblesse oblige, corrupting corporations to deceitfully seduce all others to greed and envy, reducing governments to institutions that, at best, are mostly adrift.

All of us were, the best of our personal abilities, despoiling our planet and sole native home.

Then came a pandemic and we got a chance to survey the world from our little caves. That’s when the need for regeneration became obvious to me. In biology, regeneration is a process of renewal, restoration, and growth that allows everything from cells and organisms to entire ecosystems to overcome natural fluctuations, or episodic disturbance or damage.

As a man, I recognize in pornography and erotic literature our savage pollinating fantasies of women as the source of sexual satisfaction available for the taking, penetrating, and controlling, at our whim. When I hear of domestic murder, gang rapes, sex trafficking, I realize that a #MeToo movement cannot stop this. Feminist research can’t rectify this.

We men need to be healed.

We need an outward regeneration, from the cells in our spinal cord and from the deepest recesses of our psyches. We need to cleanse society of all messages, supports, tradition, socialization, imagery and propaganda inducements to ravage and conquer women that have developed over thousands of years.

The same applies to Caucasians, the rich and powerful and their institutions, and indeed to all of humanity.

Even the oppressed and less fortunate have to change. Women have often enough enslaved themselves to fantasies of beauty sustained by malevolent industries. Non-Caucasians have absorbed notions of a tribal hierarchy of ethnicity, nationalities, and races.

No one is free of blemish.

After the pandemic, if we survive, we need to start a process of regenerating humanity.

My Transitional Year

The first full year of transition into retirement.

The first few mornings I came to my computer at the early rush hour and looked out my window to the busy thoroughfare on which I live. There were the lines of cars and buses, with passengers in suits and office apparel. I laughed.

“Suckers!”

I had first gone to work as an adult, with the end of a working life nowhere in sight — nay, unthinkable! — in 1975. I just added it up: forty-two years, longer than my older son has been alive.

My working life finished Dec. 29, 2017, with no working days left, so January to January is a fair measure of being retired rather than on a weekend.

I first came to retirement with a project and a schedule in mind: a blog I would turn into a book — check that as done — and a plan to walk the 8 blocks to a nearby library with my laptop in a new backpack. There I would edit my work and do some net surfing thanks to taxpayers like me, who delight in paying taxes so long as they go to schools and libraries and such.

Oh, I was also going to go room by room, one a month, chucking all the useless stuff I never had the time to sift from the treasures, then reorganizing the latter in an orderly way.

Those were the best laid plans of mice and men ...

I did complete the blogbook and published it as an ebook in November. You can read about it here Discover How a Faith Became Christianity — Even if You Skipped Sunday School and learn where to get it. (Hint: Google Play, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, other places.)

My walking to the library fell off somewhat.

Instead I gained a volunteer gig at a place called Samaritan Ministry, where I now help folks write their resumes and apply for jobs online.

My cleanup of my home stopped at my study in the third month, having done what could be done to the bedroom and bathroom.

Last Times

(A year ago, I wrote the following to myself.)

In the past year or so, I have had the rare and bittersweet pleasure of observing myself do or experience a variety of things for the last time. It has been a season of last things that ended today as I left my final employment, my office and the company I owned for the last time ever.

How often do you get to observe this? When was the last time you changed your child's diaper, hugged a deceased parent, made love to your last lover? Most often we don’t realize it’s the last time.

When last December ended, however, I suddenly realized that it was only a matter of months before I retired. That January and February, with that bitter wind on the walk to the bust stop five blocks away, was happening to me for the last time.

March I filed my last corporate tax return. I’d surrendered to my successor a number of editorial and production tasks and decision making. This year I would slowly surrender corporate operations. I have been a business owner since 1997. By year’s end, no more.

May I had my last board meeting in that season. July I took my last short vacation. When you are the boss, you’re always in. In November, I extended banking privileges to my successor, along with running the payroll.

Then came the inevitable last month.

Dec. 14 I put to bed the last issue of my weekly publication that I would have a hand producing. It would be the last issue before the Christmas break. It was my 1,525th issue.

“Putting to bed” is a journalism expression meaning to complete all editorial and layout work on a newspaper or magazine so that it is ready to go to press; it comes from an old printing phrase to lock up the type form of a publication in the press’ bed, before printing. My publication hasn’t been printed since 2006, but I was still putting it to bed on this day two weeks ago.

On Dec. 15th, I last saw my favorite luncheon checker, with whom I played the game of trying to find out what happened on the year matching the amount due; for example, if the lunch cost $14.92, the year was 1492, the year Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

Dec. 19, I last saw my favorite street person outside the luncheon place I go pick up something to eat at my desk. We exchanged the daily refrain. His was “What’s the word? Thunderbird!” For that he got my ritual $5 “tip.”

On Dec. 22, I finished writing the last story I would ever write for my publication, no longer under my byline (just as the first one didn’t have my byline, both for institutional reasons).

Central Americans are an "illegal-alien invasion" and Europeans weren't?

The great hue and cry among U.S. Americans watching northbound Central American emigrant caravans probably resembles what the North American natives thought as hordes of Europeans from Britain to Spain started arriving some 500 to 300 years ago.

See what I just did? I turned a bunch of poor, brown, mostly Indo-American, emigrants from Central America and Mexico into peers of the august Thanksgivings' Day Puritans and the celebrated Genovese navigator Christopher Columbus.

"This was organized so that the illegal-alien invasion into the country would occur right around the elections in mid-November," exclaimed my Facebook friend Joe Tiernan in a post yesterday early morning (10/18 at 8:33 AM).

Perhaps we might envision a Native American response to the enterprises of Columbus, Purtitans and other European migrations organized without the slightest thought given to the American natives' rules.

A part-Chippewa scholar at Berkeley's essay draws on Desmond Tutu's famous words about European missionaries to offer the following reflection: "When the white man first came to this land, we had the land and they had the Bible. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them again, we had the Bible and the white man had the land."

“Your mouth is of sugar but your heart of gall,” said more succinctly, the Abenaki leader Atiwaneto to a British official in 1752.

The caravan movement started with an original 1,000-person group in Tapachula, Mexico, this past March. Most of the caravans have been reportedly organized by Irineo Mujica, the Mexican-American director of Pueblo Sin Fronteras (People Without Borders), who sought for them asylum in the United States for Central Americans fleeing gang violence and turbulent elections.

Out of that experience, in more or less spontaneous local bursts of outrage in response to the separation in the United States of children from parents, still ongoing, in recent months others have started caravans that Mujica and a string of local migrant help centers along the route to Mexico have decided to aid as a matter of humanitarian concern.

Tiernan, a retired television news executive, posted a Reuters story announcing that the governments of Honduras and Guatemala had agreed to halt caravans of would-be Central American emigrants. The emigrants have journeyed from as far south as Honduras to, so far, Mexico — triggering a spate of nervous Trump tweets threatening dire consequences if they try to enter the United States.

One would think Tiernan was waving red flags at a happy herd of Republican bulls. However, his associates, think he is "grossly minimalizing" the politics.

They come with ready-made explanations as well. "[The emigrants] are encouraged to come to America because of our totally insane and mostly unenforced border policies, as well as the decades of dirty politics by Progressives to flood the country with Illegal Aliens," writes one Sabra Merle, from California.

Tiernan himself offers as an explanation against immigration that "European American culture will be a minority culture in America by 2050. America was 85% White in 1965." He does not go so far as to suggest, as Dana Littlefield, a self-described former IT professional at Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines, who declares: "Time to start deporting all illegal invaders, put the military on the border, and defend it at all costs."

Lost in all this is current immigration patterns from south of the U.S. border exhibit a combination of push and pull factors. The magnetism of the world's largest and most transparent economy on a per capita basis pulls would-be immigrants, while a combination of economic and political instability, high crime and corruption in their poor home countries pushes them out.

There are always transitory waves caused by events on both sides of the border. Civil war in several Central American countries the 1980s pushed emigrants to the USA. Both the Great Depression and the Great Recession caused massive departures of immigrants to south of the border.

Moreover, every study of the economic effects shows that except for slight job competition with the least schooled Americans, immigrants have a positive effect. Those without papers, moreover, leave billions in tax, social security and medicare contributions, from which they are barred from taking the slightest advantage.

One still is left with at the contrast between the great bemoaning of newcomers today and the North American natives' rumination on shore at the first arrival of Europeans at Manhattan Island.

As it was related to John Heckwelder by "aged and respected" Delawares, Momeys, and Mahicaanni, they wondered: "These arriving in numbers, and themselves viewing the strange appearance, and that it was actually moving towards them, concluded it to be a large canoe or house, in which the great Mannitto [or Supreme Being] himself was, and that he probably was coming to visit them."

Trump's Great Favor to the Republic

By becoming the obvious boil in the body politic and personifying the most venal characteristics of U.S. plutocrats, Donald Trump has done the republic the enormous favor of stripping bare the power relationships in our society. This is becoming ever clearer with every new outrage as the midterm elections of 2018 approach.

This is one reason that, rather than respond with epithets and anger, the true small-d democrats in the United States must vote against Trump's allies and work to undo the plutocracy in every way. Not for the first time, there is a broad awareness of this reality. We need to defend the civil rights won so far and expand democracy to include economic and social rights.

History teaches us that it is doubtful that the United States was ever a democracy — that is largely an as yet unrealized aspiration.

At its founding, the states, which regulated voting rights, allowed only male, free property owners to participate in electing political decision-makers. By law, this was in theory overthrown with finality by the 1965 Voting Rights Act and a 1972 Supreme Court decision (Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533); however, this is being undone by clever, largely Republican-inspired voter suppression tricks.

Moreover, even among the participating great unwashed, there existed a broad group of Americans of Northwestern European origin who lived in a near-poverty of under-education and underemployment. These Americans directed their resentment not at the wealthy who kept them down, but at the easy marks whose skin was darker and spoke with accents other than their own.

Nor has the United States honestly and deservedly been a land of milk and honey with streets paved with gold for anyone with pluck.

Sure, some younger sons of the English nobility, who inherited nothing, became wealthy thanks to slaves. Also, some landless English, German and Irish people became small farmers thanks to land theft from the natives.

Even the great American bonanza after 1945 came at the expense of a Europe mired in rubble and was merely a temporary accident — rather than the fruit of American know-how"; the broad middle class was a temporary myth, it had never existed before and it is vanishing now. Until the New Deal's and Great Society's mildly heroic soft capitalism, it was sink or swim for everyone and most sank.

The true story of American wealth is more aptly told by a famous epigram of Balzac's: "Behind every fortune lies a crime." The American crimes of slavery, land theft and industrial warmaking made a few very wealthy and these few convinced a broader less fortunate group of "whites" that they shared in the bounty, when they never did.

It's the classic Trump con.

Trump inherited money — we now know that it was more than he should have thanks to tax dodges. His own business acumen expanded that by little more than an ordinary savings account would have yielded — as shown by his now discredited feverish attempts to misrepresent his fortune to financial reporters. Moreover, he has publicly spoken of his own base as "stupid," women as something to grab and ethnic minorities as criminal escaping effective outhouses.

Thank you, Donald Trump. The scales have now fallen off our eyes and we can see the work that remains to be done to make the United States reasonably closer to its historic aspirations and goals. First, let's get rid of you and your allies.

Lessons Unlearned 17 years after 9/11

Nothing invites rebellion and doubt more than the ritual and the dogma of the American Civic Religion's new Holy Day, September 11.

I remember September 11, 2001. I was working two blocks from the White House when news started arriving. However, the idea of the alleged military heroes and the supposed patriotic meaning that is widely spread today rings hollow and false.

First of all, let's recognize that the attackers committed a crime but were never subjected to anything resembling justice under the U.S. Constitution, in part because they were willing to die in furtherance of their purpose. Instead, international goodwill toward Americans was squandered by the fake arms industry "patriots" who lined their pockets inflicting "vengeance" on Afghanis and Iraqis — over a million of whom were killed  — who had nothing to do with the crashing planes in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

Second, the Twin Towers were artless slabs that destroyed the classic Manhattan skyline with the Empire State Building as its topmost point in a central location. I was born in Manhattan and that skyline was one of the first things I knew. Long before 9/11, I regarded the World Trade Center as an eyesore. If there is an icon for 9/11, the towers are not it. Moreover, the professionals who died in the various buildings were not heroes. Most of them were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Many were bond traders, thus not exactly worshipers of anything but Mammon.

Third, the fact that any unarmed plane could crash into the Pentagon without the slightest interference is a monument to the stupidity and overall incompetence of the U.S. military. The event told the world what idiots we are to spend gazillions on it. A few guys with box-cutters could destroy the building without meeting a single counterattack. As a consequence, the thousands of Americans who signed up to kill Afghanis and Iraqis were chumps — 9/11 vets, get what you were promised while you can because the guys who promised you lollipops are about to take them away.

As to real heroes, I propose the Flight 93 passengers, who saved the United States from government by presidential fiat alone, under no less that George W. Bush, unquestionably the second worst president we have ever had. The plane is known to have been on a trajectory headed straight for Capitol Hill. As for one-man rule, this is not mere surmise: the Dubya White House sent Congress a message within days of 9/11 asking for extraordinary powers to act in case Congress was attacked. The legislative branch wisely declined.

But there is an anti-hero who should be studied. Mohammad Atta, the on-site leader of the hijackers, exhibited a moral and philosophical consistency and cogency, and even an asceticism and conviction sadly lacking among American leaders at the time and since. To Atta, the United States was the cause of much suffering in the Middle East. We can debate whether his view was correct — it hasn't been seriously examined: why did they think what they thought? — but given such an opinion, what he did was consistent with his beliefs. Moreover, it was brilliantly planned and executed.

In considering the possible grievances that people in lands far away may have against the United States — meaning the government, mostly, and its most deluded followers — 9/11 offers an intriguing paradox. On September 11, 1973, with CIA collusion and U.S. military and financial support, Chile's military overthrew the elected president of that country, Salvador Allende, a democratic socialist. Might not the Chileans who were subsequently terrorized by their government see with some sympathy the claims of aggrieved Muslims from a vastly different culture many years later?

In sum, we still need to learn the real lessons of 9/11, which I fear the current pageantry and slogans only dim.

The Human Crisis

We are always in crisis. Things around us, and even ourselves, are changing in unexpected ways. We find the present troubling because it never quite conforms to our hopes and dreams.

Instead of climate change and autocracy, we could be facing the black plague and feudal lords. It's just a matter of century.

It always seems we are on the edge of doom. We are. Our self of yesterday has died and at the end of the day today's self will become history.

Crisis comes from the Greek krinein, to decide. We are always deciding to take the next breath. Or not.

Trump may yet serve, as a foil, to awaken the greatest egalitarian movement the United States has ever seen. Or not. Climate change may usher in the most careful and generous resource use in history. Or not.

This is fraught with uncertainty, for we must always face the decision: do we go on or give up?

In the end, the present is the only time in which we decide to act and be.