Thanks, Donny T.

5 December 2025 Leave a comment

Schools that I attended many years ago were effectively segregated, as were neighborhoods, businesses, and the like. Yet, all the people of color I encountered as a child were caring, even loving, and it seemed to me, indispensable to our daily lives. I was left one morning with our Black “cleaning lady.” I played with her daughters, and later, I petitioned to return to play again, as we had had fun. I was told mildly, “No, you don’t play with them.” This came from the same voice that had left me in the care of Thelma and her daughters, while he undertook some other activity. I asked why, but was stonewalled with, “Well, you don’t.”

That’s when I learned — at 6 or 7 — that there was a rule of discrimination, which like most rules and laws were given me no reason. I was restrained by command and ignorance. It wasn’t a conscious turning point in my world view, but it did pull back the curtain to reveal the dark wizardry of the world. Kept ignorant and constrained, I would be compliant. What my father overlooked in his young son was that I was not of a compliant character. I was independent and frankly irreverent. And I am thankful for that. I was never the poor creature trapped in authority and blinded by ignorance.

In the years since, I have made a point of seeking out places and people who are different from me. I discovered that cultural differences are fascinating and enlightening. Every difference is another color of life, making a rich and vibrant world. Yet in my retirement years, I seem to have relaxed my efforts to encounter differences and have somewhat lost the joy of learning. I know this makes my life more bland, and not learning is not living. However, Donald Trump and his gang of culture thugs have come to my rescue.

By going after Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, the Trump Gang has reawakened my interest and energies for these very things. The voice of the authoritarian commanding ignorance has once more pulled back the curtain. Knowing that Donald Trump is just wrong, reassures me in my belief that diversity, equity and inclusion are essential, not just in the institutions, workplaces and marketplaces. These values are the pathways for all of us to a rich and thriving country, and ultimately, to such a world.

A daunting prospect, I agree, but dreams of reaching beyond our grasp are essential to extending that grasp to richer ends. Thanks, Donny T. You seem to have backed your ass into the fan again.

Filed under Education Policy, Philosophy, Racial Issues, Social Commentary Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Is the ship sinking?

4 May 2025 Leave a comment

There is an article from The Guardian (“Trump’s Truth Social posts make no sense – what do they say about his mentality?”) that looks at Chairman Trump’s mental state through his social media. One of those “funny if it were not so frightening” things. I’ve long harbored pity for what it must feel like to be him, but it appears he might not have the mental clarity to see his own suffering. After all, his agony may be his driving force; it seems it’s all he knows. So, it must feel normal, even correct.

While I would never willingly kill anyone, I have actually wished Trump were dead. I think now that it would be better if he somehow just faded away. Maybe he could have a stroke or be found wandering the grounds of the White house naked and then be quietly institutionalized. Whoever took over couldn’t be any worse, but they could be worse at “it,” I guess. The hope would be that the chaos Trump’s shattered mind has sown would then infect the regime itself, disrupting if not paralyzing it.

I don’t fear Trump will be the next Putin or Xi, as he is clearly not as astute nor as coherent as either of them. Trump doesn’t see that he is trying to make a new government while governing from the crumbling remains of the old government. A government recycler. A one-man revolution. The task is way beyond any apparent capacity of the man, and it seems very unlikely that he has any grasp of the scope of such a thing. Trump and his band of sycophants are attempting to recycle the ship of state from the damaged pieces of the old craft while sailing the high seas, full steam ahead. Yet as can be seen from his Truth posts, his thinking is so disjointed and delusional, not to mention superficial, that we’re heading for a serious shipwreck.

I’m not without hope, but I’m expecting irreversible change. The damage has been done to the hull, however, and the ship of state is taking on water. Unless all efforts are made to save our ship, we’re going to go down. “All efforts” are not, I believe, any longer likely in the Divided State of America. There is not an “All” in our country anymore.

 

All things are mortal. Even the mountain crumble back toward the seas. Who are we to think that anything we make or do or are will last forever. Everything is subject to the laws of physics. The tension between order and entropy is everything: the overarching universal driving force. Change is constant; stasis is nonexistent. All of us — you, me, Trump, Jesus – are in constant change in every way from everyone and everything else. Who or what we are at any moment is defined but those changing relationships to everything else. We are all as motes in a massive dust storm.

In the kitchen sink, a molecule of detergent can reach out and grasp a molecule of water with one hand and a molecule of pork fat with another, and they can flow away together down to the drain to grey-water afterlife. If this linking doesn’t happen, the water molecule may evaporate, leaving the fat and detergent unbound to fend for themselves. These two, bound to one another, may just be left behind on the empty sink bottom – in housekeeping purgatory. No one goes to the Grey Haven that day. The bonding is order; the failure to bond or have a bond be broken is the effect of chaos. Yet time and change will go on for each of these molecules, other bonds will form and be broken, over and over, until the end of all things.

We worry mightily over one washing up. We experience those few “seconds” that could be any time in the sink, in the world in a migration, in our minds in an agreement called a country. We can’t choose the coming in nor usually our going out. Over time we have some opportunities to reach out our hand and bond with other people, things, places, activities. We have some control over these bonds, but that is still very little control in the greater scheme of things. Yes, there are those who can cast shockwaves that break bonds and also form others, and other nonhuman forces create shockwaves, but shock waves are not bonds. Shockwaves threaten bonds; so, if we value our bonds, we must hold tightly. Individuals who send out chaotic shockwaves may be, and I believe often are, lightly bonded, even unbonded — isolated in their own universe and frequently, if unknowingly, very lonely.

Holding out hope may be donning a robe of futility. Engaging in the orderly holding tightly to what we have will resist change, but change will still happen. Otherwise, the only way to resist change is with active resistance – sending out one’s own shockwaves. That, of course, may precipitate retaliatory shockwaves aimed at breaking your hold on what and whom you hold on to. Aligning with many others to create a more shocking impact may be strategic. Yet, this may get an enlarged blowback and a greater challenge to many more close bonds. For every thinking individual, there must be a reckoning of what is at stake and what there is to gain. There will be change and it may be challenging. Bonds may well be broken. Of course, in time, all things will be wiped away. In the meantime, how to respond is always based in speculation. “Time will heal all wounds.” “When good people do nothing, bad things happen.” “It can’t happen here.” “People only change when it hurts.”

Is the ship sinking? Have you counted the lifeboats?

Filed under Philosophy, Reflections, Social Commentary Tagged with

The Shortness of Days

16 December 2022 Leave a comment

The luxuries and many of the essentials of our lives today will be paid for by our children and grandchildren, and by their children and their grandchildren. For them no birds will sing, no flowers will bloom, no kind winds will blow. For them will only be the dry moaning of a dying world.

This will be your legacy, your soul’s fate. Thinking only of yourself, your family, your possessions is a bargain with the Devil. Perhaps it is just the Cosmic Balance of all things. Even the best intensions of the gods may come to bad ends through the actions their wills have inspired.

Perhaps we are just tiny pawns in an infinitely vast game of galactic chess.
Humanity as an act of futility.

Filed under Environmental issues, Philosophy, Social Commentary Tagged with , ,

Profundity

3 July 2022 Leave a comment

Waking this morning, feeling my mortality,
Not just an awareness, but a presence,
An actual thing,
Like the walls and floor and ceiling of this room.
I, a portrait of myself, framed by my mortality.
I am a portrait of me, lying in my bed, doing
Nothing really,
Not waiting for anything,
Not expecting anything.
Nothing’s coming. Just
Lying in my bed,
A still life portrayed – Dormeuse.
Le dormeur mortel,
But not really asleep. Just
Lying in my bed.
There are the sounds of wind in the leaves,
And the spatter of a lingering rain.
A light breakfast today, I think,
For no other reason than to have
A reason to get up.

July 2022

Filed under Philosophy, Poetry Tagged with

Everything Means Nothing: A Ponder

29 June 2022 Leave a comment

Everything means nothing.
Reality is meaningless.
Everything is everything;
But just one thing.
Consciousness,
Which consists of nothing itself,
Gives meaning to all things.

When we are aware of a thing,
That thing exists.
It is not a separate part
Of Reality, however.
Things only exist because
We have brought them into
Our reality.
All things then are constructs
Created by consciousness.
We create all things
And endow them with purpose,
Or no purpose.
Purposeless things, however,
Tend to sink back into
The homogeny of the whole.
Purpose then
Or lack thereof
Serves the intent of the consciousness;
We think we can
Or actually can
Benefit from it.
Purpose implies that all the things
We have or could have brought into existence
Have intent,
And therefore
By extension,
Everything is intentional.

Do we have the snake or maybe reason
Devouring itself by the tail?

Unless one is truly a solipsist,
He or she, or she or he, or they runs into trouble
When one assumes
We have perceived Reality,
When we have actually created
Or perhaps only defined
Our own unique reality,
As has every other consciousness in the universe.

Being one god
Among six and a half billion gods
Is complicated.
Can everyone actually be wrong
About the real reality?

“Everyone!”

Now there’s something to ponder.

Reading Guido Morselli, Dissipatio H. G., and starting to sound a lot like him, but without the references to obscure philosophers. I must read more escapist literature, or Jane Austin to forestall this sort of mind wandering, lest I meet the Minotaur one day.

29 June 2022

Filed under Foolery, Philosophy, Poetry, Reflections Tagged with ,

Surviving the Covid-19 Lockdown

9 April 2020 Leave a comment

I was preparing what I would contribute to our online meeting this evening. It springs from what I have been thinking about and what has pretty much got me down recently. I see how people around me are stepping forward to help out and be united in surviving Covid-19, and I see how politicians are willing to let people die in the advance of their agendas.

Our weekly meetings were supposed to be about “surviving the pandemic and exploiting its opportunities.” I thought it would help people feel more connected and positive by sharing successes and spotlighting hope. Perhaps more control over what people say… Perhaps a tighter seminar format… Yet venting is important too, but it seems to descend into recrimination and emotional stagnation.

Now I wonder if that isn’t just us being who we are. Maybe we are masters of our own doom; we just have no good map for choosing which paths to take. Perhaps all we can do is take it one step at a time and continue to move forward and accept what comes and move on.

My contribution for this evening

Getting through:

Do: Yard work, bike rides and reading…and Prime Video

Avoid: Lakes and parkways, Millennials with little kids on bikes on the sidewalks, the news

Getting on:

We speak of coming out of this better in some way. In that statement are two assumptions that contradict history.

First is the assumption that we will come through the medical and financial crises and be free of any remnant of it. No. We carry our history with us forever; we will be forever affected by it. There is no getting over it. It would be like saying we have passed through the shift to agrarianism or the Industrial Revolution, and are no longer carrying the affects with us. This pandemic is miniscule by comparison, but it will be with us always.

Second is the assumption that humans will be changed by this. The only thing that changes about us is the scale and scope of our actions. We’re using Zoom which has boomed from the situation and increased our capacity to interconnect, and it has made us more easily and more often the victims of invasive and malicious behaviors. The Great Plague of the 14th century did bring an end to the Hundred Years War. 600 hundred years later, the French and Germans were back at it, again. During that plague, a business arose in body disposal. The carriers of the dead were paid per corpse, some of which were only near death. Those carriers would leave articles of clothing along the streets to promote further infection. What changes is how we exploit situations: for good or bad. And Good and Bad are entirely subjective. We only believe they are absolutes.

As humans we have always been vessels of great promise and disgusting wretchedness. That isn’t going to change and there’s plenty of evidence of that out there now. Get set for new ways to do what we have been doing for at least the last 5 millennia. It is the tension between our extremes that defines us. It is the conflict the drives the plot of our story. And where each of us comes down on that conflict defines our character.

Filed under Philosophy, Reflections, Social Commentary Tagged with , ,

To Be of a Place

9 February 2020 Leave a comment

What does it mean to be of a place?
Is who we are, where we are?
How can we know ourselves otherwise?
What does it mean to be of a place, of a country?
Is the man next to me just me again,
Because we stand in the same place?
Can I not be as a man who is far away,
Because he stands in a distant place?
I have stood at the mouth of the canyon,
And contemplated my place in the world.

If where I am in any way makes me who I am,
Then the more places I go;
The more of me there is.
I am enlarged.
I have stood on the bank of the river
And looked across at another country.
I have stood at the mouth of the canyon,
And contemplated a larger world in me.

February 2020

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I’m a Yank

11 September 2018 Leave a comment

I’m a Yank, but I don’t feel any pride, any satisfaction in the winning of the Civil war, only the satisfaction that the slaves were freed and the country was reunited.
It was the sorriest time in our history. We went to war with ourselves. Hating and killing our fellow Americans was the bottom. I can’t admire bragging about winning. I can only be proud that we put ourselves back together, not when we were trying to tear ourselves apart. Good goals were accomplished, but many bad things happened. The cost was horrendous, and worsened by the economic devastation of the South following our bloody victory.
I hardly wonder that a Southern would feel outrage at the pulling down of statues, when our Minnesota Capitol and Washington are adorned with Union soldiers. It must look like 150+ years of gloating—the ultimate poor sportsmanship.
This country has some growing up to do. Arrogant winners make sore loser. Defeat on the battlefield is bad enough. It isn’t necessary to take their honor as well. We were better to the Japanese following WWII than we were to the South after the Civil war. Can’t we show the world we’re better than that?
All the memorials of the war should be honored, but put away. Leave the memorials to the reuniting and the freeing of the slaves. Commemorate the good stuff.

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Existential Change

26 March 2018 Leave a comment

We generally change in response to what the past has done to the present, but frequently, we then ignore, even deny, what the present will do to the future. One day our past damages will exceed our resource for planned change. Ultimately, the grinding force of universal changes will sweep everything in, but we can’t do much about that. Meanwhile, how we change ourselves is ultimately our responsibility, and a clear definition of who we are.

From star dust to star dust, we are nothing special in the cosmos. There is no specialness, except what we create in the scope of our existence. In the year of a planet’s existence, life is but a millisecond, sentience a nanosecond, and then it’s over. In galactic terms, all sentient populations are effectively alone, incommunicably distant in time and space. The Here and Now is the universe we live in. Humans are all the sentient beings we will encounter and each of us is the only being of any kind we will fully encounter. Each of us lives in her or his own universe in effect. We can live there alone or we can try to merge into other universes, but our knowledge is our existential limit.

The Universe is everything we know; beyond our knowledge is Nothing. Heaven and hell are just our hopes for and fears of the Nothing. The Here and Now is the only thing we have. It is the only thing we can effectively change, and the effect will be the next here and now. Hopes and fears peer into nothingness. Only doing changes our course from one here and now to the next. Only learning grows our universe. We learn from what has been to predict what might be and that allows us to shape a plan.

A plan is a hopeful outcome of a calculated change, a shift in trajectory, an action taken or a stasis maintained. A plan guesses at the shape that will emerge from the nothingness of the future. As the future shapes itself into the here and now and slides into the past, we assess the accuracy of our planning.

Ultimately, each of us manages this process in his or her own universe, individually or in commune with others. Like vehicles on the roads, our plans and our changes will impact others, and others’ plans and changes will impact us. And like the galaxy, the solar system and the planet, the roads offer no support for the hopeful plans of the drivers. For all we can know, the road may end in a great void just over the next rise, or the truck on our left may suddenly swerve to the right. The only laws that truly apply to drivers’ planned changes are the laws of physics. What we see and hear and perhaps feel from the driver’s seat is all we know along with some rules of the road we have been led to believe. It is our known universe. It is our immediate knowledge of the here and now.

Knowledge is all we can have any faith in. Everything else is guess work, and its more courageous brother, belief, each weighting the wager placed on an outcome. Belief is not knowledge. Belief is a shroud to disguise ignorance. If knowledge enlarges our universe and who we are, then ignorance diminishes those.

“This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!” cried the Spirit…”

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

Gaining knowledge moves our here and now closer to heaven, while ignorance moves us closer to hell. The greater knowledge is on Earth then, the closer we are to heaven on Earth. Humans’ incredible capacity for learning is what most elevates us on the planet; not-learning then is bestial.

Learn to live.

Filed under Philosophy, Social Commentary Tagged with

Never a Truer Word

28 January 2018 Leave a comment

Things are not going well with the world. I have recently pondered the overwhelming, perhaps overshadowing, general sense of dysfunction, this decay of civility we now endure. It blares out of politics, economies, technologies and even organized religions. It erodes our quality of life, our access to necessities, our feelings of safety, our sense of humanity. As is natural, we strike out at the things that threaten us, usually people whom we are predisposed not to like. And we declare our injuries, real and anticipated, demanding justice, yet accepting revenge which is more tangible.

Even when justice and/or revenge is achieved, the sense of impending doom remains and seems to envelope us in a vague fog of unknowing. A place of victimization and powerlessness becomes the abode of tens of millions, even hundreds of millions. Much of what we hear when we listen are the screams of rage and fear. Reality is cracking.

There is a churning cloud of words and images hovering behind, around and over people, a cloud so unstable and so filled with threat, yet so impervious to any efforts to quell it or fend it off, that it can only be called the Darkness. It is as if the Void and the Chaos that were banished in Creation have truly crept back in, not from the starry heavens, offended by arrogant space venturers, but from the inner depths of the very people whom it afflicts.

It is as if malignant insecurity, buried under the nurturing soil of civilization is reaching up from its grave to fuel the chaos of misinformation, accusation, incrimination and virulent conflict that surrounds us. Nothing is as it seems; everything is confuted with evil forces reckoning to destroy each of us, isolated and confused. Yet, it is from within ourselves that this malignancy originates; it is our own internal dysfunctions, made manifest and fed on by parasites of power, that have created the Darkness that threatens us. We feed the turmoil we dread.

Walt Kelly’s words have never been more true, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” (Pogo, 1971)

Pogo quote

 

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