err on the side of being right

There is one thing nagging at me in this whole Syria situation and that is that we need to see the conclusive evidence that Assad delivered the poison gas.  While he sounds to me like the kind of low-life that would do something like this, the fact that we warned him not to step across that line and he did, anyway, makes me wonder why he didn’t commit suicide in some way where he had more control.  When we warned him not to do it, he had to know that it was not an empty threat.  He seems to be more than able to slaughter his people with conventional weapons, so why did he use the gas?

The assumption that al Qaeda has a role in the Syrian opposition makes me wonder if they had something to do with this.  For example, did they have a way to deliver gas to an area the Syrian government was shelling to make it look like Assad did it?  After all, don’t the al Qaeda guys have a reputation for putting innocent civilians in harm’s way to try to give themselves a tactical advantage?  How do we know they wouldn’t try something like this?

I am pretty sure the President would not jump in with both feet if he was not pretty sure his feet were going to land on the side of being right, but I just have a bad feeling that something just doesn’t add up.  Perhaps it is because there was that thing in Iraq a few years back where Saddam had the weapons of mass destruction and our president at the time was cocksure that he had to act, and, well, you know the rest of the story.

This morning the Red Chinese were using that same argument and when I heard them saying it I figured I had to be wrong, but after weighing it all, I would like to have all of the facts.

If we have the evidence, then let’s throw the Tomahawks at them and then pass that evidence to the Russians afterward, but let’s make sure we have the evidence before we light them up.  Let’s not get dragged into something unless we have clarity.

11,346,595 people like mitt romney

I signed up for a Facebook account this week so I could monitor my granddaughter's daily doings.  Facebook gives me daily suggestions of who I might like.  Today one was Willard Romney.

11,346,595 people like him, which is currently 11,346,592 more than like me.

Needless to say I did not-- and do not-- like him.

I just had to get that off my chest.

turn on the WABAC machine, sherman. OK there I said it after all

Last week, before I time travelled, I went online and did some research.  As I examined my life, I knew it was necessary to go back to where I came from.  Up to now, life has been anticipation:  looking forward to what was going to happen; working toward a future.  Now, life is beginning to be a reflection, looking back at what was and trying to make some sense of it.  Oh, I still anticipate a future.  I have not stopped in the present with no plans for what will be, but where I came from and what I did now seems almost as important as where I am going.

A few years ago I went back to Alden Street and viewed the lot where the first house I lived in used to be, so I already knew the house was no longer there.  However, it was not just the place where I slept and ate, it was the neighborhood where I lived to which I needed to return.  In addition to the cradle where my infant architectural history was nurtured, I needed to wander among the other structures and places where I walked as a lad.

Because I had a couple of paper routes in the general neighborhood, I knew that the big houses across the street were where the rich lived at the time—an area called Parkwood—and I did some research.  What I found piqued my curiosity so I had reason to fire up the WABAC.

Parkwood was not a departure from other upscale areas of Kansas City, with winding streets that didn’t form the normal grids with streets at ninety-degree angles that I was used to.  Parkwood had streets that formed sweeping wyes with semi-triangular islands with flowers and bushes.  This was nothing out of the ordinary for me.  I had seen Westheight in Kansas City, Kansas; Mission Hills and the Country Club Plaza, so I figured this is just how all the upscale areas were built.  However, my research led me to Sid J. Hare.  Sid and his son S, Herbert Hare formed Hare and Hare, a landscape architecture company.  Parkwood was Hare’s first project of note.  Later Hare and Hare laid out Westheight.  J.C. Nichols saw Parkwood and Westheight and hired Hare and Hare to do a shopping area for him—the Country Club Plaza.  Many years later Hare did Mission Woods among a plethora of other things, including the University of Kansas, Wyandotte High School, Loose Park, the Truman Library, ad infinidum.  I have been to most of them and I see the similarities.

So, I set the dials on the WABAC machine and I travelled back to the day.

Parkwood had fallen into disrepair and become a bad area of town fifty years ago or more so I was expecting a ghetto.  I was surprised to see a number of the houses well maintained with yards trimmed and landscaping clipped.  The islands were all weeded and flowers were in bloom.  There were some houses in disrepair with elderly cars parked by them but I was surprised by the condition of the area.  There were four upscale-looking guys on the tennis court playing doubles and there were no cars around so I am assuming the walked there.  So far, so good.

I drove back down Quindaro Boulevard and was surprised to find a couple of blocks of new houses, some under construction, and drove west to 17^th Street and went south toward Alden.  For some reason, many of the streets in the old neighborhood are one way, so I had to drive around for a while before I could get myself where I could drive north down Alden.  I parked in front of the vacant lot that used to be the old homestead and took some photos.

A neighbor come out of her house and asked me if I was the guy who was going to cut down the tree.  I told her I was not a tree trimmer and explained that I used to live there fifty years ago and was taking photos of where I used to live.  She came out and talked to me for a while and I told her about where my old house was and the garage.  Her house, sitting next door to where I used to live was two years old.  There were three new houses on the block that were not there last time I visited.  I told her I was going to walk around the lot if she didn’t mind and she told me to be careful.  I’m not sure of what I should be careful, but she probably figured I was a doddering elderly person who might fall and not be able to get up.

Anyway, the yard that seemed so large when I was a child, seemed miniscule to my elderly eyes.  I walked to the middle of the back yard, where second base had been in our waffle ball games and looked toward where the outfield fence had been and then home plate.  I remembered it took a mighty swing to put that waffle ball over the fence when I was a kid, but now I could almost spit from second base and hit the outfield wall or home plate.  And, I have worked on construction sites where there were gentlemen who could put some serious distance between their lips and their spittle, their mucus or their sputum, and I was not a guy who could match their distance, or even spit very far.

I took some pictures of what was now so I could have the record to compare in my mind to what used to be.  Few landmarks were the same.  None of the yard was recognizable.  There was a large walnut tree where the house had been.  My knowledge of trees was that walnuts take a long time to grow, so the house must have been razed many years ago.  I was hoping, much like Ponce de Leon that I had found the wellspring of my youth, but though I stood among the ghosts of the past, I was still old.  I guess the problem was that nothing was the same.  Even the lay of the land was different.  The side yard, which used to be a serious enough slope we could use it for sledding in winter snows, had been dozed to a lazy grade.   The front door of the house was on the main floor and the back door in the basement opened to a level just below the level of the back yard.  Now the grade was more uniform.  The landmarks of my youth were gone and things were so changed that it was hard to determine the exact place they used to be.  After all, it has been fifty years since I walked these grounds.  A half a century can erase some memories.

I guess I wanted some moment of epiphany—some recollection that brought me back to a time when a young boy ran the width and breadth of this property.  It didn’t happen.  In one regard it was good to be back but it was almost like coming home to a place I had never been.  There were some good times I had in this house and in this yard, but there was no house and the yard, for all I know, might have been six feet below me, forever covered by the bulldozer’s blade.

It was melancholy to be home but just as good to be going.  It was home no more and the WABAC had other destinations to which it would take me.  It was time to travel again and I will detail those further adventures later.

a year in and what i know

Unexamined life is not worth living.  Socrates said that.  Okay, Plato said that but he was just repeating what Socrates said.  I am a year into this retirement thing and what I know is what I know, and what I know is that retirement has given me the chance to examine life.  My examination has led me to the conclusion that I have missed a lot during my lifetime because I was busy working.  I think I prioritized things in approximately the right order, but I think I put too much emphasis on and, consequently, too much thinking time devoted to my various jobs. 

In one regard, my career gave me the opportunity to have a meager amount of money saved so I could afford to retire in the first place, but it has taken me all of the first year to wind down.  I still find myself prioritizing life like I prioritized my time at work.  That is to say that there is never enough time to do everything one wants to do and some things have to be glossed over or relegated to the bottom of the pending file until the realization hits that there just isn’t enough time to do them.  There is always the feeling that maybe, had I spent another ten hours a week working that I would have gotten them done and one or two of them would have resulted in something worthwhile.

In retirement I have little trouble pushing those thoughts aside.  If it is important I will get it done:  If not, it will wait until tomorrow or next week, or next month.

In Wampeters, Foma and Grandfalloons, Kurt Vonnegut says the following about Socrates’ quote:

 

“Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?”

 

It is my opinion that, since our lives are viewed from the point of view of our own egos, we may not even know that some of our lives are clunkers.  My own life had its low points, and many things that I should have or would have done differently, I would like to think that my own life would stand the test, but now is the time to examine it.  And my first examination was to go back in time.  The next entry will be the detail of that time travel.  If I was a dog with a vast knowledge of history and physics and I had a geeky boy as a master whose name was Sherman, I would probably say, “Turn on the WABAC machine, Sherman.”  Since I’m not and I don’t I will just say, “Until next time…”

I stole this photo from Wiki.  It depicts

Mr. Peabody and Sherman entering the WABAC machine

 

bronco bama, part two

Over the weekend some rodeo clown at the Missouri state fair put on an Obama mask and stuck a broomstick up his ass while someone got on the public address system and asked if the crowd wanted to see Obama trampled by a bull.

Ha, ha.

It goes without saying that there are a lot of people in Missouri who hate the federal government.  It also goes without saying that there are a lot of people in the show-me state who are still upset about that emancipation proclamation thing, and are not fond of black people.  It doesn’t need to be mentioned that there are Missourians who don’t buy into this gay rights thing (the symbolism of the broomstick up the ass, in case you didn’t catch the humor).

The State and the State Fair have apologized all over themselves, as they should have, and they are telling us that someone hijacked the microphone and blurted out their own racist anti-American venom.  If so, it was just a breach of security, but I am hearing too many people saying that it was all done in good clean fun and no harm was done.  Unfortunately, I am detecting a lack of sensitivity here. 

They interviewed some hillbilly today that suggested that, and this is just a paraphrase that, “Last time I looked we still had freedom of speech.”

He is correct.  As a matter of fact we do still have freedom of speech.  Freedom of speech is when someone in the crowd wears an Obama mask, stuffs a broomstick up his ass and carries a sign that says “I hate queers, blacks and America.”

Or if someone carries a sign with a swastika with the words, “Seig heil.”  That would be some dumb-ass stuff, but freedom of speech allows a Nazi to do it.

It would also be freedom of speech if someone carried a sign that said “Down with heterosexual white people.”

When someone shows up to protest, they are protected by their first amendment rights, but hijacking the microphone and the event goes beyond freedom of speech.

Would it have been in good clean fun and would it have been freedom of speech if someone would have dressed a rodeo clown like Jesus Christ and shouted over the public address system:

“Allah Akbar!  Who wants to see Christ the infidel trampled by a bull?”

Well, maybe some would think that was just clean fun.