View From Here

This is a heady topic. A topic easily misstated and misunderstood. It is an issue that is easily overthought and manipulated as well. I’ll try to avoid those pitfalls. Defining the good life is a good place to start. A simple statement may do, such as: the good life is one lived openly and honestly in relation to other people near and far. This should be simple enough to not need any declarative comments explaining what it means. Unfortunately, living openly and honestly is extremely difficult to do sometimes. I offer this very personal experience: I am gay. I did not want to be gay. I wanted a normal life with family, purposeful career and house. In the 1940’s and 50’s, gay was not spoken. Kids confronting puberty and what it means did not have printed material or counselors available familiar with gay matters. Any ‘decision’ made pertinent on what to do about gay feelings were made in a vacuum and mostly ignored and pushed far away. Those ‘decisions’ often led to problems that ...

Maintaining focus on the future and one’s purpose in it is a very large challenge. We all know people or have reliable stories of them who retired to nothing, lazed on the couch/sofa/davenport, watched TV and napped. Every day. In six months, they died and that was that. Becoming a couch potato is unhealthy. At first it may seem enticing compared to a lifetime of work, deadlines and reporting to others. But soon the body begins to lose vitality and mobility. And boredom stalks every waking hour. Boredom leads to a sense of uselessness. That leads to valuelessness. Soon, the will to live wanes. Death follows thereafter, often with haste. The trick in retirement is to feed what interests and rivets the brain’s attention. Finding tasks, large or small, to tackle soon becomes purpose. Each of us is capable of doing much more than we think. A letter to the editor of a local publication is one small step, joining a local organization working towards a goal you believe in, is another st...

This is the time we remember aching for. A time to relax, escape calendar time wars, to cease the constant movement from home to office and back, as well as to and from the offices of others. Then there is the movement to and from client offices, conferences and so many other trips.  Constant time pressures, all of them a conflict with family commitments and care. And then there is the desire to do things we don’t have time for, like fishing, boating, camping and other family explorations. What about travel to far-off places? That, too. And hobbies as well. Books, too, those we wanted to read but had no time for. I remember all of that well. A life lived half in one world and half in another. So, retirement was the end-all and be-all we hoped for. Now that I’m here, were the aches realistic?   Well, no, they weren’t. I ended my career owning my own business. It was consulting, and I made a good income from time spent with clients. But the adage is true: when working, t...

Public schooling runs through high school as mandatory. Any education after that is voluntary and provided by both public and private institutions. Most are supported in part by federal funds in the form of various grants and funding programs and financial aid. States and counties fund the rest with the addition of student paid tuition and fees. The decision to continue one’s education is a private matter. The student, whether a youth of minority age, or adult, decides to continue broadening their understanding of the world around them. This may involve a wide range of study and classes. A single public speaking event may contain the desired information and guidance, or it may be a course lasting several weeks. It may be a formal degree program such as a college bachelor’s degree. Community colleges exist to support continuing learning. Their classes may also be arranged as a single event, or a course construct. They even provide associate degrees leading to a bachelor’s degree if ...

Netanyahu : the ogre of the Middle East is Netanyahu. He has power from his people because he represents strength and aggression with their enemies. The only problem is, he creates the unrest that goads the enemy to push forward. That is Hamas’ story. It is also the core of Netanyahu’s political clout. Take that away from him and he is left with nothing. He is a crook and uncontrolled man. He is bad for Israel even if they don’t recognize that yet. Once removed from office, Israel has a chance at building lasting peace for itself and region. It will take patience and a lot of diplomacy. Both are needed to build lasting peace. Violence only creates more violence. Dump Netanyahu. Gaza, Palestinian State : two autonomous states are needed for peace in the Gaza/Israel region. One state of Palestine, and another of Israel. One exists; the other does not. Peace will come if we give it a chance and work through international networks and the United Nations. Israel ought not have hegemony in...

Indigenous Day It continues to stun me that my education was distinctively lacking in American Indian history. The thousands of years they lived autonomously in North America, made it their land (because it was!) and created culture so rich that it still exists today. Tens of millions native Americans existed when the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts. Maybe more than 50 million. Mostly gone, killed; certainly, herded away from their homelands to desert spaces totally alien to them and their way of life. Our treatment of these people remains a blot on our history and so-called values. Stunning. Wicked. Evil to the core. I get it that millions of Americans (all white and of European stock) were afraid of native Americans. I understand their fear of night raids and murders of farmers and their families. But the problem was caused by their leaders, their culture, their ignorance. All white citizens were complicit with the extermination of the Indians and their cultur...

We live in a place. We work in a place. Most of these places are separate from each other. You and I were born in a specific town, another place. We assign value to these places being special to our lives. Perhaps that value is large; maybe small; but it holds a special place in our minds. I was born in Pasadena, California. I knew that city a bit; not a lot; but our church was there, my doctor was there, the family car was bought in a dealership in Pasadena, and so forth. We lived, however, in Altadena, a suburb immediately north of Pasadena and butting up against the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. We looked up from our backyard to the Mount Wilson Observatory. We shopped locally, went to school in Altadena schools, and had a lot of friends and neighbors in Altadena. Now Altadena is a place in my mind; it was home for many years. It is long remembered and special to me. Of lesser significance is Inyokern, California, a Mojave Desert town near the Naval Ordinance Test Stat...

October 5th marked the 15 th anniversary of this blog. Originally it started as a strategy for me to avoid placing my opinions in the local newspaper I served as managing editor. The strategy worked very well, and the paper continued to focus on local issues with only a mention to regional and state issues as local concerns. The blog became my way of unloading thoughts that I had as an aging white guy. Back then I was 67. Today I’m 82 plus a few months. So the blog is now an unfolding journey of thoughts as an elder American continues to age. Gracefully or not! Looking back to high school and college years, I was anxious to get started on my adult years. I wanted to fix what I saw was wrong with our society. I wanted to leave this country and world a better place than what I found it to be back then. Don’t most of us wish this? I know I was not alone then in these feelings. And so, I began my career with a view forward. How would my work in any job of the moment make the world b...

Well, here’s what happened after the last blog post. The condo elevator was fixed but too late to visit the dealer. Monday afternoon, Pam took me to the dealer and they showed me a used 2012 Prius with 139,000 miles on it. Clean and well equipped, the car was acceptable at the price. I said yes. They bought my non-working car, paid off the loan and made the purchase possible. Pam loaned me some money for a downpayment to keep the loan payments affordable for now. I drove the new used car home late in the day. Still learning the differences and will for some weeks. The trick to this transaction was to dispose of the old car and replace it with a good working used one that promised reliability for a few more months or years until I can buy a newer model.   At my age this is the only workable solution. I am still active and engaged in life and my driving skills after 2 million miles are still quite good. Age suggests limits, of course, and I observe them with practicality. No re...

Friday, Pam and I planned a short getaway in the country. The goal was lunch in Oregon, Illinois, on the Rock River and a beautiful town. We left around 11:30 am and leisurely headed west. We entered Sycamore, another beautiful and familiar town, and the red light came on the dashboard. A huge red triangle with an exclamation mark in it. I had seen it before in July just as the car died on the way home from church. That incident required a tow and hefty repair bill. I immediately turned off the road into the parking lot of a familiar restaurant, the Park Way. Being lunch time, we gave the car a chance to settle, went in for lunch, and considered our options. Rather than chancing the car starting and dying on us again, this time on a country road alone, we called my dealer, and he recommended being towed to Dekalb’s Toyota dealer. We did. The service was quick and soon the car was being diagnosed. This was the second time this issue has caused a roadside problem, so I no longer had ...

This topic will sound old. But it isn’t. It is new. Every time it happens, it is new. Sometimes that is daily, maybe weekly. Often it is more than daily. What is this woe? Well, take a deep breath. It’s rapidly changing technology. This week, I routinely began to post my blog. But the Word document carefully written days before, was not retrievable. I could not find it. Anywhere. I looked for another document to fill the space but couldn’t find the next prepared post item. It too, was not available for retrieval. I scratched my head and spent hours searching through my technology platforms. Nothing arose to solve the problem. I stewed about the situation for a few more hours then told my good friend Pam what had happened. That evening, before supper, she noodled through my computer system and came up with a solution. She found and retrieved the missing documents and saved them to a place I could easily access. I did so this morning and posted my Monday blog one day late. As I sle...

This topic will sound old. But it isn’t. It is new. Every time it happens, it is new. Sometimes that is daily, maybe weekly. Often it is more than daily. What is this woe? Well, take a deep breath. It’s rapidly changing technology. This week, I routinely began to post my blog. But the Word document carefully written days before, was not retrievable. I could not find it. Anywhere. I looked for another document to fill the space but couldn’t find the next prepared post item. It too, was not available for retrieval. I scratched my head and spent hours searching through my technology platforms. Nothing arose to solve the problem. I stewed about the situation for a few more hours then told my good friend Pam what had happened. That evening, before supper, she noodled through my computer system and came up with a solution. She found and retrieved the missing documents and saved them to a place I could easily access. I did so this morning and posted my Monday blog one day late. As I slept wit...

Many years ago, the letters from my parents began to turn dark. Dad complained that mom was quite negative and seemed moody. Her own words were moody and dark, but the theme became clear one day when she listed her friends and neighbors who had recently died.  My folks chose to live in a retirement community with a 55-age restriction. Most of their neighbors were much older than that, including them at ages 75 and 78. It dawned on me that this is a consequence of living in an age restricted community. An aged society ages more visibly with the resulting death experience being frequent. This thought didn’t occur to my parents when they moved into the community. Natural it remains, however. So, I mentioned to dad that mom probably was experiencing elder depression. He scheduled an appointment with her general physician and appropriate meds were prescribed. Years later my mother described this doctor’s visit as one in which dad and the doctor thought she was crazy! Hardly, just experi...