Nothing Is Simple

Thoughts About Color

noreply@blogger.com (texaslupine) — Sat, 19 Aug 2023 16:06:00 +0000

Last week at my local pharmacy, I spotted something I hadn’t seen before. A box of Crayolas labeled “Colors of the World,” with 24 crayons representing different skin tones.

An Internet search tells me this set hit the market about three years ago. (I’m not a parent or a teacher. I don’t always keep up.) Colors of the World is an expansion on the set of eight “Multicultural” Crayolas released in 1992. Which was itself an improvement on the days when there was just one skin-toned Crayola labeled FLESH.

Yeah, I’m old enough to remember that. A crayon that came real close to matching my Anglo-American skin. One I could use to color arms, legs and faces of the people in my pictures.

We hear a lot about systemic racism and unconscious bias. I see that FLESH Crayola as a classic example. I really don’t think the folks at Crayola were looking for ways to make black, brown and other-colored kids feel left out. I think they just didn’t see those kids. Crayola sold its first box of colors in 1903. For the first half-century or so, the company was no doubt dominated by white people. I’ll bet they were mostly decent people, dreaming up art supplies to brighten children’s lives. When they imagined little hands holding those crayons, they saw the pale hands of their own kids.

Before I tell the rest of this story, I should explain that I learned to read at an early age, well before I was old enough to go to school. I impressed Mom and Dad by reading street signs, Little Golden Books, the backs of cereal boxes. I read the labels on my Crayola wrappers. (BLUE VIOLET looked a lot like VIOLET BLUE until you got it on the page.) So I have a distinct memory of the day I reached for a FLESH Crayola and found it inexplicably labeled PEACH.

Hmmm, I thought. Must’ve grabbed the wrong crayon. I sifted through the set. FLESH was nowhere to be found, but this PEACH sure did look like the same color. As a devotee of the printed word, I was puzzled. FLESH and PEACH each had five letters; both ended in “H”. Had I just been imagining FLESH all along?

I hadn’t, of course. An article in Huffpost tells how a social researcher wrote to Crayola in 1962. The letter pointed out what should have been obvious: humans come in different shades, and some kids in their social experiments picked on other kids who weren’t colored “FLESH.” Not long after, the company changed that label from FLESH to PEACH.

I would have been six, going on seven, in 1962. I may have been older when I noticed the change; it’s not as if I got a new box of Crayolas every year. At that age, I knew perfectly well that people came in different colors. Still, it hadn’t seemed strange to me that the FLESH Crayola just happened to match my skin. Systemic racism. It’s all around us.

Change happens, but can be awfully slow. Thirty years elapsed between the renaming of FLESH and release of the Multicultural Crayolas. More than two decades later, we get Colors of the World. Those who follow such trends mostly see it as a positive change, but Crayola’s CEO took some heat for what he said in the 2020 news release:

“With the world growing more diverse than ever before, Crayola hopes our new
Colors of the World crayons will increase representation…”

“We have always been here,” groused one Twitter pundit. “It says a lot that the CEO of Crayola has only just now started to see us.”

Change comes slowly, and sometimes it seems to run backward. Looking over what I’ve just written, I’m thinking maybe I should have kept my thoughts to myself. What if some red-state politician reads this, decides Crayolas are too “woke,” and bans their use in public schools?

Mammogram

noreply@blogger.com (texaslupine) — Thu, 20 Apr 2023 15:30:00 +0000

Here I am at The Breast Center at St. David’s, waiting for my annual mammogram.

I’ve been coming here for several years. In some ways, it’s nicer than the general imaging center where I used to get my exams. Instead of those awkward hospital gowns, we get real bathrobes with tie belts and pockets. We wait in a Women’s Lounge furnished with comfortable chairs. A round-faced woman with a brown ponytail is here ahead of me, sitting quietly. We nod, but don’t speak.

There are two changing rooms. I enter one and exchange my shirt and bra for a robe. Deposit personal belongings in locker #10 as assigned. Last time I was here, they gave me a wristband with a key. Now the locks are electronic; I have to punch a code on a keypad. It takes two tries to get the locker open.

This lounge used to have free tea and coffee, along with magazines to take a patient’s mind off the impending procedure. All that went away with COVID-19. There’s a TV mounted high on one wall, but it isn’t on today.

There are worse places to sit and wait. But I don’t like being here. I don’t suppose anyone does.

A technician comes for the round-faced woman. Other patients come and go, changing into robes or back into street clothes. A stocky woman with short gray hair. A tall, lanky gal in runner’s sandals. A classy blonde wearing a watch and multiple bracelets. We come in different sizes and shapes, but we’re all here for the same reason.

When my turn comes, they’ll take me to an examining room and ask me to slip off one sleeve of my robe. The technician will introduce herself so that she won’t be a complete stranger when she grabs my tit with both hands and positions it on the imaging plate. She’ll manipulate my shoulder and armpit, putting them where they won’t block the view, and then lower the compression plate until my breast is smashed between two hard surfaces. We’ll set up for two sets of pictures – one horizontal, one vertical – then repeat the whole process on the other side.

None of this is exactly fun, but it isn’t the main reason I hate this exam. The real reason is this: Every time I walk into this building, I face the possibility of having my life turned upside down.

It happens. On several occasions in the past 25 years, I’ve been called back for additional imaging. Twice, I’ve been sent for biopsies. I have a titanium clip to mark the spot where a suspicious calcium deposit was excised in 2008; an inch-long scar where a benign lump was removed several years before that.

None of those glitches turned out to be anything life-threatening. I’m lucky; I know it, and I have no right to whine. Who wouldn’t prefer a false alarm to a confirmed case of cancer?

Still, a false alarm doesn’t make for a happy day. When you get the call that says, “We need to take a closer look” … when they send you to a different waiting room because the radiologist wants to talk to you … when you’re at home biting your nails and awaiting biopsy results, you don’t yet know it’s a false alarm. And I always imagine the worst.

So I’m here today at the Breast Center, wishing all this would just go away. I remind myself that there’s no history of breast cancer in my family, that my last four mammograms came back normal. That even the ones that weren’t quite normal turned out to be nothing serious in the end.

Thoughts like this can help settle my nerves, but they aren’t helping now.

Let’s face it: if I knew for sure there was nothing to worry about, I wouldn’t be here, would I?

The Melendy Quartet - by Elizabeth Enright

noreply@blogger.com (texaslupine) — Mon, 09 Jan 2017 03:18:00 +0000

My Favorite Childhood Reads

With memories of this fictional family dancing in my mind, I Google “Melendy” and see that this series of books is still out there. In multiple printings, plus an audio version that parents can play in the car on long road trips with their kids.

I’m pleased to know that. I was maybe in third grade when I found The Saturdays at my town library. The kids in the Melendy family (Mona, Rush, Randy and Oliver) get bored at home on weekends, so they form a kind of mutual association. Each Saturday, they’ll pool their allowances and give the money to one sibling to spend as s/he chooses. In the 1940s, when these books were written, a couple of bucks would have been enough to get somewhere – especially if you lived in a big city with public transportation, as the Melendys did. The chapters of the book describe their individual adventures. When six-year-old Oliver’s turn comes, nobody really expects him to board a bus and head off by himself -- but he does, with interesting results.

In the next book, the family moves to the country. They live with their father, who's a fairly cool guy, and a housekeeper/nanny named Cuffy, in a house that’s old and peculiar enough to harbor interesting secrets (The Four-Story Mistake.) One of the kids gets to know a teenager named Mark, who appears to be alone in the world. The family eventually adopts him (Then There Were Five). The older kids grow up and get on with their lives. In the last book, Spiderweb for Two, Randy and Oliver are the only ones left at home.

In some ways, this series reminds me of the Narnia Chronicles. Two brothers, two sisters, and a string of adventures that progresses over time. But the Melendys’ lives happen in the everyday world. Sure, it was a world different from mine. My small Texas town didn’t have city buses, subways or art museums. We didn’t have the seasonal changes that the characters experienced in their country home (it was here, I think, that I first heard of “Indian summer.”) But the house, the woods that surrounded it, and the characters that graced the pages were vividly drawn. I felt like I knew this family. I was always thrilled to find the next volume at the library, to know the story wasn't over yet.

The Wind Call - by Rosalie K. Fry

noreply@blogger.com (texaslupine) — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 04:25:00 +0000

My Favorite Childhood Reads

This book, with its worn hardback cover, has been with me perhaps longer than any other. Mom and Dad would read me chapters at bedtime before I learned to read on my own. The author shares our family name. I’ve often wondered if that’s why my parents (or grandparents?) bought the book.

It’s the story of a tiny boy, a child of the Little People, who arrives unexpectedly in an English garden. An assortment of birds is checking out a strange new plant, something the gardener brought home from a recent holiday in the tropics, when they find the dark-eyed infant sleeping in a flower. The kid is obviously far from home with no one to take care of him. So a pair of songbirds takes him to their nest in a hawthorn tree, and he grows up with three newly hatched chicks.

The “wind call” in the title is that subtle change in the air that marks the approach of fall, telling migratory birds that it’s time to fly south. Father Blackcap sings the little ones to sleep every night with a song about the great flight and their sunny winter home by the Mediterranean Sea.

When his adopted brothers are ready for their first flying lesson, the boy, Pierello, is old enough to climb out of the nest and make his way to the ground. He spends an idyllic summer learning to fend for himself in the woods: picking wild berries, sliding down little waterfalls in the burbling stream, consorting with glow-worms, butterflies, dormice, and all types of birds. There are line drawings of Pierello and his friends, and a half-dozen color pictures printed on special paper. Behind all these happy adventures looms the novel’s Big Question: will this wingless child find a way to go south with his family when the Wind Call comes?

Looking back, I wonder if my love of nature began with this fairy tale. Many of its creatures were (and still are) unfamiliar to a kid growing up in Texas, but I’ve always suspected the portrayals were accurate. Today, thanks to the Internet, it’s not hard to check. I did some surfing and found that yes, male and female blackcaps do share chick-rearing duties. Nightjars really do fly silently and lay their camouflaged eggs on bare ground.

And what about the author and illustrator, Rosalie K. Fry? I didn't think I'd ever heard of her, aside from this book. But it turns out she wrote several others, and one became the basis for the indie film The Secret of Roan Inish. Wow. Who knew?

The Zany World of Dr. Seuss

noreply@blogger.com (texaslupine) — Sun, 18 Dec 2016 15:35:00 +0000

My Favorite Childhood Reads

Dr. Seuss has his own Facebook wall. The Grinch is all over it, urging visitors to “grow your heart 3 sizes” by doing a good deed each day from now until Christmas.

I read some odd books as a kid. In some ways, Dr. Seuss’s books are among the oddest – but they’re also some of the best known and universally loved. Who doesn’t instantly recognize the Cat in the Hat’s red-striped stovepipe? Who couldn’t, on command, recite a few lines of Green Eggs and Ham?

I think The Cat in the Hat was the first Seuss book I read. I loved it. It was so much better than those dull Dick-and-Jane readers we used in primary school. I was even more fascinated when the Cat came back, left a nasty ring in his unwilling hosts’ bathtub, and wound up staining the whole hillside a garish pink.

Having gotten acquainted with the distinctive look of Dr. Seuss characters, I started to seek them out whenever I went to the library. I met Horton the elephant, Sam-I-Am, Bartholomew Cubbins of the 500 hats, the pointlessly prejudiced Sneetches, the parade of wildly fanciful creatures that marched across the pages of If I Ran the Zoo and If I Ran the Circus (two of my favorites.) And of course the immortal Grinch, who tried to eliminate Christmas and wound up saving himself.

I am clearly not the only kid who never forgot these stories. Just last night I went Christmas caroling with a group of friends. We came upon a front-yard display with life-size cutouts of the Grinch, his dog Max and a whole village of Whos. No kids in sight, just a middle-aged man who came out to listen. We sang him all six verses of “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” from the movie version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

As a writer, I have other reasons to admire Dr. Seuss. His galloping verses, so easy to read, couldn’t have been easy to write. But he kept turning them out, decade upon decade, still publishing new works long after I grew up. The Seuss Enterprises website says there are 44 books under the name of Dr. Seuss, plus 22 more that he wrote under other pen names. Okay, none of them is a tome like War and Peace, but still. Each one tells a story, or presents a new idea, or makes a point. And of course he did his own illustrations, too.

Here’s a bit that’s often mentioned in writers’ workshops, when they’re coaching us on the kind of determination it may take to break into the publishing market: Dr. Seuss’s first kiddie book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, was turned down by at least twenty publishers. They didn’t know what to do with it. They couldn’t see where it fit. What if he’d given up after the tenth rejection letter? Or the 12^th, or the 15^th? This story lives in my memory bank and pops up whenever I need reminding: if I really have something to say, don’t let the naysayers hush me up.

Theodor Seuss Geisel had plenty to say, and he’s still saying it. Go to the kids’ section of your library, your favorite bookstore, and you’ll see. Pull up one of the movies based on his books (they're still making new ones!) Or go check out some holiday decorations.

Tent Under the Spider Tree - by Gene Inyart

noreply@blogger.com (texaslupine) — Tue, 29 Nov 2016 14:00:00 +0000

My Favorite Childhood Reads

Around ten years ago, when some people I work with got involved in the Children & Nature Network, I started thinking of this novel that I read and loved in elementary school. A book about three girls who spent a summer camping out alone. They slept in a tent, explored field and stream, and faced an invading horde of daddy longlegs (hence the title).

Having just read Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods, I found myself wondering if I’d made the whole thing up. Three pre-adolescents in a tent by themselves? That book was in my grade-school library. Would it even be allowed today?

Curiosity aroused, I got online and tracked down a copy of Tent Under the Spider Tree. It really is as good as I remembered. Short chapters written for kids, characters with distinct personalities, plenty of action.

My recollection was a little fuzzy. The girls camped out for a week, not a whole season. They weren’t entirely unsupervised: there was a farmhouse nearby, and a daily check-in with the family that lived there. But still. The girls slept every night in their tent by a stream. They couldn’t see the house from their camp. They prepared their own meals and survived mosquitoes, gnats and leeches. They had disagreements, but worked things out without adult intervention. At week’s end, they knew they’d had an experience they would never forget.

What a contrast with the kids described in Richard Louv’s book, who have lost touch with the natural world. The Children & Nature movement, working to reverse this trend, is finding out we also need to pry Mom and Dad away from their desks and computers and cars, because parents don’t let kids run free any more. Even if they want to, society tends not to let them. Two years ago, a single mom was arrested for letting her 9-year-old play at a park while she was at work. In the daytime, with a cell phone. And that wasn’t an isolated case.

The girls in Spider Tree didn’t have cell phones. That book was published in 1959. I found it in the early ‘60s. To my fourth-grade self, it read like a marvelous adventure, but not especially far-fetched. Today, it seems like a fairy tale: nearly as fantastic as the Harry Potter series. As dated, in its way, as those Betsy-Tacy stories that took place over a century ago.

The Betsy Books - by Maud Hart Lovelace

noreply@blogger.com (texaslupine) — Mon, 21 Nov 2016 13:28:00 +0000

My Favorite Childhood Reads

There were a bunch of these books, and I think I read them all. Betsy-Tacy was first in the series, set, as I recall, in the very early 1900s. Two little girls met and became Best Friends. In a subsequent book they bonded with another girl called “Tib” (short for Thelma), and became a threesome. The girls grew up together, went to school, moved on to high school. Readers got to know their families: Betsy had a big sister, Julia; and I think Tacy had several siblings. As time went on, Betsy left home, spent time abroad, and got married.

It’s been many years since I read these books. I don’t recall any intricate plots; it was more slice-of-life stuff, how it was to be a girl growing up in that time. Just a few incidents stick in my mind. Some members of Tacy’s family caught scarlet fever or some other contagious disease, and the whole household went under quarantine. Years later, Betsy was living in a German boarding house, doing personal hygiene with a basin and washrag. She found out there was a real bathtub in the building, reserved for the use of army officers, and talked a couple of housemaids into smuggling her in for a real bath.

More information about Betsy, Tacy and friends

My Favorite Childhood Reads

noreply@blogger.com (texaslupine) — Mon, 21 Nov 2016 12:30:00 +0000

A funny thing has been happening in my mind these past few months. I’ll be going about my daily routine and suddenly find myself thinking of a book I read when I was a kid. I’ll recall scenes, characters, and whole sequences of events. Sometimes it’s a book I haven’t thought about in decades. Sometimes it’s a more familiar story, one of those I always suspected I would never forget. (I should mention here that I have vintage copies of several childhood favorites. They live on the top shelf of a bookcase in my writing room.)

Perhaps, at age 60, I’m starting to enter a second childhood. Maybe some part of my psyche figures it’s time to climb into the attic of my mind and sort through the piles of stuff that are lying around in there.

When something interesting turns up in the attic, it’s fun to share with friends. In the coming weeks, I’ll post mini-reviews of my favorite childhood reads. Some are classics that anyone would recognize. Others may be obscure, and I’ll be interested to find out if any of my friends also read them. Feel free to comment and share!

Romney: Obama's Gift-Giving Beat Me

noreply@blogger.com (texaslupine) — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 13:33:00 +0000

Mitt Romney isn’t running for president any longer, but he’s still our there saying odd things. My local paper this morning contains several snarky letters-to-the-editor about that conference call last week, where he said President Obama won a second term by giving “gifts” to special interest groups. Even Newt Gingrich and Bobby Jindal are on his case!

It feels weird to be on the same side with those guys (especially Newt), but I must also take exception to what Romney said. Of course, I wasn’t in on the call, so I didn’t actually hear him say it. But I’m told it went something like this:

"With regards to the young people, for instance, a forgiveness of college loan interest was a big gift. Free contraceptives were very big with young, college-aged women. And then, finally, Obamacare also made a difference for them, because as you know, anybody now 26 years of age and younger was now going to be part of their parents' plan, and that was a big gift to young people.”

The college loan interest isn’t one of my issues, but health care is. So I’ll start with those free contraceptives.

You may be right, Mitt. Getting pills and diaphragms without a copay might make life easier for many young women, and may have won some points for Obama. On the other hand, it’s just as likely that you lost points with your vow to “get rid” of Planned Parenthood, along with other things you’ve said about abortion and birth control. I was a college-aged woman in the 1970s. My primary concern wasn’t getting those services for free; it was being able to get them at all.

And those young adults who can stay on their parents’ health insurance until they’re 26? You’re not the first to take a pot-shot at that. Somewhere back in the campaign cycle, another guy -- it might have been Ron Paul -- said, well, if that’s going to be the rule, we ought to raise the voting age to 27.

I’m tired of hearing politicians speak of this provision like it was some kind of wild, new, un-American idea, because it isn’t.

First of all, it isn’t a “gift.” Young folks up to 26 can be covered on a parent’s health insurance policy if (a) the parent has health insurance, and (b) the parent agrees to keep the kid on as a dependent.

Parents may not have insurance. A lot of Americans don’t. Those parts of Obamacare that say we all have to get some and the insurance companies can’t refuse to sell it to us won’t kick in until 2014. If parents do have insurance, and choose to keep under-26 offspring on the policy, chances are it won’t be free. I’ve worked at places that had group health plans. Most paid at least part of the premium for the employees, but if I wanted coverage for my family, I’ve always had to pay extra for that.

Point two: Young adults need that insurance, and many don’t yet have the means to get their own. We’ve seen some job growth in recent months, but it’s still tough out there, especially for young folks just entering the market. When they find a job, it often comes without benefits. In the two weeks since the election, I’ve heard businesses wailing about Obamacare and how it’s going to break their budgets, how they can’t afford to provide health care for their employees, The complaints all seem to be coming from restaurant chains, and that’s where a lot of young adults work.

Point three: This is not a new idea. Before Obama signed the health care act, before he was elected to his first term, many existing health insurance plans (including the one at my company) offered coverage for unmarried dependents up to age 25. And I personally know quite a few parents who have used that option for kids who were still in school or still trying to find their place in the economy.

Under the new law, young adults can stay on until 26 and it doesn’t matter if they’re married. On this provision at least, Obamacare didn’t make a big, sweeping change. It simply took an existing industry practice, made a couple of incremental changes, and made it a required feature of any policy issued after September 23, 2010.

Gifts, indeed.

Five Good Things About the 2012 Election

noreply@blogger.com (texaslupine) — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 01:01:00 +0000

Barack Obama won a second term. I’m glad about that, but I didn’t feel like popping balloons and shooting fireworks on election night.

This campaign season was crazy, disheartening, hideously expensive and unconscionably long. And what do we have at the end of it? Same President, same Speaker of the House, same Senate Majority Leader, and more or less the same divided Congress. Is there any hope that our elected leaders will solve any of our pressing problems in the next four years, or will it be the same old gridlock?

Now that a week has passed, and some of the dust has settled, I find a few signs of hope in last Tuesday’s results.

Big Money didn’t buy our votes. This was our first presidential contest since the Citizens United ruling. Corporations and SuperPacs spent $billions to elect Mitt Romney and other candidates who would do things their way. For the most part, they lost.
Health care reform (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, or whatever you want to call it) has survived a Supreme Court challenge and a slew of candidates who vowed to repeal it. Looks like it'll stick around long enough for all its provisions to go into effect. I don’t doubt it will be a rocky road. But I’d rather see the country go down that road, making course corrections as needed, than go back to the way things were.
Outrageous comments about rape did not win over the electorate. Missouri’s Todd Akin (legitimate rape rarely causes pregnancy) and Indiana’s Richard Mourdock (if it does, it’s a gift from God) lost their Senate bids.
We will, in fact, see some new faces in the Senate, and they aren't all tea-party favorites like Ted Cruz (newly elected in my home state). The League of Conservation voters reports that seven of eight environmentally-minded candidates won. And come January, we’ll have more women in the Senate than ever before. Maybe these leaders will find something better to do than deny climate change and block access to birth control.
Texas is still very much a red state, but our House of Representatives will be less lopsidedly Republican than it was during the last session. I suppose that's something.

Corporations Aren't People

noreply@blogger.com (texaslupine) — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 17:31:00 +0000

Corporations are not people. Anyone with common sense can see they’re not. It’s one of those truths that should have been self-evident, until lawyers got involved.

The 2010 Citizens United decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that corporations have the right to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections, has led to public outrage. Two years later, it’s clear that the newly blessed corporate “right” is not having a healthy effect on our democracy.

But Citizens United didn’t come out of nowhere. Some would argue that the ruling was a logical next step on a path we started down more than a century ago. Maybe I’ll say more about that in a future post. Just now, I prefer to meditate on how a corporation is not like a person.

First, a caveat. For purposes of this discussion, “corporation” doesn’t mean a non-profit group like the Humane Society or the Sierra Club. It doesn’t mean my grandfather’s business, which was a corporation with all shares held by family members. I’m referring here to for-profit corporations that trade on the public stock market.

By law, such a corporation has only one purpose: to make money for its shareholders. And that’s the first thing that makes it different from a real person.

Sure, people like money. Some of us like it a lot, and do a great deal of sweating and scheming to acquire more of it. But ultimately, money is only good for what it can buy. What we really want is food, clothing, security, cars, IPhones, a nice place to live, cool vacations, a big-screen TV and an education for our kids so they can earn money to buy their own stuff when they grow up. Some people use money to gain power and status, bend others to their will, or hire goons to beat up people they don’t like. Whatever a person chooses to do with it, money is chiefly a means to an end.

For a corporation, money is the end and everything else is a means. Anything it does -- bringing jobs to a community, putting out a good or lousy product, making snazzy Super Bowl commercials, buying off politicians, even donating to a worthy cause -- is in service of its real purpose. If those incidental activities don’t pay off (i.e., lead to increased profits), then the corporation will find a way to do without them.

Point two: People are living, breathing organisms. As such, we need clean air, clean water, and food that will nourish our bodies. A corporation doesn’t need those things. It eats only money.

For a person, being alive has a flip side; it means he’s going to die someday. A corporation, on the other hand, is theoretically immortal. It may have a human CEO and board of directors, but those individuals can be replaced. Shareholders come and go as people trade in the market. If a shareholder dies, his stock becomes part of his estate and passes to his heirs. And the corporation goes on.

Point three: A corporation has no conscience, and has no soul.

A wise friend explained this to me one day. We were discussing our investments. Yes, I own stock in corporations, and I’m choosy about where I invest. I try to pick companies that don’t pollute, treat employees decently, and produce things that make the world a better place. I don’t want to believe that corporations are, by their very nature, immoral.

“Not immoral. Amoral,” my friend said. “Morality is outside their frame of reference. An entity can’t be moral or immoral if it hasn’t got a soul.”

I bet I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking of real, live people you’ve met who appear to have no conscience, already have more money than you could ever figure out how to spend, and are willing to do egregiously unethical things to get more. You’re wondering if corporations are really so different from people after all.

Hold that thought. I’ll come back to it in a moment.

When I first started pondering the morality of corporations. I thought about sharks. A shark, I suspect, doesn’t spend energy worrying about right and wrong. It’s just a fish with big teeth and a taste for blood, swimming through the ocean and devouring any critter that looks good to eat. A corporation, I thought, is like that.

But sharks have a place in the ecosystem, and there are checks and balances in nature that keep predators from wiping out the competition. If you’re among those who believe that God created the earth and everything in it, then God created sharks. I trust He knew what He was doing.

God did not create corporations. People did. Funny thing ... our myths and literature are full of cautionary tales about persons who have taken it upon themselves to create some kind of pseudo-life form and had it not go well at all. Frankenstein’s monster comes to mind. The Jewish legend of the golem. The goblins in Dean Koontz’s creepy novel Twilight Eyes. Somebody dreams up a creature that’s stronger, faster, or more devious, intending to use it as a tool, a servant, a weapon. Instead, the thing turns on its creator and the whole human race.

I think we’re living that story now.

Last Sunday, I saw a piece in the Wall Street Journal about the people who work on Wall Street, and how a surprisingly high percentage are psychopaths or sociopaths. One person quoted in the article said you really sort of have to be one to succeed in that world. Another described a sociopath as “a person with no conscience.” (italics mine)

When you give corporations the same status and rights as people, maybe it’s inevitable that your society will cultivate people who think like corporations.

We’ve created a monster, and now the monster is us.

That Contraceptive Mandate

noreply@blogger.com (texaslupine) — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 03:33:00 +0000

I got e-mail this week from Senator John Cornyn. He sends out a newsletter called “The Lonestar Weekly.” The lead story this time was about the contraceptive mandate that’s been causing the big firestorm in the media. Pundits everywhere seem to be arguing one side or the other: should faith-based employers be required to provide health insurance plans that cover birth control?

Cornyn, predictably, says no. Not that he, personally, has anything against birth control. Well, he doesn’t exactly say that, but he makes a point of saying contraception isn’t the point:
“The dispute over the mandate is not a dispute over the use of contraception. It is a dispute over First Amendment rights.”

He devotes several paragraphs to this argument, using phrases like “a blow to one of our most cherished liberties” and “the bedrock principles upon which our great country was established.” His headline vows, “If President Obama doesn't end contraception rule, Congress will.”

Ah, the good ol’ First Amendment. Freedom of religion, freedom of speech. That’s why the Congressional oversight panel held a hearing about the mandate and didn’t let any women testify.

So maybe this brouhaha isn’t about contraception, or the First Amendment either. What it’s really about, I suspect, is finding one more sticking point that opponents of health care reform can use to stir up the Tea Party, make the law less effective, and maybe get the whole thing thrown out. New York Times columnist Gail Collins has expressed the same suspicion.

At this point, I’d like to step back and review what started this whole discussion. The Affordable Care Act includes a requirement that all insurance plans, as of a specified date, include coverage of certain preventive services with no deductible and no copay. That includes FDA-approved contraceptive methods, sterilization procedures, and patient education and counseling, not including abortifacient drugs. You can see the complete list here.

Regarding those contraceptives, there’s supposed to be an exemption for churches, etc., that don’t believe in them. Earlier this year, the Obama Administration decided that church-affiliated hospitals, universities, and other organizations whose main business isn’t church, don’t qualify for the exemption and must provide the coverage.

That makes sense to me. Anyone who accepts a paying job at an actual church, diocese headquarters, or some place like that is likely to be an adherent of that faith, and should expect a certain amount of lifestyle-policing in connection with the job.

Church-affiliated universities and hospitals, on the other hand, are businesses that operate in the secular world. Non-profits, perhaps, but businesses all the same. Often run by lay people with management credentials, they serve customers and employ workers of all religious persuasions. It seems reasonable that these institutions, if they provide employee health insurance, should have to meet the minimum standards that are required for everyone else.

I got to thinking about how many Catholic-affiliated schools and hospitals there are in my state, and how many people they employ. Feeling curious, I contacted two old friends who work at Catholic universities and asked about their health benefits. Both said their policies covered birth control, no problem. One friend, it turns out, also put in a few years with one of the big hospital networks. That job provided coverage, too.

So why the sudden outrage about Obama’s rule?

A faith-based institution may provide employee health coverage for things that are, strictly speaking, against its religion -- but it doesn’t want the government saying it has to?
Is it the no-copay thing that’s causing the trouble? Is it somehow less immoral to provide that coverage if the employee picks up part of the cost?

Or is it, as I suggested above, that politicians are once again using religion as cover for plots and schemes that wouldn't meet anyone's definition of godly conduct?

Update: Here's an article about a state that already requires insurance plans to cover contraceptives, and the reaction (or lack thereof) from faith-based institutions there.

Family Connections

noreply@blogger.com (texaslupine) — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 02:39:00 +0000

I saw a picture in the paper today. People sitting a courtroom, looking much friendlier than they typically do at a trial or jury selection day. The bench is piled with teddy bears and other cuddly critters. In the foreground, a man hugs a little girl while his wife, decked out in a corsage, wipes away tears. The caption says this girl, age 5, was one of 25 local kids who got a new “forever family” on Adoption Day.

A note under the caption directed me to more photos on the website. I found more photos of the little girl with her new parents, and photos of another couple who adopted three boys to add to the three kids they already had. It was a happy occasion all around. Each adopted child got a stuffed animal to take home, and a necklace or bracelet engraved with his or her new name.

Wow. What a great story! Bless those kids, their new siblings and parents, and the judges and lawyers who made it official.

Similar celebrations are going on all over Texas this month. They’re promoted by our state Department of Family and Protective Services, and they’re about kids that have wound up in state custody for one reason or another. Rather than keep them in foster care for years on end, as was typical 30 years ago, the department works to find families that will take them on for life.

But the picture got me thinking about adoption in general. It’s more common than you might think.

I grabbed pencil and paper and made a quick list. Without thinking too hard, I came up with around 30 adoptees that I know personally, or knew at one time. They include a close childhood friend, a co-worker, a kid at my church, and children of friends and business associates. Heck, I count nine in my own extended family. And there’s probaby somebody I’m forgetting.

These friends and acquaintances represent all classes of adoptees, if you want to put it that way.

Some were adopted as infants by families of similar appearance; they could pass for natural children if you didn’t happen to know, except that in some cases their parents are a bit older than average.
Some were adopted by parents of a different ethnic group; if the kids didn’t notice, I suspect they didn’t get very old before some bystander brought it to their attention.
I know kids who were adopted from foster care like the ones I saw in the newspaper today,
... kids who were orphaned by famine or unrest in other parts of the world and found new families in the United States,
... and kids who were formally adopted by guardian aunts, grandparents, or a parent’s new spouse.

I’m calling them kids, but many of these individuals aren’t kids any more. Some were hardly what you’d call kids when the adoption ceremony took place. I knew two brothers and a sister whose mother lived an unsettled life. She often left them in the care of a maiden aunt who helped them with homework, signed their report cards, and got them to doctors when they were sick. All three kids thought of the aunt as their “real” mom, but their mother didn’t want to waive parental rights. Until the kids reached legal age and could decide for themselves. When their aunt got around to adopting them, the oldest was married with a child of her own. She became a mother and a grandma all at once.

In these families of my acquaintance, it doesn’t seem to matter how old the kids were when they were adopted, or whether they do or don’t look like their parents. When someone says, “I’d like you to meet my dad,” or “That’s our daughter, third from the right, with the clarinet,” they all sound pretty much the same.

Everyone needs a Forever Family. And there are many different ways of making one.

Papers, Please!

noreply@blogger.com (texaslupine) — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 17:53:00 +0000

For the past week, Texas has been on fire. At least 1,400 families have lost their homes and pretty much everything they owned. Some of those are people I know. And the fires are still burning.

As I sit here wondering what I can do to help those friends and co-workers, I find myself fretting about important documents they may have lost. Thirty years ago, that would have been way down my list of concerns. But in this polarized, post-9/11 America, it seems you can hardly do anything without a document that verifies your right to exist.

Skeptics will say it’s been that way for a long time. A card to borrow books from the library, a membership card to buy groceries at Costco or Sam’s Club, a “driver’s license” that has morphed into an all-purpose ID that's all but required to write a check, board a plane, check into a hospital or walk into a bar.

The skeptics are right -- but it’s getting worse. On January 1, when the new Texas Voter ID bill takes effect, my driver’s license will effectively become a license to vote. At the same time, another law enacted by this year’s Legislature will make that license harder to get. From now on, anybody who goes to apply for, renew, or replace a Texas driver’s license will have to show proof that he or she is in the country legally.

The intent of this law, I suppose, is to make it harder for illegal immigrants to get around and tend to business. If the feds won’t deport them, the reasoning goes, let’s make life in America as inconvenient as possible, and maybe they’ll leave on their own.

Maybe, and maybe not. Some, I’m sure, will stick around and keep driving without a license. Meanwhile, the Lege has created extra hassles for everyone else. Texas residents who have had a driver’s license for decades will find, next time it comes up for renewal, that they have to trot out a birth certificate or green card or other proof that they’re entitled to be here.

Didn’t I show that birth certificate when I applied for my first license at age 16? Citizenship wasn’t an issue then, but I had to prove I was old enough to drive. And didn’t the Department of Public Safety take my thumbprints and attach them to my permanent record?

Oh, well. In my particular case, those are rhetorical questions. I happen to know where my birth certificate is, and furthermore, I have a passport. I’ll just have to remember to take it with me when I go to stand in line at the DPS.

There are plenty of Texans who don’t have those documents handy. I find it sadly ironic: aside from the undocumented immigrants, the folks that will be most inconvenienced by this law are natural-born Americans who don’t travel much.

Think about it:

If you’re a citizen of some other country, here on a student or worker visa, I suspect you keep that visa close at hand.
If you’re a legal resident alien, I’ll bet you know where your green card is.
If you were born in some other country and became an American by choice, especially if you were old enough to sign your own naturalization papers, you probably know where you put them.

So I’m thinking mostly of fellow Texans who were born in the USA, never lived anywhere else, and have never even left the country on vacation. People who grew up reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, who had the words memorized long before they gained the grammar skills to sort out what they meant. People who’ve sung along with the national anthem at countless football games and 4th of July parades, voices cracking on “the rockets’ red glare.” People who’ve raised kids, gone to PTA meetings, cared for aging parents, held garage sales and lived in several different houses. Who don’t have a clue where their birth certificates might be, and never thought much about it, because it never entered their heads that anyone would question their right to be here.

And now there are hundreds of Texans who may have had those documents two weeks ago, but didn’t have time to save them before their homes and all their belongings were reduced to ashes.

Sure, those papers can be replaced. It’ll take a bit of time and money. I’m hoping those folks took their driver’s licenses, at least, when they fled their burning neighborhoods. I hope they won’t need to renew them until they get their papers straightened out.

... or if they do, maybe our Department of Public Safety will cut ‘em some slack?

Taxing Questions

noreply@blogger.com (texaslupine) — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 15:50:00 +0000

It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything in this space. Not because I had nothing to say. I just didn’t know where to start.

I still don’t, really. But today, I’ll start with taxes. We’ve heard a lot about them in recent weeks. Federal, state and local governments are strapped for cash. They’ve been slashing budgets with a vengeance. Liberal/progressive types think we could stand to raise some taxes -- especially on wealthier Americans, who, they say, are not paying anywhere near their fair share. Conservatives just want to cut.

As a taxpaying American, I wanted to find out where I stand in this equation. So I did a little exercise this week. I dug out all the paperwork I could find and added up the taxes my household paid in 2010. It came to 26.27% of our total pre-tax income. Just over a quarter of each dollar we made went to taxes.

The numbers are interesting on several fronts.

I’ve been hearing all over the place that close to half of Americans pay no federal income tax. Here are a couple of stories about that:

Well, I do send money to the IRS every year, but really not all that much. Last year’s payment, after taking all the exemptions, deductions and credits the tax code said I was entitled to, came to just 5.16% of our 2010 income.

Of course, income tax isn’t the only government levy that drains our wallets. Social Security and Medicare took another 6.9%. If I throw in the federal portion of the gasoline tax (18.4 cents/gallon), our national government took 12.37% of my income.

State and local taxes took a larger share,13.9%. And here’s what’s funny about that:

1. As you may have heard, the Governor of Texas is running for president. He’s traveling around the country claiming that the Texas economy is in great shape, that our job market has improved not declined, that our state government knows how to balance a budget, and how, if elected, he’s going to get Washington off our backs.

Well. I saw what Gov. Perry and our Legislature did to balance the budget for the two years just ahead. Making sausage doesn’t begin to describe it.

2. I read a story yesterday in The Austin Chronicle that referred to an organization called United for a Fair Economy, which claims that Texas has the most regressive tax structure of any state in the union. UFE says the poorest Texans pay 12.2% of their income in state and local taxes, while the richest pay only 4.4%. You can download a chart here.

Hmmm. If UFE is figuring pre-tax income the same way I did, I’m in one of the middle income groups. Which means I would be paying somewhere between 7 and 10 percent. According to their chart, nobody is paying rates as high as I’m paying.

Oh, well. I never heard of the UFE until yesterday. I’m sure there are plenty of groups out there, advocating a wide spectrum of tax reforms or lack thereof. I wouldn’t be surprised if they all came up with different numbers.

Here’s what I know about Texas. It’s true that we have no state income tax. We rely on a variety of other taxes and “user fees” to finance our streets, highways, schools and other public services. The biggest pieces of that patchwork, from my perspective, are:

Property taxes. Levied by city and county governments, independent school districts, rural utility districts, etc. Schools account for the biggest share of this. Education is expensive, and property taxes are their primary means of support.
Sales taxes. We have a state tax of 6.25 cents on the dollar, and local governments can tax up to an additional 2 cents. Sales taxes are known for being regressive. Our code softens that effect, to some extent, by waiving tax on “essential” items like groceries and prescription drugs.
Fuel taxes. 20 cents/gallon on gasoline, and I forget what it is for Diesel. Statewide, this generates a lot of funds. Texans drive long distances, and many areas have little or no public transportation.

So. Am I overtaxed or under-taxed? How does your experience compare to mine? Are we getting what we pay for? Here are my numbers, as best I could figure them. Let me know what you think.

Federal income tax - 5.16%
Social Security - 5.57%
Medicare tax - 1.3%
Property taxes - 10.39%
Tax on telephone service - 0.05% (any line item on the bill that’s called a “tax,” and disregarding all those other fees they tack on)
Gasoline tax (state) - 0.38% *
Gasoline tax (federal) - 0.35% *
Sales taxes - 3.07% *

* These amounts are educated guesses. I keep good records about some things, but I’m not the kind of person who saves a whole year of receipts.

Pro-choice in the 21st Century

noreply@blogger.com (texaslupine) — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 13:38:00 +0000

Back on the subject of abortion, I appreciate this op-ed that appeared last week in the Washington Post. Written by the former president of Catholics for Choice. Like I said a few weeks ago, a lot of us fall somewhere between the extremes on this issue.

Anchor Babies in Arizona

noreply@blogger.com (texaslupine) — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 01:02:00 +0000

Sometimes when I feel a great need to write about a burning issue of the day, and I'm still thrashing about for the words that will best express my thoughts, I open up my morning paper and find that Leonard Pitts has nailed it.

Today's bull's-eye was on immigration. So I'll just hush and give you a link to Leonard's column.

My Opinion on Abortion

noreply@blogger.com (texaslupine) — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 04:32:00 +0000

It’s complicated.

I don’t think abortion is a good thing. I can’t imagine, really, that anyone would. About the best thing I can say about it is that under certain conditions, it may be a lesser evil.

I know there are plenty of Americans who would disagree with that. Who think nothing could be more evil than terminating an unwanted pregnancy. Some of those people are my friends and relatives.

I take back what I said at the beginning of this post. Actually, I can state my opinion in very simple terms:

In a perfect world, there wouldn't be any unwanted pregnancies.

...and we wouldn’t be having this discussion.

So why are we having this discussion? Because we don’t live in a perfect world, and we disagree vehemently, sometimes violently, on how to deal with that. Also, the subject is on my mind because tomorrow morning, a committee of the Texas Senate will hold a public hearing on a bill that would require every woman seeking an abortion to have a sonogram first and listen while the doctor describes the fetus in great detail.

I expect this hearing will be full of extreme statements from both sides, presented to legislators whose minds are already made up. Abortion is one of our most polarizing issues.

That’s too bad, because I suspect a lot of Americans, like me, are somewhere in the middle.

My personal belief (which I don’t require anyone else to follow) is that life begins at conception. On that point, I’m more or less with the Catholics. Nature shuffles the deck, puts a sperm and egg together, and you have a new set of chromosomes: a unique individual. If that embryo were in my womb, I don’t think I could cast it out. If I were a doctor, I’m not sure I would do abortions.

But still, when the pro-life/pro-choice controversy heats up, I tend to come down on the pro-choice side. For several reasons.

One, my view on when life starts – when the embryo acquires a soul, if you want to put it that way – is just one possible interpretation. I’m well aware that there are others.

Two, I’ll bet there are plenty of women out there who didn’t believe in abortion until they needed one. I can’t say for sure that I wouldn’t have been one of those, because I never found myself in that position. I made it all the way through my childbearing years without a single unwanted pregnancy. I credit that partly to due diligence, and partly to luck. Some women aren’t so lucky.

Three: As I see it, the best way to eliminate abortions is to give everyone access to reliable birth control, along with the best possible education on how to use it. I’ve noticed that many of the groups who fight against abortion also oppose birth control, which seems totally counterproductive. They shut down women’s clinics in third-world countries that are ravaged by famine. They lobby to take funding away from Planned Parenthood, which puts most of its energy into preventing unwanted pregnancies and provides basic health care to thousands of low-income women. I don’t want to hang out with people who think like that.

The Mentally Ill Among Us

noreply@blogger.com (texaslupine) — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 16:06:00 +0000

Okay, maybe it isn’t fair to blame the Tucson shootings on Sarah Palin’s cross-hairs map. Or the weapons-and-combat imagery in the campaign ads of Jesse Kelly, who tried to unseat Gabrielle Giffords in last year’s Congressional election.

Don’t get me wrong. I deplore the hateful rhetoric, the name-calling, the demonizing of anyone who sees things differently, that dominates our politics today. We could all stand to tone it down. But I’m not sure it would have made a difference in this case.

In the past week, we’ve learned a few things about Jared Loughner, who is accused of firing the shots that turned a citizen participation event to a bloodbath. I’m getting a picture of a young man who is seriously unbalanced, and has been for some time. It’s pointless to argue about what someone said that might have pushed him over the edge.

But it may be helpful to talk about how we deal with mental illness in America, and how we can do better.

Harry Shearer brought it up last week on Huffington Post: “.... we're being told that toxic political rhetoric is dangerous, because of its possible effect on the less rational, more mentally unhinged folks among us. So, maybe it's time to ask this question: Why are they among us?”

His column rings true; it jibes with what I’ve heard and seen. Mental health care is not easy to get. For families who pay their own bills, it tends to be a luxury that only the rich can afford. For those who rely on insurance or public assistance, resources are limited. Sometimes a patient gets just enough care to scratch the surface of a problem, with little or no follow-up.

I don’t mean to suggest that everyone with a mental illness is a potential mass murderer. To quote the New York Times, “a vast majority are no more likely to commit harm than anyone else.”

True. That doesn't meant they don't need help. Living with mental illness is no picnic -- for patients, for the families and friends who struggle to help them cope. Society misses out on what those people might contribute if they are made whole again, or at least semi-functional.

And the rare, spectacular violent cases serve notice that any of us, while going about our daily business, can wind up paying the ultimate price for our the cracks in our mental health system. I don’t have to think very hard to come up with examples:

October 1991, Killeen, Texas: George Jo Hennard drove a pickup through a plate-glass window into a Luby’s cafeteria, than strolled through the dining room picking out people to shoot. He killed 24, including himself.

April 2007, Virginia Tech: English major Cho Seung-Hui went on a Monday morning rampage, killing 32 teachers and fellow students before committing suicide.

Before these massacres, and the one in Tucson last weekend, the perpetrator gave clear signals that he was not okay. But we weren’t able to use that information to head off a tragedy.

I don’t mention Charles Whitman, the University of Texas Tower sniper, who brought us the worst campus shooting in history before Virginia Tech. He was definitely not in his right mind, but I’m not sure he gave many warning signs, or that anyone could have read them. At the time, nobody had done anything quite like that.

I also don’t mention Timothy McVey, who blew up the federal building in Oklahoma; or last year’s shooting rampage at Fort Hood. I believe those mass murders really were driven by politics or ideology.

But this guy in Tucson? He may have been just a garden-variety nut.

A Decade Remembered

noreply@blogger.com (texaslupine) — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 04:39:00 +0000

The 21st Century isn’t a new thing any more. As of today, we’re into its second decade. The first decade swooped in and took off again before we came to any real consensus on what to call it. The Aughties? The Naughties? The Zeroes?

Maybe it’s appropriate that we haven’t come up with a name. It’s been a pretty uncertain decade.

Remember how we argued about when to officially celebrate the turning of the millennium? Would it be when every digit of the year rolled over, when 1999 became 2000? Or would it be just after the stroke of midnight on the first day of 2001?

In retrospect, I’d say that for Americans, at least, the 21st century began a few minutes before 9 a.m. on September 11, 2001. By the end of that week, we all understood that we were living in a different world.

A lot of scary, destructive things marked this past decade — some related to the big events of 9/11, and some not. Two wars that we don’t know how to stop. Gulf Coast cities nearly wiped out by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Weeks later, evacuees had to be evacuated again as her sister Rita slammed the coast. In 2008, we had Hurricane Ike; and in 2010, many of Katrina’s still-recovering communities were hit by the man-made disaster of the BP oil spill.

To me, the world feels quite different than it did a decade ago. Public discourse is uglier; nearly everyone seems to agree on that. I’ve heard tales of old friends who don’t talk any more; and my own family, after a few unpleasant shouting matches, has found it necessary to ban discussion of political issues at holiday gatherings. International travel is riskier, or maybe it really isn’t, but it sure feels that way. And air travel is just no fun these days.

But there are other aspects to the “Aughties.” In this decade, our country elected its first African-American president. Whatever your views on how he’s working out, that was a major milestone for a nation that is still trying, in fits and starts, to live up to the ideals proclaimed in its founding documents.

And while some of us are putting up walls and drawing lines in the sand, others have found dozens of new ways to stay connected. This decade saw the introduction of the IPhone, the IPad, and new ways of using the Internet that include photo sharing, social networking, and cyber-communities of shared interests.

I think of the sci-fi books and shows that shaped my adolescent mind. The crew of the Enterprise with their pocket communicators. Starfaring aliens with doohickeys in their ears that allowed them to talk to the ship’s computer from anywhere on board. Science fiction? Hah! I see people using devices like that in the grocery store, at the post office, on the sidewalk in front of my house.

I'm not sure I'll ever feel like a native of this century, but I survived the first decade. Happy New Year to all my online friends.

Warring Holiday Billboards

noreply@blogger.com (texaslupine) — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 22:03:00 +0000

War On Christmas Spreads To Lincoln Tunnel - Heard this story on NPR today. I thought it was a fun piece, well done. Both sides got to express opinions. And I'm pleased to note that so far (at least, based on what I've seen), the whole argument between the "Merry Christmas" and "Happy Holidays" factions seems to be lower-key and less rabid than it was a year ago. Maybe both sides are painfully aware that we have bigger things to beat each other up about...

Anyway, here are my thoughts on the competing billboards.

The American Atheists put up a Nativity scene with the words, "You know it's a Myth. This Season, Celebrate Reason." (Nice picture, by the way. The Magi, the star, the manger. Looks a lot like a Christmas card.)

The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights countered with "You know it's Real. This Season, Celebrate Jesus." (They have a nice picture, too.)

I have no problem with any of these statements. Celebrate reason? That seems like a good idea; it would be nice if there were more of it in the public discourse. Celebrate Jesus? Sure. Christmas is one of the religious holidays observed at this time of year. In the Christian calendar, it's all about the birth of Jesus. I think it's entirely possible to celebrate Jesus and reason at the same time.

Real? Mythical? I'm not sure those terms are mutually exclusive.

In my decades of reading, writing and pondering the nuances of the English language (and the other languages it has borrowed from along the way), I've learned that "real," "true," and "factual" don't mean precisely the same thing. And I grit my teeth when I hear some pundit or politician say that an opponent's statement is "pure fiction," when they really mean to say it's a pack of lies. Because "lies" and "fiction" aren't synonymous either, though they may have characteristics in common. I've read works of fiction that express profound truths. I'll bet you have, too. Sometimes, fiction feels truer than fact.

And what about "myth"? As I see it, a myth is one of the big stories. It might be based on factual events, or a story that somebody made up. Chances are, it's a bit of both -- and because it strikes some universal chord, over time the story has taken on larger-than-life meaning, sent echoes through the ages, influenced a culture, or taught us something about how to live our lives.

If that's what a myth is, I'd say the Christmas story qualifies. That doesn't necessarily mean it didn't happen. I'll leave that argument to the Catholics and atheists. I don't count myself as a member of either group. But if somebody wants to say "Peace on Earth," I'm all for that.

Gambling With Insurance

noreply@blogger.com (texaslupine) — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 06:19:00 +0000

Let us ponder the concept of insurance.

The way I figure it, humans long ago figured out life isn’t fair. A guy spends a whole season cultivating his crop, and then it gets washed away by a flood just before harvest time. Lightning strikes a thatched roof and a family’s home burns to cinders — but the house across the lane, made of exactly the same stuff, is untouched.

After a few millennia of this kind of thing, somebody came up with an idea for easing the random cruelties of fate. Maybe this person addressed a council of tribal elders, or maybe he went door to door explaining his plan. “We don’t know where lightning will strike next,” he may have said, “but if everybody puts one guilder in this strongbox, we’ll have enough money to build a new house for the one who gets hit. Just think, it could be you! Wanta buy in?”

I found a “history of insurance” on Wikipedia. Sparsely referenced, but reading it, I see the beginnings of burial policies, survivor benefits, and fire insurance. Plans to compensate for cargo lost in shipping appear to have arisen centuries ago, before the time of Christ. Which makes sense, I guess. Water transport is one of the oldest industries, and it’s inherently risky.

For the customer, insurance is like gambling in reverse. You ante up your premium, and you “win” by losing. Human nature being what it is, this leads to weirdness.

In conventional gambling, you play to win. You buy a lottery ticket, or put your chips down and spin the wheel, hoping your number will come up. And who knows? It just might, though the odds are overwhelmingly against it. Some of us are willing to bet money (in some cases, way more than we can afford) on that ghost of a chance. Because we are dreamers at heart. A gambler believes in the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. And even if we don’t win, it’s fun to take a chance and spend those moments visualizing success.

It’s not so much fun to bet on something you hope won’t happen.

To collect on an insurance policy, you must suffer misfortune. Your house gets blown away; you wreck your car; your kid gets meningitis and spends a month in the hospital. These are things you don’t want to think about, and if they happen, you know the cash payoff won’t fully replace what you’ve lost. In reverse gambling, there’s no way to really win. Either something bad happens, and it’s less bad than it might have been without insurance; or nothing bad happens, and you’ve paid all those premiums to no purpose.

Those of us who are born worriers, who have assets to protect, may still feel that insurance is a good investment. A small price to pay for peace of mind.

This works okay if the ante isn’t too high. You can pay it, file your policy in a safe place, and get on with your life.

If the price of insurance starts to interfere with other needs, peace of mind is hard to come by. One, you have to pinch pennies and worry about money. Two, whenever there’s a budget crunch, you start to wonder if you really need that insurance policy. Which forces you to think again of all the things that might go wrong.

You can reach a point, I think, where you’re so invested in fearful possibilities that you don’t have the resources, or the spirit, to work on making things go well. I think a great many Americans are at that point now. Maybe that’s why our national problems seem so insurmountable.

Maybe we all need to spend a week in Vegas and learn to dream again.

I Miss Mexico

noreply@blogger.com (texaslupine) — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 04:23:00 +0000

It’s been there all my life, just across the Rio Grande. A good day’s drive from any town I’ve lived in, but a heck of a lot closer than New York or Washington, D.C.

Come to think of it, I’ve never been to D.C., and all I’ve seen of New York is the inside of an airport. But I’ve been to Mexico lots of times.

I’ve shopped and dined in border towns, built sand castles on a Yucatan beach, explored pyramids at Chichen Itza, ridden a train into the Copper Canyon, visited a Tarahumari village, taken my car on the hand-pulled ferry at Los Ebanos, and hung out in a cantina in Boquillas del Carmen, next door to Big Bend National Park. Have you heard Robert Earl Keen’s song, “Gringo Honeymoon”? That’s exactly how it was.

I don’t go to Mexico any more. Don’t know when it’ll seem safe enough to travel there again. And I feel that my world has grown smaller and meaner.

Sure, there’s plenty to see in these United States. In my 50-odd years I’ve visited at least 25 states and two dozen national parks. I’ve danced in the surf on all three coasts, hiked through forests, deserts, and slickrock canyons. I’ve made three forays into Canada and two trips to Europe. But still, I miss Mexico.

For most of my life, living in a border state meant having interesting neighbors. You always knew there was another country just a few hours away. A country that was friendly, but different enough to be intriguing. A place that smelled different and spoke a different language, where people slept in the afternoon and worked until late at night. If you got past the border towns and took the trouble to learn more about it, you’d find that Mexico also had majestic mountains, amazing archeological sites, and factories that make enameled pots and dishes in a rainbow of colors.

Nowadays, it feels more like living next to a fenced-off demilitarized zone between two countries who are not exactly at war, but aren’t sure the other side isn’t. And I can’t quite figure out how we got here.

I could point a finger at the U.S. government, which decided – after 19 men from Middle Eastern countries hijacked planes and flew them into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, killing several thousand people – that Mexico was somehow a threat.

Not long after 9/11, they closed the unofficial border crossings in the Big Bend. No more rowboat ferries that would take you to Boquillas or Santa Elena for a dollar. If you wanted to go to Mexico, you had to drive to Presidio, an hour west of the park, and cross at the International Bridge.
Border Patrol checkpoints on the northbound highways, ten or twenty miles inside the actual border, are nothing new. In recent years, however, the station on U.S. 281 has grown from a portable shed to a large installation with offices and multiple inspection bays. Banks of remote-controlled cameras ogle each vehicle that passes on both sides of the highway.
And that travesty of a border wall, or fence, that several communities have tried in vain to stop? Don’t get me started!

So maybe the U.S. isn’t looking too neighborly these days. But Mexico has its own problems. If I think it’s too dangerous for tourists, it sure isn’t safe for the people who live there. I don’t believe U.S. policies are responsible for all the mayhem created by warring drug cartels (though I do have to ask myself who’s buying their drugs.)

And there is this: seven years before 9/11, before there was a Department of Homeland Security, when Bill Clinton was still president, we visited relatives in deep South Texas. A cousin-in-law invited us to spend the night at her new house, in a new suburb on the outskirts of town. Nice place, but the back yard looked like a fortress. There was an iron fence around the patio, with a gate that required a key. On the way home, my spouse reported on a talk he’d had with the cousin. “Apparently, those gates and things are considered normal precautions down here,” he said. Maybe the drug violence was starting to build even then.

Our last trip to Mexico was almost three years ago. Military trucks patrolled the streets of town with automatic rifles mounted in back. Somehow, this did not make me feel safe. As we headed down the road to visit friends -- six family members in a crew-cab pickup -- a troop of uniformed men motioned us to the side of the road and searched our truck. They patted down the men in our party and searched my 80-year-old mother-in-law’s purse. I suspect I got a taste that day of how it feels to be an undocumented alien in Arizona. Or anybody who just happens to look like one.

In the end, I don't know precisely who to blame for all these strained relations. I don't know what I can do to fix it. But I sure do miss Mexico.

Texas Politics Makes NY Times

noreply@blogger.com (texaslupine) — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 01:43:00 +0000

I'm still not ready to ruminate on the meaning and possible effects of last week's election. But Health Beat has had a few things to say. Today's post is about Texas! ... as described in the New York Times ... which reprinted a story from our own Texas Tribune. Ah, the Internet!

Here's a link to the original article.

Coming Into Los Angeles

noreply@blogger.com (texaslupine) — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 03:11:00 +0000

Here in America, the election is over. In general, it seems that the loudest and shrillest voices won. I haven't begun to make sense of it all. So just for today, I'm sharing a piece that's not at all controversial, and is, I hope, just fun to read. Enjoy.

My spouse thinks he’s in an Arlo Guthrie song. He has never been to southern California, and I let him sit by the window so he can see the huge expanse of the city and its unending suburbs as we come down from the sky. I’m not a fan of big cities. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to live here. But still, it’s something to see. I remember the first time I flew into this town, some twenty-five years ago. It was twilight. Strings of light crisscrossed the landscape like gold necklaces. Then we dropped a little lower, and I saw that each of those gold chains was a twelve-lane freeway.

There’s no such view for my husband’s first visit. Los Angeles is socked in, and we see nothing but clouds. Reasonably clean clouds, from the look of them. Maybe this is honest weather, and not just smog.

I was a Star Trek fiend in my teen years, knew the first two season’s shows almost by heart, and I always liked how the crew of the USS Enterprise found use for nautical terms in the void of interstellar space. Indeed, Star Fleet was an interstellar Navy, with fleet admirals and courts-martial.

It occurs to me that airplanes, too, are ships. They have captains and crews, heads and galleys. They navigate by compass; instead of depth-finders, they have altimeters. Red and green lights flash on port and starboard wings so that other ships can tell which way they’re headed when it’s too dark to see the outline of the craft. As our vessel drops through these layers of clouds, it occurs to me that planes also sail through water. I see it condensing on the wing; it gleams for a moment as a ray of sunlight breaks through and lights the wet surface. Then we bank. The sun dips behind the fuselage and the wing turns dull metal again.

A quarter-hour ago, our captain got on the PA system and said that because of the way the wind was blowing, we would take a turn over the Pacific and land to the east. No worries; we were ahead of schedule. He just came on again and said the wind has shifted; so we’re going to circle around and land the other way after all. I have to take him at his word. When we finally get through the clouds, we’re almost on the ground, and all I see is the airport.

Wind and water; water and wind. Ancient seafaring peoples harnessed them and got where they needed to go. The airships of the 21st century are working with the same elements. It’s just that the proportions are different.