Not Yet Nirvana

We lost many celebrities in 2016. Many of us lost loved ones. I lost my mother and my aunt. My wife lost a friend and we both have friends who lost their loved ones all during some part of 2016. Most of us agree 2016 was a bad year. Now, as the year closes out and we look to renewing hope that the next year will somehow be better,  we are struck by the politically realities of a new president. Most of us are having difficulty clinging to the hope a New Year promises. The horrors of Aleppo, the rampant greed that is fast destroying our environment and causing wars, religious fighting, these things still exist, they are happening. But so are good things. And often, the quiet good things do not get the equal attention with the sensational and bloody stories. There is strife and sadness in the world and perhaps there always will be, but gains are being made, good things done by good people do happen. The thing of it is, taken in context, 2016 was not that bad of a year. There w...

All this justification for guns and war, all of this justification for killing people, I wish it would stop. Why can't we spend more energy justifying peace? Violence begets violence. For the religious folk, isn't your premise that an eye for an eye was replaced for the love and peace and forgiveness in the New Testament? While I am not religious, I nevertheless, do not want people killed in my name. I wish the entire world could enjoy peace and love, for there is far too much killing and hatred. That might strike some as a naive position, reminiscent of the 60's hippies. And admittedly, I am a hippie. I am one of those far left, democratic socialists from way back when I lived in Canada and voted for the New Democratic Party, a party where Bernie Sanders would have been at home. But politics aside, and naive as my position may be, if we give up on even hoping for peace then surely we have already lost. And is it really a bad thing to want peace? Is it not a good id...

I just watched, for the second time, a documentary called Best of Enemies , the debates in 1968 between William F. Buckley Jr . on the right and Gore Vidal on the left. The debates were part of a new truncated coverage of the 1968 primaries by ABC which did not have the budget to compete with the gavel to gavel coverage the other two major stations, CBS and NBC, could manage. The familiar lines were drawn, the right was the party of the greedy and heartless, and the left represented the lazy and the decadent. But this was the first time the coverage drew upon drama created between two iconic advocates from the respective sides. Buckley was the darling of the conservative movement; in fact, he founded it and the magazine, the National Review . Later, in coming out for Reagan, he was regarded as a kingmaker. Vidal was the popular author of many historical fictions beginning in 1948 but is most famously remembered for the novel Myra Breckinridge . Vidal’s social commentary was wrap...

I don’t know about you, but my existential angst has reached near critical mass. Racism, bigotry, misogyny, and jingoism, while certainly not new to this country, have become legitimized. Truth has always been hard to find, but now verifiable information is a virtual Grail quest. Apparently, all established, credentialed news agencies are not to be trusted. I am now admonished to accept as fact, the posts of a masked person who speaks with an electronically altered voice on the Internet. The mask incidentally is symbolic of Guy Fawkes, a religious zealot who tried to assassinate the Protestant English King James, on the 5th of November 1605. And there are many other Internet sites claiming to speak truth to power that escape that meddlesome chore of fact checking. There are countless sites explaining how the government, that nameless nemesis always the culprit no matter which political party has the majority, is rendering the population compliant by spreading lithium via che...

Confirmation bias is what we do when we search for information that supports our position. We have all been guilty of this type of thinking from time to time. And what makes it even harder is the abundance of bad information, especially on the Internet which is where, let's face it, we do most of our arguing. In this venue, in today's charged political climate, it is a full time job fact checking other people’s claims. It has come to the point where we actually have to fact check the fact checkers. Scientists look for evidence that will prove their hypothesis wrong. This is one reason why science, with all its flaws, remains the best modality available for learning stuff. But I am not a scientist, I barely made it out of high school and I dropped out of college. I am a middle class, blue-collar worker, average in every respect. In my defense, I have read a lot. And not just crackpot books with weird political agendas. I’ve read books, by Shermer, Sagan, and Asimov, to n...

I am not lonely when I am alone. I only feel loneliness looking at the back of the smart phone sitting opposite and as the silence thickens, I realize how less lonely I’d feel if I were by myself. You ever stand in front of the mirror, looking at the strange old man with the perplexed look on his face, eyes casting about trying to make contact with you? There he is, looking at you with his wrinkled, blemished skin, saggy and mottled instead of taut and tan, with fat where muscle used to reside. Do you try to pretend he’s not you? Do you deny him? Scented shaving cream applied, razor in hand, and you suddenly wonder why bother? Why, instead of shaving grey whiskers from a slack, jowly jaw line, do you not just cut your throat? According to Algerian playwright and philosopher, Albert Camus, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest...

The country is divided. You are either right wing or left wing, you live in a blue state or a red state and if you disagree you are unpatriotic. Political candidates, well, at least the only two allowed to be recognized as such, spend their time bashing each other. The media dishes the dirt on each of them and not so evenly perhaps. From both sides, we hear how bad things are, how we are under threat, and how our way of life is being threatened. Frightened and cowed by the political rhetoric, frustrated and distracted by the media and desperately fact checking every statement, an endless job, we turn our anger toward each other. We draw lines in the sand about whether or not standing for the national anthem, itself a song about war and written while witnessing an attack, constitutes treason. We support police, law and order even when we see fellow citizens shot and killed over nothing or at least for no capital crime. We support protesting those actions and yet are hard pre...