The Era of the Robber Baron: Good or Not So Good? (Pt. 2)

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Ford

With the success of the Model T, and the coffers full, Henry turned to his next project, the envisioned River Rouge Plant.

Like most men of his ilk, micro-management was the norm. These men are control freaks. They are not satisfied until they have all the marbles. Much like Rockefeller who when faced with railroads intent upon getting a bigger profit from carrying his crude, built his own pipeline to carry crude to his refineries, (while destroying a few railroads and putting thousands out of work), Henry didn’t like buying steel. He wanted to make his own.

The Rouge Plant was his vision for doing that. The Rouge River runs through Dearborn, and has access to the Detroit River, which gave Henry access to water transportation for iron ore. Dredging the river, he was able to bring raw materials to his new factory which was 1.5 miles by 1 mile in size. It ultimately employed as many as 100,000 people, and turned raw iron ore into a finished car. Hundreds of miles of roads and rail supported the 93 buildings.

But we move ahead of ourselves. When Henry made known his desires to build the Rouge, his investors balked. They wanted dividends to be paid on the enormous profits that Henry was holding. Henry had always hated investors considering them to offer him nothing but money, missing the point that of course he could do little without it. Henry refused to issue a dividend, they sued, they won. Henry was livid. He concocted a scheme with his son Edsel to wrest control from their hands.

All sorts of “plans” were announced for the future, plans that seemed scary and likely to bankrupt the company. People became nervous, and soon investors were selling stock off to willing buyers (all of course fronts for Henry). When all the stock had been re-acquired, it is said that Henry danced a jig. Now with control of his company, he turned to building the Rouge.

Once built, he spent little time there, finding it cold and ugly. It was as one put it, soulless. It was worse than soulless, it was a hateful place to work.

Along the same lines, Henry bought thousands of acres in the Brazilian Amazon forest, clear-cut it (always the environmentalist), and started a rubber farm, replete with “Americanized local workers” and a town and neighborhood called Fordlandia, where happy families would live life according to Henry’s model of perfect family living.

Meanwhile, at the Rouge plant a security division was run by one Harry Bennett, who had become Henry’s most loyal and trusted friend. He was a man of little education, and he rose through the ranks of Henry’s organization, being the tough. At the Rouge, he supervised a security team of nearly 3000, and enforced the rules. His team consisted of thugs, ex-cons, ex-cops and various mafioso.

The rules were simple. No sitting, no talking, and no gathering in groups of even two during breaks. Talking was dangerous.

Why? The Wagner Act.

In 1935, Congress passed the National Labor Relations Board act, which in part legalized the rights of workers to unionize. (Back when Republicans actually thought unions a good thing)

The United Auto Workers formed and chose GM as their first strike target. After months of struggle, GM gave in and negotiated a contract. Chrysler quickly followed suit. When  UAW organizers came to the Ford to pass out literature outside the plant, well, Bennett was ready. Although plenty of journalists had appeared to watch the confrontation, Bennett thought he had that covered. Cameras and equipment were snatched and smashed. Yet pictures were taken and they were printed. They showed Bennett and his thugs beating union organizers with baseball bats.

Henry was having none of the this union business. He continued to fight unionization at his company, until Edsel quietly on his own negotiated a contract and ended the matter. Henry really never forgave him. Edsel also continued to bring new car concepts to the old man, which were always rejected, finally resulting in Henry telling Edsel to take a long vacation in California and not come back until Henry called to see him.

But running his company was not enough. Henry also had a paper that he published out of Dearborn. As the war years loomed, Henry became increasingly fanatic in his anti-Semitism, blaming Jews for almost everything wrong in America. He blamed them for World War I and sympathized with Hitler. His tracts in The Dearborn Independent were bound and sold in Germany under the title The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem. Hitler called Ford an “inspiration” a man who had maintained his independence from the “masters of the producers”, namely Jews.

Sales slumped, Henry issued the pro forma apology, and the Dearborn Independent was closed.

Meanwhile, Edsel grew sick, and eventually died of stomach cancer, leaving the old man in control again. However, by now Henry’s mental faculties had been ravaged by dementia and the company for some time was in chaos as he made and changed directives daily. He continued as head during the war years, though at one point Roosevelt considered taking over the company to protect its war manufacturing, so erratic had Henry become.

In 1945, he turned over the reins to Henry II his grandson. He died some two years later. Henry sold off the failed Fordlandia and took the company public again soon after.

The five-dollar day is one thing Ford is remembered for, and it was a good thing, although as we saw, it was intended to stop a savage turnover rate that was costing too much in training new workers. He did, hit on the idea of the assembly line, although there is reason to believe that it was a team discovery. He did develop a serviceable and cheap auto that changed the face of America, though certainly no such thing was envisioned at first.

Does this offset his craziness and the pain and suffering he caused to so many? The meddling in others personal lives, they intimidation and fear that was said to be so thick you could cut it with a knife on the factory floor? The outrageous hatred of Jewish people, and the aid and comfort he gave to Hitler? The bullying of his only son? The incessant drum beat that Henry knew how everyone else should live?

I don’t know. I suspect that the assembly line would have been created by someone and in no short time. Any manufacturer at some point (unless they make yachts) recognizes that more money can be had when products are cheaper and can be purchased by a broader public. The determination to lower costs will always drive technology.

The Model T? Oh it was a glorious car no doubt, but there was no shortage of cars, and again, it would not have taken long for other car makers to conclude that selling to the rich insured a small market.

So you judge? Did the ends justify the means? Is Ford a man to be held up as a brilliant diamond in the firmament of American industrialization, or as a sleazy awful human being, with a personality that drove him to succeed, and inadvertently  to provide a service (mobility on the cheap) that changed a country, and ultimately the world?

It’s a hard call.

Tell me, what do you think?

Oh, and the Contrarianism?

After watching the PBS documentary on Ford the other night, we had just got in bed, and were talking about the unions. The Contrarian mentioned Jimmy Hoffa and his disappearance in 1975. I agreed, a lot had happened relative to unions during our lives.

“Yes,” he pointed out, “and there was Joe Louis from the United Mine Workers.”

“No, no it’s not Joe, it’s Lewis, but not Joe,” I moaned.

“Yes, it is, sure, it is.” he assured me.

“NO,” I exclaimed, “that’s the boxer,” I said.

“NO, it’s Joe E. Louis,” he whispered.

I scrambled from the bed. “Where are you going?” he asked.

“To the computer to look up the name, I can’t sleep now!” I yelled.

I returned to bed a couple of minutes later.

“Its JOHN L. LEWIS!”

“Yes, but the E. was a nice touch don’t you think?” he chuckled, turned over, and snuggled into the covers.

“Oh God,” I moaned, “I’m really expecting a big job up there, I really am!”

The Era of the Robber Baron–Good or Not So Good?

Tags

American History, Henry Ford, robber barons

I’ve been engaged for some days in a debate with an arch conservative. Eventually, I made mention of the era of the robber barons, that time of the Gilded Age, when industrialists of one sort or another came forth and fought each other for supremacy, and while doing so, became largely responsible for bringing about the American industrial age of greatness. It is a greatness that continues to this day, though it may now be on the wane.

The question becomes, at what cost? It seems to me that conservatives are all too willing to let the ends justify the means, finding as the argument went, that the good these men did makes them heroes and the bad they did, well, it’s the price of genius. I suppose it remains to be seen whether any of them was in fact a genius or rather just brilliant at playing the game of king of the hill. I don’t find their ends justified.

Arguably, each exhibited the personality traits that better fitted them to be serial killers, but for the grace of having a different avenue to display their driven self-centered megalomania. They were men who felt born to lead, and born to succeed. And given their complete lack of emotional attachment, they were prepared to succeed whatever the cost. In building their empires, they brought America into a new era, an era that I believe would have been achieved in any case, but of course it’s impossible to know how changing the dynamics would have changed the outcome for good or ill.

I should note that this is likely to be a two-parter, because I want to delve into the life of one of the players, Henry Ford, who came on the scene, arguably at the tail end of the era, but his story is instructive. And I feel fairly qualified to do so, since I was born and raised in Flint, Michigan, home of GM, and just down the road from Detroit, home of Ford. I worked in Detroit for two decades, and am familiar with the Ford legacy as well as all the old haunts–the Rouge plant and the Highland Park plant. I’ve been to Greenfield Village, the museum developed by Henry, on more than one occasion, and seen the homes of Edsel and Henry II or as he was known in Detroit, “The Duce”. I’ve read histories of the family. I grew up in a union family wherein most everyone in my family and in my neighborhood worked for GM or one of its supporting industries. I know the terrain.

The story of Henry is to me the story of a deeply flawed individual who was not worth the knowing, but who accomplished much. His talent was in his drive to “be somebody” rather than any particular innovation. Born in Dearborn, to a farming family, Henry’s interests lay in machinery and how they worked. He was allowed to go to work in the city at age 16 and soon became involved with others in the development of the new craze, the automobile. Some 250 other car companies were started at or about the time Henry set up the Ford Motor Company. Securing investors he began his quest to develop a cheaper but reliable car.

Henry’s quest was not merely motivated by a desire for fame and fortune, in fact he cared little for money. He enjoyed fame, but he hated the regular elites of Detroit and elsewhere, including bankers and lawyers. Ultimately when the money rolled in, he chose not to build his mansion in Grosse Point, the elite residence for Detroiters, but he build Fairlane in Dearborn, the then still farming community where he was born and raised. Henry, being of rural beginnings did want to bring a cheap and serviceable vehicle to the farm, where distances to town were long and often arduous. He wanted to make lives easier. But of course, a cheap car would also be one that become available to the average person, not just the rich, and THAT would vastly open the market to unbelievable  sales.

Everyone knows of the success of the Model T, the car that revolutionized America in so many ways. But perhaps people don’t realize that development started with the Model A. Successive models were mostly failures for one reason or another, until he got to the letter T. Being driven to succeed goes with the territory of the robber baron.

When the Model T took off and the orders came streaming in, Henry set his mind to thinking how he might make more and at a faster rate. It is unclear to me whether the idea of a conveyor belt and stationary workers was Henry’s idea or one of his gang of developers, but in any case, it started with one part, the magneto which was broken into pieces and then worked into a piece by piece assembly. They looked for another part to add, and then another, until in the end, the modern assembly line was born, allowing the production of a vehicle in literally half the time or less.

The problem became then, that the work was so boring that his attrition rate was awful. Men quit after a few months. That is not cost effective. So Henry hit on an idea–pay them more. This didn’t mean more in their weekly salary. Oh, no. There was a catch. They signed a contract, worked for a year, and received the equivalency of the $5 dollars an hour in one lump sum. Immigrants who made up a large portion of his workforce, were required to attend the Ford school to learn English. Of course it was hoped that that lump sum might burn a hole in the pocket and be dumped off quickly at the nearest Ford dealership!

This is where things get murky, in the sense that one enters into the dark recesses of Henry’s mind. For Henry believed that he was better than most people, and that belief gave him an insight on how a person ought to live. In one of the most bizarre results, this is what happened when an immigrant “class” finished its English training. An event was scheduled. A very large  ( and  I mean very very large) pot was constructed. The immigrant “graduates” were required to dress in their native country clothing. They marched up a series of steps to the top of the pot, and descended down into it. Two men then went up with long sticks and simulated the “stirring of the pot”, after which, the immigrants re-emerged now dressed in American garb of suit and tie and bowler, descending to the floor again. Weird? To say the least.

But it did not stop there. A unit of the FMC was set up as a “social” monitoring division. Men went out to seek out the homes of workers and “investigate” them. Henry had a series of rules about how people were to live. The monitors were to determine that people were lawfully married, that they did not drink, that they kept their homes properly clean. Violators were warned. Second violations were met with dismissal. Henry knew best you see how humans should live.

Henry thought the Model T the perfect vehicle. After GM was formed, and then Chrysler, new cars, a range of models and prices, began to be seen on the streets. Edsel, Henry’s son and titular head of the company (in name only of course), urged that a new model be developed. Henry refused. Why? Because in Henry’s view, nobody needed anything more than the Model T. Henry knew best. This was to be illustrative of the relationship between son and father–the father bullied and dictated and the son made the best of it.

NEXT: The Rouge Plant, and Henry’s really dark side, and a finish with the Contrarian’s fun with names!)

Related articles

• ‘Henry Ford’ film offers look at man behind machine (usatoday.com)
• PBS documentary explores the life and achievements of Henry Ford (heraldonline.com)

 

Food, Huh! What Is It Good For?

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crap I learned, diets, food, life in the foothills, lifestyle

Okay, you caught me. I’m avoiding politics. Just for a bit. I’m tired of reporting on idiots. Tired up to the tippy-top of my noggin with fools and dopes, and all manner of misanthropes who permeate our political landscape. The last was the isolated butt-stupid “law enforcement” personnel across the country who have determined that “they will not enforce unconstitutional gun laws”. These missing-links to humanity are nothing but assholes with inverted mouths. To suggest that they haven’t thought this through would be to suggest that they can think in the first place.

So.

What ya wanna talk about today?

Food? I thought so.

I been reading about food lately. I read The China Study, and now I’m reading, Healthy at Every Size. I won’t bore you with long drawn out descriptions except to say that the first does an excellent job of proving that for health reasons, a plant-based diet is probably the very best any person could choose. Of course only a tiny segment of the population is or ever will be prepared to never eat a hamburger, a glorious slice of Vermont Cheddar, or a gnaw upon a spicy rib bone. The second, fairly echoes my conclusion but goes ever so much further stating once and for all, that diets don’t work, except again for a tiny segment of the population.

I tend to agree with both. I cannot do a plant-based diet. I’m not that tiny segment. I have tried every manner of diet, and been successful on most all. Until I had lost the weight and tried to eat NORMALLY again. I do mean normally too. I put the weight back on faster than a nearing 40-year-old says “I do”, and as then some. It’s all quite predictable, for diets interfere with the bodies own dynamics, and as soon as the diet is done, the body starts to repair the damage at it sees things. It does little good by the by to try to tell it otherwise. It has a mind of its own.

You see this has to do with systems that are evolutionarily developed over millions of years to care for the body (itself) when the brain sitting atop all this mass of flesh was not smart enough to make the right decisions. A whole mass of interconnected “stuff” in our brains, bloodstreams, and so forth released chemicals, slowed them down, pushed them about, all to regulate what we ate and when. For a lot of millions of years, we did just fine.

Then the mirror was developed. And we saw that fat butt, and that round tummy, and well we became insane. We started to artificially alter our size. And our inborn systems have been rebelling ever since. You diet, the brain says, “we’re starving–quick slow systems down!” So our metabolisms fall making our calorie output slower than normal. We become hungrier, and  the normal level of our satiety is thrown off kilter. So when we stop starving ourselves, we eat more, more often.

Then the food industry comes into play. They want to make money. They don’t care about our natural mechanisms for maintaining a healthy body. They use high fructose corn syrup because it is cheap. It goes into everything now. It messes up the “satiety” bells and whistles. So we eat more and more often. They use all kinds of additives that affect the proper release of various chemicals and so forth into our bloodstream that help us to decide what to eat and when. They mess it up. So we eat Cheetos, instead of an apple.

The government is complicit. They subsidize farmers who grow corn. It stays cheap so it can be the favored supplier of sweeteners. In Europe, by the by, you can hardly find soda pop that uses HFCS (high fructose corn syrup), because it’s BANNED as UNHEALTHY. Here you can’t find any without it. It’s in bread and almost all boxed and pre-made foods.

The government promotes the use of milk, although studies suggest it plays a part in breast and prostate cancer, onset juvenile diabetes, and cant’ be digested properly by tons of people. There are no good studies that say its a good way to avoid osteoporosis either.

Fast food places supersize foods because the french fries are so damn cheap that they can double the size at about only 40% of the cost. And over time, the consumer becomes used to the larger size, and considers it the “normal” portion. The more we eat, the more we crave it. We mess up our internal systems. Go into a McDonald’s and ask for a “small” fry. They will not have a clue what you are talking about. There is no such thing as “small” any more.

We don’t eat because we are hungry. And we don’t eat what our body needs, we eat what our drunken brains have been taught to crave. We eat because it is noon, and we eat a salad because we want to be “good” until evening when we are starved and we devour a bag of chips and a twenty-ounce coke.

Now, I’m not trying to talk you into anything here. But these two books are worth your attention before you start yet another weight-loss scheme. If only to alert you that you can’t depend on the government to keep you safe, nor frankly even a lot of the various medical associations. You cannot believe how many of the things like Pediatric Doctors Associations (and similar things) are heavily contributed to by all the “bad” food makers to get a nod. These associations have a maddeningly bad habit of altering their “advice” to include “reasonable” portions of soda, chocolate, and all the other things we know are not real food in return for those hefty “donations”.

I’m simply trying to make better food choices, and exercise because I find it fun, and because it makes me feel better. I’m trying to make most of my diet from real foods, and meals created from whole ingredients.  Being healthy is, at my age, increasingly much more important than whether I can pop my buns into a pair of sexy jeans. Way more.

Related articles

• High fructose corn syrup linked with diabetes (thenaturopathicnutritionist.com)
• Soybean Oil: One of the most harmful ingredients in processed foods (sott.net)
• Dr. Mercola: Why Americans Are Less Healthy, and Die Sooner Than People In Other Developed Nations (consciouslifenews.com)
• This is how the food industry makes Americans fat and hungry (rt.com)
• Fructose Sugar Tells the Brain To Keep Eating (livescience.com)
• Imaging study examines effect of fructose on brain regions that regulate appetite (esciencenews.com)
• Diabetes Rates Higher in Countries Using Lots of High Fructose Corn Syrup (nlm.nih.gov)

Package That in Your Madison Avenue Briefcase

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advertising, crap I learned, Humor, life in the foothills, stupid products

I have a bone stuck in my craw. Trouble is, where the craw is eludes me. And the bone ain’t with you, but you are damn sure gonna listen. Do read on!

For the umpteenth time, I’ve been advised by the earth movers that pass as the intelligentsia of Madison Avenue, that I am dumb as dirt and too stupid to bother existing.

Let me ‘splain Lucy.

I recognize that I am from the cave-keeping days, when *gasp* one actually purchased an onion and cut it into dice (not with the numbers dummy), and cooked it. I didn’t get it out of the freezer section and measure out 1/2 cup into the pan. I realize that. But really. Just how lazy do you think I am?

You used to go to the grocery story and pick out some potatoes and proceed to buy them. Now they come in 5, 10 and 20 lb bags. If the recipe calls for 2 lbs of potatoes, I have no idea on the face of Pluto what that is. I have to run a few potatoes into the bathroom and throw them on the scales? I mean surely you jest!

I used to have the common sense of a cow so it was assumed that I could manage to figure out how many carrots I needed when I shopped. Then some bright farmer decided to bundle them into a new thing called a “bunch”. Maybe you know how many carrots are in a bunch, but my scale is busy weighing potatoes and I don’t have time to count them. Is is a dozen? Or a pound? DO YOU KNOW? — I thought not.

Speaking of dozen, who the hell decided that I wanted eggs by the twelve, or by the eighteen? Nobody asked me. I checked my diaries since the age of sixteen, and there are no references to being asked about this.

Whose the numbers guy who decided all this stuff? It’s harder and harder to be allowed to purchase four turnips you know. They put them in fives and cover them with plastic wrap. Like I can’t get through that crap? They put my grapes in a ziplock bag, and I just this morning, in full view of every other shopper and God herself, opened it and extracted a whole bunch and laid them gently on the display, zipping up my lighter bag and marching off. No alarms, and no police followed me home.

Apparently it’s not okay to put mayo on my hamburger bun (when I choose to have lettuce on my burger) and then draw a smiley face with mustard. No I must BUY some pre-mixed concoction called Djo-nnaise, where somebody way smarter than I has figured out what the perfect ratio of mayo to mustard is. How the hell I have ever mixed the dressing of you-guessed it, mayo-mustard for my to-die-for potato salad is beyond me and the Muses.

I can’t be trusted around cheese either. I’m offered all manner of grated cheese in every flavor, and sometimes mixed together in “premium” offerings. It would be horrifying and would no doubt ruin the dish should I get three shreds more of cheddar than Monterey Jack in my own eyeballing method of shredding.

Oh I know, there is someone even older than I who is crying about how they used to make their own catsup and dill pickles and so on, and so forth, but I’m not trying to be difficult here. Those are reasonable to find ready done at the store. “Mexican blend” is, well just an East Coast innovation to help Brooklynites THINK they are eating some authentic “Mexican” when of course any fool knows that there is actually Mexican cheese that is actually authentic.

Well, I saw a new one the other day, and you may have seen it too. Now Land-o-Lakes wants me to buy their butter in honking chunks with seasonings already in it, so you don’t have to actually buy any herbs or spices, but you can just melt them into your pan and throw your piece of steroid rich chicken breast on top where it will meld into the flesh, seared there until the planet is incinerated in its last gasp before being swallowed by Mother Sun in an incestuous firestorm of eating one’s own.

See, it really is not so much that they think that I’m incapable of deciding on which herbs and spices I want on my skinny chicken flesh. It’s not that, though I can appreciate their snooty, nose in the stratosphere unbelievably gaudy display of wretched excess. No it’s not that. It’s the fact that they think that I am so unthinkingly stupid that I will actually pay them to tell me that I am this stupid that I need their in-your-face slap at my self-esteem.

For this is the bottom line here folks. For all this “time-saving” help they want me to pay a premium price! Here stupid, buy this and pay through the nose too! I mean that is so many insults heaped upon one person, that they should weigh more than enough to sink through the planet and plop out the other side faster than any of those sub-atomic particles that allegedly sling through my body every second without so much as a howdy do or excuse me!

I mean I can take the MENSA application test if I want to be insulted. I can nod dumbly as a nuclear physicist patiently explains the wherefores of string theory if I want to feel OUT OF MY MIND STUPID. I can make a list of stuff like this a mile long that would make me feel light in the neuron-possessing academy.

I don’t need no idiot at Land-o-it’s-butter-for-christsakes-Lakes telling me they know what herb to put on my freakin’ chicken!

So stuff it in your advertisement portfolio and budget and sit on it and twirl!

I feel better now.

 

 

 

Juggling Life Turning to Balance

Tags

happiness, life in the foothills, lifestyle, New Mexico, spirituality

No matter your life style, no matter your family situation, no matter, no matter, you are juggling your life. Even if it amounts to nothing more than “shall I sit here and watch The Price is Right, clean the toilet, or make some brownies?”, you are juggling choices that are only yours to make.

You decide priorities, the order of things, and the time devoted. Oh of course, it’s all to a greater or lesser degree I admit. But let’s not pretend we are at being controlled by outside forces completely. Even the prisoner confined to a cell twenty-three hours a day has control of his or her mind.

So don’t give in to the safe but ultimately untrue belief that you have no control, and that whatever mess you find yourself in, is not your fault. It may well not be in most of its tendrils, but YOU decide how YOU will relate to it at least.

No, I’m not giving you some lecture as to how to run your life. I have plenty enough trouble juggling my own. What I am suggesting is that the daily stories of people talking about how they are running all the time just to keep up, well, I don’t think it needs to be that way. That’s not the norm and if it is for all too many people, it shouldn’t be. For it’s simply not healthy.

I mean healthy in the broadest of senses. Physically, mentally, emotionally, and gasp, spiritually. Yes, spiritually.

Fully aware that a good many of my most loyal readers are at best agnostic, I still broach the term spiritual. For we are spiritual whether in a religious sense or only in a more naturalist, biological sense. For if you deny or suspect that no superior being(s) had a thing to do with this planet or you, then you probably believe rather wholeheartedly in evolutionary theory and have some thinking about how life started on this blue dot.

Not that believers don’t believe in a “scientific” answer for life and how it evolved. A good many of us do, in fact, I’d hazard a guess that most of us do. Evolution tells us how life forms change over time. And it is inescapable from the evidence at hand, that we, long in our past, share a common ancestor with chimps and gorillas and orangutans. Ultimately, we regress back to one-celled creature that first replicated in some primordial soup of chemicals and water.

Where am I going with this? Please you know me by now. I wander, as my dancing neurons flip and kiss, and circle and part, cross and leap in joyous chaos that is my brain. I’m getting to the point. Geesh, relax!

So last night the Contrarian and I sat down and watched Under the Tuscan Sun. If you haven’t seen it, I’ll summarize without giving away any of the goodies. A newly divorced nearing middle-age, writer takes a gift of a trip to Tuscany, and on a whim, buys a beautiful old villa that is in need of much work. The balance of the movie is about her growth as her house comes into itself, as does she. From beginning to end, she is challenged to rely on intuition, not do the safe thing, and to think with her heart. I think of it as living in the Spirit.

It got me to thinking, with all the dangers that that always entails. I thought about our trip here to Las Cruces, and the thinly veiled intuitive hope that we would find a home that would make my heart sing again. For those of you who have been on this long journey with me, you know that I was barely hanging on at times in the meadow, living on hope and faith that I could reclaim the free spirit that I felt had sunk deep within and was losing ground. I guess I make it sound worse than it was, for surely I found times of laughter and joy in those last couple of years, but my heart yearned to soar in a new place where the sun shined more, and the temperatures would tease forth my innate sense of wonder at life.

That happened for us. It happened with a shocking perfection that still takes my breath away when I think of it. If I had listed the twenty things I wanted in my new home environment, fully eighteen have been met and the other two are available, just slightly more difficult to achieve, i.e., I have to drive fifteen minutes to the pool instead of it being two blocks away!

It has been my firm belief for a good many years that there are several components to a good life:

1. Proper care of the body. Nutritious food and reasonable exercise. Sleep enough.
2. Proper care of the intellect. Plenty of good books, good movies and intellectually probing television (PBS of course) and conversation and study.
3. Proper care of the psyche. The cultivating of relationships, creative spirit, and doing things you love for themselves.
4. Proper care of the soul. Plenty of spiritual reading, and spiritual living (walking in nature, meditation,  mindfulness, kindness, charity, volunteering and all that that entails).

You note that I don’t include an involvement in civic affairs or something of that nature. Well, I find that doing that sort of thing is really feeding one’s own soul. So it falls under number 4.

These are the keys, I believe to a life well lived, or happiness as we commonly understand it. The bare outlines of course. Each of the four requires a fleshing out of several pages no doubt. And it is just not the four, but the BALANCE between them that makes it all work like a well-oiled machine.

I’m still finding the balance, but in the last few days as I have snuggled in, recovering from a cold, I’ve been organizing and puttering in my head, to better balance my life. And it’s coming along.

And it feels good.

How is your juggling going along and are you in balance?

 

Related articles

• Tipping the Scales and Maintaining Balance (spilledcookies.com)
• 7 Ways to Juggle Better and Stress Less (alizasherman.com)
• Meru University Announces Upcoming Spiritual Courses for Online Students (prweb.com)

 

Wackos of the World Unite: You Have Nothing to Lose But Moronic Thinking

Tags

conservatives, liberals, philosophy, psychology, sociology, tea party, teabaggers

I was recently called a wacko. Nothing could be truer and if the person who so named me, had known me well, I would have laughed in agreement. But he knows nothing but a smidgen of my politics, and his opprobrium was limited to that fact alone.  To that sir, I take umbrage!

I have heard, and it seems to be folk wisdom, that one becomes more conservative with age. I guess it stems from an accumulation of anecdotal observances of friends and family as they age.

It may well be true.

I know it was nearly true of me.

At one point in my life, I found my life in a place that was not pleasing. I was living in an urban setting in a city known for violence. I was tired of house break-ins, and all the petty crime that life entailed. I was tired of my job, tired of the people I worked with and we were embroiled in a fight within our organization over wages and rights.

And I found myself slipping into conservative mode. I wanted out, and that required savings, and anything that impinged on my ability to save money was something I was against.

Life got better. And it continued to be so.

I realized something as life got sweeter. My normal liberalism was returning. My life is great today. And my liberalism is flaming, in fact I’m not sure I’m not sliding well into anarchism. (please do look that up before you report me to the FBI–I’m a Chomsky type anarachist and I’m just beginning that journey of discovery, so don’t hold me to it. Being the eclectic I am, I am always trying to learn something new. I almost became a nun for goodness sake!)

Which suggests that something more is at work here.

I’ve become involved in some discussions with old school mates as of late. The discussions have often involved issues of the day. And I find a very curious thing. Perhaps I’m reading the tea leaves wrong, but well, judge for yourself.

I view the Tea Party as a loose amalgamation of disparate spirits. There are your fiscal deficit hawks. There are your, don’t tax me (but do fix the pot holes). There are the “it smacks of socialism/fascism/communism” to me even though I can’t actually tell you which is which, but I don’t like it. There are your basic racists and any anti-Democratic group sounds good to me given that THAT guy is in the White House types. There are your basic survivalists who just hate government, but are also itching to shoot it up. There are your religionists/fundamentalists who think the US of A ought to be based on the bible as they interpret it, along with all their ideas of social living arrangements made mandatory by God, speaking through them. There are probably more.

It makes for a messy group.

But in discussions, I find that those who are most impossible to engage in anything other than sound bites direct from Breitbots, Daily Caller, Blaze, WND, and the ever reliable bellicose grifters, Coulter, Limbaugh, Hannity, and so on, are people who over time, you perceive to be just really really unhappy individuals. They have fallen into their conservationism as a defense to their miserable lives.

I paint this portrait with the proviso that not all need apply, but as they say, if you find yourself answering yes to three or more, you may have a problem that is leading you to be a Conservative:

1. You are divorced or separated, and you feel that you are not at fault, having spent your life working to provide for your spouse who is an ungrateful _________.
2. You have no education past high school, or if you do, it was toward a trade or low-level technical job.
3. You are self-employed and have no more than six people who work for you.
4. You have long given up an dreams of opening a second shop, franchising your business, or crossing that threshold to being a “businessman”. In other words, you still are working along with your employees.
5. You work long hours, and while you make a decent living, you still can’t afford all the things you dreamed of having at this point.
6. Every dime you pay in taxes becomes a dime that keeps you that must further away from “retirement”, and a chance to finally enjoy life. Emphasis on finally because you don’t expect to enjoy life until you have “made it”.
7. You have few hobbies or enjoyable down time, because you “don’t have time” or can’t afford it.
8. Life has definitely not turned out the way you expected it to, and you are close or at retirement age.
9. You increasingly see that most people don’t work as hard as you do, yet they “get stuff” for free because they are a minority, a woman, an undocumented worker (illegal).
10. You know that if the government didn’t take your money, you could have been wealthy like all the rich people you so admire. You’ve read all their books, and you know you are just like them.

What this all leads to is extreme anger. It’s not my fault I’m not living the life I deserve. It’s __________ fault. It’s got to be somebody’s fault you see. I just has to be. For it cannot be mine. I work too hard for it to be mine.

Of course, it begs the question that you have perhaps listened to the wrong people. I could explain that you are believing exactly what the corporate masters desire you to believe. You are blaming who they wish you to blame. You are mired in self-pity, because it is not your fault. And it truly isn’t your fault. You simply based your beliefs on those whose interest it is to keep your striving in place,  and misdirecting your anger away from them.

So I think of it as a badge of honor to be a liberal at my age. I have successfully avoided the pitfalls of self-interest in the name of what I call being human. I see the human experience as one of striving to be more human, and that means being more open and giving and sharing with the lives that surround me. There is nothing so very noble about it. It’s a constant struggle to pull away from purely selfish interest to include “the other”. I don’t always win that battle, but the struggle enhances my ability to win more than I lose. And as a citizen of planet of earth, I find that a positive step forward.

Evolution is about change over time. Try to be mindfully engaged in that process. I think God likes that. But that’s me, the wacko speaking.

Rand Paul For President!

Tags

Glenn Beck, GOP, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Rand Paul, tea People, wacko media

Uh, NO!

Perhaps the most amusing moment during Hillary Clinton’s testimony before Congress yesterday, was her encounter with the weird Randal. Son of the famous Ron Paul, the Libertarian who whines that nobody gives him his props as a serious candidate, Randal represents the fair state of Kentucky, where of course, his stable mate is Mitch “the Turtle” McConnell.

Now Randal has delusions of being president. He plans to carry the GOP banner in 2016, after fending off the likes of Bobby Jindal and Marco Rubio, two who can at least claim foreign-ness as a bonus point. Randal can only claim stupid (his under understanding of the Constitution is rather stellar), with a strong dose of crazy mixed in.

Yesterday, Randal tried to go toe to toe with Hillary. And he hitched up his jammies and told Hillary that well you can read it for yourself:

I think that ultimately with your leaving you accept responsibility for the worst culpability for the worst tragedy since 9/11. And I really mean that. Had I been president at the time and I found that you did not read the cables from Benghazi, you did read the cables from Ambassador Stevens, I would have relieved you of your post. I think it’s inexcusable.

Of course, I was hoping for something utterly dry like, “Well, on so many levels, Senator, we are assured that THAT won’t be happening!” But she is a diplomat after all.

Worst tragedy since 9/11? Wow, that leaves out Katrina, Hurricane Sandy, Aurora, Sandy Hook, and a half-dozen tornadoes I can think of. It leaves out the fairly senseless deaths of all those killed in Iraq and probably a goodly number of those killed in Afghanistan.

When you go for the killer punch Senator, it’s so tempting to make something so much bigger than it really is. When you are on national TV and all, and have an ego as big as Texas and have delusions of being POTUS, yourself.

You’re an idiot. Go sit in the corner and suck your thumb Randal.

¿

Johnny S. McCain promised us that he had a lot of questions he wanted answers to. He didn’t ask any. He just pontificated. The old war-horse who never met a war he didn’t want to send somebody’s kids to fight (so they could enjoy all the fun he had), claims that Ambassador Stevens told him personally that security was not up to snuff in Benghazi. Whom did he tell?

No one as far as anyone can ascertain. And how about those Republican holds on funds for security in Libya and other places? John had nothing to say about that either.

Same old Johnny. Just a lot of angry old complaints that amount to “I woulda been a better President than him, I would have!”

Old record, John, and it’s beginning to skip. I think the record is scratched.

¿

I loves me some conspiracies.

So good with a nice cup of hot chocolate.

Nobody is better at the game of conspiracy hunting that that dear boy Glenn (where went my fame?) Beck.

Beck, if you didn’t know, runs that rag The Blaze, which is on the sleaze factor one point up and over from WorldNetDaily, and one point down and over from the other twin  bunker Breitbart, home of the Breitbots, which is an oxymoron, cuz nobody there is in any way deserving of the adjective “bright”.

Beck having found no fun in Texas, is back in the Big Apple trying to re-invent himself. And since Glenn is all about conspiracies, his latest is something of a tongue-twister. So hold on to your hats, private parts, or the porcelain throne as it fits your predilections.

Beck suggests that we must rid ourselves of all those OLD Conspiracies, they being the birther issues, and the Sandy Hook conspiracy. Sandy Hook conspiracy your gasp? What is that about? Oh, didn’t you hear? The Obama administration did Sandy Hook. Killed those little kids just to use it as a focus for taking away your guns! Boy, now it makes sense right?

Oh.

Well, Beck, says, whoa, you know, how many people would have to be involved in such a plan–to shoot up a school, and all that? No, that’s CRAZY!

Beck says, that all these conspiracy theories are just things that Obama USES to deflect your attention so that you don’t see the REAL conspiracies. I know, I know. Let me start that again. Slowly.

The crazy theories exist out there in the ether. And Obama grabs onto them, and feeds them surreptitiously to keep your conspiracy-lovin’ noggin occupied. All the while, the REAL conspiracy is going on behind your back. You know the one I mean–all the NEW WORLD ORDER ILLUMINATI DRACONIAN PLANS BY THE CAPITALIST-HATING, FASCIST/SOCIALIST/COMMUNIST/ LOVIN’ O-B-A-M-A.

Glad you know the truth? I bet you are. Shine up that AK-15, cuz baby you are gonna be using it soon against those black helicopters headin’ your way.

Don’t believe me? Think I made it up? Ha!

So, now that your mind is functionally unable to do anything else but count dust bunnies under the bed, I’ll leave you dear reader until tomorrow.

Or, leave an incoherent, but pithy, and funny, if at all possible, comment.

Related articles

• Glenn Beck to Devote Whole Show To ‘Debunking Conspiracy Theories About Sandy Hook’ (sgtreport.com)
• GOP Senator Pushes Gun-Running Conspiracy Theory During Benghazi Hearing (thinkprogress.org)
• Video: Sen. Rand Paul Goes On A Condescending Rant Towards Hillary Clinton At Benghazi Hearing (sensico.wordpress.com)
• Hillary Clinton 69, Rand Paul 10 (thehill.com)