As I Was Saying…

I’d be happier if this could be an actual conversation, my anonymous progressive friend, but my experience has been that you do not listen. Even when you are willing to give your name, you only show up to talk–specifically to bestow upon those of us whom you see as sitting in darkness the superior wisdom of your orthodoxies. You are insufferable when you do this, but you don’t seem to know that. Perhaps you would if you were better at listening.

For most of my adult life I’ve done my best to maintain my equanimity in the face of patronizing insults, but now you seem to have crossed a line. Today, the day after President Obama’s first State of the Union Address, you left this anonymous comment on the Who is IOZ? blog: “I didn’t watch the Address. What did el presidente say? Wait. Nevermind (sic). It doesn’t matter what he said. At all.”

Really, Mr/Ms Anonymous? The remarks of the single most powerful and influential  person on earth don’t matter? At all? Not to anybody, do you think, or just not to you?

But have I missed something crucial here? Perhaps you are the most powerful and influential person on the planet so what Obama said really doesn’t matter if you say it doesn’t.

If that’s the case, I wish you had taken the time to call him and let him know he didn’t need to go to all the trouble of writing and delivering that speech. Noblesse oblige and all. It would have been a nice gesture on your part. I mean, if it didn’t matter what he said, Obama could have stayed home last night with Michelle and the kids–maybe played fetch with Bo or something.

The truth, of course, is that you missed the speech last night because you and your ilk have written off Obama. You gave him about 90 days to remake the world in your image, and when that didn’t happen (how could it possibly have happened?) you wrote him off. That’s your prerogative under the Constitution you rely upon Obama to defend, but there are a few things you and those like you should consider:

• When you write off the President unless he agrees with you 100%, you are doing your very best to hand the keys back to the GOP. If you are so amnesiac or willfully blind that you can’t tell the difference between Obama and Dubya, then you deserve Dubya and are helping to bring him or someone like him back to the White House.

• When you only listen to people you already agree with, you get so you don’t even notice when you say things that are really, really stupid. The Who is IOZ? comment is just one tiny example of this.

• When you indulge in supercilious brat attacks, you become profoundly unattractive. Perhaps you don’t care, but I would suggest that if you don’t admire Rush Limbaugh you should stop acting like him.

Back in October I wrote a series of posts about the week I spent in New Orleans as a Katrina relief volunteer. Last week I put together a slide show of the trip for use during church yesterday. The slide show was a huge time sink, as such projects can so often be. The problem for me was that when I started I had no clear idea of what story I wanted to tell. There’s a bit of that indecision still visible (at least to me) in the final product.

Nevertheless, I’m linking the slide show here. If you’ve read this far, I hope you enjoy the show!

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P.S.
I think I made a resolution to post here at least three times a week. That thought obviously lasted about as long as the typical new year’s resolution. But who knows? Maybe I’ll start doing better by this blog. Truth be told, it has been an ongoing disappointment that the thing won’t write itself…

I’m packing up Christmas decorations today. This is a task I’ve sometimes grumbled about and often found melancholy, but this year I’m feeling at peace. That may be because I’m not working against a deadline, but I doubt it.

The fact is last year’s holidays were more difficult than anything we had ever experienced or imagined. Marge was just heading into her chemotherapy. We did not utter our darkest thoughts, such as that we might be having our last Christmas together, and we propelled ourselves forward fueled by one part will to two parts desperation.

By contrast, this year’s holidays were serene. In our better moments, we have come to accept that life is fragile and finite as well as precious. Putting away the ornaments is giving me the chance to remember our Christmases together. There have been 42 since we got married in 1968. The last 30  have included Elizabeth. We have never been separated on Christmas, not once in all those years, so there are lots of memories.

The ornaments themselves tell part of the story. There are those we purchased, those we inherited, those that were given to us and those we made ourselves. The one shown here was made by Elizabeth in 1985 and cut from a sheet of loose leaf notebook paper. Every year since then Elizabeth has endured the same joke: “Ladies and gentlemen, let’s give Santa a big hand…” Every year since then Big Hand Santa has hung on the tree.

Every year since then I have been amazed to discover how much joy can be found in one sheet of notebook paper.

It’s the end of 2009, whether my French is correct or not. In looking at the blog, I realize that I haven’t posted anything here since early November. I’m not exactly sure why that is. To rule out the obvious, however, it’s not because I didn’t have anything to say. That hasn’t happened to me for a single waking hour since I was about three years old.

My online silence, I think, has had more to do with a sort of profound weariness–a delayed hangover, so to speak, from the ordeal of supporting Marge through her cancer treatment and recovery. She has felt it, too. After months of having too many difficult things to do every day, both of us came to a time when we didn’t really have to do anything at all. So we didn’t. That consumed most of the summer. Through the fall, we did what was required. The blog, however, somehow got labeled “Not Required.” And so it has been.

I don’t usually make resolutions for the new year, but I’m making an exception this time. During 2010 I want to post something here at least three times a week. As the old cliché has it, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”

So out with the old year and in with the new year. Take it away, Guy…

A day or two ago, I found myself launching into a discussion of healthcare reform via the comment capabilities of Facebook. Taking the Facebook approach is, to be charitable, a fool’s errand. Healthcare reform is complex, and opinions on all sides are passionately held. Yet I think I learned something by trying to take the discussion to the land where BFFs LOL.

The difficulty lies in the divergence of our fundamental beliefs about healthcare; and it has proved insurmountable, in Congress as much as on Facebook.  The current debate should tell everyone that it’s finally time for us to decide where healthcare belongs in our view of the world. We’ve long since made such decisions about many other things. The military, for example, protects everyone at taxpayer expense, including people who don’t pay any taxes. In the same way, public highways, libraries and schools are available to everyone, whether they contribute a lot or a little in taxes.

Highway usage is admittedly constrained by tolls and vehicle registration and use fees, but pedestrians and bicyclists generally use public ways for free. People paying to register their cars usually don’t fret about paying taxes to provide roads for cyclists. Taxpayers don’t ask public libraries to limit patrons’ use of their materials and facilities to a “fair” share. Public schools don’t tell families with lots of kids that they can’t all come to school. This is because over the course of our history, we’ve decided that the nation as a whole benefits from establishing and maintaining roads, libraries and schools as public institutions. Availability is based upon universal need rather than the ability to pay.

So, does healthcare belong on the same list as highways, libraries, schools and the military? People who think the way I do say yes. From that premise, of course, it is impossible to imagine healthcare reform without the so-called “public option.” The nation as a whole will benefit from a healthier citizenry. Government therefore must be involved. How else are we going to to take care of everyone’s health needs?

On the other side of the debate are people who believe that doctors and hospitals provide a personal service, like accountants, mechanics, maids and dog-walkers. From this premise, it follows that healthcare should be available based on the ability to pay rather than actual need. But everyone needs healthcare. Against this backdrop, therefore private insurers currently earn billions of dollars, through ever-increasing premiums, by making healthcare available to people who otherwise couldn’t afford it.

Given that government is already in the business of providing and paying for healthcare, through Medicare, the Veterans Administration, the military and the health plans members of Congress currently enjoy, I maintain that it isn’t much of a leap to take healthcare public. The military wants its people as healthy as possible, because healthy people do their best work. The military therefore provides healthcare for service people and their families. That seems to me like a direct, simple and smart approach as well as a worthy goal for society as a whole.

Here in Maine, we’ve been through months and months of hysteria, misinformation and outright nastiness from self-styled defenders of marriage who have mounted a referendum effort to repeal a measure passed last May by the Legislature and signed by the Governor that legalizes same-sex civil marriage.

I’ve done my best to stay positive while doing my part for the campaign working to defeat this referendum. This afternoon, however, I happened to get a look at one of the websites promoting passage of the referendum. This is what I found.

If that link doesn’t seem to work, by the way, please enable popups in your browser. I’ve put up a picture of the page rather than an actual link because, well, because I’m damned if I’m going to give that site a link! If all else fails, you can go directly to the picture by clicking here.

Please take a moment to read the copy on that page and to study the picture that accompanies it. I’m asking a lot here because I’m about to start a rant, and I really, really want you to know what I’m talking about.

Let’s start with the headline which suggests that Question 1 is the only thing protecting schoolchildren from an onslaught of homosexual propaganda. No matter that Maine’s Attorney General has rendered a formal opinion that states that the law as enacted has no impact at all on what is or is not taught in Maine’s schools. The Stand for Marriage Maine (SAMM) folks must know this, unless they are as obtuse as they seem to hope Maine voters are, but they continue to beat the same drum. It’s hard to imagine they have any other purpose in mind than to sway through fear voters who don’t know about the AG’s opinion or who don’t know enough to believe it.

Next they talk about “national organizations” bringing a fight to Maine. If this doesn’t qualify as an attempt to manipulate through distortion, I don’t know what would. The facts are these: The referendum is to repeal an act of the legislature, not to enact anything. The truth about this claim appears when we “follow the money.” According to campaign finance reports, the bulk of the money funding SAMM and the referendum itself comes from out of state. It’s the effort to preserve the existing law that is funded overwhelmingly by contributions from people here in Maine.

The rest of the text is speculation and innuendo about Massachusetts, but it drops a nasty little zinger about attempts to limit parents’ rights to control what their kids learn in school. I suspect that this is an attempt to connect SAMM’s agenda with the same parental anxieties that only a few weeks ago launched that brainless resistance to President Obama’s speech to school children.

My suspicion is strengthened by the photo. According to the 2000 census, Maine is the whitest state in the nation. Nevertheless, SAMM offers an image that features an African-American teacher, black like Obama. Perhaps this is something besides a blatant appeal to racism, but given the content of the text on the page I have serious doubts.

In the photo the blue-eyed blond in the back looks as if she is hearing something that she doesn’t believe. The other kids, however, merely look troubled and confused. The narrative of the photo is therefore this: a teacher who is an alien influence, like Obama, is filling the minds of our innocent children with poisonous ideas from an out of state conspiracy of homosexuals. Some children (e.g., the blond symbol of white America) will be able to resist these lies, but what of the rest? What will they do, the picture asks, if we don’t beat back these invaders by undoing the law our own elected representatives enacted six months ago? The sky is falling! The sky is falling! Vote Yes!

There are certainly poisonous lies coming from out of state, but they appear on the SAMM page and do not come from existing law or the campaign to preserve it. A responsible and legitimate political organization would offer actual information upon which a voter might base a reasoned decision. SAMM, however, offers a skewed and paranoid vision of our schools and state government based on half-truths, innuendo, racism and homophobia.

This is simply more than I can keep silent about.

I know it looks and acts younger, but the Internet is 40 today. It was on October 29, 1969, that the first message was sent from one computer (the Internet’s first node) to another computer (the Internet’s second node).

By today’s standards, the computers of 1969 were real clunkers. That first message was only two letters long, after all, with confirmatory phone calls between letters. I like to point out that a typical cellphone these days has more processing power than NASA’s Apollo control room at the time of the first moon landing. Most of the power in today’s computers, of course, goes toward making the computer seem less like a machine and more like a companion.

Even so, I often wish I had been an Internet pioneer. On that momentous day in 1969 when a bunch of geeks at Stanford were creating the Internet, I was in my ninth month of military service. I didn’t really appreciate that computers had already seriously affected my life. Thanks to a tip I got from a colonel on the day I signed in at Pease Air Force Base, the Air Force’s primitive personnel database was working to keep me from being sent to Vietnam.

Here’s the back story on that. The database was totally unprepared for “irrational” input, in my case a signed and dated but otherwise blank volunteer statement. I was proud to volunteer for…nothing and nowhere. That mattered because of the way the database worked.

Say, for example, that the Air Force needed a 922 specialist (like me) with a rank of E-5 (like me) to go to Vietnam. The computer would look for 922 E-5’s who had volunteered for Vietnam. I hadn’t volunteered for Vietnam (or anywhere else) so my name wouldn’t pop up.  If nobody’s name popped up, the computer would switch to the list of non-volunteers, the people who had not signed volunteer statements. My name, however, wasn’t on that list because I had signed the volunteer statement. The result was that the computer couldn’t find me either as a volunteer or as a non-volunteer.

Leonard Kleinrock, the computer scientist interviewed in the article linked above, speaks of the openness and trust among computer scientists and Internet users in those early days. That sort of innocence about implications probably carried over into the programming of that Air Force personnel database. From that point of view, my blank volunteer statement probably counts as an early computer “hack.”

So, maybe I really was a pioneer!

I went to New Orleans with a group of volunteers. We worked on one house that belonged to one family. Others involved in rebuilding the city, however, have serious money behind them and seek to implement Big Ideas about architecture, energy conservation and the nature of community.

We heard a lot about Brad Pitt while were in New Orleans, but I didn’t actually see any of projects bearing his name. Back in Maine, however, I read this article in the November issue of The Atlantic.

The article is intriguing, and it certainly contains ideas that are new to me. Even so, I’m left wondering what all of it actually has to do with the people I met in New Orleans. I can’t escape the feeling that these are the ideas of conquerors and missionaries, not helpers.

New Orleans certainly needs help and its people are generally grateful for the contributions that have been made. I’m not convinced, however, that it’s in anyone’s best interest to take this time of crisis in New Orleans as an opportunity to paper over the place with sensibilities that have more to do with San Francisco and Cambridge than the Crescent City.

Every New Orleans resident whose home was flooded or otherwise damaged by Katrina has faced wrenching decisions about whether to leave or stay, what to rebuild, what to abandon, when to do or not do anything and how to pay for whatever decisions are finally made. From the vantage of our group’s work site on Pauline Drive in Gentilly Woods, we easily found examples of many of the ways these decisions have played out.

Pauline Drive runs north and south, parallel to and west of the Industrial Canal. The house we worked on is on the canal side of the street and faces west. The house directly across the street, shown here, seems to be completely new, right down to its immaculately manicured lawn. I have no idea who owns the house or even whether there was anything on the lot before Katrina.

The neighborhood shows lots of signs of work in progress, but this house stands alone in its newness and completeness. My friend and fellow volunteer Tom has years of experience as a real estate appraiser. Who, he wanted to know, would build this house in a neighborhood so damaged that its survival may still be uncertain?

It’s a fair question, I think. The only plausible answer I can think of is that the house was built by someone who wanted to stay put in Gentilly Woods and who had first-rate insurance in force when Katrina struck.

The next door lot to the south tells a different story. It has been vacant since 2007 when everything on the lot except the cement slab and driveway was hauled away. Most people would agree that the lot is now an eyesore, but I have to wonder what happened here. Is this a case of a displaced owner, financial ruin, family quarrel, title problems or bureaucratic morass? Maybe the cause is just the owner’s despair.

That driveway visible on the left side of the photo is where I parked most days, but I didn’t explore the lot otherwise. I have a natural aversion to most insects and reptiles,  and I was pretty sure something I wouldn’t like was alive and hungry in those bushes. The smaller picture shows how the vacant lot and its driveway looked from the back bedroom of the house we were working on.

It appears that no one has done anything on this lot for at least two years. I say that on the basis of information I got from people in the neighborhood. It seems incredible to me, however, that those bushes could get that big in just two years. I have to admit that I don’t fully comprehend the incredible fecundity of New Orleans. I remember joking to another member of our group that everything we saw had something else growing on it, even the mold.

The house on the adjoining lot to the north looked like a lot of the homes we saw in Gentilly, uninhabited, unrepaired and boarded up. In this case, the yard has been taken over by kudzu or something similar, although someone has paid enough attention to the property to hold back the bushes.

Across the street from the vacant lot, we saw a variation on the boarded up house theme. Although this house was also uninhabited, unrepaired and boarded up, there is something about that new bright blue paint on the blinds and window coverings that suggests this owner will be back. Restoring this house seems obviously a work in progress, perhaps even a labor of love.

The little corner of Pauline Drive where we did our work typifies the situation in New Orleans overall. Apart from and in addition to all of the big decisions made and to be made regarding the city’s future, there are the stories of individual properties and individual property owners.

The new house across the street is already inhabited. The house we worked on should have residents in time for Christmas. The vacant lot may remain vacant and overgrown for a long time to come. The boarded up house will probably be repaired and once again made into someone’s home, but it may remain as it is for several more years. The house with the blue paint will certainly be back, sooner rather than later. With the passage of enough years, Gentilly Woods will probably look more or less the way it used to, although by that time so many of the old residents will be gone and so many new residents will have arrived that those who remain from before Katrina may barely recognize the place.

I’m glad I went to New Orleans and proud that I got to play a part, however small, in the city’s recovery. For the six days I spent there I knew each morning, unequivocally, that just by showing up I was doing some good. Life is usually more complicated than that.

So I say again, if our church sends another group to New Orleans next year I will be part of it.

Years ago when I practiced law, a truth of human nature became apparent to me: nothing is simpler than somebody else’s problem. The so-called helping professions, including law, counseling and social work, are all founded upon this principle. As a lawyer, I didn’t agonize much over my clients’ problems. Their situations seemed absurdly simple: Client X should get a divorce; Client Y needed to file bankruptcy; Client Z had to sober up and turn himself in. Sure, these were huge, life-fragmenting steps with frightening implications—but they seemed so obvious. People just needed to quit dithering and get on with it!

I think most of us apply the same kind of reasoning to groups of people as well as to individuals. Moreover, the larger those groups and the farther away they are, the easier it becomes to feel comfortable making blanket pronouncements about how other lives should be led. The temptation is great, therefore, to believe we can take in the nearly 300-year history of New Orleans at a glance and conclude that the place shouldn’t be rebuilt at all. People need to face reality and move to a place where things like Katrina don’t happen, right? It’s just so simple!

Except that it isn’t.

My own thinking has matured since I took the photo at the top of this post. I went to New Orleans, and I saw for myself. The picture shows the back of the house my group worked on as it appears from the flood wall at the top of the embankment that abuts the back yard. You are seeing in this photo, by the way, exactly what you think you are seeing. The wall that flood waters over-topped when Pauline Drive flooded is higher than the roof of the house. So, doesn’t this prove that rebuilding the house is a bad idea? That thought is at least part of the reason I took the picture in the first place.

But the picture doesn’t really prove anything. The seawall and other earthworks that make the Gentilly area habitable date from 1927 and have held back the water for more than 80 years. Most of the houses shown in the photo were built in the 1950’s and have stood where they are for half a century or more.

There have been storms through the years, but nothing like Katrina. This seems to mean more to the residents of Gentilly than to people outside New Orleans. Residents love their homes and for the most part want to stay put.

In the four years since Katrina, many people have had a lot to say about the folly of those in New Orleans. At least one writer, however, has had the perspicacity to note the recurring hazards some of them, in such disparate locations as Seattle, St. Louis, Reno, Torrington, CT, and Lewiston, ID, were choosing not to heed in their own backyards.

The irate resident of St. Louis in the article linked above is quoted as saying, “I am sick…of hearing how every taxpayer in America should pony up a couple grand to subsidize the rebuilding of a cesspool of a city that will just be wiped out again by the next ‘unlucky’ hurricane.” Yikes!

Somehow he does not acknowledge that huge sections of his own city were submerged and destroyed by flooding as recently as 1993. The Mississippi River is still there, Mr. St. Louis. It’s obvious that flood waters will come again. Do you really think it was a good idea to rebuild St. Louis?

The resident of Reno, no less irate than his St. Louis counterpart, is even more amnesiac and seems to have no memory of the 1997 flood in his city. Yet the Truckee River, like the Mississippi, is still there and will flood again, Mr. Reno.

And as for that cesspool remark, well, the FBI has a lot to say about St. Louis. Reno, as everyone knows, has its own well-developed reputation in that department. The God of the Old Testament may have laid waste to the cities of the plain on account of their morals, but it’s probably not up to us to make that decision about New Orleans.

The fundamental fact is that St. Louis and Reno, like the rest of America, do not build for the ages any more than the people of New Orleans. It’s easy to decide that other people should give up their homes and move to a new place, but even easier to believe that our own homes should be rebuilt.

So it is in New Orleans, and so we worked to make our own small contribution to that rebuilding.

~ ~ To be continued ~ ~