Honour thy father and thy mother, as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee; that thy days may be prolonged, and that it may go well with thee, in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.

In a better world, the CNN story would have a better headline. In a perfect world, the story wouldn’t even be news. Get your parents to stop spending your inheritance, says the page title. Stop Squandering My Inheritance says the headline. The story itself concerns elders’ tiresome habit of living on and on instead of buggering off to the cemetery so the next generation can get their hands on the money.

Something about this raises my blood pressure so much that I barely know where to begin in explaining why I find it so offensive. I have to begin somewhere, however, so I’ll start with the headline and its use of the term “my inheritance.”

Readers of this CNN article are invited to believe that the terms “my inheritance” and “my parents’ money” are synonymous. They are not. I may hold a minority view here, but I believe the words “my inheritance” mean absolutely nothing until and unless someone decides to bequeath something to me.

Try to stay with me here, gentle readers of CNNMoney.com. Your parents are under absolutely no obligation—legal, moral or financial—to leave you a dime. Their money is theirs. Period. Your inheritance doesn’t exist until and unless your parents decide otherwise. You have no claim against them and no inherent right to their money. Why would you ever doubt this?

At this point, readers may point out that parents generally have the children they deserve. But this changes nothing. Anyway, I know from personal experience that it isn’t always true.

One day about 20 years ago, a man brought his aged mother into my law office and said, “Mom wants to deed her house over to me.” His manner was brusque, and he was in a hurry.

I explained that I would have to talk to Mom privately. If I were to draft a deed for her to sign, she would be my client. I had a duty to her to ascertain her intentions before I advised her to do anything. The son looked unhappy about this and protested a bit, but he finally headed off to get a cup of coffee while I had a little chat with his mother.

“Who’s idea was this to begin with?” I asked.

She explained that her son had suggested it as a way to prevent her losing the house to pay medical bills in the event of catastrophic illness.

“OK,” I said, “so what about these bills like that? Would your son pay them if you couldn’t?”

She didn’t think so.

“Do you have other assets in addition to the house?” I asked.

She did not.

“So, the question comes down to this,” I said. “Are you willing to die bankrupt in order for your son to be able to have your house?”

She pursed her lips and was silent. She hadn’t thought about it that way. When she did think about it that way, however, she didn’t like it.

“I want to be able to pay my bills,” she said. “I’ve always paid my bills. I don’t want to end up as a welfare case.”

About this time Sonny Jim came back from the coffee shop. When I told him his mother in fact did not want to deed away her only asset, he was furious. He got Mom on her feet and practically pushed her out the door. I assume his next move was to take her to another lawyer to see if he could get a different result.

My hope has always been that Mom was able to fend off her son’s rapacious bullying. She seemed like a nice lady, and she clearly didn’t have the son she deserved.

The point here is that inheritances and other transfers of property from parents are things that must be earned. It seems obvious to me, but not everyone thinks so. A big chunk of the so-called Elder Law business consists of “asset preservation” strategies that work basically by impoverishing parents by placing their assets beyond the reach of their creditors. That typically means maneuvers like getting Mom to deed over her house, and it overlooks a couple of points that ought to be obvious:

• People who have led responsible lives want to be able to meet their obligations right to the end
• Parents want the love and attention of their children right to the end

In our time, however, the obvious sometimes isn’t even discernible unless an expert calls it to our attention. A great deal of effort has therefore been expended in some quarters in order to understand why aging parents don’t naturally welcome penury and isolation in order to enrich their children, no matter what. Among the helpful hints in the CNN story is this little gem: “…studies show that children who frequently call and visit their elderly parents tend to inherit larger amounts than those who don’t.”

No kidding. Hard as it may be for some folks to accept, parents can in fact tell the difference between when their children visit and when they don’t. Parents may not say anything about it, but they know. And it matters. Parents need and usually deserve the attention of their children.

This isn’t a new idea. It dates from ancient times and has been a central tenet of our culture from the beginning. Everything anybody needs to know about it is right there in the 5th commandment.

Looking in the window, we see that on the whole, the Victorians were less troubled than we by the plight of the poor and more devoted to flights of public piety. We would not with an easy conscience turn a blind eye and deaf ear to the poor and their children starving to death in plain view in the streets of our cities. Neither, I think, would we refuse to seat a member of Congress solely on the basis of that member’s unwillingness to swear an oath on the Bible.

There is much talk about religion and devotion to God in our time, but piety just doesn’t inform our public life the way it did for the Victorians–Pat Robertson and his ilk notwithstanding. Congress doesn’t debate theological matters the way Victorian Parliaments did.

I have to admit that an exception to this arises in the case of Darwin. The Kansas State Board of Education and the alleged “controversy” about evolution come to mind. In our time, however, opponents of evolutionary theory try to use scientific language to advance their point of view.

The Victorians were under no such constraint. Bishop Wilberforce, debating evolution with the biologist T.H. Huxley in 1860, is said to have asked whether “it was through his grandfather or his grandmother that [Huxley] claimed his descent from a monkey.” Not to be outdone in ad hominem argument, Huxley replied, “If…the question is put to me, would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means of influence and yet who employs these faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion, I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.” Both parties earn an A+ for rhetoric but a D- for science.

Looking in the mirror that the Victorians hold up to us, we see a people so convinced of their own virtue and noble intent that in general they approve of everything they do on the world stage. For the Victorians this included the posturing and incompetence of the Crimean War as well as the oppression and opportunism of the Raj. For us, the same self-satisfaction and blundering tone-deafness are apparent in our military adventures and alliances over the last 50 years. Too often, as it was for the Victorians, the underlying principle seems to be that since we’re nice people, what we’re doing must be right.

For our lives as individuals, the Victorians also hold up a mirror. For us as for them, the most able and admirable are not always the most influential. Hard work and fair play are not always rewarded. The verities of the age may tell us one thing and our experience something else.

Like the Victorians grappling with the implications of Darwinism, many of us face a longing of the spirit that our attainments do not comfort or address. Thomas Hardy speaks for many of us as much as he did for his contemporaries when he wrote, “I have been looking for God for 50 years, and I think that if he had existed I should have discovered him.”

Coyotes

Is this world truly fallen? They say no.
For there’s the new moon, there’s the Milky Way,
There’s the rattler with a wren’s egg in its mouth,
And there’s the panting rabbit they will eat.
They sing their wild hymn on the dark slope,
Reading the stars like notes of hilarious music.
Is this a fallen world? How could it be?

And yet we’re crying over the stars again,
And over the uncertainty of death,
Which we suspect will divide us all forever.
I’m tired of those who broadcast their certainties,
Constantly on their cell phones to their redeemer.
Is this a fallen world? For them it is.
But there’s that starlit burst of animal laughter.

The day has sent its fires scattering.
The night has risen from its burning bed.
Our tears are proof that love is meant for life
And for the living. And this chorus of praise,
Which the pet dogs of the neighborhood are answering
Nostalgically, invites our answer, too.
Is this a fallen world? How could it be?

I thought of this poem last night when a dog barked outside. It’s unusual in this neighborhood. The dogs here are well-cared for and well-trained. They seldom find much to bark about. Listening to the dog, I began to wonder if the coyote I saw in the street a few years ago was making his rounds again. Probably it was just wishful thinking. It is mid-winter, and much of the time I feel trapped indoors.

We live in a time of shrillness, and too many of the voices in what currently passes for public discourse have taken to howling and barking. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity,” wrote Yeats. The problem is not new, and we find it everywhere.

In the current issue of Newsweek, a reader from California pronounces that “The president is a socialist ideologue…” In response to the same article, a reader in Connecticut insists that the president “has done nothing but capitulate to the right and to Wall Street.” The howl and the bark. Mr. California and Ms. Connecticut cannot both be right, and in this instance actually manage both to be wrong. They howl and bark to make stupid sound smart and scared sound strong.

The coyote doesn’t howl for emphasis because the howl is the message: “I am a coyote, and right now I am in this exact spot.” The dog barks in reply, “I am a dog, and right now I am in this exact spot.” It’s all true, and they are both right.

As always, the time is right now. As always, politics and punditry don’t have much to do with actual living. Knowing this, couldn’t we as human beings just try a little harder not to be stupid and scared and not to take it out on each other? Couldn’t we leave the howling and barking to the coyotes and dogs?

They’re really good at it after all, and we aren’t.

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.

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

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.

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…

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.

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.

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!