When Kindness is Wasted

Peggy and I took a walk. Two blocks from home, we came across a broken bottle on the bike path, so I went home for a broom, a bucket, and a dustpan. I didn't do this because I'm kind but because if I can spare other people (and dogs) a big headache by undergoing a small headache myself, decency dictates that I do so. This means that I deserve no credit for what I did, but that those who could have removed the glass and didn't deserve censure.

Pedestrians often break bottles on bike paths. I suppose some do it because many cyclists are jerks who haze pedestrians for using their path (although it is a multi-use path), but however the glass breakers rationalize their behavior, it is inexcusable for the same reason that carpet bombing is inexcusable.

"Many People Are Alive Because It's Against the Law to Kill Them"

I agree with the above bumper sticker. If, by pointing my thumb up or down, I could kill anyone who intentionally breaks bottles on bike paths, I would kill them, and while I was at it, I would kill pedophiles, cat torturers, members of the Islamic State, people who drop boulders onto cars off overpasses, various members of the Trump administration, and many others. Not all people deserve a second chance, yet I live under a legal system that keeps giving criminals chances until they've raped or murdered so many people that we finally lose patience and lock them up for life. To show sympathy for a hardened criminal is to become a party to his crime.

I've heard, and it makes sense to me, that people with a high empathy quotient tend to favor harsher penalties than those who have a lower empathy quotient because they feel the victim's pain more acutely (they're also prone to burnout when they enter one of the helping professions, but that's another subject). This is true of me.

Some people, conservatives mostly, mistake me for a liberal, but I deny it because liberals believe that people are inherently good. Ann Frank was a liberal:

"It's a wonder I haven't abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart."

As liberals see it, criminals deserve help rather than censure, which leads them to devote the most resources to the people who deserve them least. Here's an example. Three teenage boys burned down a beloved baseball stadium a few blocks from here. Of the many people who wrote to the newspaper about the crime, one suggested that Eugene's residents need to come together to make these boys feel loved and supported rather than penalized and shamed. No such deluge of love was proposed for kids who work their asses off to make something of their lives.

Conservatives are the polar opposite of liberals in that they believe that people are inherently evil. I'm neither a liberal or a conservative. I believe that people have an enormous capacity for both good and evil. One of the most interesting aspects of war is that the same people perform acts of good and evil in rapid succession.

I believe that I am good inasmuch as I wish death on people who torture cats, and I believe that liberals are evil inasmuch as they aid and abet evil by showing kindness to people who torture cats. Some crimes speak so profoundly and so lastingly about whom a person is within his or her deepest being that there is no possibility of redemption. Some might argue that, when a person is killed, all the good that he (or she) might have done dies with him. I say

Let It Die

because if there's one thing we're not short on, it's people.

Something else I ponder from time to time is the question of which crimes should be punished most. As I see it, the punishment for a crime should be based upon the crime's reasonableness. Killing an abusive husband when he's sleeping is reasonable. Littering is unreasonable. Hence I would lightly, if at all, punish people who kill their abusers, while I would severely punish litterers. Another factor that I would consider is the likely damage to people other than the victim. For example, by breaking into one house, a burglar frightens an entire neighborhood, yet a first time burglar might not serve a day in prison.

There's a push here in America to punish people less severely because, it is believed, severe punishments don't deter crime. I rather think that we haven't made the punishments severe enough to know, so while I wouldn't send anyone to prison for using heroin (I would even consider decriminalization or legalization), I would see them dead for cheating old people out of their life savings. As things stand, "white collar" crime is lightly punished. Steal $10 in an armed robbery, and you might serve 10-20 years (sentences across America vary widely), but cheat scores of old people out of their life savings, and you're looking at 2-6 years. This leads me to another thought. Psychopaths and sociopaths can't be fixed, so if you have a person like that, a person who is certain to go through life committing one foul deed after another, why wait for him to do it? Why not respond to him (or her) as to a rabid dog who must be euthanized before he bites someone?

Show Snovels and Other Trivia

 

Eugene, Oregon, rarely gets temperatures lower than the mid-twenties (-4 C.) or more than an inch or two of snow accumulation. As I write, my yard contains fourteen inches that fell in the last day and a half, and snow is still falling. The airport is closed, and Amtrak (America's long distance passenger train service) hit a tree forty miles from here, and its passengers were stranded in the train for 36-hours with too little food and heat. Few people own snow shovels, and I even saw one woman clearing her driveway with a round pointed garden shovel.

I didn't even know what a snow shovel looked like (verbal maladroit that I am, you could put a gun to my head, and the term would still come out show snovel) before moving to Minneapolis in October 1988, just in time for the season's first snow. I always enjoyed buying tools, and my fondness for shoveling certainly stood me in good stead, but I would have had to do it regardless in order to get the car out of the driveway and to avoid a fine for letting snow accumulate on my sidewalk. During my two winters there, the Twin Cities (the only thing that separates Minneapolis from St. Paul is the Mississippi River) never had a snow so heavy that it brought life to a standstill. 

Therefore, when I heard Minnesotans whining on the TV recently about the sub-zero cold, I thought they must have turned into sissies because I remembered zero degrees as being almost balmy on sunny, windless days. Sure enough, when I looked up the winter lows during my time in Minnesota, I discovered that in both '88 and '89, the mercury hit -24 F (-31 C.), which wasn't even regarded as noteworthy. In fact, my area of southern Minnesota was called the Banana Belt to distinguish it from the far colder northern Minnesota cities of Duluth and International Falls. Truly, global warming has spoiled Twin Cities' residents if they regard -5 (-21 C.) as cold, although I'm sure that the schnauzer we had back then would agree with them because when I dressed her in her fleece-lined red coat and took her for her daily walks, she would run up to the door of every house we passed in the hope that someone would let her in.

The southern Willamette Valley doesn't do well with heavy snow, and god forbid that we get an ice storm. I live near downtown and had naively imagined that our power would stay on regardless, but a few winters ago, it was out for six days during zero cold (-18 C.), and it was out for four days during another winter (zero being very unusual here). Because I use a BiPAP for severe sleep apnea, power outages are no joke for me, and my potted plants don't think any too well of them either. Fortunately, we have a gas fireplace insert that at least enables the plants to survive and for us to remain in our home (I power my BiPap with a twelve-volt battery).

As I write, many thousands of people are without power, but thankfully Peggy and I aren't among them. We're also fortunate in that we have no place that we have to go because while I think our four-wheel drive car would do fine, I don't want to get salt on it. When I moved to Minneapolis, I was as ignorant of salt as I was of snow shovels, so when I saw trucks scattering sand on the roadways I concluded that the sand was being used instead of salt, but I soon learned that the two are mixed.

Well, here I sit in my cozy home, writing and listening to Vivaldi in the company of my wife and four cats. Life could certainly be worse. I could have a schnauzer that I felt obligated to walk "for her own good" no matter how much she hated it. I still don't know if I did right by that dog, but she came through it okay, finally dying at age seventeen.

Mississippi On My Mind

My ancestral roots go deep in Mississippi, a state that regards itself as God's chosen part of his chosen nation, yet lags behind the rest of that nation in every measure of welfare. For instance, Mississippi ranks 50th among the fifty states in health care, 49th in infrastructure, 49th in opportunity, 48th in economy, and 46th in education.* The state is such a hellhole that it receives more money from the federal government than it pays into it, which makes it all the more extraordinary that Mississippi consistently elects politicians who oppose helping the poor. I can think of a few reasons for this. 

(1) Although poverty plagues the entire state, the 37% of the population that are black suffers more. Because white Mississippians tend to attribute their black neighbors' problems to laziness, improvidence, and sexual immorality, I think it likely that the state's resistance to receiving federal aid is partially inspired by a desire to harm its black residents. 

(2) Mississippi only elects conservative politicians (preferably Southern Baptists) who get misty-eyed while talking of their love for Jesus and who interpret the Bible literally. No candidate who believes in evolution, global warming, or the antiquity of the earth, can win an election in Mississippi, and I would despair of even calling an ambulance if I were openly pro-choice or favored gay rights. Despite this, white Mississippians are wildly enthusiastic for President Grab-em-by-the-Pussy because he at least claims to love Jesus and to support Biblical morality and "science." If pressed to explain their inconsistency, white Mississippians say that, although Trump might fall short of being exactly perfect, well, who is. It is not a tolerance that extends to fetus-murdering, fag-loving, gun-banning Democrats who have never "invited the Lord Jesus Christ into their hearts."

(3) From its antebellum era onward, white Mississippians were infamous for their a reactionary mentality and mistrust of the federal government. Envision a belligerent neighbor who decorates his yard with junked cars and half-starved dogs, and you have an image of Mississippi. I'll give two examples: 

Although the state's antebellum economy made a handful of people spectacularly wealthy, the rest of the population's inability to compete with slave labor kept them impoverished, yet this did not discourage tens of thousands of poor Mississippians from marching off to kill "nigger-loving Yankees" so that rich men might keep their slaves, euphemistically referring to that war as a struggle for state's rights. This same mentality remains evident in Mississippi's support of politicians who pander to the state's religious and racial prejudices while opposing its economic interests, only today's rationale is religious liberty, by which is meant the liberty of conservative Christians to force their values, ceremonies, "science," and monuments, on everyone else. 

Here's my second example: during my adolescent years in the 1960s, the state's economy suffered because out of state businesses were unwilling to locate to an area where people were being bombed, shot, beaten, and jailed, simply for exercising their right to vote. It was true then as it is true now that the more the rest of the nation scorns white Mississippians, the more white Mississippians are convinced that they are "suffering for righteousness' sake."

How, then, does Mississippi explain its many failures or the advancement of such secularized areas as New England and the Pacific Northwest? Mississipians quote the Bible to prove that God tests those he loves; they argue that, despite being the prayingest state in the Union, Mississippi needs still more prayer; and they claim that God punishes the parts of a nation for the sins of the whole. As a result of its refusal to act in its own interest or to take responsibility for its failures, Mississippi blames its every problem on someone else. For example, it blames school shootings on the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling that compulsory school prayer is un-Constitutional ("When the Supreme Court kicked God out of our schools, it invited Satan in"), and I wince when I remember being struck on the head when I didn't stand for opening prayer while on jury duty. Such is the mentality of people who blame violence on too little prayer but, in my case and others, use violence against those who don't pray. It was this mentality that led me to leave the state because I concluded that I had to either stand up for my convictions and bear the consequences, or I had to move to where sanity prevailed. I made the latter choice, although I am still pained by the knowledge that I acted out of cowardice, and that I abandoned those who shared my values.

Mississippi has been on my mind of late because Peggy recently went there to visit her father, commenting before she left that she was about to fly into hostile territory. I could but agree. Although Mississippi could be far worse (in the absence of Federal protections, it could be a Christian version of theocratic Islamic nations), my memories of having lived there for 36 years are nonetheless demoralizing. No one should be made to suffer simply because he or she is a non-conformist or a member of a minority, and I'll never get over the fact that Mississippi's oppressing majority claims moral superiority by virtue of its love for Jesus Christ.

*https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/mississippi

The Shutdown

Trump's most often repeated campaign promise was that he would build a 2,000 wall between the US and Mexico and make Mexico pay for it. When Mexico refused to pay for such a wall, it was expected that Trump would get the money from Congress because, after all, his party controlled both the House and the Senate. Yet, he failed there too because, as a group, Republicans regard negotiation and compromise as indicative of moral failure (as Kentucky senator Rand Paul put it, it's wrong for those who occupy the moral high ground to those who occupy the low ground). 

When you have a petulant president who is used to getting things his way, and he suddenly can't do it, bad things are sure to follow, the bad thing in this case being that Trump has refused to allow 800,000 government employees to draw their paychecks until such time as Congress allocates money for his wall, something that Congress was unwilling to do even before January 2, when the Democratic Party took control of the House of Representatives. Today marks day 31 days since one-quarter of federal employees drew their last paycheck. 

Trump opened the shutdown with the following words:

"I will shut down the government, and I am proud [that] I will be the one to shut it down. I’m not going to blame you for it... I’m going to shut it down.”

A few days later, he blamed the Democrats for making him do it (I don't know if Republicans are too oblivious to notice or too immoral to care that Trump rarely opens his mouth without lying). Since the shutdown, the people who protect our borders are going unpaid, although Trump claims that the shutdown is aimed at strong borders; federal courts are not hearing cases; loans are not being approved; national parks are being robbed and vandalized; travel by plane is grinding to a halt; criminal investigations are ending prematurely; and so on ad finitum. All of these countless millions of people are suffering, not because of anything they did but because their president is in a snit. Such recalcitrance is what passes for strength among Republican voters.

On the bright side, Trump and Congress are still being paid, although the Secret Service agents who protect them are not. When the leader of the Congress advised Trump that, because of security concerns during the shutdown, he should postpone a speech he wanted to make to Congress; he denied her access to a government plane for a secret trip, although he allowed his wife to take a vacation in Air Force One. So what does Trump have to say to (and about) these people who are going unpaid and who, in many cases, are being forced to work because their jobs are deemed "essential"? 

1) He says that most of them voted Democratic, which, I suppose, means that it doesn't matter if they're paid. 

2) Despite having never lived a moment of his life during which he didn't have more money than the life savings of hundreds of thousands of us added together, he says that he can relate to not getting a paycheck. 

3) He says that those who are being unpaid will "get by like they always do" (he is apparently is referring to the fact that the Republican Party has often shut down the government when it didn't get its way, although it has never shut it down for this long). 

4) He says that those who aren't being paid are happy to make the sacrifice. 

5) He assures the country that he's eager to negotiate with the Democrats, but that they're unwilling to negotiate with him, and while it is true that he invited the two most powerful Democrats to the White House, it's also true that they went, and that Trump Tweeted the event as follows: "Just left a meeting with Chuck and Nancy [he calls others by their first names but demands that he be called "Mr. President"], a total waste of time. I asked what is going to happen in 30 days if I quickly open things up, are you going to approve Border Security which includes a Wall or Steel Barrier? Nancy said, 'NO." I said 'bye-bye.'"

Trump is the standard of truth to millions of Republicans who praise him to their children as an example of how a good man should live. To millions of Democrats, Trump is proof that the Republican Party represents the nadir of dishonesty and immorality. It is to millions an organization for people who take the position that, "As long as I get mine, then screw you," "America First" being code for "Me First, and You Not at All." I keep thinking that the day will come when these people are finally fed up with supporting a man whose behavior flies in the face of the very Christian values that they claim to hold dear, but since it hasn't happened yet, I find it hard to envision what it would take to make it happen.