Dichroic Reflections

This latest thing with athletes kneeling during the US national anthem confuses the heck out of me. I support anyone’s right to protest peacefully, of course, as a form of free speech; it’s just that I’d have thought that kneeling was a deeper expression of respect than standing.

• I grew up in a religion that stresses not kneeling to anyone but God (as have other religions including parts of CHristianity). Hebrew school included stories of martyrs who were executed for not kneeling to various kings.
• I also grew up in a city that stresses US Revolutionary history because so much of it happened there. It was a big deal, establishing protocol in the infant US government, and they specifically rejected kneeling before his Majesty the President, because free men do not kneel.
• But I’m not sure how much of all that these athletes know. Are they just trying to attract attention? Or are they saying symbolically that they’re still slaves?

And all that is even ignoring the more basic question of “How is the Star Spangled Banner” even suitable for a national anthem? Canadians pledge to “stand on guard” for their country; Brits express allegiance to their ruler. The French call themselves to action; others hail their homeland express hope for the future of their country. How does “Hey, the flag didn’t get shot down on one night of a battle 200 years ago” work as an anthem? (It’s too bad we can’t use America (My Country ‘Tis of Thee) instead, because that DOES have an appropriate message, but the ENglish got to the tune first.)

On another topic, speaking of free speech reminds me of Jim Wright’s 9/11 post, that got pulled down from Facebook, which made me think of what I was saying the other day about math and mortality – only a different sort of math. Wright pointed out that 3000 people were killed on 9/11/01, and to avenge them we spent the lives of 8000 of our own and killed 300,000 or more in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Side note: it’s hard to see how anyone can claim the US is a Christian country while so thoroughly forgetting “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord”.) It doesn’t seem like a very good deal in terms of pure numbers. Maybe it would have been worth it to make an important point, just as men volunteered for WWI in the hopes that it was a war to end all wars. Unfortunately, we seem to have succeeded about as well as they did.

That whole mortality thing yesterday had me thinking about math and time. My online friend’s husband did die yesterday, and she mentioned that they’d had 61 years together. My parents had 50, and one set of grandparents were just shy of that. Ted comes from a longer-lived family; his parents just hit 50 years (that was the reason for our Galapagos trip with them) and I’m hoping for many more; one set of his grandparents hit 60 years minus a few days, and the other made it to 65.

We’ve been together 26 years now, married 23 of them. That means that with luck we could have another 40 or more together – more time to look forward to than we’ve had already, which is kind of wonderful since we’ve already been together more than half our lives. The downside of that of that – and it does seem a little unfair – is that those will all be our over-50 years. I don’t think that age means you can’t have fun or do cool stuff – participating in a sport where it’s common to see people competing at 80 or even 90 would have cured me of that. Moreover, even the small added bits of graying and creakiness we’re seeing so far have convinced us that the best way to age is to age together; I think it would suck, in fact, to be a 60-year-old wedded to someone 30 or 40 years younger, though obviously that’s totally subjective. But there’s no denying that age means that more things hurt and though you might be able to do much of what you always could, you recover more slowly.(There is eventually a point where the body just says “nope!” though it comes at a different age for everyone. We saw that in Ted’s grandfather last weekend. He split wood by hand up into his 70s and still lives alone, so it’s been a good run, but you can tell his body is just noping out of a lot he’d like to do.)

Anyway, I find myself a little resentful of the inexorable math of humanity, that even if we’re lucky enough to have as much time together as humans can reasonably expect, we’ll spend two thirds of it being middle-aged and old. I would like our Lazarus Long-type treatments to be starting around now, kthxplz.

Oh, well. Nothing for it but to ride as long as you can, and enjoy as much of it as possible.

I’m right there with Robert Browning on “youth shows but half”, but not so convinced on “the best is yet to be” – guess I’ll have to wait and see. Maybe Kipling is more suitable:

It’s like a book, I think, this bloomin’ world,
Which you can read and care for just so long,
But presently you feel that you will die
Unless you get the page you’re readin’ done,
An’ turn another—likely not so good;
But what you’re after is to turn ’em all.

Gawd bless this world! Whatever she ’ath done—
Excep’ when awful long I’ve found it good.
So write, before I die, ‘’E liked it all!’

(One thing sure, however old I get I will never stop wanting to play with toys. Last night I did the lazy person’s version of camping out in front of the Apple Store. I set my iPad on the appropriate webpage before going to sleep, and when I woke up during the night, as I almost always do (an inevitable consequence of sleeping lightly and living with cats) I ordered one of the new Apple Watches. It’s supposed to arrive in three weeks.)

I had a slightly frustrating conversation today; someone told me in so many words that she doesn’t want people to be able to go to college for free because “well, we had to pay for ours!” taxes, but this didn’t even seem to be that. I think this person would be shocked if I called her mean-spirited, but that’s precisely what this sort of zero-sum thinking is: the fear that you are somehow losing out if someone else gets a benefit that you didn’t get. I can understand being envious when someone else gets something great; in a similar case, I’m still a little piqued myself that the free Birthright trips to Israel for young Jews didn’t start until I was too old for them, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want other people to have the experience!

I can understand it better if someone doesn’t want to pay for other people’s tuition with an increase in their own taxes, because then it really does take (a tiny amount!) away from you – but isn’t that the cost we pay for living in a healthy society? No such thing as a free lunch; if I benefit from living in a civilized society it’s only reasonable to expect there to be costs as well. It can’t all me benefits for me-me-me or someone else is getting shafted. Personally, I’m happy to do pay for education because a) I don’t expect to notice a difference – fine, charge me an extra $1, I don’t care! and b) I expect to benefit more from living in a well-educated country than it will cost me.

I’m probably a little off-kilter today anyway – saddened to hear that a longtime online friend’s husband is in hospice care now. This is someone I’ve never met in person, but I’ve liked and admired her since probably the late 1990s. He’s 91 and has had health issues, so it’s not a surprise, but I don’t suppose that makes it easier for her. I’m feeling it a bit more because Ted’s parents came for a visit of the Labor Day long weekend, bringing his grandfather. The other grandfather has visited our lake house a few times, but this one hadn’t, and the in-laws really wanted him to see it. He’s 95 now; moving from the living room to the back deck is about as much distance as he can manage, everything hurts and he sleeps a lot. So it was good to see him and be able to have him visiting us, but a little sad too. I doubt he’ll be coming back. On the plus side he still lives alone, and has lots of people stopping by to visit every day – he spent as much time on his cellphone this trip as a teenager – so at least he still gets to enjoy his life!

Sorry, downer entry.

I. I’m always amazed at all the things people don’t know. I don’t mean trivia so much – I can understand not knowing bits of history or song lyrics or whatever because you’re just not interested. And I’m always amazed at how much people know (especially kids) about the things they are interested in. On the other hand, it’s surprising how much people don’t remember about their own lives – do many people not really remember what it was like to be 6 or 9 or 14? And if so, maybe that explains why I never outgrew reading kids and YA books, and many do. (I’m not referring to people who had traumatic childhoods and have good reason for forgetting the details.) But I know I’m not the only one who remembers, or there wouldn’t be adult authors of kids’ and YA books at all.

II. I’m always surprised at seeing just how much things have changed socially in my lifetime – I was expecting to see lots of technological change over the course of my life, but I think I just thought that the major battles for things like feminism and civil rights were over and we’d just see sort of a continuous progress toward wider and wider acceptance. I wasn’t expecting many of the new battlefronts we’ve seen and I wasn’t expecting the change in the …. I don’t know, general feeling of communities spawned by the intersections of technological and social change. Heinlein wrote something to the effect that the difference between youth and age is that older people know in their bones that change happens, but I was born into such a time of ferment that I always knew it, just didn’t expect what kinds of change, or in what corners of my life.

What spawned this was that I just happened to come across the latest newsletter from my mom’s synagogue online, while looking for something else. his is so different from anything I ever saw in a synagogue newsletter growing up – they included a sample page in there from 1960, and I don’t think it would have looked much different in 1980, the year I became Bat Mitzvah, or in 1988 when I graduated college and moved away (it’s not the same exact synagogue we belonged to, but is a larger one they merged into – I think they would have been much the same as the one I attended in the 1980s). I’m very glad my mom has a community like this. It’s avowedly feminist and progressive, discussing everything from why a female congregation member began wearing a kippah and tallit to ritual and meaning, to an open letter from the rabbi to her daughter, prompted by watching Hillary and Bernie at the DNC and realizing what that means in terms of the examples available to her as a Jewish girl.

I’m sure there were Jewish communities doing this kind of thing in the 1970s or 1980s, in downtown Boston or Philadelphia – but I don’t think it would have been as likely out in the ‘burbs where these people are, or in the Conservative tradition at all.

III. On the other hand, I sometimes wish things would happen a little faster in the short term! I’m in a doldrums period now, between the excitement of our Galapagos trip, and the wait for September, when a ton of small but exciting things are happening – mostly books coming out that I’ve been waiting for, but also (hopefully) the new Apple Watch. There were a few features missing in the original one that convinced me to wait for the second version, but in the meantime I’ve used various fitness trackers that all have one lack or another – like not having an actual watch function! So while this is just a ‘thing’ rather than an experience, it’s been a long time coming from my point of view.

I had the coolest dream last night – something about being on a spaceship that was mostly built by the Mayans. There were some issues with the oxygen system – we’d thought we wouldn’t need any O2 above 900 miles, then it turned out we did, so suddenly I couldn’t breathe and thout we were all going to die – but then the backup system kicked in. It had only been intended for a few people who for some reason had different breathing requirements than the rest of us, but it was somehow self-contained and could handle any number of people. It provided less air than we were used to but plenty to function well. (This may have something to do with me recently spending a few days in Quito, which is at an elevation of 9250’/2820m.)

Later on, I went to explore the ship farther and walked into a big room with a sign proclaiming “GET ALL YOUR SPACE QUESTIONS ANSWERED – FROM MOVIES, BOOKS, ANYTHING”. There were lots of people all around the room, at screens or talking to computers.

The whole thing seemed like a much more cohesive story at the time than my patchy memories are conveying now, I do like it when I get narrative dreams – it’s like getting to keep reading even while I’m asleep. (Aside from the time I had a nightmare involving cryogenics. I don’t ever need to do that one again. The problem was, Ted went under first, To be woken up at some far future time, and only then did I learn that the procedure ended up killing about 75% of the people who went through it. So I had to choose between losing him or taking that risk myself. Blech.)