Countless songs describe how quickly things can change, The song that says it most directly to me – “things change, rearrange in the blink of an eye” – is by the Moonalice Band.
(You can listen or download a copy of the song and other of the band’s music at www.moonaliceband.com)
We’ve had many blinks of an eye moments this year, and things certainly have changed and rearranged.
The first was back in the winter when my wife, Adelaide, fell down the stairs at our house – 16 of them. Miraculously, she survived without permanent injuries, but it has taken months of recovery, and that process continues. Things change.
Then two weeks after what is usually a routine surgical procedure, I began hemorrhaging, and made two trips to the emergency room in a single day. Rearrange.
The resulting anemia left me weak and frustrated. It took an agonizingly long period for the red blood cells to regenerate, and I spent the summer only as a spectator.
I slowly recovered, though, and had enough energy to attend the Biennial Roundup of the Usual Suspects that I wrote about in an earlier post, although there were a couple of times when I just ran out of gas.
A couple of weeks after our return I stopped by the doctor’s office to get a prescription renewed. She asked about our trip, and when I told her that I’d hit the wall a couple of times, her ears perked up. You know, those can be the symptoms of heart disease, she said, and we ought to get it checked out.
I respect her skill, so I had a calcium scan the next day. We hadn’t gotten home from that good before she was on the phone saying that I needed to come see her that morning.
&nb The scan results put me in an extremely high risk category, she said and made me an appointment with a cardiologist.
Here I was riding along with the top down, so to speak, and I got hit by a log truck.
In the blink of an eye.
More tests, including a heart cath. The result was not what I had hoped for, so, barring the unforeseen – boy aren’t there a lot of unforeseens in life – in the next day or so, a surgeon will bypass the clogged arteries and we will begin adapting to still more changes in our lives.
There have been countless blinks of the eye that have been immeasurably great. But not so many this year. So we will be happy to put a close to 2008 and look forward to some of those great ones next year.
“Things change, rearrange, in the blink of an eye.”
Bill Brown can be contacted at billatthelake@gmail.com
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
When things settle down...
It’s a lesson that you would think I’d have learned by now, but I delude myself, and so I have to keep learning it over and over:
Things are never ever going to settle down.
I think that telling ourselves that things will settle down is simply a way of coping with the fact that we will always have more things that we need to do / want to do than we have the time to do them.
So we pretend that eventually we will have all the time we need.
When things settle down, I’m going to:
… go through the closet and get rid of all the clothes I’ll never wear again.
… finally read War and Peace (or one of those other important books that we would like to have read but haven’t ever put a high priority on actually reading).
… weed the flower bed.
… volunteer at the food pantry.
… learn a foreign language.
And when will things settle down?
When the houseguests leave…
When I get through with all these medical tests…
When there’s a little more money in the bank…
When things aren’t so busy at work….
“When things settle down” is a small-scale version of the “one of these days I’d like to…” syndrome.
I’ve learned to deal with the latter more effectively than with the former. The “one of these days” want to list usually is made up of fewer, more substantial things: One of these days I want to go hiking on the Appalachian Trail. One of these days I want to go to France.
Those “one of these days” things can be turned into reality by putting them on the calendar. You’re never going to make that trip to France unless you put your departure date on the calendar – in ink – and work backwards, listing everything you need to do to depart on that date.
The “when things settle down” items are those things that don’t seem nearly as consequential, and they wind up on a list that only grows longer even as it gathers dust.
So many of those “little” things seem to be beyond our control. Life in a family and in a community imposes obligations, and it is easy for the days to slide away one by one as we accommodate to the obligations we feel.
Once again I am realizing that being more jealous of my time – even if it occasionally makes someone else unhappy – is the only way of getting to those things on the “when things settle down” list.
There’s only time when things will truly settle down, and I’m not really eager to get there.
You can contact Bill Brown at billatthelake@gmail.com
Things are never ever going to settle down.
I think that telling ourselves that things will settle down is simply a way of coping with the fact that we will always have more things that we need to do / want to do than we have the time to do them.
So we pretend that eventually we will have all the time we need.
When things settle down, I’m going to:
… go through the closet and get rid of all the clothes I’ll never wear again.
… finally read War and Peace (or one of those other important books that we would like to have read but haven’t ever put a high priority on actually reading).
… weed the flower bed.
… volunteer at the food pantry.
… learn a foreign language.
And when will things settle down?
When the houseguests leave…
When I get through with all these medical tests…
When there’s a little more money in the bank…
When things aren’t so busy at work….
“When things settle down” is a small-scale version of the “one of these days I’d like to…” syndrome.
I’ve learned to deal with the latter more effectively than with the former. The “one of these days” want to list usually is made up of fewer, more substantial things: One of these days I want to go hiking on the Appalachian Trail. One of these days I want to go to France.
Those “one of these days” things can be turned into reality by putting them on the calendar. You’re never going to make that trip to France unless you put your departure date on the calendar – in ink – and work backwards, listing everything you need to do to depart on that date.
The “when things settle down” items are those things that don’t seem nearly as consequential, and they wind up on a list that only grows longer even as it gathers dust.
So many of those “little” things seem to be beyond our control. Life in a family and in a community imposes obligations, and it is easy for the days to slide away one by one as we accommodate to the obligations we feel.
Once again I am realizing that being more jealous of my time – even if it occasionally makes someone else unhappy – is the only way of getting to those things on the “when things settle down” list.
There’s only time when things will truly settle down, and I’m not really eager to get there.
You can contact Bill Brown at billatthelake@gmail.com
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Abandoning Freedom a Little at a Time
I ordinarily write about everyday life, about yellow cats and early mornings, flowers and friends and family. But every once in a while, the wider world intrudes and cannot go unremarked. A report in the Washington Post brought the latest intrusion and these reflections:
Do you think there is even the remotest chance of Al Qaeda – or the Taliban or Hezbollah or any other extremist Islamic group – taking over this country?
There is no more likelihood of that than there was of the Irish Republican Army taking over Great Britain.
If we realize one day that the freedoms we have taken for granted – the ones we’re taught about in school – are gone, we will see that the people who have taken over look just like us. And they will not have wrested control in one convulsive coup. In exchange for promises of security, we will have willingly surrendered our freedoms step by step.
We have been confronted with the false choice between freedom and security since the early days of the republic – think of the Alien and Sedition Acts – and we have periodically lurched into spasms of fear ever since.
All of this is brought to mind by a recent Washington Post story reporting that the Justice Department wants to make it easier for state and local police to collect intelligence about Americans, share the data with federal agencies and keep it for at least 10 years.
Of course, the supporters say the measures preserve civil liberties and are subject to internal oversight.
The Post quoted White House spokesman Tony Fratto as saying the administration agrees that it needs to do everything possible to prevent unwarranted encroachments on civil liberties, adding that it succeeds the overwhelming majority of the time.
The Post article quoted Jim McMahon, deputy executive director of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, as saying, "It moves what the rules were from 1993 to the new world we live in, but it maintains civil liberties."
Have you ever heard anyone in a position of authority say, “What we are doing encroaches on your civil liberties.”
This latest move is just one more effort to break down a wall erected in the mid-1970s after extended Senate hearings into widespread abuses of citizens’ rights.
The committee chaired by Sen. Frank Church found that “Intelligence agencies have collected vast amounts of information about the intimate details of citizens’ lives and about their participation in legal and peaceful activities. The targets of intelligence activities have included political adherents of the right and the left, ranging from activists to casual supporters.”
Among committee’s findings:
The FBI had kept files on a million Americans and investigated a half a million “subversives” between 1960 and 1974 without a single court conviction.
The CIA – with cooperation from the Post Office – illegally opened mail for over 20 years, collecting information on more than a million Americans.
The National Security Agency intercepted every overseas telegram sent or received by an American citizen between 1947 and 1975.
The IRS gave tax returns of 11,000 groups and individuals to the FBI and conducted audits as a form of political harassment.
Army intelligence investigated 100,000 American citizens during the Vietnam War.
The FBI’s COINTELPRO counterintelligence program was designed to “disrupt” groups and “neutralize” individuals that the FBI deemed to be threats to domestic security.
And that’s just a sampler.
All kind of Americans were targeted. Suspected subversives were under every bed.
The FBI’s well-publicized war against Martin Luther King was perhaps the most egregious example of government run amuck. But it wasn’t just J. Edgar Hoover striking out on his own
The Church Committee found that every president from Roosevelt to Nixon had pressed the intelligence agencies to go beyond the law.
Even with the laws that grew out of the Church Committee investigation in place, in the past half dozen years undercover New York police officers infiltrated protest groups before the 2004 Republican National Convention, California state agents eavesdropped on peace, animal rights and labor activists; and Denver police spied on Amnesty International and others before being discovered.
And of course the Bush Administration claims that it is unhindered by constitutional safeguards as long as it invokes the magic phrase “national security.”
Our founders had a first-hand acquaintance with unchecked power, and they established a constitutional form of government to protect the citizens against the government. Read that again if you like. The citizens need to be protected against the government, regardless of whether that government is controlled by Republicans or Democrats.
The founders were willing to risk their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to seek freedom. We’re not willing to risk much of anything to preserve it.
The excuse for abridging freedom in the 1970s – as it was with the Palmer raids in 1919 and 1920, which swept up the innocent along with the guilty, and the McCarthy madness in the 1950s – was the Communist menace.
The excuse now is the threat of Islamic terrorism.
We have been afraid since Sept. 11, 2001, and there have been those who played our fears like a violin.
Former FBI Director Clarence Kelly said in a speech some years ago that “we must be willing to surrender a small measure of our liberties to preserve the great bulk of them.”
That pretty much falls into the same category as “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”
When I read the recent Post story, I recalled that Michigan Sen. Phil Hart had been heartbroken by what the Church Committee had found.
I found Hart’s reaction in the conclusion of a speech former Sen. Walter Mondale, who also served on the Church Committee, delivered not long:
Hart said that his family had been right all along. They had told him repeatedly that the FBI was trying to thwart dissent against the Vietnam War.
“As a result of my superior wisdom in high office, I assured them that they were on pot – it just wasn’t true. [The FBI] wouldn’t do it.”
Turning to the witness before the committee, Hart said softly and sadly “what you have described is a series of illegal actions, intended to deny certain citizens their first amendment rights – just like my children said.”
In the McCarthy era, journalist Edward R. Murrow took the occasion of a See It Now broadcast to remind us of some truths that are relevant today:
We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men. …We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. …We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
Or, as Benjamin Franklin, observed, “They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security deserve neither liberty or security.”
Bill Brown can be contacted at billatthelake@gmail.com
Do you think there is even the remotest chance of Al Qaeda – or the Taliban or Hezbollah or any other extremist Islamic group – taking over this country?
There is no more likelihood of that than there was of the Irish Republican Army taking over Great Britain.
If we realize one day that the freedoms we have taken for granted – the ones we’re taught about in school – are gone, we will see that the people who have taken over look just like us. And they will not have wrested control in one convulsive coup. In exchange for promises of security, we will have willingly surrendered our freedoms step by step.
We have been confronted with the false choice between freedom and security since the early days of the republic – think of the Alien and Sedition Acts – and we have periodically lurched into spasms of fear ever since.
All of this is brought to mind by a recent Washington Post story reporting that the Justice Department wants to make it easier for state and local police to collect intelligence about Americans, share the data with federal agencies and keep it for at least 10 years.
Of course, the supporters say the measures preserve civil liberties and are subject to internal oversight.
The Post quoted White House spokesman Tony Fratto as saying the administration agrees that it needs to do everything possible to prevent unwarranted encroachments on civil liberties, adding that it succeeds the overwhelming majority of the time.
The Post article quoted Jim McMahon, deputy executive director of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, as saying, "It moves what the rules were from 1993 to the new world we live in, but it maintains civil liberties."
Have you ever heard anyone in a position of authority say, “What we are doing encroaches on your civil liberties.”
This latest move is just one more effort to break down a wall erected in the mid-1970s after extended Senate hearings into widespread abuses of citizens’ rights.
The committee chaired by Sen. Frank Church found that “Intelligence agencies have collected vast amounts of information about the intimate details of citizens’ lives and about their participation in legal and peaceful activities. The targets of intelligence activities have included political adherents of the right and the left, ranging from activists to casual supporters.”
Among committee’s findings:
The FBI had kept files on a million Americans and investigated a half a million “subversives” between 1960 and 1974 without a single court conviction.
The CIA – with cooperation from the Post Office – illegally opened mail for over 20 years, collecting information on more than a million Americans.
The National Security Agency intercepted every overseas telegram sent or received by an American citizen between 1947 and 1975.
The IRS gave tax returns of 11,000 groups and individuals to the FBI and conducted audits as a form of political harassment.
Army intelligence investigated 100,000 American citizens during the Vietnam War.
The FBI’s COINTELPRO counterintelligence program was designed to “disrupt” groups and “neutralize” individuals that the FBI deemed to be threats to domestic security.
And that’s just a sampler.
All kind of Americans were targeted. Suspected subversives were under every bed.
The FBI’s well-publicized war against Martin Luther King was perhaps the most egregious example of government run amuck. But it wasn’t just J. Edgar Hoover striking out on his own
The Church Committee found that every president from Roosevelt to Nixon had pressed the intelligence agencies to go beyond the law.
Even with the laws that grew out of the Church Committee investigation in place, in the past half dozen years undercover New York police officers infiltrated protest groups before the 2004 Republican National Convention, California state agents eavesdropped on peace, animal rights and labor activists; and Denver police spied on Amnesty International and others before being discovered.
And of course the Bush Administration claims that it is unhindered by constitutional safeguards as long as it invokes the magic phrase “national security.”
Our founders had a first-hand acquaintance with unchecked power, and they established a constitutional form of government to protect the citizens against the government. Read that again if you like. The citizens need to be protected against the government, regardless of whether that government is controlled by Republicans or Democrats.
The founders were willing to risk their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to seek freedom. We’re not willing to risk much of anything to preserve it.
The excuse for abridging freedom in the 1970s – as it was with the Palmer raids in 1919 and 1920, which swept up the innocent along with the guilty, and the McCarthy madness in the 1950s – was the Communist menace.
The excuse now is the threat of Islamic terrorism.
We have been afraid since Sept. 11, 2001, and there have been those who played our fears like a violin.
Former FBI Director Clarence Kelly said in a speech some years ago that “we must be willing to surrender a small measure of our liberties to preserve the great bulk of them.”
That pretty much falls into the same category as “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”
When I read the recent Post story, I recalled that Michigan Sen. Phil Hart had been heartbroken by what the Church Committee had found.
I found Hart’s reaction in the conclusion of a speech former Sen. Walter Mondale, who also served on the Church Committee, delivered not long:
Hart said that his family had been right all along. They had told him repeatedly that the FBI was trying to thwart dissent against the Vietnam War.
“As a result of my superior wisdom in high office, I assured them that they were on pot – it just wasn’t true. [The FBI] wouldn’t do it.”
Turning to the witness before the committee, Hart said softly and sadly “what you have described is a series of illegal actions, intended to deny certain citizens their first amendment rights – just like my children said.”
In the McCarthy era, journalist Edward R. Murrow took the occasion of a See It Now broadcast to remind us of some truths that are relevant today:
We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men. …We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. …We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
Or, as Benjamin Franklin, observed, “They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security deserve neither liberty or security.”
Bill Brown can be contacted at billatthelake@gmail.com
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Watching Another Morning Arrive
Without any particular effort or desire on my part, I have become a morning person.
It is a far cry from my younger years, when I worked at night by choice. On a Saturday or Sunday could easily sleep until noon.
Now, at a time when I rarely have any need to set an alarm or get up at a certain time, I awaken, lie for a while considering whether it is possible that I will go back to sleep,and then get up to greet another day.
Our house is perched on hillside overlooking the lake, and the bedroom is on the second floor. Next to the bedroom is a small room with two chairs separated by an old children’s school desk and a floor lamp.
We call it the reading room, but in the mornings it is where I sit nursing a cup of coffee and letting my mind wander as a new day takes shape. My wife usually is still asleep, and I sit quietly to try to avoid awakening her.
Everything is quiet. Not even the birds are stirring, and at this time of year, it is light well before the school bus runs.
The view from the reading room is of the upper part of the trees that grow in front of the house, the water, and the land on the far side of the slough.
The morning sort of sneaks up on me, even while I am looking. Perhaps that’s a metaphor for life in general.
At first light, the world in monochromatic. The trees, those just outside the window and those across the slough, a simply silhouettes. The open water and the sky are the color of tarnished silver. There are patches of water that reflect the trees along the shore, and it is difficult in the half-light to determine what are trees and what are reflections.
Across the way, at the end of a slough, a light blinks on, blinks off briefly, then on again in a night-long ritual. I know from having paddled past it that the light comes from a miniature lighthouse painted in the orange and blue colors of Auburn University.
A hummingbird levitates almost as high as the white oak tree in front of the house and then darts sharply away. Three ducks fly by in a hurry to get to somewhere.
Gradually, almost imperceptibly, colors emerge, the greens of the leaves, the colors of the house across the slough.
The sun rises behind our house, so we don’t see it appear over the horizon. What we see is the sun’s work. The sky overhead slowly turns blue; if there are any clouds, they are painted a tropical pink.
Soon enough the creation of a new day is completed; I am glad for having seen it.
The writer can be contacted at billatthelake@gmail.com
It is a far cry from my younger years, when I worked at night by choice. On a Saturday or Sunday could easily sleep until noon.
Now, at a time when I rarely have any need to set an alarm or get up at a certain time, I awaken, lie for a while considering whether it is possible that I will go back to sleep,and then get up to greet another day.
Our house is perched on hillside overlooking the lake, and the bedroom is on the second floor. Next to the bedroom is a small room with two chairs separated by an old children’s school desk and a floor lamp.
We call it the reading room, but in the mornings it is where I sit nursing a cup of coffee and letting my mind wander as a new day takes shape. My wife usually is still asleep, and I sit quietly to try to avoid awakening her.
Everything is quiet. Not even the birds are stirring, and at this time of year, it is light well before the school bus runs.
The view from the reading room is of the upper part of the trees that grow in front of the house, the water, and the land on the far side of the slough.
The morning sort of sneaks up on me, even while I am looking. Perhaps that’s a metaphor for life in general.
At first light, the world in monochromatic. The trees, those just outside the window and those across the slough, a simply silhouettes. The open water and the sky are the color of tarnished silver. There are patches of water that reflect the trees along the shore, and it is difficult in the half-light to determine what are trees and what are reflections.
Across the way, at the end of a slough, a light blinks on, blinks off briefly, then on again in a night-long ritual. I know from having paddled past it that the light comes from a miniature lighthouse painted in the orange and blue colors of Auburn University.
A hummingbird levitates almost as high as the white oak tree in front of the house and then darts sharply away. Three ducks fly by in a hurry to get to somewhere.
Gradually, almost imperceptibly, colors emerge, the greens of the leaves, the colors of the house across the slough.
The sun rises behind our house, so we don’t see it appear over the horizon. What we see is the sun’s work. The sky overhead slowly turns blue; if there are any clouds, they are painted a tropical pink.
Soon enough the creation of a new day is completed; I am glad for having seen it.
The writer can be contacted at billatthelake@gmail.com
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