How To Piss Off Progressives With A Few Uncomfortable Statements

Somehow I feel reason is a dying art. Expertise that should matter, often doesn't. We live in a world where information of any kind is literally at our fingertips, and yet we have a populace ill suited to utilize it. 

We educate our populace in the sciences, but we never educate them about what science is or why it is valuable. We spend at least twelve years educating our children without ever teaching them HOW to think for themselves. 

To live a properly "woke" life you only need a handful of things. 

1). Empathy. This is where all positive thought for our species has to begin. You have to care, genuinely care, for the well-being of yourself and those around you to live properly. No one is self made and independent in any truly significant way, except perhaps in the case of sociopaths.

2). Learn something new as often as possible. The world is wonderful and scary and amazing and terrifying. Education doesn't end with high school or college. If it does for you? If you aren't the type to just pick up a book? You're part of the problem.

3). Always be prepared to ask one simple question. "Is this true?" . This is the most critical and important step, and the most difficult. It isn't actually difficult to do in practice at all. But it will be difficult to accept, because you have to do this across the board. Including and especially with ideas and concepts you agree with. You will discover that there is bullshit everywhere and that seemingly simple problems you'd think are as simple as "if only we did this instead" to solve, aren't remotely that simple.

But some shit that seems woke just isn't.

It doesn't take a Nobel prize winning level of intellect to do this. It just takes a certitude to begin every inquiry in your life with a few important tenents. Certitude and especially courage, because once you embrace a few simple concepts you'll likely also become that uncomfortable person in conversation accused of calling bullshit on ideas other people value. But this part is crucial, because there is bullshit everywhere. Left, right, progressive, conservative, whatever. Just as their are conservative values that aren't really conservative, their are progressive values that just aren't progressive. Everyone is to some degree peeing on their own feet. 

The only problem with this is that if you're not an expert it only prepares you to start recognizing what is wrong sooner than what is right. And it is difficult to build consensus with people like this, because people want easily scalable solutions. Solutions with no downsides. And every solution has downsides.

Too many of us approach issues with a winner take all mindset, especially if an issue resonates personally. 

This affects all discourse, and not just the technical. You can't approach any meaningful topic, even with a backpack full of empathy and reason, without pissing someone off. And you often piss off the people behind the idea you champion MORE than those opposed. 

Here are some examples that will 100% reliably land me in hot water with progressives. I focus on these because I am a progressive liberal secular humanist, so it is very important to me to get this house in order, even if many progressive minds wouldn't want me in the room.

We need a newer greener energy infrastructure. We know this. The science informs this. But we are going about this the wrong way, with the wrong priorities. Even though we are at some levels of parity between wind and solar compared to natural gas, coal and nuclear from a cost standpoint that is only true upfront. It takes massive amounts of coal and quartz to make solar cells. Yes coal is a primary ingredient in it's manufacture. And despite every silly documentary on earth showing a picture of a sandy dune when talking about solar, you cannot make solar cells out of sand. Sand may be predominantly quartz, but it is too impure. It'll probably break your brain to realize what company predominantly sources the quartz for this too, Koch Industries. And then you have to replace panels every ten years or so. What you end up with (when you toss in necessary batteries and maintenance) is solar having a similar long term carbon footprint to an efficient modern natural gas plant. The same is basically as true for wind. The technology in materials science just isn't quite there yet. And it's something we should be investing in on a national and federal level. Instead we are still relying on so called "free market" incentives and getting predictably short term profit driven solutions whitewashed as "green". The two primary things we can do now that we aren't doing are political footballs. Our infrastructure for distributing power is century old tech where efficiency gains from rebuilding it nationwide would offer huge gains. We still use AC voltage for lighting and home electronics when these things actually operate via DC today, so we have century old inefficiency built into our walls still. And then there is the elephant in the room that will get me in trouble. Nuclear. Nuclear is not terrible. What is terrible is the 60-70 year old Nuclear tech our energy infrastructure still uses. We still utilize light water reactors due to patent and contract pressures, and no longer even consider building intrinsically better and ridiculously safe molten salt systems (systems that CAN NOT melt down, and CAN NOT produce weapons grade waste). Nuclear is by far the greenest easily deployable method that no one will consider, no matter how good the actual science is.

Ok. That's one tub of hot water. Here's another.

LGBTQ. The alphabet people. I used to think this one was simple. As someone who doesn't identify with any of those letters personally I always approached this topic merely with empathy and the reason behind the concept of liberty. Live your truth, be who you are, love who you love, fuck whomever makes you happy, etc. So long as no one is harmed who cares? After all one of the things our world needs is more genuine love. And you have to admire the courage it takes to live those truths in societies that are less like you. It has real consequences that can affect your ability to stay alive in some places in our world, so I think I completely grasp how important this is. I'm completely on board with the idea that the lifestyles of the LGBTQ community are absolutely none of my business, and yet things I must champion so that I can live my hetero life ethically. With one tiny exception that will land me in hot water.

Trans competitive sports. And this is a layered topic. We know reliably, factually, biologically that transgender is a real phenomenon. Unlike haters on the right who deny this, we have a centuries worth of biomedical science behind this phenomenon. It is real. But, you cannot deny the reality either. Someone born presenting male who transitions to female should not be allowed in female mma, weightlifting, track and field, or pretty much any competitive arena of sports without careful acknowledgement of facts. Growing up with testosterone increases bone density, tendon and ligament strength, and the quality and quantity of muscle mass. Required estrogen therapy preserves these physical advantages, go ask an endocrinologist. MTF Trans competitors in sports tend to utterly dominate their respective competitive classes. Women fought long and hard to have their competitive spaces allowed in sports, and it is still an ongoing fight. To add this variable, which denies science, is unfair. It just is. In the other direction FTM Trans it is problematic due to the realities of maintaining a male presentation (testosterone therapy). Testosterone therapy is banned in competitive sports precisely because it creates a slippery slope of unfair advantage. For a FTM Trans it is necessary, so where should that line be drawn? You cannot turn a blind eye to these admittedly tiny issues, because these issues are real. But heaven forbid you bring them up. You aren't even allowed to discuss this without knee jerk hate being spewed in your direction. Women and men are biologically different and in the general areas of strength and stature men are superior all else being equal. We thankfully live in a world where that narrow set of differences rarely matters. Almost every job that exists gives no advantage to men over women anymore, and that's a good thing. But competitive sports is the rare exception, and it cannot be swept under the rug because it doesn't fit with someone's delusional and sometimes dangerous truth. Watch a MTF trans MMA fighter beat up biological females relentlessly in a ring and you'll be unable to not sense the disparity. That isn't to say women cannot beat men in a fight. They totally can. But any women that does is a technically skilled fighter using those skills to overwhelm a physically stronger opponent in almost every case. Transition to your true self all you want. I applaud that sort of decision and I admire the courage of it. But don't expect all reality to just get out of the way because you don't personally like it. What's fair is fair. Live with your limits like so many have to.

Anyone pissed off yet? 🤔

MAGA!!! 🤔

People become ignorant through complacency. MAGA hat wearing dildos that can't make an argument beyond "freedom!!!!" fail to recognize that the extremes of their worldview are little more than luddism, a misplaced longing for simpler times, and a beaten like a dead horse misrepresentation of patriotism. Times before the industrial revolution when something as simple as diarrhea was deadly. Times when women and children were treated as little more than chattel, and people with a different skin tone were treated worse. Times when basic survival was the only game in town.

As laudable and historic as our Constituition is, it is also a living document.

It did not guarantee nor even desire voting rights for women, people that didn't own land, or slaves (who were still counted for Congressional purposes, but only as 3/5ths of a human being). It deliberately disenfranchised most of the citizenry. 

Oh and it has had to be amended 27 times. So far.

So many on the right (and a far smaller aspect of the left) fail to grasp though just how legitimately horrified the founders would be at the outcomes of their grand experiment for good or for ill. Most would definitely throw up in their mouths at the rabid state of patriotism we have today. 

Why is patriotism not a clever idea? Well it can be, but it can equally become fuel for propaganda. I always go on and on about words and the value in their definitions and origins. Patriotism derives from the Latin "patria" which means "father". So patriotism has its roots ideally in a fealty towards a society. But its just a verbal misstep away from the idea of a "fatherland". When we translated German ideals into English during WW2 it is interesting to note that we used that phrase of similar meaning to patriotism, merely phrased with different words, to draw a distinction.....rather than note a potentially dangerous parallel. 🤔

Concepts of freedom and liberty are vitally important, but they have to be couched in the reality that we live in a collective society. A machine where everyone relies on everyone else to create this thing we call a society. 

From the cashier that rings up your groceries, the construction worker that helps pave a road, to the aerospace engineers that keep GPS working, and to the theoretical physicists whose field made GPS possible and everyone else literally everyone else in between. We couldn't live our daily boring-ass lives without any of these people.

And yet this reality is where most of the apathy and complacency I mention in the beginning stems from. It is an almost insulting denial of reality.

And ALL of that requires a functional government and tax base.  All too often the conversation is two dimensional. Small government vs. big government. The size isn't the issue. The issue is priorities. 

A government's role in such a large collective society is to simply establish the rules. Those rules do define what constitutes winners and losers in a society. But that depends entirely on your definition of winning and losing. A billionaire who gets taxed at a high tax rate and still remains ridiculously wealthy because math (duh!) isn't a loser in any definable sense of the term.

It isn't about what is free and what is not. It's about deciding the minimums of what we as a society are willing to accept to create the environment we want to live in.

As a for instance, for nearly half a century Germany has had essentially free education and universal health care.

You or one of your children could go to Germany today and receive an inexpensive higher education in engineering and the sciences...... Taught in English!! Wrap your mind around that little fact. Don't need citizenship.... technically don't need to really know German that well.

Germany is doing fine. They are not Venezuela. Both are basically Democratic Socialist countries. The difference is priorities. The only difference fundamentally. 

They are merely interested in having a well-educated populace so that the country can maintain its stature as a leader in engineering and science. 

I think we all have a vested interest in not being surrounded by stupid people. Education isn't solely about future career paths, even with the current valid conversation about college vs. technical schools. Many initial careers are more greatly impacted by social connections than ones education. But getting a proper education above all else teaches you HOW to think and problem solve. It is fundamentally empowering regardless of how well or poorly it might line your future selfs pocket.

We can see it throughout centuries of history. The society that innovates thrives. The society that values education and STEM fields flourishes economically. High tides do indeed lift all boats.

It isn't free versus not free. It isn't freedom versus taxes. Such arguments are just vaguely clever ways of misunderstanding and abusing language. It's about priorities and a future we can live with.

Response

I've had an emotional roller coaster the last few months and kinda went in a pity party direction about social media...etc....bleh... Sorry. Things are really personally very difficult right now financially and otherwise. I've been on shaky ground.

But lurking I came across this and just had to toss in my two cents. Probably because it's relevant to me right now in a prescient way.

And it's gonna be one of those "it depends" posts (and I suppose me being selfish and using this post to do some of my own emotional laundry). Apologies...

My daughters are grown now, but when I got divorced they were 9 and 7. So just barely perhaps old enough to see their parents as people as much as just their parents.   As a divorced man with joint custody there was 50% of their lives experiences that I could not protect them from. I knew when I divorced their mother that they were going to end up having to go through a lot of complicated stuff that was unavoidable. And thankfully as bad as some of it was (my ex-wife was and is not the best maker of decisions) it was never as bad as my own childhood.

I decided early on that the only way I could combat that in any meaningful way was to simply be honest and open with my kids rather than fall into the trap of trying to protect them from everything. Because I think that is a trap.

And it wasn't like an immediate idea or a deliberate decision, but it was something I grew into rather quickly over the first few post-divorce years.

With our joint custody it meant sometimes I only had weekends, but with the topsy-turvy nature of my ex-wife's life meant sometimes I had them for long stretches. At first I kept my experiments at figuring out how to have a personal life of my own again completely private from them. But after only a couple of years, I began to realize what a mistake that was. Or at least I began to realize what a mistake it was for us. My relationship with my girls got a whole lot better and a whole lot more personal after I divorced. Some people seem to think you shouldn't become close friends with your children until they become adults but I decided to begin building that relationship with them when they were really young. And things were realistically, financially as well as emotionally tough back then. And the only way I could combat the nonsense that occurred and there was a lot of it was to simply tell the truth, but usually only when asked. I never threw my kids mother under the bus unless they asked me about things. And I always tried to be thoughtful and in a mindful presence when I did that, as well as being thoughtfully candid about my own pain that I experienced when I was married to her. I tried very specifically to not be nasty (even when my ex-wife was and she was all the time) and it helped us develop not only a solid relationship of love but a mutual understanding and respect.

Once we got to that point and I guess the girls were about 11 and 9 at that point, I never kept my forays into having a personal life with the opposite sex from them. In fact at that point I couldn't have if I tried because they were morbidly curious about my personal life. Not just because they were girls who loved their wacky dad, but because they realized they should be as invested in my happiness as I was in theirs.

Even though my ex-wife remarried immediately (she'd had an affair with my ex-best friend) they became estranged rather quickly and just on the sheer numbers my ex-wife had as many successful and failed attempts at relationships as I did over the years.

The difference between us wasn't the ups and downs that you go through when you try and fail. The difference between us was how we let it affect our world. So I never clung to that instinct we have as parents to protect my children or to sacrifice my own life merely for their sake.

And I'm not trying to disparage the struggles of single parenthood, because I do actually know pretty much what that's like. It's just that I feel like you can do a disservice to yourself and those you care about by pulling yourself into a cocoon.

I never felt like I was putting my kids in any sort of emotional danger, because even with all of the ups and downs I had in relationships over those years until my kids were grown, I never felt like I was sacrificing one relationship for the other. Primarily because I wouldn't allow it. About the only thing I ever had to put my foot down about was a few women here and there who would try to talk me out of my time with my kids. You know, get a babysitter let's have some fun tonight. That sort of thing... My time with my kids was a bargaining process at best most of the time so I was always like "nowp!!". I would always leave the option open and I mean always for a woman I was dating to hang out with all of us.  I can also tell you it was difficult and usually impossible to convince women that would be okay.  That I actually had a cool and legitimate strong relationship with my girls and that we always found a way to have a good time no matter what. I suppose it was a bit intimidating. But I suppose not a lot of people have tried to develop that sort of relationship with their children so it was unusual.

I also had experiences in the opposite direction where women would be overly and unnecessarily protective. I say protective but they weren't actually being protective they were just trying to have their cake and eat it too. It's way more about fear and coping mechanisms than a noble desire to "protect". Trust me it is a little insulting after you dated someone for a while when they won't let you know their children. I mean it comes across like it's perfectly okay for me to put my hand up your skirt, but not okay to play Xbox with your son???? That's actually kind of nasty and dismissive and hurtful if you even think about it for a second. Trust me to entertain you, but not trust me to be a part of your life? That's pretty weak. And the opposite of trust.

Now that my girls are grown I actually feel proud of how I handled all that, because I think by example they got to witness both the f*****-up ness that divorce can be, and that everything can still be okay. That the world is a real place with real consequences and not a fairy tale. Kids know the difference. They may indulge their imaginations all the time but believe me they really do know the difference. It gave them the idea that relationships are complex and that you never have to settle nor should you for things that make you unhappy.

Right now I'm also dealing with that "it depends" aspect of things with my girlfriend Laura. Because I'm an empty nester and she has a 4 year old. And as a result I have had to be extremely patient with her overprotectiveness and her desire to be a helicopter mom. And that's not a criticism of her at all. He's only 4, so his ability to be aware of things beyond mom and dad (his actual dad disappoints him pretty much every minute of every day) and veggie tales and chicken nuggets is limited. He's not quite old enough to understand the emotions he's already having to deal with, so there's no need to make that more complicated than it is. But it is foolish to deny that does emotions exist even in a 4 year old. And you can never protect a child or shield a child no matter what you do from reality...... Unless you're too afraid to teach your child about reality. I'm not saying it's easy but its necessary.

Right now to him I'm just some fun weirdo that his mother knows, and he has no understanding beyond that because he's too young to be equipped understand anything beyond that. So when kids are too young it might be too much, or it might be something you need to take very slowly. But once they get just a few years older than that, just a few, in my experience it's really not that big of a deal. And it's not that big of a deal because pretty early on, and I can remember this from my own childhood, your children begin to see your life and try to grasp what it is beyond your role as a mother or father. They have no choice but to do that because they're present in your life. Children from a very early age have excellent bullshit detectors. And at least for me I decided that it was a disservice to mine to pretend to them that that wasn't the truth.

There were many reasons why my marriage failed, but I can tell you the main one.

When two people fall in love and decide to get married they're deciding that we are two people who want to build and existence. And so at least that contract requires two people putting each other above everything else in their lives. Even their children. Whether a couple has zero children or 10,000 children that still has to be true. Children are desirable amazing and precious things that will really teach you the true nature of love in a way you won't ever grasp until you do perhaps, but love and a relationship is not required to make them and bring them in this world. There are things that are both poetic and profound when you make the conscious decision to have children I'm not trying to lessen the beauty of that. But making babies is strictly biology. Anyone can do that and there is no instruction manual required.

My marriage failed because we forgot why we got married. We forgot that children weren't the goal, but merely an addition to what we chose to have with each other. Being parents to our kids and dividing into the roles that Parenthood sort of forces you into, made us lose sight of why we got married in the first place. Being married is complicated. Being married and having kids is even more so. But it is a mistake, a critical and dreadful mistake, to put your kids ahead of everything else.

A lot of people I've talked to strongly disagree with me about that. And the only thing I have to add as a counter is if you put your kids first, you have now turned raising kids into a contest, a war with yourself with your kids and with your significant other over your capacity to have a relationship with all of them. I've seen that sort of thing break up pretty much every marriage including my own that I have ever witnessed. Love is kind of like peanut butter. It spreads. But if you lose the foundation of that love there's no peanut butter to put on the sandwich. I tried to reverse the course of this in the last few years of my marriage, because I finally woke up to the mistake we had made. I reinvested myself heavily into the idea that my relationship with my wife was something worth salvaging above everything else. The reason why that didn't work it's because she couldn't stop playing "mom" long enough to be a wife. And that sounds harsh but it's nonetheless true.

It took me a long time to understand this, and and my current situation I still struggle to get this point across to my girlfriend.

I don't know whether she and I will be together another month another year or together for the rest of our lives. not because I don't want to be together with her for the rest of my life. It's rather that I don't know what our future holds. you have to be in the moment at all times in order to have any kind of meaningful relationship, and when you add a child into the mix that means you have to be even more in the moment and that can be overwhelming.

All I keep trying to tell her is that I love you and because you love him I have to love him too it's really that simple. And maybe it's too simple because she still struggles with letting go and being overprotective. But, I hope at least, it shows her that love isn't a contest. That there isn't a ranking system.

I'm a firm believer that having children will teach you a valuable lesson about love. It simply opens a door that doesn't get opened any other way in your life. But it can also lead to you shutting other  doors that you shouldn't allow to happen....unless that first love with your spouse or significant other that got you the children in the first place wasn't that kind of love.

So I think denying yourself the opportunity of succeeding or failing, even failing multiple times, at forming a relationship that you need for yourself intellectually emotionally intimately and sexually, just because you're afraid of what might happen to the other people you love is a colossal mistake. My children taught me this lesson.

Your Heart

I suppose as close as we have become, we are still very different types of people. Still, no matter what else has happened and no matter what else will happen, I will never not be grateful for the opportunity to have known you.

I am a person of actions. Words. Shitloads of them. And though I have feelings like everyone else does, I've never really been that good at expressing them without words. It is this part of ourselves where we are polar opposites.

I have strived hard to be the kind of person where "reading between the lines" isnt necessary. I've made way too many mistakes in my life, and the number one mistake has always been keeping my mouth shut. It's why I don't anymore, but it's also why I've turned into an incredibly difficult shit to deal with. And that's nobody's fault but my own.

Even though we've known each other for 12 years, I'm sure that would be a legitimate shock to you. Even with all I've said to you. But we've only really come to the point of intimately being close to one another in the last year. So you've been able to get a glimpse of a person you didn't quite know recently even though we've known each other for so long.

Granted, I've always had a big mouth. And I've always been a sarcastic jackass, and most of my life a bit of an extrovert. But I can also say most of my life that's merely been a tactic. And in all honesty I can say it's been a learned and calculated way a relating to people in a friendly and affable manner just so I could keep people at enough of a distance to hide my real self.

The person you know today is a complex and very lonely individual. The more time I have spent over the years since my divorce trying to deconstruct just what went wrong in my life, the more I have realized just how messed up I actually am.

Granted I'm not a complete train wreck. I know I have a cogent and agile mind and intellect. And I can be grateful for the fact that my experiences both good and bad have allowed me to retain my kindness. My mother, who is both the most damaged and impressive person I have ever met, at least instilled in me the value of kindness and empathy.

Friendship, connection, and genuine love.....This is the business of the universe and literally the only things we indulge in that actually matter.

Our ancestors millennia ago struggling to feed themselves every day understood that perhaps better than we do ourselves. Life is struggle and bullshit and pain. It's random. The fact that any of us is alive is the most incredible dice roll there ever is or ever has been. And nothing is guaranteed. Nothing is ever guaranteed.

The struggle, to make a tiring point, is real.

I have tried to embrace this as my truth. Even if it's not actually the truth I still believe it is.

I'm ridiculously smart. I could at least sit in front of a bunch of teenagers and give a discussion of astrophysics and quantum mechanics that would not get frowns from a high school science curriculum staff. And I've never been formally trained in any of that. So I know I'm at least smart.

But I'm also smart enough to recognize that I might not know enough. Ironically being smart, if you're dedicated to skepticism and honesty, means you recognize how stupid you are.

And believe me in some things I completely recognize how stupid I am.

I know you babe. And I can say with confidence I know you better than you have had the courage to allow anyone else to know you.

There are so many things I admire about you, but I also know you live in a really dark place. And I'm struggling to understand that place.

I don't understand why you and I are not blissfully fucking happy at this point.

After 14 months worth of struggling together why aren't we blissfully fucking happy?

I have been ready to step across that threshold for so damn long. I don't understand what holds you back.

And I fully realized even if we were to come to some stunning realization tomorrow and put all of this nonsense to bed and decide to move forward together in every sense of the word that we would be facing a really difficult fucking year ahead. A year of difficulty that is largely my fault.

I cannot expect you to be on board with that. But at the same time you better goddamn be ready to be on board with that. I didn't fall in love with you because it was cute convenient or blatantly sexual or any of that nonsense.

I fell in love with you because I did. It happened. I'm not afraid of that.

You still are.

Please tell me why....

A Complicated Mother's Day

Mother's day was a mixed bag for me. I had to work. My mother passed away four years ago. And I couldn't spend the day with my girlfriend (she is a mother too).

For me, in order to move forward in my life I do often have to pause and look back. Not to be all pithy or trite, but the journey is as important as the destination. And despite it having been personally a very difficult and trying year I do have a destination. The first time I've had one in a very long time. Love will do that for you.

As the vast majority of my life has been a complicated one (some, but not all of which was my fault) I have to get my thoughts out of my head to make sense of them.

So.... Mother's Day. I miss my mother. Very very much. It was always a complicated relationship, and she was always a complicated person. She did her damnedest to raise two sons, but much of her life she was treated with everything from indifference to outright scorn and hatred. By the time I was old enough to understand anything at all  she was already damaged goods.

When my mother graduated high school in 1953, she immediately went to Charlotte to pursue her dreams. She went to college and started to learn to dance and eventually teach ballroom dancing. She competed both nationally and internationally in ballroom dance and got the opportunity to travel the world. At the height of her career, as a teacher of teachers and a district coordinator for the largest chain of dance studios in America, she was in a very unusual place for a woman of her time. She made what we would consider today easily a comfortable six figure salary. She bought owned and ran businesses on the side with her best friend in Charlotte. She was extremely active in the Civil Rights movement and helped found one of North Carolina's first chapters of the NAACP. During this time she met her first husband Bob.

Her first husband, my brother's father, was basically a self-centered egotistical ass. What little I remember of him from my childhood gave me the impression that he cared about nobody but himself. And even though I think he cared about my brother, his ability to step outside of himself and care about other people was probably quite limited. His extramarital affairs are what led to my mother's first marriage dissolving.

Another factor was that she was tiny, and she had great difficulty having children. After she had my brother she had three miscarriages and then just gave up or so she thought. She even had a tubal ligation.

By the time my brother was 8 years old she met and fell in love with the man who would be her second husband, my father. And though I remember almost nothing pleasant about the man, I do know that he was unimpeachably brilliant. His eagle scout badge was earned by helping found the North Carolina Natural History Museum, as he was passionate about nature and wildlife.

They moved to Inglewood California and my father took up a position as a mechanical engineer with Volkswagen of North America. He even consulted with Disney and actually built the stunt cars and camera cars that were used in the Herbie the Love bug movies!

And then lo and behold I showed up. Born yes after she had her tubes tied LOL. I was born at 5 and a half months and only barely survived.

My mother and my brother would tell me stories about our early life out there because much of it I barely remember. They had a Winnebago and went out into the desert digging for gemstones on weekends. They even did volunteer work with the Smithsonian Institution. I still have fragments of some of the fossils they were allowed to keep during some of those digs.

My father did have one problem. Alcohol. It'd be too long to tell the story here, but basically he had issues with alcohol since he was a little baby. Putting alcohol in his bottle was how my grandparents "babysat" him.

Even though I know my mother told me parts of their life back then were idyllic, her as a strong-willed independent professional woman who actually earned more money than he did was the problem. And their ego conflicts led to more and more drinking on his part. His drinking got so bad that he lost his cushy position with Volkswagen. In an attempt to salvage their lives he took the family back to Charlotte his hometown. But all that did was make things worse. As this was the seventies by now, ballroom dancing was a dying art and my mother's career was functionally coming to an end. By the time we were there, my mother was 36 years old. And for a woman at the time it's kind of difficult to rebuild a career at that age after you had spent most of your life dancing and working in theater.

So then everything went to hell. The number of times my father beat my mother and put her in the hospital were countless. By the time we left I think in 1975, she was basically suffering from PTSD though she wasn't diagnosed with that until a little later.

We came back to Spartanburg her hometown to regroup when my mother left my dad. My racist asshole KKK loving Uncle used this as an opportunity to continually belittle her for decades to come. My grandmother was there to support us, but she was timid in the face of my uncle, and even my grandmother had issues with my mother and her feminism and her civil rights leanings. So we were all black sheep in a family that merely tolerated us at best.

All of this led to me having a very unpredictable mother. Unimpeachably brilliant and full of kindness she most definitely was. But I could also come home to a house destroyed, or to my mother being drunk, or to my mother threatening to commit suicide and she did more times than I can count.

When things were okay, she encouraged me to get into the performing arts myself. And so I did for many years. I sang in the South Carolina All-State chorus, and spent a few summers at the governor's School of the arts. I also did a lot of local theater. And I was always expected to keep top grades.

All of these things became escapes for me. They gave me something else to do. They allowed me to put on a face for the rest of the world that I could cope with. Being at home most of the time was wondering what the fuck was going to happen next, and knowing that I was going to have to take care of my own mother when I couldn't even take care of myself.

Things actually got better for a little while. She met an amazing man. A man by the name of Ray Russell. He was a territorial manager for Clairol products and frequented the hotel she managed at the time. They fell deeply in love. And he was a genuinely kind sweet and honorable man as I remember him.

He was also black. Their relationship did not last long. And it failed because my uncle threatened to have him and his family killed (he had children from a previous marriage that I never got the opportunity to meet).

This broke my mother's heart for the last time and afterwards she was never the same. Not even until the day she died.

The chaos got much worse. She eventually realized after an intervention by one of my friends parents that she needed help. So she voluntarily committed herself to the mental institution in Columbia to get that help. This led to me spending the better part of a year at the Spartanburg County children shelter and being inside of the nightmare of DSS and the foster care system. I did towards the end of that run get semi rescued by my brother and his wife. But his wife was a complete psychopath and it was not a very comfortable arrangement.

Eventually me and my mother were reunited, but it just wasn't the same anymore. We were on pins and needles with each other for years, and the time she spent in the hospital really didn't seem to help. She was still suicidal. Still occasionally drinking really bad, and by the time I was sixteen she had so much difficulty holding down a job that I was paying all the bills basically while we were on food stamps and AFDC.

I'll try to shrink the story a little bit at this point, because by this point I got into adulthood and got married. I had developed some really bad habits in my behavior that I wasn't really able to shed until decades later after some hard lessons and a painfully bitter divorce which because of my ex-wife's misbehaviors led to both of my children becoming damaged goods themselves.

I'd given my mother a great deal of power over me. I was always having to be the fixer. She interfered in my marriage greatly, but in hindsight probably rightly so. But I was also a superficial fixer in my marriage. I did love my wife when I married her, but we were never friends. She was just the next project. and because I had so much of my actual true self hidden I was largely miserable for most of the marriage. When my career began to falter due to corporate downsizing that's when the backstabbing and her multiple affairs started.

By the time I got divorced I was completely penniless and broke. I had literally lost everything including my family. And the only person I had to turn to was my mother. And our relationship was prickly to be kind.

When I went through my most recent downsize in 2008 I was so stubbornly opposed to doing that again that I lived in my car for a while before I finally got a job again. That job is with the company I currently work for now.

And at the same time my mother started going blind. So we did it all over again reluctantly except this time I was really genuinely taking care of a very stubborn person.

The last year's of her life I think were the only ones where she was content in any vague sense of the word. She had to rely on me because she had no other choice. But the dynamic between us changed. And it was then that I realized that I was probably the only man she had ever trusted in her whole life. Her relationship with my brother would require writing a book of its own. Their history was fraught with lies deceit theft and even violence. And before she died they never reconciled all of that.

She passed away a sad and heartbroken woman, who still tried hard to be a good mother and grandmother. She felt like throughout her entire life that no one had ever actually loved her. I know because she told me this the day before we had to put her in the hospital for the last time.

When she passed away I had very mixed feelings. Some of which I am ashamed of. But I've had four years to reflect. I felt relief when she passed away. Ashamedly it was because a lifelong burden had finally lifted. But I also felt relief for her. A lot of her story may have been tragic, but I also knew in that last year of her life that she had made her peace with a great deal of it and she was finally at some point truly okay with their being an end.

With all of her flaws, I can still say that I genuinely miss her, and I know I will for the rest of my life. Despite all the negativity above she taught me many valuable things. It is from her that I get my curiosity and my critical thinking. It is from her that I learned the value of kindness and empathy, even though she struggled to have those things in her life for herself.

She raised two boys and got them to adulthood under almost impossible odds, and did so as a fundamentally damaged person. For that I am grateful, and I'm grateful for the fact that I got to know her.

There's still a lot of pain in my heart. But there's no pain at all about what we went through growing up. Not anymore. I've tried to grow too and I put most of those things in my heart to bed a long time ago. She showed me how to do that even though she wasn't really good at it herself.

The pain that's left is simply knowing that she's gone and I'll never see her again. But that's a good pain to have, because it is the proof of the fact that she existed and she mattered.

I take all these ponderings and all these emotions and all these lessons I've learned and just hope that I can apply them moving forward in the life I hope to have from now on with the woman I love.

Thanks Mom! I love you....

A Response On Healthcare & Economics.

This is my unedited response to a discussion thread I'd started about healthcare. In the below commentary and reply I try to explain WHY Universal Health is both the right thing to do, and why it'll be very complicated to pull off without deeper changes in our socioeconomic system and politics....

"Healthcare in those countries isn't free. It's just supported by the tax base. And we all are already paying essentially for Medicare we can't use yet through the payroll tax.

People are weird. They get all patriotic about overseas oil wars, but don't trust the government when it comes to taking care of domestic issues. People need to make up their mind. It isn't about trust. Trusting ANY politician is stupid, even and especially the ones you blindly agree with.

The problem with government isn't it size or its reach, it is the purpose that it should serve. Greed for the military industrial complex, the energy sector, or even the technology sector (Afghanistan sits on upwards of trillions of dollars worth of rare Earth metals) isn't a viable alternative (even though all of these create economic opportunity) to making sure our citizens have clean drinking water and infrastructure that isn't crumbling.

One can argue that Universal Healthcare is a bad idea, and if we do nothing else to the healthcare system or the underlying economy it probably would be. This is the reason why Obamacare, though extending access to healthcare, has done absolutely nothing to reign in costs. One of the compromises in ObamaCare (to get Republicans to vote for it...and they did) was to disallow the government from having any say so in the price of medical procedures and equipment, a power all other Western systems have.

Just look at a hospital bill sometime in the United States and ask yourself while you're paying $4 on average for that tiny plastic cup they bring you pills in, when I can sell you a pack of 250 for less than $2, and still make a profit. :-P

The problem with revamping Health Care in the United States is twofold. In the 1970s the United States was at the forefront of fundamentally changing nutrition in the Western world, all from adopting a now demonstrably flawed study known as The Seven Countries Study, led by the epidemiologist Ansel Keyes. This was a first ambitious attempt at doing what we refer to today as lineal regression analysis of a multitude of studies, and this was done before the era of computers being widely available. It is only in the last decade or so, that this study has been revisited in any sense, and shown to be fundamentally flawed precisely because there weren't computers available to check the rather glaring mistakes of the study's author. It was too ambitious and far-reaching, and too unwieldy for anyone to check his work. And no one did. and this study became published right around the same time our countries USDA had adopted policies (during the Nixon era) that dovetailed almost to a perfect storm level with the conclusions reached in the study.

This is what led to the adoption of the low-fat diet, and to the nearly one thousand percent increase in sugar added to processed foods. The two countries that ran with this in a big way are the United States, and ironically Saudi Arabia. which is why those two countries top the world's charts in type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome.

So our diet is killing us. That's the first shoe.

The second shoe is economic. All of the countries that adopted universal healthcare systems did so between the late 1940s and the early 1970s. This was an era when Keynesian economic theory dominated all Western democratic socioeconomics. The United States decided to not deliberately go the universal Health Care route, as the Western world was getting the jitters from the economic growth in the third world due to the beginning pressures of globalization. So the United States led the charge at turning Keynesian economics on its ear, and adopting what we refer to now as supply-side economics, or trickle down economics as it is more well-known. And it was precisely at this point, when we let free markets decide the nature of healthcare, that we started this never-ending upwards spiral of inflation when it comes to healthcare. The same can be said about our higher education systems because this also aligned with the same time period when government started playing less of a role in higher education.

The inflation in these two fundamental systems of our society has actually been driven by the fact that we have let free markets have free reign. And free markets are kind of a mythology baked in to supply side theory.

Most other Western Powers did not back off of either universal Health Care, or publicly-funded higher education. And because of that political inertia, you find that most western nations have vastly superior and less expensive health care and education as a general rule.

Now that is not to say that the United States still does not dominate in the fields of advanced medicine, or advanced and prestigious higher education. Because we still do. Barely...

But the inflationary pressures that we allowed to occur unabated is also the reason why Healthcare is the number one cause of bankruptcy in the United States, and why postdoc education at a prestigious University like MIT can cost upwards of a half a million dollars.

I got accepted to MIT in 1985, but couldn't afford it then. But even then a postdoc education was a quarter of what it is today.

Today only the wealthy can afford good health, and the benefits of higher education properly. Regardless of what your intrinsic health actually is, and regardless of what sort of intellectual talents you may possess.

The part of the conversation that seems lost on many people is this weird concept that Democratic socialism is some weird anomaly that only occurs in countries that conservatives like to make fun of.

The United States actually invented Democratic socialism.

Read that again to yourself. Slowly.

GPS, The Interstate Highway System, two  thirds of ALL of the recreational lakes in the U.S., etc.....the list just goes on and on of all the PUBLIC WORKS you and I rely on every single day that form the (now crumbling) foundation of Democratic Socialism that makes your life possible. To deny this is plain hypocrisy.

And it was through that invention that we saw the gilded age in the latter part of the nineteenth century go away. It was again through a change in the social contract that we saw a country lift itself out of the Great Depression, which set the United States up to become the superpower it is today.

So for nearly a century the United States was the template and the role model for Democratic socialism for the rest of the western world. And it's really only since the late 1970s that this hasn't been the case.

There's a lot to unravel in order to give our citizens non bankrupting healthcare."

My Little Black Heart :)

Ok so this is a first for my blog. Normally when I post here it is to get intellectual or philosophical ideas out of my head so that I can make sense of them. And then I make the post public, because I invite feedback from EVERYONE to make sure I'm keeping my own intellectual bullshit in check.

This is the first time I've ever written something just for one person. You. So this is a bit more significant to me because the risks are greater. Granted I know all too well I wear you out all the time saying everything (probably incoherently) on my mind. It's how I'm made. I can't not do that.

I never meant for any of this to happen between us. Mind you, I'm glad it did. More grateful than I can probably ever say. But a part of me still feels just a tinge of guilt about that, given the circunstances. Often I feel like I'm being really unfair because I really never intended to unlock my feelings so thoroughly or so quickly. It's left me a little dumbstruck actually. Over the years that I've been at least mostly single I've always had at least a little of my guard up. Once you've experienced certain things in your life you learn the value of that. But I also know that keeping your guard up too much just gets in the way.

Maybe it's like you've told me before, fate. I'm not a big believer in spiritual matters, like at all. But this has been utterly profound for me. Maybe it was just the right time. I've known you for a long time, but the past few months have made me realize how little I knew, and how grateful I am to properly really know you. I'm in awe of the person you actually are, and at the same time deeply empathetic towards the situation you find yourself in. This has really and truly gone beyond merely liking staring at you and thinking really awesome thoughts about those possibilities (though I won't apologize ever for getting my jollies from that).

My experiences have taught me, rather harshly, to really grasp what matters in this life thingy we're all trying to do and live. I'm sure from your perspective often the situation you are in is utterly nerve wracking. I can't imagine it being anything else. I utterly hate the situation you are in. It's terrible. It sucks. I know all too well, because I've been in a similar spot myself, and more than once. So I know how soul crushing it can be. Struggling your hardest to do what is right and to take care of those you love, and get no appreciation for it, or even worse get bitched at about it. It breaks my heart to see someone else, especially someone I care about, go through something like that.

Though I deplore your struggles, I am inspired by how well you cope and by how tenaciously you sacrifice for your son. Everything you are going through and have gone through speaks volumes about the kind of person you are. And THAT is what I have fallen for.

I struggle with my patience here, but don't overthink that. It's MY struggle. I just endeavor to be as candid about that as I can, so you'll know. You deserve to know what you're getting into with a person like me. Burdening other people with my actual life, experiences, situation, and feelings.....isn't something I do very well. Or usually at all. At least in my recent history this is something I've been utterly relucant to do. So this whole thing is equal parts exciting, amazing, and downright scary to me. And I think it should feel like that, but it's been a very long time since I've really recognized that.

I'm all about the idea, the concept of love. Love is literally all we have. Yeah you gotta go to work and earn money and stuff. Gotta eat a sandwich. Gotta sleep. etc.... But the only thing of value in our lives is love. So I'm a fan of the concept. It's how I approach all of those few people I'm actually close to. So I'm all about some love. But I'm also keenly aware that I've been in a whopping total of three committed relationships in my life. And all three failed. So it makes me think really deeply, and really hard about this. It forces me to stop and think (probably too damn much) about all the stuff swirling around in my head.

This is gonna sound cliche' and trite......but I've been in relationships before. Far longer ones, and ones that led to more face-time and more intimacy than you or I have ever had the chance to experience. And what I can say is that I've legitimately not felt what I feel for you...like ever before. It's a bit unnerving. It's unfamiliar territory. It's weird. It makes me sit here and second guess everything I do and say....and everything I've done and said already. And it really worries me that I've just typed this out on a screen, knowing full well I'm planning to send you a link to this.

And I don't want you to think I'm completely off my rocker or that I've turned into some obsessive weirdo. I'll still be behaving myself like a grown person should. If I get nothing out of this that I truly want, I'll still value everything we have shared. And we have shared a lot. And it isn't like I haven't listened or paid attention. You've been candid with me about how you feel about me, so this isn't me doubting your words. Not at all. I trust you implicitly and believe everything you tell me. I'm inspired by you, in awe of you at times, and I worry so much about you. I think you've been done very wrong. And yet you struggle on, and still face me honestly despite what I am sure are conflicted feelings given how suddenly all of this happened to you.

I know I've helped you out here and there, and I know you're grateful. But that is that, and this is this. I want and need to be closer to you. And you need to be appreciated for the awesome woman that you are. I can't wait for us to have the opportunity to discover what that could be.