Category Archives: To Think About

It’s Not Nice to Fool (Around With) Mother Nature, or Carl Hiassen’s Vindication

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Sometimes it seems this world has lots of mean people—greedy, self-centered, and unthinking. They’re amassing money, ignoring real needs, and destroying the environment.

It’s even easier to find bad guys in Florida, at least according to author Carl Hiassen, who’s been beating on this drum for decades.  Usually categorized as a mystery writer, Hiassen is truly a social satiricist, attacking the profiteers, idiots and bad guys who value the all-mighty dollar at the cost of the natural world and common decency.

Many of his plot points seem impossible—rodents with tongues dyed blue, an Orange Bowl Queen kidnapped by a local terrorist cell, an evil developer so obsessed with Barbie he remakes his flings into doubles.

Lo and behold here comes real life to prove anything is possible, even Hiassen’s visions.  Recently a sinkhole near Disney World gobbled up a resort with no warning. Slowly, slowly the villas, elevator shaft and walkways cracked and shattered, then sank into the ground.  Fortunately all visitors and staff were evacuated with no injuries.

I have to wonder if Mother Nature is finally flexing her muscles to take revenge.  In Hiaasen’s books, humankind has so brutalized the native flora and fauna that any benevolent balance seems impossible.  Even the folks charged with creating and enforcing laws to protect, not only the environment but also people, gleefully ignore, cheat, and steal to cover their own assets and asses.

An official with the USGS said humans are accelerating the problem of “sinkhole alley.”  Development creates surfaces off which water must run off, then go underground to cut through weak rock and exacerbate the problem.

Is Hiaasen an extremist or a prophet?  An hysteric or a pragmatist?  We may be getting a response from Mother Nature.

 

Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?

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Fort Robinson

Fort Robinson

I’ve never been able to understand why men indulge in fistfights. Seems to me at the conclusion you have bloody, damaged participants, and no one wins much of anything except a snippet of status. By extension I feel the same way about armed conflicts. Seems to me the people of both countries lose out and only the top dogs, be they generals or CEOs or presidents stand to gain. The rest of us are poorer, damaged, depressed, and older, but not wiser.
I've come to accept that aggression and violence must be part of the human condition. After all, look at stories and histories down the ages, right from the beginning, i.e., Cain slew Abel. Maybe we needed that brutal streak to guard or feed our families.
From this bias, I'd be unlikely to wax enthusiastic about a military facility, but here I am, touting Fort Robinson. Now a state park in Nebraska, it was an active post from 1874 (first as a camp, then with permanent buildings) until after WW II. These days, although many structures remain, together with a smattering of horses that remind visitors of the Fort’s equine prominence, it’s become a recreational area, perfect for families to run wild and those seeking a retreat from everyday busy, as well as a time capsule of Old West history.
As I peeked into the reproduced or renovated cabins and houses, saw where Chief Crazy Horse received his death blow from a bayonet in the back, imagined the thousands of dogs trained for military during WW II, and walked the paths of a German POW camp between now-vanished barracks, I was struck over and over by the similarities among all the people who’d lived here more than the hegemony* the US government exercised. The Indian women who managed to escape during the 1879 debacle with their children had much in common with the military wives who feared losing their husbands to violence and their children to illnesses. The German soldiers held to a routine almost identical to the Americans’.
Fort Robinson is the perfect place to ponder these questions. You can bed down in the old enlisted men’s quarters in simply furnished but immaculate rooms. Walks or rides or biking let you contemplate nature and just how tiny our struggles seem next to the wide Nebraska skies and variegated greens of grass, evergreens, and shrubs.
I wish I could have packed Fort Robinson’s time and space for musing to my everyday life.
* Hegemony: domination, preponderant influence, or authority over others.

Is Good Enough, Enough?

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Comedian Pete Holmes has a bit in which he says if you lower your standards for success, you feel better about yourself.  Rather than beating yourself up for not getting ahead in your career or making enough money to buy that fancy car you have your eye on, achieve small goals.  He uses the example of going to dinner in a new friend’s house and finding the silverware drawer on the first try.  Yeah! You can be proud that you know the American way of housekeeping so well.

This approach makes a lot of sense.  Yesterday, I cleaned half a bathroom. Today already I’ve flossed and brushed my teeth well before I had to run out the door.  Success!  My to-do list may be hundreds of items long, and I know from experience I can’t possibly complete ten percent today.  But I can delight in my immediate accomplishments.

Sometimes it seems we aim our sights so high that we set ourselves up for failure. Following close on the heels of failure are self-doubt, uncertainty, insecurity.  Then we don’t like ourselves much.  We often go through the same exercise for our partners and children, too, making them miserable in the process as well as ourselves.

I remember in high school and college every person was going to achieve some momentous feat.  One was going to be a surgeon; another, president of the US.  Several planned to take over the world of finance and become billionaires at the same time.  Too numerous to count were the best-selling authors, the world-famous performers, the wildly innovative artists sure to arise.  My personal (unachieved) goal was to lose 40 pounds before I ever returned for a high school reunion.

How much more fulfilling if my aims are simply to reduce the stack of bedside reading by a magazine or two, water my houseplants before they die, write a decent paragraph each day.  The ineluctable* reality—if good enough is enough, I just may enjoy my life more.

 *Ineluctable: inescapable, inevitable, unavoidable

MIGHT MAKES RIGHT, RIGHT?

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might

There was a time, and it may still be upon us, when parents tried to breed out, condition, or reason away aggressiveness in children.  I remember refusing to buy my son a gun, erroneously thinking I was a pacifist, and by gum, he’d be one, too. Kind of a strange position for someone who married an Irish ex-Marine notorious for swinging fists in his youth.

So I should have been delighted when my 19-month-old grandson Asher turned out to be so non-aggressive he bordered on cowardly.  At library story hours, he backed away from babies, especially if they made noises.  Playgrounds presented numerous threats, with other kids elbowing to get to the slide ladder first or claiming the shovel and pail in the sandbox.  He perpetually refused to stand up for himself.  However, I was worried. 

I was surprised at my dismay, but as a person who shies away from any type of conflict, I know the disadvantages of timidity.  Assertiveness may not be essential for a toddler but is a major disadvantage in adult life.  “Nice guys finish last,” right?

Fortunately, I had no idea how to train him in the manly arts.  And nature seems to be taking care of the problem.  Last week at the library, now at nearly 24 months old Asher stepped up and refused to let a little girl snatch the stuffed animal he had his hands on.  “No, no, no,” he pronounced clearly.  And she backed away.  

Not egregious* behavior in his case, because it means my grandson isn’t fated to be bullied.  Through natural development, he’s learning to stand up for himself.  Oh, he still shrieks and runs at the sight of certain wind-up toys, and weird-looking masks he avoids like the plague.  Our floor fan is viewed with suspicion.  But he’s demonstrated a healthy dose of determination, combined with a sense of purpose, when most important. 

And by the way, my son did get his childhood wish for guns.  He just had to buy them with his own allowance. * egregious: extremely bad, outrageous, shocking

Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Green?

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eye

Through chance, not planning, I have the great fortune right now of being able to escape an eight-to-five job.  With this flexibility, I’ve turned to writing fiction, which always has been my goal.  But the strangest thing happened.  The freer my time and more open my schedule, the less motivated and more depressed I became.  It got to the point I couldn’t answer the simple question “how are you?” and I avoided talking to friends and family.  No project seemed important enough to complete.  I dreamed up excuses to slump in a chair reading or click through television stations searching for something, anything, to fill my time.  

What was wrong?  Was my iron low?  Supplements didn’t help.  Did I have an undiagnosed mental malady?  I still cracked jokes left and right when I found myself in a group.  Was I just getting old and experiencing a decline?  I knew plenty of people my age and older who were still going strong. 

The answer, or at least an answer finally came to me at a meeting.  Every woman who spoke seemed to be traveling or working on an exciting project or changing the world for the better.  I was envious of every single person there.  This didn’t make sense, I thought.  I’d never felt this way before.  

That’s because I’d previously always been super-busy.  Held down a full-time job, wrote in my spare time, volunteered with several groups, went places with my husband, saw friends regularly.  But since my self-imposed isolation, I mostly had contact just with myself. 

No one, not even an independently wealthy super-introvert (which I’m not), can survive with no external stimulation.  We’re human beings, and we need interaction with others.  We require the give-and-take, the ebb-and-flow of life around us, or else we stagnate.  That’s what was happening.  I was stagnating.  As Bob Dylan wrote years ago, “He not busy being born is busy dying.”  

With that realization, I’ve begun reconnecting with old acquaintances, attending an occasional event I usually avoid, becoming involved with a group whose work I support.  I no longer forget what day it is because my calendar has a variety of engagements for me to keep.  And they’re not all dental or doctor appointments.  

Jealousy is supposed to be a green-eyed monster.  But in my case, envy sparked a major improvement in my life I might not have achieved otherwise.