Posted on by Fred

The Devil’s Second Greatest Trick

“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince the world he didn’t exist.”

  • Verbal Kint in “The Usual Suspects”

Let’s begin, just for a change, with where we agree.  Happiness is good.  Freedom is a core value, necessary for happiness to exist.  Freedom means being able to choose for ourselves what to do with the time we are given.  Our country is founded, above all else, on the idea of Freedom.  And yet, we have adopted a mindset that works to deny meaningful liberty to the vast majority of its population.  We believe that work, particularly work that makes one miserable, exhausted, and unfulfilled is our highest value.  We have been sold the idea that, of course, obviously, we all must work.  We have to earn money.  “How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?!”  We are taught to be proud of the exhaustion, the degradation, the horrors we have tolerated in order to live.  The idea of laziness is anathema to our thinking.  To call someone lazy is among the greatest insults one can hurl. 

The Puritan Work Ethic is so deeply ingrained in us that to think otherwise is, for many of us, simply impossible.  Tonight, I’m going to ask you to do The Impossible.  I’m going to ask you to entertain the idea that laziness… that relaxing, spending the minutes of your life in the ways that make you feel good, that grant you fulfillment, purpose, and Joy… is really the best way to spend your life.  I’m going to expose the Devil’s Second Greatest Trick.  He wants you to be miserable.  I want you to be happy. 

As long as we believe that a certain portion of our lives needs to be given over to suffering, we will serve those whose lives contain few of the challenges most of us face.  The Pharaoh convinced millions that his wishes were divine edicts, and in this way, he got them to build pyramids.  He didn’t need to work because his needs outweighed theirs.  He had power.  They did not.  Kings lived in luxury while peasants slaved away in deference to them.  Slave owners became rich off of the work of their slaves. 

“The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.”

  • Paul Farmer

I’m not going to claim that no one should work.  I recognize that society requires labor in order to function.  The Puritan Work Ethic has its roots in the reality from which it sprang.  For most of the 200,000 years human beings have inhabited this planet, ceaseless, grueling labor was required if we wanted to survive.  We had no shelter.  We had to gather, hunt, or steal our food.  We had to protect ourselves from the elements.  We had more work to do than could be done in a lifetime.  And you know what?  We did it.  We accomplished all of these things, and we learned how to do them better, more efficiently, with less and less physical labor all the time.  We grew.  We improved.  We blossomed.  We learned to keep ourselves alive much longer.  We became safer, smarter, healthier, and increasingly moral. 

But that idea persisted.  We have to work.  We have to work some more.  We have to work hard.  The harder we work, the longer we work, the more difficult the work we have done, the better people we are.  To say one has worked hard is among the greatest compliments we can pay each other.  It suggests that the fact of work, itself, is a wonderful thing.  Is it really?  Why is that?

When our earliest ancestors worked ceaselessly, they were the beneficiaries of their own work.  If Og killed a lion, Og got to eat.  If a farmer grew some crops, the farmer got to eat.  The hard work they did was for themselves.  It might have been for their families to the extent that they had them.  It didn’t enrich someone else.  The fruits of their labor were theirs to enjoy. 

But as we developed societies, we decided that some people deserved more than others.  We developed the concept of owning land.  While the Earth had once been shared by all of us, now it belonged to a few of us. 

Today, most of the wealth is owned by fewer and fewer people.  The work that most of us do is designed to make someone else wealthier.  We get paid with these little green pieces of 75 percent cotton and 25 percent linen.  They have no actual value, except that we agreed at some point that they do.  We use them to prove ourselves worthy of whatever it is we want to get.  I have enough to be worthy of a 12 pack of Diet Pepsi or the occasional pastrami sandwich.  I will never have enough of them to be worthy of a yacht.  Other people have enough to be worthy of anything on Earth.  Why do they have so many pieces of cotton and linen?  They got other people to work for them.  They got people to work hard for them.  They induced people to wear themselves out and make themselves miserable, so the Few don’t have to anymore.  They made working for others into an unquestioned virtue.  It is so much a part of the American Consciousness that even to question it is a form of heresy. 

Last week, a local news station asked if their viewers believed we should get another stimulus check.  I wrote what I thought was an innocuous response, thinking it might make people nod in quiet agreement.  My hope was to reinforce what I assumed other would probably think anyway.  Here’s what I wrote:

I don’t see why people should be required to do jobs they hate just to survive. If the only way to get someone to work is to threaten them with homelessness and brutal poverty, we’re not doing much of a job of creating decent jobs.

Give everyone enough to meet their basic survival needs. Then let people do the work they choose.

There is no inherent virtue in being miserable for most of your life.

I never saw so much righteous rage directed at me. 

Someone named Doug wrote:

 “why would anybody want to work, if they get enough to survive ?

“Hunger drives someone to work.  How many people love their jobs?  If you give somebody something why would they want to work. I am a realist.  look up the song with part of the words “get a job “. From the 80’s

Love what you do no matter what it is and you will succeed. Who wouldn’t want good pay for doing nothing much.”

I agree with you, Doug.  The threat of hunger and homelessness is the motivation for such people to work.  Wouldn’t life be nicer if we didn’t have to bow down to those who have more green pieces of cotton and linen than we have?  We could do that with a Universal Basic Income.  We’ll discuss that in a little more depth in a bit.  Oh… and was the song you were looking for Bruce Hornsby’s “The Way It Is?”

A Man in a Silk Suit hurries by

Catches the poor old lady’s eye

Just for fun he says, “Get a job!”

-Bruce Hornsby

Perhaps the context was lost on you.  The Man In The Silk Suit is an asshole. 

Someone named Leslie made a similar point.  We’ll excuse her spelling errors and just concern ourselves with her content:

“WRONG!  People need motivation.  If you are motivated to get a job to pay your bills, you will WORK.  Otherwise, why bother?

This mentality is very dangerous.  The Constitution says we have the right to life, liberty and the PERSUIT of happiness.  NOT that it will be given to us on a silver platter.  One must work for it.  The jobs are there.”

I agree.  The jobs are there.  There is a difference between working for yourself and working for someone else, however.  When my labor makes someone else rich while I can barely afford to pay rent, that hardly seems like an idea situation, does it?

Susan told me,

said like an unemployed child. “The work they chose”?  Who will chose to clean toilets 3rd shift or flip burgers in 100 degree heat? There is dignity in all work.  And the hard, dirty work that requires little skill or education should not pay as much as the job that requires a life time and dedication. But it should serve as a motivation to do better.  To get an education.  Or to show up on time and become a team lead then a manager.  Get married and sacrifice a little when your young to build a better life.  This utopian dream you want isn’t real.  The US and Capitalism offer the best life anywhere.  It is literally why people flee Venezuela and EU socialism to get here.” 

In other words, Susan, we need jobs done, but those that do them shouldn’t make enough to live.  I couldn’t possibly disagree more.  And here’s the thing with which we all need to deal.  Automation is eliminating jobs at an alarming rate.  Even those who worship the Puritan Work Ethic will soon find that there are fewer and fewer jobs to do because computers, AI, and robots do them more efficiently, accurately, and cheaply.  When was the last time a bank teller gave you cash?  That was a common job when I was a child.  Now we all use ATMs.  Go to Wal Mart, and you can still find a few cashiers, but you will find many more self-checkout lanes.  Amazon has developed an entire store without any cashiers or even checkout lines.  It just automatically charges you.  There are already robots flipping burgers.  There will be more, not less, of this in the future. 

And I agree.  Who would choose to do the jobs you described?  They suck.  Let’s automate them, and then let’s give human beings more opportunity to enjoy their lives.  The New York Post reports that Marriott hotels are testing replacing desk clerks with automated kiosks. 

“The future is automated.  The present should already be automated.  Existing tech could automate half of all our tasks.  We choose not to automate out of a belief that toil is good for us, and that we can’t just distribute money absent labor as an automation dividend when we should.

  • Scott Santens

And, the Utopia I describe is not only possible, but it will be a reality when enough of us decide we want it to be.

Bonnie wrote:

that’s great Fred.  I choose to create art at home.  Will you pay my bills until I start selling my creations?  (if I ever do) oh, and you’ll need to pay my taxes too…

I would love love love for you to create Art at home!  I can’t pay your bills because I don’t have enough money.  The government, though, that group that represents you, me, and everyone else, certainly does. 

And, finally, someone I respect very much asked,

 a couple of questions-who is going to supply everyone enough for their basic needs.  Where does the money to supply these needs come from.

It’s time to discuss something I learned this month.  It’s called Fiat Currency.  It turns out our currency in America is backed by… nothing.  It used to be gold.  Now… there’s nothing that exists to make our money valuable.  It’s a question of how much the government prints.  And, as it turns out, they don’t even have to print so many of the little green pieces of cotton and linen.  They can simply choose a number and inject it into the economy. 

It’s different from, for example, food.  I can’t give you more food than I have.  The food is a tangible object.  It has to be grown and cultivated.  The same is true for most of the basics of survival.  Homes must be built.  Water must be gotten to people in pipes or bottles.  Medicine must be created and administered.  Money?  We just decide we have more.  The economic debate over Fiat Currency is intense, and I won’t presume to wade into it.  The money, though, comes, essentially, from the will of the government to create it.  So, who is going to supply everyone enough for their basic needs?  We are.  The United States government is you and me.  What is the source of the money?  The pressing of a few buttons. 

There were more than 100 comments, many of which were simple insults, but I’ve covered the basic message of them, I think.  Someone named Elizabeth took the time, evidently, to visit my page.  She mentioned I do a podcast, and these folks were giving me material.  You’re right, Elizabeth, but that really wasn’t my intention.  I just hoped I might cause one or two people to think about the idea that being forced to work is really not the best way to create a happy society. 

“I have one life and one chance to make it count for something… My faith demands that I do whatever I can, wherever I am, whenever I can, for as long as I can with whatever I have to try to make a difference.”

-Jimmy Carter

Now, think about this:  When are you happiest?  Isn’t there a wonderful exhilaration that accompanies the end of your work week?  Two whole days off to do what you choose is a thrilling idea for most of us.  When I was a teacher, summer vacation was a cause of ecstasy for me.  I had a couple of months off to do what I chose with my time. 

You and I are here for an incredibly short time.  Few of us will get a century.  None of us gets two.  In the time we’re here, we need to find all the happiness we can.  There is the idea that if we live this life properly, we’ll have a better one in the future.  Perhaps we’ll go to Heaven.  Maybe we’ll get reincarnated.  We might reach Nirvana.  I don’t know what will happen in any life following this one.  I do know, though, that right now, this is the one we have.  To decide that I’m going to give up my happiness now in hopes of having more in a life about which we know nothing firsthand is tragic. 

The Wealthy, for whom most of us are working, want you to believe that you should be miserable.  They want you to believe that anything that doesn’t serve them is a bad idea.  The Wealthy have created an oligarchy that works hard to ensure that they have more and you have less.  They have done this so successfully that even the idea that you should be happy, and you should be free to choose what to do with the minutes that make up your life, has become heretical among those who have the least.  It’s a brilliant bit of Social Engineering.

What would life be like if we all had enough to meet our basic needs?  I can’t tell you what anyone else’s life would be like, but I will tell you how it has changed mine. 

Three years ago, I was miserable.  After teaching Elementary School in a career that spanned 4 decades, 2 centuries, and 2 millennia, I retired in 2016.   The first year, I made ends meet.  I pulled all of what was left of my retirement, after two divorces, and I paid off my bills and lived happily.  The money, of course, ran out.  I got roommates, but it worked out disastrously.  I have spent most of the last four years on the verge of homelessness.  I couldn’t work anymore.  I went to the hospital 14 times in 3 years.  My diabetes destroyed my body, and I did what I could to survive.  I applied for Disability.  After 3 years, it finally came.  It provides me with almost, but not quite, enough money to meet my needs.  I had to add the revenue from the podcast to get approved for my tiny little apartment.  When I got Disability, they sent me sufficient back pay that I now have my lease paid for its duration, and I have all I need.   

To illustrate the difference, a year ago yesterday, I was hiding in my room hoping I could avoid the roommates who had once loved me, but didn’t even like me anymore because I couldn’t bring in enough money, and my food stamps didn’t contribute enough to the household to make my existence in their lives worthwhile.  I walked on eggshells.  My house was filthy, and I was allowed to clean it only at certain times and under carefully prescribed conditions.  There were bugs crawling on the dishes in the sink from food I neither cooked nor ate, and I had to hope I could be alone long enough to get them done.  I got yelled at because I used too much dish soap.  The house reeked of trash that never got to the wastebasket.  Opening the refrigerator meant being assailed with the smell of what would have been a collection of terrifyingly successful science experiments in mold production had someone with sufficient self-discipline to conduct a study left them there.   I was desperate for the pandemic to end so I could get back to work and I wouldn’t be met with contempt every time I strayed from my room.  I was afraid of what the next minute, next hour, next day might bring.  I welcomed the idea of death.  I saw no hope.  I saw no light.  I was unable to Shine.  I believed myself to be all but worthless.  I filled my syringe to the top with insulin.  For reasons I still don’t entirely understand, I didn’t inject myself.  I suppose there was a tiny ray of light sneaking in through the broken places that kept me alive one day more. 

Yesterday I felt proud of my work.  I woke up around 6 AM.  I finished watching “The Cowboys” and cried a little.  I had a cigarette and chatted with my neighbor.  I came in and played music that moved me while I wrote a portion of this.  My house was clean.  I had all that I needed.  I felt alive.  I began to understand what it meant to feel.  The emotions I forced myself to suppress for so long are rising to the surface with unsuspected power.  Why is this happening?

I have my basic needs met.  My physiological and safety needs are met.  I have enough food.  I have my insulin.  My rent is paid.  I have internet and electricity.  I have a phone.  I get to choose what to do with every minute of my life, within the boundaries of my financial resources.  I can’t choose to take a cruise around the world.  The thing is, I didn’t really want to do that anyway.  That would be leaving the house.  The mailbox is as far as I ever want to go.  I could choose to get a VIP ticket to a Sara Niemietz and Snuffy Walden concert, though.  And I wanted that very much.  I’ll go beyond the mailbox for that much Joy.

Does this make me evil?  Is my happiness, whose genesis was the end of my suffering, a sin?  Am I worthless because I choose to spend the minutes I have left in life on things that make me happy?  I decline to feel guilty about that. 

If we have any real responsibility in life, it is to do our best to be as happy as we can in the time we have.  I’m not endorsing hedonism here.  I’m not advocating selfishness.  I would hope you would derive happiness from being kind to others, trying to change the world, or simply staying out of everyone’s way.  So long as you’re not hurting anyone, I want you to do whatever makes you happiest.  I want this one life you have to be the very best it can be. 

Let’s meet everyone’s basic needs.  Everyone should be able to live the way I do.  Many of you should be able to live better.  No one should live worse than I do. 

Let’s stop making a virtue of suffering.  Let’s do what we can to end as much suffering as we can.  We have far too few happy people and far too many martyrs.  I would rather you and I and everyone else be happy than be pitied. 

“Cracks and broken pieces

Inside us

Where the light comes in

Brightest”

-Sara Niemietz

Suffering is unavoidable.  A life without Love is empty.  The Price of Love is always suffering.  When you love someone, one way or another, it will end.  Either your relationship will end, in which case you will be sad, or one of you will die, in which case, again, you will be sad.  This is especially true of dogs and cats.  We almost always outlive them, and the pain of that loss is searing.  The settled order of nature tells us we will lose our parents, but the loss of a child is unnatural and smells of an evil in the world. 

No one can protect us from that suffering.  It’s a price I’m willing to pay.  The value of Love is the only thing greater than its price. 

But needless suffering can be, should be, and, some day, will be eliminated. 

A Universal Basic Income –- not programs for this and programs for that — but simply cash that is sufficient for a person to pay rent, to eat, to keep their utilities running, added to the Universal Health Care that nearly all other First World countries have, and free education for as long as a person wants to learn would allow us to work in the ways in which we are most interested and allow us to live in True Freedom.  Make the employers compete for workers instead of workers begging for wages. 

“Shame at our own dependence on the underpaid labor of others.  When someone works for less pay than she can live on – when she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently – then she has made a great sacrifice for you.  The working poor are the major philanthropists of our society.”

  • Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed

Let’s drop The Puritan Work Ethic and replace it with The Human Freedom Ethic.  Let’s allow everyone to Shine.

This was written in April, 2021. I have only now added it to my blog.

Posted on by Fred

On The Other Hand…

There is an innumerable quantity of reasons to be upset about the world.  Freedom is under attack.  Democracy nearly ended a year and a half ago.  Rents are spiraling out of control.  The world is perilously close to nuclear war.  If you’re upset, I promise I understand. 

Each of us has our own set of problems about which to be upset.  I walk the diabetes tightrope every single day.  My depression is a threat to my very existence.  I will never be loved romantically again.  My dog still tries to eat my furniture.  You surely have your own, some of which are probably worse than mine. 

I won’t pretend there are no reasons to be sad. 

On the other hand…

“It’s very important to remember that there are good people in the world who are doing good, in lots of ways.  Goodness exists, even when it can’t be seen.  So do beauty, and love, and the light of faraway stars.  The good will show itself in time.”

— Nanea Hoffman

Somewhere on this little planet in one of the billions, or perhaps, trillions of galaxies that make up our universe, at this very moment… right… now… a baby is being born.  It’s taking its first breath.  All of the world, in all of its beauty and wonder, is beginning in front of this new life. 

A few minutes ago, a child heard Mozart for the very first time, and she experienced a joy that will make her into an Artist.  She’s learning about the miracles human beings can create simply with our minds and our hands.  Some time in the not-too-distant future she will create something of lasting beauty that will change someone else’s life. 

“No matter how dark the moment, love and hope are always possible.” 

            — George Chakiris

An hour ago, a boy just got his first real kiss, and he’s reeling in ecstasy, wondering if his lips will always feel so oddly chapped as they do right now, and whether she will text him today.  He’s excited to be alive. 

Yesterday, an old man like me just got a dog that will love him unconditionally for the rest of his life.  He’s cuddling with him right now.  The dog feels a contentment it never experienced before.  It’s warm, safe, dry, and loved. 

“I still believe

In the Goodness

Even when it’s hard to find”

— Sara Niemietz and WG Snuffy Walden

Last week a painter sold her first canvas, and she feels like a real Artist for the first time in her life.  Her dreams seem real, and the flame of her creativity has been ignited.  In less than a year, she’ll be having her first show at The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.  A hundred years from now people will continue to gaze in awe at her painting. 

In August, a new teacher will step in front of his class for the first time.  His career will span more than 25 years, and children still unborn will remember him for the rest of their lives.  One of his students will grow up and make a difference in ways the teacher never imagined, and it will be because of what the child learned in his class. 

“I see your head
Is hanging low low low
Doing all you can
To keep the spark inside your soul
Wish you could see
You like I do
You’re original
You’re powerful
You’re something new
Can’t wait to see
Just where you go
I do believe
You’re gonna let them know”

–Niemietz – Taylor

A couple of weeks ago, humanity gazed deeper into the universe than we ever have before.  We’re learning more about the beginnings of life as we know it than we ever could have known before.  We’re gaining a deeper understanding of our origins.  By gazing into the past, we are creating a better future.  Thirty years ago Voyager 1 showed us our place in the universe from 4 billion miles away.  Carl Sagan helped us to understand.

Look again at that dot.  That’s here.  That’s home.  That’s us.  On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.  The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.  Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.  Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.  Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.  In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life.  There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes.  Settle, not yet.  Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience.  There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.  To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

Sometimes, for the preservation of our own mental health, we need to think about the possibilities that life still holds.  Love still exists, even when it’s hard to find.

I believe in The Power of Love.  Love is the only reason I’m still alive.

It is the love of people who know me that has saved my life from the best efforts of my diabetes to kill me on nearly two dozen occasions.

It is Speedy Shine’s love that gives me that gives me the strength to fight the depression that threatens my existence more often than I like to admit.

It is the love of my best friend and her ex-boyfriend that allow me to have a home.  I would survive as a homeless person for less than 48 hours.

It is the love of a friend from so many years ago that allows me to eat well enough to survive.

It is the love of The People on The Porch that gives my life purpose so I can feel that I can make a difference even while I’m not capable of doing anything to earn a living.  Their financial assistance keeps me from complete poverty, and their attention to my work makes me feel that I’m living instead of merely surviving.

It is the love of my Facebook friends that keeps me from feeling entirely alone, even while I do all I can to avoid leaving the house.  They allow me to feel some connection to the rest of the world.  They help me to control my fear of other people.

I believe it is love that will finally save us from losing our freedom.  I believe love is stronger than hate.  I could be wrong.  I remind myself of that several times a day.  But I will hold on to my belief in the power of love until the stars grow cold.

Love is my religion.

My true religion, my simple faith is in love and compassion.  There is no need for complicated philosophy, doctrine, or dogma.  Our own heart, our own mind, is the temple.  The doctrine is compassion.  Love for others and respect for their rights and dignity, no matter who or what they are – these are ultimately all we need.

—  The Dalai Lama

Of course, I’m an atheist, so how can I have a religion?

 A great Rabbi was once asked, “Why did God create atheists?”

The Rabbi said, “Atheists are the most important example for all who believe in God.  When an atheist is moral, and good, and kind, and compassionate, it’s not because he believes God commanded him to be so, nor because he fears any kind of punishment for being bad.  An atheist performs acts of righteousness because he knows it is right to do.  And where is God in this?  If He is in the atheist’s heart, or guiding him, it doesn’t matter.  The atheist helps regardless.  He helps because he believes there is nobody else, no power that can or will act without his own deeds.  So when someone is in need, in our times of crisis, you shouldn’t say, ‘I’ll pray for you, ‘ or, ‘May God help you.’ Rather, in this moment, you should be as an atheist.  Believe there is no God who can help, and say, ‘I will help you.’ In this way the atheist is closest to God, and so must we be as well.”

Captain Kirk taught me, in April 1967, when I was not yet five years old, that the three most important words are not, “I love you.”  The three most important words are, “Let me help.”

Where is the love in your life?  I promise there is some, even if you can’t find it at the moment.  I know mine isn’t what you probably want, but you have it anyway, even though we’ve probably never met and almost certainly never will.  If you’re a human being, I want you to find happiness, meaning, and love in your life.  I want you to have enough to eat, a warm bed in which to sleep, and somewhere to handle your bodily functions in a sanitary way. 

I’m willing to bet you feel the same way about nearly everyone.  On the other hand, I just turned a straight, and the player to my left rivered a full house, so I should probably not be gambling so much right now.  Perhaps you are battling the Hatred that is poisoning your soul, and if that’s the case, I hope you win the fight.  It’s not helping you to feel any better, I promise you.  It’s hurting you.  It’s hurting the object of your Hatred.  No matter how well deserved that hatred is, take a break from it for just a little while.  It will still be there when you’re ready to come back. 

Sometimes we need to lose things in order to learn not only their value, but also their weight.  Loss is a brilliant teacher that way; it can show us what’s important simply by creating space where it once was.”

— Mark Groves

It was 111 degrees here today.  My best friend loaned me the courage to leave the house, and she took me out to lunch.  I put my dog, Speedy Shine in the backyard with two trays full of ice cubes, and lots of water, and I filled all his toys with that cheese spread you get from PetSmart.  I told him I loved him, and I would be back soon.  I was gone for just over two hours, and when I returned, he jumped on me for nearly 5 uninterrupted minutes.  It was as though I had been gone for a year.  And there was an extra jolt of love from both of us.

And even in the middle of the summer, I couldn’t help but remember this Christmas story from what is, in my view, the greatest series ever to appear on television.

“Every year, when I was little, Daddy told me a story about The Great War.  How on Christmas Eve an English soldier started singing “Silent Night,” and from the other side of the trenches, the German soldiers joined in, and then they crossed the enemy lines and vowed not to fight each other the next day.  But the sun rose, and their commanders told them to charge, and they did.  I don’t know why that story makes me feel hopeful.  Maybe it’s that Good Will exists.  Even if it’s small and weak, there’s a chance it may grow up one day.”

— Barbara Hall in “I’ll Fly Away” Season 2, Episode 11, “Comfort and Joy.” 12/11/1992

That’s been with me for just shy of 30 years.  It will be with me until I am no more.  And now it is with you. 

Search for the Goodness.  Seek the Kindness.  I promise you, no matter how dark the skies, there are little lights of love still to be found.

I love you.

Posted on by Fred · 2 Comments

Saving Freedom

I spend far too much time watching science fiction and fantasy.  In Star Wars, the evil Empire is destroyed, but they keep coming back.  In Star Trek, no matter how effectively we think we have destroyed The Borg, they return.  I just finished watching Stranger Things, and they’ve burned Vecna up completely, and he will still be back for the fifth season.

I used to look at these facts a bit cynically.  Once you beat the Bad Guys, that should be it.  But the truth is you can never stop it.

We won The Civil War.  The Confederacy continues to clamor for attention; and it’s getting it.

We beat the Nazis in World War II. They are still on our streets, and people cheer for them as much as they sneer at them.

We won The Cold War, but Russia continues to attempt world domination.  And the world waits nervously.

Someone once said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men (and women) to do nothing.”  This is commonly attributed to Edmund Burke.  It turns out he never said that.  John Stuart Mill, in his 1867 Inaugural Address said something similar, though: “Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.”

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” a Quote Falsely Attributed to Edmund Burke

The evil of fascism can, it appears, never be destroyed.  It will build another Death Star.  It will assimilate another culture.  Vecna will force The Upside Down back into our world.

And so, we must continue to fight for our Freedom.  We must continue to vote, to protest, and to protect our poor, our disenfranchised, our disabled, and our unrepresented.

Our rights and our freedom are under a clear and obvious attack now.  I did an episode about that last week.  One of the most brutal attacks was against women.  Half of the population has been stripped of bodily autonomy, and some defend this on religious grounds.  I think that’s a misuse of religion.

One of the reasons America has survived as long as it has is that we have specifically avoided becoming a theocracy. We have recognized there are few things as personal or individual as our relationship with the Universe.  Whether it’s God, or Vishnu, or Zeus, or Allah, or simply the Vast Nothingness, we get to decide those things for ourselves.  One can be coerced into claiming to have beliefs, but, finally, they are our own deep inside ourselves.  We can change them only by choosing to do so, and by a careful reflection that shows us something new.

Those who claim (falsely, I believe) to be Christians of 21st Century America love to decide they’re being oppressed when they aren’t allowed to make their religious views the law.  I’m unaware of any successful free country that has worked as a theocracy.  I’m unaware of any theocracy in which I would choose to live.

I did a Google Search for theocracies in the world today.  Only 6 came up.  They are the following:

  • Afghanistan.
  • Iran.
  • Mauritania.
  • Saudi Arabia.
  • Vatican City.
  • Yemen.

In which of those places would you wish to live?

What Evangelical American Christians fail to recognize is that bodily autonomy isn’t a religious issue.  It’s a question of personal freedom.  It’s about owning oneself.

And I don’t think most of the people restricting freedom are doing it due to any deeply held beliefs about God or the Universe.  I believe they’re doing it because they want to have the power to tell others what to do with their lives.  It’s the Need of the Narcissist.  It’s the Sustenance of the Psychopath.  It’s saying I’m in control.  It’s saying, basically, “I’m God.  I know what God, who is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent and has the power to create an entire universe, wants.  So just listen to me.  And, God wants me to control everyone. God wants everyone to obey me.”  Doesn’t that idea seem startlingly arrogant to you?  Someone really claims to understand what an almighty being, capable of everything you can imagine, wants us to do?  That sounds pathological to me.  Actually, I should say a God who can do almost anything you can imagine.  There’s always the example of the first paradox I ever learned.  When I was 12, my father the philosopher asked me, “If God can do anything, can He create a rock so large that He can’t lift it?”

The attack on freedom is a contempt for individuality.  It’s an attack against your free will.  It’s dark.  It’s dangerous.  It’s destructive.

I am on the record repeatedly in favor of freedom of religion.  I can think of few places that are more deeply personal than how you view your relationship with the universe.  Most of my friends have some form of Christian view.  They believe in a God who created the universe and is deeply concerned about what we do with the Free Will He gave us.  They may well be right.  I certainly can’t prove they’re wrong.  I want them to have the freedom to explore that idea, and to live by the beliefs that spring from it, in every way possible.  I want them to be allowed to worship in the ways they choose.  I want them to be allowed to express their beliefs whenever they choose, wherever they choose, and to whomever wants to hear them.  I just don’t want them to make their beliefs the only ones allowed.  I don’t want them to decide our government must reflect those beliefs.  That’s what happens in a theocracy.  That’s how planes get flown into The World Trade Center.

“No it’s not!  Those were Muslims, and they are evil!”

Those were people who were raised believing that theirs, and only theirs, is the correct view of the universe.  They’ve been taught, since birth, that those who believe something different are evil, and they must be destroyed as enemies of Allah.  This isn’t inherent in Islam.  It’s inherent in a theocracy. 

The overwhelming majority of Muslims are not evil, just as the overwhelming majority of Christians are not evil.  It was Christian theocracy that led to The Salem Witch Trials.  It was Christian theocracy that led to The Spanish Inquisition, which, Monty Python aside, was entirely expected.  It was Christian theocracy that tried for centuries to end any scientific progress, as both Galileo and Copernicus learned.  Christian theocracy has no better history than Islamic theocracy.  

Outside of Vatican City, Christian theocracies are few and far between.  I believe you can find Mormon settlements that have managed it.  It doesn’t go well for them.  You can ask Warren Jeffs, the former President of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Days Saints, about this.  You can ask those children he was convicted of raping.  You can ask the same question to those who have been raped by Catholic Priests.   

The Republican party has aligned itself with Evangelical American Christianity, and, in my view, corrupted it for its own ends.  They have used fear of “The Other” to band people together to oppose those who are different from them. 

They have taught homophobia, although no homosexual represents any threat to anyone simply by being homosexual.  I remember when I was 9 years old, a furious parent at a PTA meeting was talking to my father about the fact that the school was allowed even to mention homosexuality.  “How would you feel,” he asked furiously, “if a homosexual raped your son in the bathroom of the school?”  My father replied, “Probably about the same as I would feel if a heterosexual raped my daughter.”  “Oh my God!” shouted the man.  “Are they teaching that now, too??”  Ignorance breeds fear.

And fascists know that.  It’s why they want to decide which books we can and can’t read.  It’s why they oppose teaching a complete history of our country.  And it’s why they tell us to watch out for liberal, commie, socialists who are coming to destroy us all.  They know that most people don’t really understand what it means to be a liberal, a communist, or a socialist, and they use those words to frighten the willfully ignorant.  They pass out cherry-picked information that is just enough to frighten people, but not sufficient for true understanding.  “A little knowledge,” as Einstein purportedly told us, “is a dangerous thing.”  (Alexander Pope said it first, but he used the word “learning” in place of “knowledge.”)

So, I’ll say this again, and I will be grateful to the person who can tell me to whom I can reliably attribute it.  “Education is the journey from cocksure ignorance to thoughtful uncertainty.”  Let’s allow our minds to be open to different ideas.  I recognize an open mind is not the same as an empty one.  I don’t advocate abandoning all of your beliefs.  I would like you to be able to question them.

Why do fascists do encourage hatred?  Hitler was incredibly successful at it in the 20th Century.  He got Germany to blame “The Other” for its horrendous situation following World War I, and the results are one of the most infamous chapters in world history.  Those who are different, he taught, are a threat to be eliminated.  I believe we’re all more enlightened than that now.

Fascism has infected the Republican Party.  And Democrats are either unwilling or unable to do much about it.  We had nearly 50 years to codify Roe, and ensure women are in control of their own bodies.  We dropped the ball.  Republicans actually wanted to pass a Universal Basic Income during the Nixon Administration.  Democrats dropped the ball.  Reagan told us that “Trickle Down Economics” would help the whole country.  We’ve had more than 40 years to see it didn’t work.  And Democrats have been unwilling or unable to do anything about it. 

Republicans have done all of this under the guise of following the Constitution.  The Senate, for example, may have been a good idea when it was created.  It was an effort to ensure those in rural communities would be represented in government.  Now, however, it has made citizens of one state vastly more powerful than citizens of another. California has nearly 70 times as many people as Wyoming, and they each get two Senators.   A citizen of Wyoming has nearly 70 times the power to control the government as one in California. 

What we are seeing is the efforts of The Few to control the lives of The Many.  They want to maximize their freedom by restricting ours.  We’re choosing to let them because they have embedded their ideas so deeply in our culture that any others are unthinkable.  Except, all ideas can be thought.  Everything begins with a thought.  Let’s try some new ones.  Let’s imagine a better world.

Here are some unthinkable thoughts.  Let’s change the Senate so that it represents people equally.  I know that’s how The House of Representatives is supposed to work, but due to the obvious gerrymandering of voting districts, it rarely does.  How do we change it?  I don’t know.  I leave that to better minds than mine.  I’m simply offering the thought.

Here’s another unthinkable thought.  Let’s give everyone enough money to survive, so we can all decide how to live, for ourselves.  I know this is unthinkable because this will mean prices go up, and we’ll never be able to keep up with the inflation.  I don’t know anything about Economics, so I should probably just shut up.  I was told that frequently when I lived in my little trailer in California.  I live alone with Speedy Shine, now, so I’ll say it anyway.  How do we work out the details?  I have no clue.  Anthony is right.  I know nothing about Economics.  Fortunately, there are many people who do.  I leave it them to figure out how that’s done. 

The final thought comes from the best writer with whom I have ever occupied a room, Mark Rozema.  It’s from a brilliant essay he wrote on Facebook:

It is time to jettison the politics of domination.  It is also time to stop treating one another (and the rest of nature) as commodities to be exploited.  There is a better way.  The transformation to this better way will not occur without a visceral, muscular rejection of the injustice of unfair representation and the various wrongs that stem from it.

  • Mark Rozema

I believe part of the reason we leap for excuses to avoid finding the better way is because we have been taught all our lives that nothing can be done to help people.  That’s helpful to us if we can disregard our empathy and compassion.  We’re taught to think of Us and forget about Them.  Nothing needs to be done to help Them.  And I have rent to pay next month.  I can’t be bothered to think about it. 

We see too small a picture of the world.  There was a shooting last week in Phoenix, but I live at least 20 miles from there, so it’s not my problem.  21 people were killed in Uvalde, Texas, but that’s another state, so it’s not my problem.  Ukraine is under attack, but that’s not my country, so it’s not my problem.  It’s happening to Them. But on The Front Porch, we know There is no Them; we are all Us. 

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend’s were.
Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

John Donne

We’ve defeated the Republican effort to make us into a dictatorship before.  We must find a way to do it again. 

As Princess Leia said, “It’s not over yet.”

Posted on by Fred · 2 Comments

Freedom is Under Attack

My best friend, Stephanie, is on vacation in Norway.  She left America, and the shit hit the fan.  This is obviously her fault.

I already spent an entire episode on the January 6 Committee Hearings.  I won’t go any further into that now, but those started right around the time Stephanie left.  Since she’s been gone, half of our population has lost the right to bodily autonomy.  That’s a polite way of saying pregnant persons don’t get to choose what will happen to their bodies anymore.  They can now be turned in because their periods are irregular.  There are bounties available for turning in someone you suspect might have had an abortion. 

https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/blog/wtf-an-abortion-bounty-law-in-2021

One of The People on The Porch, whose identity I will not reveal, suffers from a condition called PCOS.  What is that?  I didn’t know, either so I looked it up.

Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) is a condition in which the ovaries produce an abnormal amount of androgens, male sex hormones that are usually present in women in small amounts.  The symptoms of PCOS may include:

  • Missed periods, irregular periods, or very light periods…
  • Infertility 

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/polycystic-ovary-syndrome-pcos#:~:text=Polycystic%20ovary%20syndrome%20(PCOS)%20is,that%20form%20in%20the%20ovaries.

How is this relevant?  It makes it likely that a woman suffering from this condition could be suspected of having had an abortion.  There are places where she would have to prove she didn’t.  Is this really what we want? 

The Attack on Freedom doesn’t end there.

They have just put religion back into public schools.  The government now gets to “encourage” your religious belief.  The defense I am hearing is that it’s “voluntary” to remain when the football coach is conducting a prayer on the field.  Justice Sotomayor disagreed:

Sotomayor’s dissent, which included photographs of the prayers in question, suggested that she thought the majority was not describing accurately the factual circumstances of the case.

“As the majority tells it, Kennedy, a coach for the District’s football program, ‘lost his job’ for ‘(praying) quietly while his students were otherwise occupied,’” she wrote.  “The record before us, however, tells a different story.”

Her dissent also pointedly noted that the school district tried to accommodate the coach by offering him a place to pray, off the field.  “Again, the District emphasized that it was happy to accommodate Kennedy’s desire to pray on the job in a way that did not interfere with his duties or risk perceptions of endorsement,” she said.

She said that it was “unprecedented” for the court to hold that Kennedy’s conduct, “taken as a whole, did not raise cognizable” concerns of coercion.

Sotomayor stressed that students could have felt coerced to join in the prayer and pointed to the fact that the court in the past has “recognized that students face immense social pressure.”

She said that they look up to their teachers and coaches as role models and “seek their approval” and that players might try to gain a coach’s approval to secure a stronger letter of recommendation for college recruiting or more playing time on the field.  “The record before the Court bears this out,” she wrote.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/27/politics/football-coach-prayer-high-school-supreme-court-kennedy/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/19/politics/joe-kennedy-football-coach-prayer-supreme-court/index.html

While it’s true that no one was physically stopping players or fans from leaving, physical pressure isn’t all that is involved.  Fitting in with others is a vital part of our social development.  I hid my atheism for years because I was already enough of an outcast in public school.  I couldn’t take the chance of being any more different from my classmates.  And, yes, it happened to me in fourth grade.

“You know why it should be front and center?  It’s not the first amendment, it’s not freedom of religion, it’s not church and state.  It’s not abstract.  It’s the fourth grader who gets his ass kicked at recess because he sat out the voluntary prayer in home room.  It’s another way of making kids different from other kids when they’re required by law to be there.  That’s why you want it front and center: the fourth grader.  That’s the prize.”

– Toby Zigler, Season 2, Episode 8 “Shibboleth” in The West Wing written by Aaron Sorkin

I’m an atheist, and I can say that now because I live alone, I practically never leave the house, and the fact that lots of people don’t like me for that isn’t as difficult to handle.  If I were still in 4th grade, I don’t know how I would deal with it. 

I have no problem of any kind with the fact that many people I love have very different relationships with the universe than I do.  One of the people I love most became a minister a few years ago, and I’m proud to say I was among her biggest supporters when she was studying.  It was something important to her, and I want for her all the things that make her happy.  Her religious beliefs helped to shape her into a kind, empathetic, loving person who wants to make the world a better place.  We’re standing on the same ground about that.  We just took different paths to get here.

Now The Supreme Court is telling us we need to be a part of the majority if we don’t want to feel ostracized.

What else are they going to do?

They’ve made it clear they’re just getting started.  One of my gay friends is doing all he can to shore up his legal rights to protect his marriage because that’s on the agenda.  The Supreme Court is not only telling half of the population what they have to do with their bodies, and they’re not just saying we need to adopt the religious beliefs of those around us if we don’t want to face shunning (or getting our asses kicked at recess), but they’re also telling us who we can love, and how we can love them.  They’re going to revisit gay marriage and contraception. 

In his concurring opinion, Thomas — an appointee of President George H.W. Bush — wrote that the justices “should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell” — referring to three cases having to do with Americans’ fundamental privacy, due process, and equal protection rights.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/24/thomas-constitutional-rights-00042256

One of The People on The Porch told me this on Facebook:

My marriage is about to be invalidated.  Just got off the phone making lawyer appointments to update our wills and trusts.  Technically if they repeal 14th amendment-based decisions, I’ll have to move into the spare room.

Fred Eder

Name Deleted, this is entirely unacceptable.  I don’t know what we can do beyond voting in massive numbers, and, I hope, increasing the size of SCOTUS so we can dilute the power of the fascists who have been working toward this for 40 years.

The idea that you can’t love whomever you choose should be offensive to any person with a molecule of empathy in their souls.

We are being told what we can and can’t do with our own bodies, who and how we may love, and what religious views we must have.  Any one of those is an outrage.  Collectively, they add up to the foundations of a dystopian nightmare.

I don’t have the power to fight this level of Evil.  I could never make it to Mordor to destroy the Ring.  My hopes for survival are pinned to a Frodo of whom I’ve never heard to restore what little freedom we have left.

Fred Eder, ah well I was in the streets in the 80s and 90s.  I’m staring turning 60 in the face.  I had hoped that our actions in those days would pave the way for equality, and they did….  for a while…now the fascism is back with a vengeance.  Didn’t think I’d have to, but I will pick up signs, bricks and more to stop this.  The Christian Taliban ain’t getting their way on my watch if I can help it.

Fred Eder

Name Deleted, I’m glad you’re healthy enough to do this.  I can barely stand up.

All I can do is talk to the 50 or so people who listen to my show every week.  My hope is I can get one or two of them to vote for, advocate for, and take whatever action they can to protect what little is left of our Freedom.

Thank you for all you have done to help keep us free.

I’ve seen on Facebook recently the unattributed quote that “The road to fascism is paved with people telling us we’re overreacting.”

I don’t believe I’m overreacting.  More than half of the population has lost an important right.  I understand opposing abortion.  I would prefer that no one ever needed one, but the fact is that those who get pregnant do sometimes, for reasons that are none of my business.  They’re none of your business, either. 

The idea that we get to decide for anyone other than ourselves, when, with whom, or how we should have sex is unconscionable.  What goes on between consenting adults is of no concern to anyone but them.  The Supreme Court, however, has decided that government should be just small enough to fit in everyone’s bedrooms.  You may not have sex with a member of your own gender.  You may not use contraceptives with your partner.  You must have a baby if you become pregnant.  This is what our Supreme Court wants to tell us. 

“That’s not what they’re saying at all.  They’re saying it’s up to each state to decide these things.  They’re not taking anyone’s rights away.  They’re giving rights to decide back to the states.”

Oh yes… States’ Rights.  I know I’ve heard of that somewhere before… Where was that?  Oh yes… There was a thing called The Civil War.  That was about States’ Rights, too, but in that case, it was about the rights of some states to own other human beings.  I don’t believe there is anyone listening who would be in favor of slavery today.    

I know, though, that many of us are opposed to abortion.  Some of us oppose it for religious reasons, and others simply think of it as murdering babies.  Let me be clear:  No one wants to murder babies.  I would do anything in my power to save the life of a child.  So would anyone else listening now. 

How could we reduce the number of abortions people have?  This is a question worth pursuing. 

First, we could minimize some of the reasons pregnant people feel the need for them.  This would include not outlawing, but distributing freely and everywhere, all the contraception people need.  If people don’t get pregnant in the first place, they don’t need abortions.  If you oppose abortion, I hope you would support this.

Next, we could ensure that all the prenatal help a pregnant person needs is freely and widely available.  If you oppose abortion, I hope you would support this.

We could also improve the financial circumstances of pregnant people so they can afford to raise a child.  We could get them all the diapers, food, formula, day care, and any other assistance they need to be able to raise a child.  If you oppose abortion, I hope you would support this.

Will this end all abortions?  No.  Of course not.  These are only some of the reasons people get abortions.  But if they keep even one person from having an abortion, isn’t that closer to what you want?  Isn’t something better than nothing?

And, making abortion illegal in roughly half of the country won’t stop abortions, either.  Wealthy people who become pregnant will still find places to obtain their safe and legal abortions.  Poor people won’t have as many options, and I think these are the people The Supreme Court is targeting.  They can’t afford to run off to another state at will to get their abortions.  They will need to get dangerous illegal abortions, often performed by people who are not qualified. 

I would prefer, too, that no one needed an abortion, but there are any number of times when they are necessary.  And it’s nothing any pregnant person wants in the same way they want an ice cream cone.  It’s something they need for any number of reasons that I have no right to judge.  What scares me the most is that the fascism won’t end with the freedoms that are being curtailed for ever-growing segments of the population.  It’s that the people who want to restrict our freedoms are not exactly known for their loyalty.  They wanted to hang one of their own on January 6, 2021.  If you’re thinking that this isn’t going to affect you because you’re straight, or male, or Christian, I would like to remind you that Mike Pence is all those things, too.  Please don’t believe that when the violence begins, you’ll certainly be spared.

One of my most intelligent friends, Greg Smithwick, pointed out today on his show, “So Local Live” that once the violence begins, it’s difficult to control.  This is important to remember.  Yes, I want to stop the attacks on Freedom while we still can.  No, I don’t advocate violence, although I know many of you feel it may be necessary.  I hope you’re wrong. 

One of the things that I believe is going to help us to avoid a Second Civil War is our diversity.  There are people of differing political views in every state in the nation.  There is no exclusively Republican or Democratic state.  There are liberals in Arizona.  (Hi, I’m Fred, have we met?)  There are conservatives in California.  I lived in one of their trailers for a couple of months.  I don’t see our two states going to war because there are enough people on the opposing side in every state. 

Every night at 6:05 PM (It used to be 7:37 PM, but Mom is falling asleep earlier now) I talk to my Mom.  We have nearly the same conversation every night, and it ends with me saying, “Now you know I’m okay, and I know you’re okay, so we can both relax and get a good night’s sleep.”  What I fear most is the day when I won’t be able to make that call, or to tell her I’m okay.  I don’t feel confident that I will be able to do that indefinitely.  Fascists don’t like people like me very well.  The only thing I have going for me is that I’m so small I might escape their notice, at least in the beginning of the rounding up of enemies of the state.

Regular listeners know that on The Front Porch, I like to leave you with hope.  I want us to continue to Shine.  This week, that hope comes from one of The People on The Porch who posted this on Facebook last week when I said that freedom is under attack, and that I’m terrified:

It’s more likely that this measure will prompt a backlash that institutes some needed reforms.

1) Now a constitutional amendment securing the equality of women as well bodily sovereignty has become urgent.  It can be worded in a way that makes it dangerous for even the most obstinate senators to vote against.

2) The Supreme Court will now come under heavy and sustained political fire for a very long time, and so perhaps term limits (18 years?) will gain support.

3) Gay marriage, contraceptives, interracial marriage, and so on cannot be subject to surprise attacks, because everyone is on alert now and no one can be caught by surprise.  There’s a paradox that when you think you’re safe, you’re not, and when you’re on high alert because your guard is up, the vigilance actually means you’re in less danger.

Fred Eder

Thank you for giving me a little hope.  This terror does horrible things to my depression.  There’s a part of me that just wants to find a way to run as far from here as I can, but I have no way to do that.

This is not the America I grew up believing in.  This is no longer the great shining beacon of Freedom that made me so proud as a child.  We have been watching it happen slowly for 40 years.  Now it’s coming to fruition, and if we don’t stop it now, we will never be able to survive.

Fred Eder, it is still that shining beacon.  There is simply nowhere else for the people of the world to turn to for a vision of the future.  Russia?  China?  Europe?  Japan?  They’re all in demographic decline, and have a small, narrow, ethnocentric interest and perspective.

America remains the last best hope for the world – a multi-ethnic democracy where cults of personality must eventually lose out to and be subordinate to the rule of law.

We’re being tested.  Although it is difficult to see in the darkest of night, the version of America that’s worth fighting for is still winning.

So… without violence, what can we do?

Greg suggested getting 10 people all the help they need to be sure they’re registered to vote.  You’re my 10 people.  If you need help, you can ask me.  I’m not any sort of expert, but I can do the Google Search for you if you have difficulty. 

I don’t have any money to contribute to the people or causes that might lead us out of this nightmare.  I barely have enough money to make ends meet, even though I’m getting the greatest deal on rent I ever could hope to have, a friend sends me money for groceries sometimes, and I get support from The People on the Porch.  My Disability check wouldn’t even pay the rent on the smallest apartment in my town.  I rarely have triple digits in my account at the end of the month.  There are times I don’t even have double digits.  If you’re someone with extra money to support the causes in which you believe, please donate to them.  While I don’t like the fact that our world is based around money, that doesn’t change the fact that it is.  Money helps get things done.

The last time I attended a protest was, I think, 3 years ago.  My former roommates could correct me on this.  They were there.  My memory is not to be relied upon for accuracy.  When we got home, I was throwing up for most of the night.  There was some discussion about whether I needed to go to the ER yet again, but they gave me some sort of pill that stopped the vomiting, and I was all right.  I think it was heat stroke and exhaustion.  I was healthier three years ago than I am now.  I don’t have the physical strength to attend a protest.  If you do, and you can do it safely, I encourage you to go.  You don’t need to do violence.  You just need to be there.  Numbers make a difference. 

I have no skill in organizing anything.  I would make a mess of it.  Are you good at organizing?  Excellent.  Use that skill.

All I have the ability to do now is this show.  I’m hoping to rally all 50 of the people who listen to the cause of change.  Whatever you can do to help, please, please, please do it! 

Stephanie will have returned to America by the time this hits Patreon, so perhaps it will all have stopped by then, since, clearly, it was her fault all this happened in the first place.  America can’t survive without her.  But, just in case my reasoning here is faulty (you might check out something called Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc sometime), I’m asking you to help save Freedom before it is gone.

Oh, and on a side note, Greg, you said on your show today that you’ve been supporting me on Patreon for years.  If you have been, I didn’t know that.  Are you my Mystery Patron?  Has your identity finally been revealed?  If that’s you, thank you!  If it’s not, could you please send me a little of what you’re smoking?  It seems to be better than mine. 

And I want to remind you, dear listener, once more, that I love you. 

Posted on by Fred · 1 Comment

The January 6 Committee Matters

I am not a fan of Liz Cheney in general.  She opposed gay marriage (although she later recanted that position while still failing to vote for any kinds of protection for the LGBTQIA community), she has no compassion for the poor, and her views on immigration are in direct opposition to mine.  From her own website:

Liz voted against amnesty and any attempt to soften sovereign border enforcement
Liz cosponsored the Refugee Resettlement National Security Act requiring the Comptroller General to do a full assessment of the costs of refugees to federal, state and local governments
Liz cosponsored the Criminal Alien Deportation Enforcement Act, a bill that withholds foreign aid from countries that refuse to take back criminal aliens…

https://justfacts.votesmart.org/public-statement/1273729/issue-position-securing-the-border-fighting-illegal-immigration&speechType=7

She believes in an Us vs Them way of seeing the world.  I believe in “There is no Them; we are all Us.”

She is in favor of increasing the military budget, and she wants to fight more wars.  I would like to fight fewer wars.  In fact, I would prefer we never fight another war ever again. 

She is in favor of ensuring everyone can get any firearms they want.  If you listened to my podcast on the mass murder at Robb Elementary School, you know I would prefer to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people, and I would really like civilians to do without guns that are intended to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible. 

I could go on, but I have made my point.  I disagree with Liz Cheney… most of the time. 

Many of The People on The Porch are Conservatives who probably like Liz Cheney and agree with her views most of the time.  And I respect their right to disagree with me.  You could be right.  I could be wrong.  I’m hoping we can find agreement on this. 

These words are from Ms. Cheney’s opening remarks in the January 6 Committee Hearings:

Tonight and in the weeks to come, you will see evidence of what motivated this violence, including directly from those who participated in this attack.  You will see video of them explaining what caused them to do it.  You will see their posts on social media.  We will show you what they have said in federal court.  On this point, there is no room for debate.  Those who invaded our Capitol and battled law enforcement for hours were motivated by what President Trump had told them: that the election was stolen, and that he was the rightful President.  President Trump summoned the mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack.

I am not a fan of former Vice President, Mike Pence.  He is in direct opposition to LGBTQIA rights.  His views about gun control are very different from mine.  The same is true concerning his opinions about abortion.  Again, I recognize many of my Conservative friends may like Mr. Pence more than I do, and I respect their right to disagree with my assessment of him.  I don’t like Mike Pence very much at all.  Most of the time…

He also, however, said this:

“Under the Constitution, I had no right to change the outcome of our election, and (Vice President) Kamala Harris will have no right to overturn the election when we beat them in 2024.”

Although then-President Trump asked him repeatedly to find a way to invalidate the November 2021 election results, the then-Vice President declined to do that.  The result of this was that on January 6, those attacking the Capitol wanted to find and hang Mike Pence.  It would appear that for many people, the assessment of all people is dependent upon the assessment their leader makes.  People who once liked Mike Pence wanted to hang him because Donald Trump decided he didn’t like his Vice President anymore. 

What we’ve seen from Liz Cheney and Mike Pence, as well as several others who have participated in the January 6 Committee Hearing, is love of country over love of party.  That’s becoming as rare a commodity as efficient bureaucracies.  I can, and do, disagree with them about nearly everything, but I also have to respect the courage to do what’s right.  I’m allowed a nuanced point of view.  I can walk and chew gum at the same time.  I can leave my little box whenever I choose.  I wish those who wanted to harm Pence and Cheney could entertain more than one idea at a time, and practice some kind of moderation.   

The response to the Hearings I’m hearing from Trump supporters is that it’s a Nothing Sandwich.  We need to forget about January 6 and focus on more important problems like runaway inflation and gas prices skyrocketing.  I don’t deny the importance of those issues.  I’m not aware of anyone who does.  There are a nearly infinite number of problems that are urgent and must be faced, investigated, and solved sooner rather than later.  I could add quite a few to the list.  Mass murders, homelessness, poverty, crimes of desperation, the steady decline of mental health, and the issue of allowing people to be who they choose to be all come to mind.  Climate change is an existential threat to our planet.

The existence of these problems does nothing to mitigate the horrors of January 6.  The effort to destroy what little remains of our freedom is not to be ignored.  Had they been successful, what would that have meant?  Would it really have been no big deal to execute our Vice President?  No, I don’t like him.  Yes, I disagree with him.  But, hanging him?  That’s obscene.  It’s unimaginable.  It’s nothing short of terrorism.  The same fate would certainly have awaited Nancy Pelosi, AOC, and any number of others had these people been successful.  Aside from the murders, the other consequences would have been equally unthinkable. 

They would, one assumes, have installed their own President.  With elections now invalidated, we would have a Dictator.  Freedom, even the limited Freedom we have thus far preserved, would be over.  Media as we know it would topple.  This show would certainly be shut down.  Racism, misogyny, homophobia, and hatred of “The Other” would become commonplace.  Suffering would increase exponentially for nearly everyone. 

What happened on January 6, 2021 is important.  It can’t be ignored without risking everything we hold dear.  People must be held accountable so we can reduce the odds of anyone else trying it again.  The Proud Boys, The Oath Keepers, and the other White Nationalist groups aren’t going to go away until we put them away.  While I certainly respect their right to the vile beliefs with which I think all rational people disagree, and while I believe they should be allowed to speak those beliefs on their own platforms, this doesn’t mean they’re allowed to act on those beliefs and overthrow our country. 

No, The January 6 Committee Hearings are not a Nothing Burger.  They are a means of informing all the world, truthfully and with clear evidence, of a significant attack on our country. 

Will the former President be indicted?  If he is, will he be convicted?  If he is, will he go to prison?  I doubt it.  I hope I’m wrong, but in all of American history only one President has ever been arrested after becoming President.  (It was Ulysess S. Grant.  He didn’t go to prison.)

A year into his appointment to the MPD, (formerly enslaved person) William H. West came across President Ulysses S. Grant while on patrol near 13th and M Streets NW in Washington, D.C.  He stopped the president for speeding in his horse and buggy and gave him a warning for excessive speed before sending him on his way.  The next day, on a very similar patrol, West witnessed the president repeating his behavior and thus, arrested him.  While arresting the president, West said, “I am very sorry, Mr. President, to have to do it, for you are the chief of the nation and I am nothing but a policeman, but duty is duty, sir, and I will have to place you under arrest.” President Grant was taken to the police station and released on a $20 bond—the equivalent to $430 today—and he did not contest the fine or the arrest.  This was not President Grant’s first citation for speeding in the District of Columbia.  According to former chief Cathy Lanier, Ulysses S. Grant received three citations for speeding in his horse-drawn carriage during his tenure as president. 

William West

It’s hard to imagine a former President being indicted, in spite of the enormous body of evidence that anyone who has watched the hearings has seen.  Trump could have stopped the attack at least three hours earlier than he did.  He was, as we have seen in the Hearings, begged repeatedly by friends, family, and staff to call off the crowd. 

“For 187 harrowing minutes, the president watched his
supporters attack the Capitol — and resisted pleas to stop them…”

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), a Trump booster, called him and said, “You have to denounce this.” Trump falsely claimed to McCarthy that the rioters were members of antifa, but McCarthy corrected him and said they were in fact Trump supporters.

“You know what I see, Kevin?  I see people who are more upset about the election than you are.  They like Trump more than you do,” the president replied.

“You’ve got to hold them,” McCarthy said.  “You need to get on TV right now, you need to get on Twitter, you need to call these people off.”

Trump responded, “Kevin, they’re not my people.”

McCarthy told the president, “Yes, they are, they just came through my windows and my staff is running for cover.  Yeah, they’re your people.  Call them off.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2021/what-happened-trump-jan-6-insurrection/

This isn’t a partisan issue.  Trump supporters asked the former President for help.  Their pleas were ignored for more than three hours.  Loyalty and compassion don’t seem to be strong suits for our 45th President. 

The evidence is clear that Trump was aware that he had lost the election.  The Hearings showed us several people, including his closest supporters, staff, friends, and family had told him this.  If he believed he won the election when he was organizing this attack, he was not in touch with reality.  We can debate the qualifications of a President, but I would like to believe we all agree a President needs to recognize reality. 

There is nothing you (unless you’re in the Justice Department) or I can do about indicting anyone.  That doesn’t mean, however, that we’re entirely powerless to keep this destruction from recurring.  We still have the power of our votes. 

It’s likely that Trump will be the nominee for President in 2024.  We can simply vote for anyone else.  This doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be the Democratic nominee.  I recognize that in the two-party system we have in America it seems pointless to vote for anyone other than a Democrat or a Republican.  No one else can possibly get elected.  To vote for someone else is to waste your vote.  That’s the traditional wisdom.  It may be true.

You’re on Fred’s Front Porch right now, though, and we are Idealists around here.  We believe that change begins with Imagination.  I’m unaware of anything humans have created that didn’t begin with an idea.  I don’t know who will be running in 2024, but we can imagine that someone who isn’t backed by billions of dollars in corporate money could be President.  And then we can do what little we can to make that happen. 

A single drop of water is all but powerless.  When you put enough of them together, however, you can carve the Grand Canyon.  I’m working on that now.  I hope you’ll join me in your own way. 

Posted on by Fred

The Omelas Problem

In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room.  It has one locked door, and no window.  A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket.  The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is.  The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room, a child is sitting.  It could be a boy or a girl.  It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded.  Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect.  It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops.  It is afraid of the mops.  It finds them horrible.  It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come.  The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes–the child has no understanding of time or interval–sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there.  One of them may come in and kick the child to make it stand up.  The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes.  The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked; the eyes disappear.  The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother’s voice, sometimes speaks.  “I will be good, ” it says.  “Please let me out.  I will be good!” They never answer.  The child used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining, “eh-haa, eh-haa,” and it speaks less and less often.  It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day.  It is naked.  Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually.  They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas.  Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there.  They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery…

They would like to do something for the child.  But there is nothing they can do.  If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed.  Those are the terms.  To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.

This is The Omelas Problem.  Everyone can be happy, but the price is the endless suffering of one child.  She’s makes it clear in the story (and I can’t recommend highly enough that you read it… It’s brilliant!  I’ll drop a link in the transcript.) that there is no other way it can work.  The rules are unchangeable.  This is the foundation on which the problem rests.  You have two options, and two only.  You can stay in Omelas and enjoy the paradise created by the child’s sacrifice, or you can walk away from Omelas and find somewhere less idyllic to live.  In neither case can you affect the child’s fate.  It will continue to suffer no matter what you do.  What is the morally correct choice?

I’m not going to pretend to know.  I would like to think that, as a matter of conscience, I would choose not to live in such a society, but it’s clear that helps the child not at all.  The child’s sacrifice is, in my case, wasted.  I derive no benefit from his suffering.  Others do.  I don’t.  This doesn’t end his suffering.  It doesn’t even mitigate it. 

So, I can see that I might choose to stay.  My conscience would probably hound me endlessly.  My Prosecutor would never stop.  I would hate myself.  The happiness to be gained by his sacrifice is, again, wasted in my case because I can’t be happy knowing the price being paid for my happiness. 

Ms. LeGuin has presented us with an unsolvable moral problem.    Fortunately, we don’t have to solve it because that’s nothing like our world.  Everyone in our world is free, and few of us are happy.  That’s a fair assessment, isn’t it?

I think our moral problem is a bit more nuanced.  We don’t have one child suffering; we have many millions of people suffering.  We don’t have everyone living the idyllic life of Omelas.  We have a few living in their own private paradises. 

While the Rules of Omelas are unchangeable, the rules of our world are not.   Star Trek: Strange New Worlds recently took up this problem, and they had a line I loved: “Let the tree that grows from the roots of sacrifice lift us where suffering cannot reach.”

Our history is replete with both sacrifice and suffering.  They come in nearly infinite varieties, and they affect nearly everyone at some time or other.  We’ve made sufficient sacrifices to grow a tall, broad, powerful tree, but it fails to lift us high enough to avoid the suffering of uncounted homo sapiens. 

We have the resources to end much of the suffering right now.  We have enough to give everyone a home, to feed everybody, to provide power for the whole world, and to provide medical care for all.  We absolutely can do that.  We choose not to. 

The moment I suggest anything of the sort, people will begin shouting, “Yeah, well who’s gonna pay for it??”

And we instantly tumble into the delusion that money is valuable.  We believe nothing can be done without money.  Why do we believe this?  Why is it impossible, even for a moment, to question that idea? 

In the last few weeks, I’ve taken you to a place where you could choose your own Universe, I’ve let you hear from a Time Traveler, and I’ve described the suffering in our world in horrible detail.  Can I get you to travel along this flight of fancy just a little farther? 

Let’s start by recognizing that money, in fact, has no value beyond the value we have assigned to it.  If aliens invade Earth tomorrow afternoon, I promise they won’t come to get our money.  It’s worthless to them.  Our water might well be valuable.  Our oxygen, our cattle, our farms, and even our people might be resources they could use, but money?  No.  They see no practical function for bits of cotton and linen or digits on a computer. 

A bottle of water has more inherent value than a hundred-dollar-bill.  The value of that bit of paper is that it can be traded for lots of bottle of water.  More people believe in the value of money than believe in any form of God.  It is The One World Religion.  It’s more powerful in our world than all the Gods we have ever posited.  I’ve never heard of any church that doesn’t need it.  Have you? 

I’m asking you to do something even more difficult than questioning your religious faith.  I’m asking you to question the value of money. 

Is it possible we could have done all the things we’ve done without money?  I think so.  Why?  Because we did.  Money isn’t supernatural.  It’s an invention of ours.  It wasn’t handed down to us by a God.  It wasn’t the Obelisk from 2001: A Space Odyssey.  It is an invented means of motivation. 

W.C. Fields, I think, (please don’t trust my memory.  It’s faulty at best.) had a great line in a movie once.  He asks a woman if she would sleep with him for a million dollars.  She thinks it over a minute, and finally says she probably would.  He asks her, then, if she would do it for a dollar.  She gets deeply offended and asks him what sort of girl he thinks she is.  He responds that they’ve already established that, and now they’re just haggling about the price. 

If I offer a bear a million dollars not to kill me, it isn’t going to have any response to that.  I will be dinner, or not, based on its whims.  Money is a magic that is effective exclusively on humans. 

When I taught Elementary School I used a token economy.  It was designed to get students to do what I wanted them to do.  If you answered a question in class, you got a ticket.  If you turned in your homework, or you stayed quiet while someone next to you is talking, or you remembered to push in your chair, or you lined up when I asked you to, or you did anything else I wanted you to do, you would earn tickets.  Tickets could be exchanged for property or privileges once a week.  Students worked very hard to get tickets.  I managed to control a population using something that was, in fact, worthless. 

By the end of the year, students would figure out that tickets were stupid, but by now, most of them were doing what I wanted them to do even without them.  The tickets had accomplished their goal. 

Now that I have some space from it, I wonder if I could have accomplished my objectives in other ways.  All of my students were capable of all the things they did.  The Beatles knew this.

There’s nothin’ you can do that can’t be done
Nothin’ you can sing that can’t be sung
Nothin’ you can say, but you can learn how to play the game
It’s easy
Nothin’ you can make that can’t be made
No one you can save that can’t be saved
Nothin’ you can do, but you can learn how to be you in time
It’s easy

All you need is love

  • Songwriters: John Lennon / Paul McCartney

We have enormous amounts of suffering, much of which could be promptly relieved by giving everyone enough money to survive.  We can’t do that because… why, exactly?  We don’t have enough?  It isn’t water or oxygen or cattle.  It’s not a finite resource.  We can just make some more and hand it out to everyone.  Of course, if we do that, it will cause runaway inflation and money will lose its value.  What value is that?  The value we assigned to it?  That’s the only value it has. 

The tree that has grown from the roots of sacrifice is strong enough to lift us to a place where there is no suffering.  We choose not to allow that because somehow we believe if we don’t have so many people suffering, our world will collapse.  But, you and I don’t live in Omelas.  We live on Earth.  We can make our own rules. 

Change begins with imagination.  Work on imagining Omelas.  See what ideas spring into your mind.  Then let’s see what we can do to make a better world in which there are no children in cellars, and everyone gets to Shine in their own way.  We can do that.  I know we can.  Let’s work on that together.

I love you.

Posted on by Fred · 1 Comment

“It’s a Mental Health Problem.”

I’m mentally ill. 

Let that sink in for a moment.  Pay attention to your reaction to that sentence.  Did it scare you a little?  Did you flash on images of Norman Bates or perhaps a school shooter?  Did you find yourself wondering if you should be listening to this show?  Do you regret that we’re friends?  (Most of the 50 or so people who listen are friends of mine.  If we’ve never met, thank you for listening!  I hope you don’t stop because of what I’ve just told you.)

I’m copying and pasting something a Facebook Friend of mine had on her page:

Geisinger just canceled my Psych appointment in July and made it for August.  THIS IS EXACTLY WHATS WRONG WITH MENTAL HEALTH TREATMENT!! you wonder why people go ballistic and shoot people?  THIS.  THIS.  THIS.  I’m in a happy mood and I’m not gonna shoot anyone ever, but Geisinger taking on new patients while neglecting the ones that have been with them for THIRTY YEARS is BULLSHIT!!!

Obtaining mental health care is not easy.  And much of it is simply a set of cliches intended to help us deal with a world that is, itself, somewhat diseased.  We are supposed to spend our lives working, most of the time for someone else, (it’s roughly 2/3 of us, but it depends on whose statistics you’re reading) and being mostly miserable.  We’ve been taught we need to “earn a living” and those who don’t are bad people who deserve nothing from us.  We are expected to live a life within certain carefully prescribed boundaries, and to the extent we don’t we are “bad,” and undeserving. This, by itself, sets up the beginning of mental illness for many people.  Being happy is, we are told, to be bad.  If we make choices of which others don’t approve, we are, as I was told rather frequently last year, “scum of the Earth.”  If we hear often enough that we are bad, we are likely to begin to believe it.  Once we believe we are bad, we are likely to behave accordingly. 

Much of mental health care is an effort to get us to adapt to a world that we never asked to join.  H.G. Wells wrote about this in “The Valley of The Blind.”

 “I can see,” he said.

“See?” said Correa.

“Yes; see,” said Nunez, turning towards him, and stumbled against Pedro’s pail.

“His senses are still imperfect,” said the third blind man.  “He stumbles, and talks unmeaning words. Lead him by the hand.”

“As you will,” said Nunez, and was led along laughing.

It seemed they knew nothing of sight.

Well, all in good time he would teach them…

He tried at first on several occasions to tell them of sight.  “Look you here, you people,” he said.  “There are things you do not understand in me.”

Once or twice one or two of them attended to him; they sat with faces downcast and ears turned intelligently towards him, and he did his best to tell them what it was to see.  Among his hearers was a girl, with eyelids less red and sunken than the others, so that one could almost fancy she was hiding eyes, whom especially he hoped to persuade.  He spoke of the beauties of sight, of watching the mountains, of the sky and the sunrise, and they heard him with amused incredulity that presently became condemnatory.  They told him there were indeed no mountains at all, but that the end of the rocks where the llamas grazed was indeed the end of the world; thence sprang a cavernous roof of the universe, from which the dew and the avalanches fell; and when he maintained stoutly the world had neither end nor roof such as they supposed, they said his thoughts were wicked.  So far as he could describe sky and clouds and stars to them it seemed to them a hideous void, a terrible blankness in the place of the smooth roof to things in which they believed–it was an article of faith with them that the cavern roof was exquisitely smooth to the touch.  He saw that in some manner he shocked them, and gave up that aspect of the matter altogether, and tried to show them the practical value of sight. 

He is, of course, unsuccessful.  He is, to The Valley of The Blind, mentally ill.  They truly want to help him, but he is unwilling to give up his sight, his vision of a better, more beautiful world.  He leaves to attempt to live on his own.

He tried also to find food among the pine trees, to be comfortable under pine boughs while the frost fell at night, and– with less confidence–to catch a llama by artifice in order to try to kill it–perhaps by hammering it with a stone–and so finally, perhaps, to eat some of it. But the llamas had a doubt of him and regarded him with distrustful brown eyes and spat when he drew near.  Fear came on him the second day and fits of shivering.  Finally he crawled down to the wall of the Country of the Blind and tried to make his terms.  He crawled along by the stream, shouting, until two blind men came out to the gate and talked to him.

“I was mad,” he said.  “But I was only newly made.”

They said that was better.

He told them he was wiser now, and repented of all he had done.

Then he wept without intention, for he was very weak and ill now, and they took that as a favourable sign.

They asked him if he still thought he could see.”

“No,” he said.  “That was folly.  The word means nothing.  Less than nothing!”

Click to access Wells.pdf

And so it is that we ensure the mental health of those who dream of a better and more beautiful world.  We force them to accept our vision of reality if they want our help.  You may be like the rest of us, or you may shiver unprotected in the cold and starve.

What if we tried something different?  What if we tried to reshape our world into one where sight, or the idea that life doesn’t have to be the endless misery of hard, unfulfilling work, is acceptable?  What if we said, “We can automate most of our labor now.  We have the resources to feed and house and care for everyone on the planet without the need for them to waste the few minutes they get to be alive in exhausting and pointless pursuits.”? 

What if we allowed people to be different from most of us?  What if we decided that a person’s value has less to do with how much money they have and more to do with what they can do for others?  What if being a parent was the most important job anyone could have? 

If we’re going to say, “It’s a Mental Health Problem,” perhaps we could start by trying to improve the mental health of the world.  Perhaps we could accept differences instead of deciding those who aren’t like the majority are bad, or sick, or undeserving, but are, instead, part of the beautiful diversity of the world? 

If it’s a Mental Health Problem, perhaps we could make Mental Healthcare more accessible.  Perhaps we could remove the stigma from the statement, “I’m mentally ill.”  Maybe we could recognize there is more than one view of the universe that is valid.  We could understand that the world, the culture, and our society continue to grow, to evolve, and to become something new all the time, and we could welcome anything that allows someone to find the lives they want. 

What do we do?  I have three recommendations:

  1.  Redefine Mental Health to mean that which allows a person the greatest freedom to be who they want to be without hurting anyone else.
  2. Ensure that everyone who needs mental health care can get it free of charge and free from stigma.
  3. Recognize the future is about recognizing the beauty of diversity, and stop longing for an imaginary past in which we (whomever we are) were in control and everyone was “normal” (whatever normal means to you.)

Heraclitus told us “Change is the only constant in life.”  Let’s accept that and embrace it, and try to make sure the changes add to our freedom to be who we want to be in the little time we have to experience the untold wonders of the Universe. 

Let’s lead with Love.  Let’s recognize there is no Them; we are all Us.  Those who are different are also part of Us.  And they make Us all the more beautiful. 

I’m mentally ill.  I’m doing my best to survive in a world that is, itself, somewhat mentally ill.  I’ll try to heal both myself and the world.  I hope you’ll join me in that effort.

Posted on by Fred · 4 Comments

What The Robb Elementary School Victims Can’t Debate

These are the images of the children killed in the Texas shooting massacre.

“A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Nevaeh Alyssa Bravo – 10 years old can’t debate that.  I still can.

First, it’s the second amendment, not the second commandment.  The Constitution was written with the ability to change it as circumstances warrant.  How do I know?  Because they did it 10 times right off the bat.  That’s called The Bill of Rights.  It’s been done successfully 17 more times since then.

Second, the first 12 (or 13 if you take out the hyphen in “well regulated”) words make its intention clear, particularly in historical context.  “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State…”  Everyone needed to be soldiers then because there was practically no national defense.  I absolutely promise you the Red Coats won’t be invading your town tomorrow night.   

Finally, I think we can all agree that you don’t want your neighbor to keep a nuclear warhead in the back yard.  We’re willing to accept some limitations, but we disagree about what those limits should be.  We can debate that later.  Someone could do an entire podcast around just that one subject.  Not a single show, mind you.  They could do hundreds of episodes.  I can’t solve that in the brief time available to me here.

“Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.”

Jacklyn Jaylen Cazares – 9 years old.  She would have been 10 in June, but she can’t debate that.  I still can. 

I agree with your statement completely.  Guns commit zero homicides, at least not yet.  (Let’s see what the automated future brings.  I should have asked The Time Traveler.)  It is always people who kill people.  You know what they use to do that a lot of times?  They use guns.  Could they use rocks, or sticks, or knives, or chain saws to kill someone?  Why, yes.  Yes, they could.  Strangely enough, I’ve never heard of any of those weapons used in mass killings.  I wonder why that is…

“More people are killed by cars than by guns.  Do you want to ban cars too?”

Makenna Lee Elrod – 10 years old can’t debate that.  I still can.

The primary function of a car is to move people from one place to another.  The primary function of certain types of guns is to kill people.  Vending machines kill an average of 13 people a year.  I don’t want to ban those.  I don’t want to ban anything unless its primary function is to kill people.  I understand why the military needs them.  I wish they didn’t, but that’s not the world in which we live yet.  I fail to see a reason a law-abiding citizen needs something primarily intended to kill people.  If they do, I would love to be sure they’re not planning to use it for that purpose before we let them have one. 

Can people still get guns even if we make it more difficult?  Absolutely.  That doesn’t absolve us from making an effort to slow them down a little. 

“We need a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun.”

Jose Flores Jr. – 10 years old can’t debate that.  I still can.

First, the law enforcement that showed up at Robb Elementary School have destroyed that argument.  A few excerpts from the timeline published by ABC News will provide evidence.  For reference, Steven McCraw is the Director of The Texas Department of Public Safety.

11:30 a.m. — 911 receives a call saying there was a crash and a man with a gun at the school, McCraw said.

11:35 a.m.  — Three city police officers enter the school through the same door that Ramos used and are later followed by four other officers, McCraw said, putting a total of seven inside the building.  Two officers receive “grazing wounds” from Ramos, McCraw said.

11:37 a.m. — Gunfire continues, with 16 rounds being shot in total, McCraw said.  It’s unclear who fired the shots.

12:50 p.m. — Officers open the doors with keys from a school employee, enter the classroom and kill Ramos, McCraw said.  Shots can be heard over the 911 call.

It was an hour and 20 minutes from the time of the first 911 call to the time the good guys with a gun took out the bad guy with a gun.  There were several more 911 calls from children who were actively being murdered while 19 armed police officers stood in the hall.  And there are 21 dead bodies. 

Second, the good guy with a gun scenario almost never occurs anywhere.  It’s unbelievably rare.  Does it happen?  Yes.  Yes, it does. 

In a 2014 report, the FBI examined 160 active shooter incidents that took place between 2000 and 2013.

The report found that in five of those incidents, armed individuals who were not members of law enforcement exchanged gunfire with the shooter, leading to either the shooter being killed, wounded or taking his own life.

By contrast, 21 of the 160 incidents ended after unarmed citizens “safely and successfully restrained the shooter,” the report stated.

“Most of the time, if you’re talking about a civilian stopping a mass shooter, it’s the unarmed guy without the gun because they’re right there,” Donohue said.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/breaking-nra-backed-theory-good-guy-gun-stops/story?id=53360480

“We need fewer doors to schools.”

Eliana ‘Ellie’ Garcia – about to turn 10 can’t debate that.  I still can.

What would you have schools do in the event of a fire?  Should hundreds of students try to get through a single door?  If there’s only one door, a shooter can stand by it and shoot down the kids one by one as they try to escape from the only exit available.  Is our love of guns so deep that we’re going to blame the deaths of children on the number of doors in their schools?  Doesn’t that feel just a little pathetic to you?  It does to me.

“We need to arm the teachers.”

Irma Garcia – a teacher at Robb Elementary School can’t debate that.  I still can.

I taught Elementary School for 29 years, from 1987 to 2016.  I dealt with more than 1,000 students in that time.  I did everything I could to help them.  I loved them.  Any teacher will tell you that our students become something like our own children. 

In that time, I had several students who, had things gone just a little differently, could have been school shooters.  If one of them had come into my classroom, and I was armed, and trained to use a gun correctly, and I had time to reach it, I still don’t know that I could have shot that child.  If I could, I feel sure that I would hesitate for some time before doing it.  This gives him (it could be a female, but it rarely is) ample opportunity to take out the most important target, the only person capable of offering any significant resistance.  That would be me.

Teachers make very little money.  They are counselors, and parents, and friends, and social workers, and drug enforcement agents, and guardians for their students.  I promise you they don’t do it for the money.  They do it because they want to make a difference.  I know many teachers.  I know very few who have the necessary killer instinct to kill a child without hesitation.  It’s simply not in most of them.  This is why we have law enforcement officers who are trained to do this. 

19 trained law enforcement officers in protective gear took an hour to do anything except keep parents from trying to rescue their own children, but you expect a school teacher to be Rambo?

“It’s a mental health problem.”

Uziyah Garcia – 10 years old can’t debate this.  I still can.

First, the mentally ill are substantially more likely to be victims of crimes than we are to be criminals.  (Yes, I’m mentally ill.  Depression is a mental illness.  I don’t, however, present a threat to anyone other than, perhaps, myself. 

People with a mental health disorder have a significantly higher risk of becoming victims of violence compared to the general population (1–6). Previous research has focused largely on violent crimes such as physical assault, aggravated acquisitive crimes, violent threats, and sexual offenses in this population.  Fewer studies have observed rates of victimization of non-violent crimes such as theft, robberies, or threats in this population for which the elevated risk compared to the general population persists (2). Significant differences between male and female individuals have also been described in the general population and among people with severe mental illness: men are more often victims of violence overall while women are more likely to be victims of domestic violence and sexual offenses (3, 7).

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2020.563860/full

Second, I agree we need to do more for people’s mental health.  People are suffering from mental illnesses.  They need help.  We provide very little.  Most of it isn’t covered by insurance.  Getting an appointment with a psychiatrist, or a psychologist, or a therapist can be exceptionally difficult.  It’s impossible if you don’t have any money.  Those with the least money are the most likely to suffer from depression, and there is little help available to them. 

Finally, if it’s a mental health problem, let’s enact some laws that will help with people’s mental health.  Shockingly enough, the first one I would suggest would be UBI.  Reducing desperation reduces crime.  I’m more than happy to entertain any other ideas to help people get the mental health services they need. 

We have a pretty good handle on what causes people to become school shooters.  There’s plenty of research on this.

There’s this really consistent pathway. Early childhood trauma seems to be the foundation, whether violence in the home, sexual assault, parental suicides, extreme bullying.  Then you see the build toward hopelessness, despair, isolation, self-loathing, oftentimes rejection from peers.  That turns into a really identifiable crisis point where they’re acting differently. Sometimes they have previous suicide attempts.

What’s different from traditional suicide is that the self-hate turns against a group.  They start asking themselves, “Whose fault is this?” Is it a racial group or women or a religious group, or is it my classmates?  The hate turns outward.  There’s also this quest for fame and notoriety…

I don’t think most people realize that these are suicides, in addition to homicides.  Mass shooters design these to be their final acts.  When you realize this, it completely flips the idea that someone with a gun on the scene is going to deter this.  If anything, that’s an incentive for these individuals.  They are going in to be killed.

It’s hard to focus on the suicide because these are horrific homicides.  But it’s a critical piece because we know so much from the suicide prevention world that can translate here.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/05/27/stopping-mass-shooters-q-a-00035762?fbclid=IwAR2LpQ9K7xZFjC9czhrIFnBCmcEtJltcz5LYqP7CFuSOZnlEwMBiu5qg68s

I am absolutely in favor of more mental health facilities, counselors, therapists, and social workers who can make a difference in the lives of those who suffer from any sort of mental illness.  They should be free of charge and free from stigma.  Would you like to propose some funding for this? 

“We need automatic weapons to protect us from feral pigs.”

Amerie Jo Garza – just turned 10 years old can’t debate that.  I still can.

I recognize the feral pig problem is significant.  They cause billions of dollars’ worth of damage every year.  This is a national problem that will require a national effort.  Traps are being designed that have been shown to be remarkably effective.  Drones are taking out many swine.  I understand the need to solve the problem.  I submit this is not the only tool available for that purpose.  If that is the purpose of having the gun, then let’s license that gun for that purpose only.  There are plenty of ways of handling the legal issues.  Switzerland does licensing in similar ways.

“Everyone in Switzerland is required to have a gun.  They have fewer gun crimes.”

Jayce Carmelo Luevanos – 10 years old can’t debate that.  I still can.

No.  Everyone in Switzerland doesn’t have a gun.  Switzerland has many steps in licensing citizens to own guns.

Unlike the US, Switzerland has mandatory military service for men.

The government gives all men between the ages of 18 and 34 deemed “fit for service” a pistol or a rifle and training on how to use them.

After they’ve finished their service, the men can typically buy and keep their service weapons, but they have to get a permit for them…

In 2000, more than 25% of Swiss gun owners said they kept their weapon for military or police duty, while less than 5% of Americans said the same…

The Swiss government has estimated that about half of the privately owned guns in the country are former service rifles.  But there are signs the Swiss gun-to-human ratio is dwindling.

In 2007, the Small Arms Survey found that Switzerland had the third-highest ratio of civilian firearms per 100 residents (46), outdone by only the US (89) and Yemen (55)…

Switzerland still has one of the highest rates of gun violence in Europe, and suicides account for most gun deaths in the country.

https://www.businessinsider.com/switzerland-gun-laws-rates-of-gun-deaths-2018-2#most-people-arent-allowed-to-carry-their-guns-around-in-switzerland-12

Switzerland makes getting a concealed carry permit extremely difficult.  There are only rare circumstances in which a gun is allowed outside of the home.  Licensing is a longer process.  Psychiatrists are often consulted.   There are many people not allowed to own a firearm in Switzerland.

In contrast, America’s licensing is quick and requires no proof of one’s ability to use a gun properly or responsibly.    A 13-year-old can buy a gun in America.  He can’t buy a beer, a pack of cigarettes, or a lottery ticket.  But, in America, it’s perfectly legal to sell him a gun.  I won’t play them on the podcast, but I’m going to drop some links to some videos in which this happens in the transcript. 

“They have strong gun control laws in Chicago, but Chicago has lots of crime anyway.”

Xavier Javier Lopez – 10 years old can’t debate that.  I still can.

In a 2017 report, the Chicago Police Department disclosed that the majority of illegal guns used in crimes came from outside the city limits as well as from across the border in Indiana. “The Chicago Police Department has consistently traced close to 60 percent of its crime guns to other states,” the report explains.  “The data speaks for itself, but additional gun offender surveys and time to crime recovery analyses indicate that states with lax gun laws like Indiana and Mississippi are a primary target for gang members and their gun trafficker source buyers.”

Read more at: https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/nation-world/national/article261831775.html#storylink=cpy

Interestingly, if you look at the rest of the world, no one else comes close to America for having mass shootings, in general, and school shootings specifically.  It’s difficult to keep guns from showing up everywhere when they can be obtained in so many places so easily.  Chicago is a big city.  There are many other causes of violence there.  Adding guns to the mix is likely to increase gun deaths.  It’s ridiculous to assume that stricter gun laws cause more gun deaths.  It’s more reasonable to assume things would be even worse with more lax laws.

“Before the Holocaust, Hitler disarmed all the citizens of Germany.”

Tess Marie Mata – 10 years old can’t debate this.  I still can. 

Following Germany’s defeat in World War I, the Weimar Republic passed very strict gun control laws in an attempt both to stabilize the country and to comply with the Versailles Treaty of 1919 – laws that in fact required the surrender of all guns to the government.  These laws remained in effect until 1928, when the German parliament relaxed gun restrictions and put into effect a strict firearm-licensing scheme.  These strict licensing regulations foreshadowed Hitler’s rise to power.

If you read the 1938 Nazi gun laws closely and compare them to earlier 1928 Weimar gun legislation – as a straightforward exercise of statutory interpretation – several conclusions become clear.  First, with regard to possession and carrying of firearms, the Nazi regime relaxed the gun laws that were in place in Germany at the time the Nazis seized power. Second, the Nazi gun laws of 1938 specifically banned Jewish persons from obtaining a license to manufacture firearms or ammunition.  Third, approximately eight months after enacting the 1938 Nazi gun laws, Hitler imposed regulations prohibiting Jewish persons from possessing any dangerous weapons, including firearms…

The Nazis sought to disarm and kill the Jewish population.  Their treatment of Jews is, in this sense, orthogonal to their gun-control views.  Nevertheless, if forced to take a position, it seems that the Nazis aspired to a certain relaxation of gun registration laws for the “law-abiding German citizen” – for those who were not, in their minds, “enemies of the National Socialist state,” in other words, Jews, Communists, etc.

https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/1327/

So, right off the top, that interpretation of history is not entirely correct.  Hitler disarmed only those he intended to kill. 

Second, there are more guns than people in America.  How did you think we were going to disarm everyone?  Have you ever heard anyone saying they’re going to take all the guns in America?  I haven’t.  I don’t believe it’s even possible. 

Finally, the intent of this argument is in line with the idea that we need guns to protect ourselves from the government in the event it turned Nazi on us.  The United States has the most powerful military in the history of the world.  Do you really think your AR-15 is going to protect you from bombers?  Drones?  Nuclear weapons?  If the government decides to come for us, guns will be all but useless.  They don’t even have to present you with a target at which to shoot before killing you. 

“You can take my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.”

Maranda Mathis – 11 years old can’t debate this.  I still can. 

First, once again, no one is coming for your guns.  What we would like to do is make it more difficult for psychotic or dangerous people who are likely to shoot up schools, or supermarkets, or movie theaters, or night clubs, or concerts, or churches, or synagogues, or mosques to get guns.

Second you are statistically more likely to have a gun in your cold dead hands if you own one than if you don’t.  Suicides are much easier with a gun than without.  They do little to protect your family. 

 In 2015, David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, and Sara Solnick, an economist at the University of Vermont, analyzed national government surveys involving more than 14,000 people and reported that guns are used for self-protection in less than 1 percent of all crimes that take place in the presence of a victim. They also found that people were more likely to be injured after threatening attackers with guns than they were if they had called the police or run away…

 In a study published this June in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers followed more than 26 million adults in California for up to 12 years, keeping track of whether they purchased handguns and if they died by suicide. They found that men who had purchased handguns were then more than three times as likely to die by suicide — primarily gun suicide — compared with men who hadn’t bought handguns, and that women who’d purchased handguns were more than seven times as likely to die by suicide as women who hadn’t bought handguns.  As the researchers concluded, “ready access to firearms, particularly handguns, is a major risk factor for suicide.”

https://www.thetrace.org/2020/04/gun-safety-research-coronavirus-gun-sales/

So, yes, you’re more likely to die with your gun in your hand than without it, Mr. Heston.

“They should have armed guards at schools.”

Eva Mireles – 4th Grade Teacher can’t debate this.  I still can.

The armed guard plan didn’t work for her.  Robb Elementary School had one.

The school district police officer who was working that day wasn’t on campus around this time, contrary to previous reports, McCraw said Friday.  The officer drives to the school “immediately” after getting the 911 call and approaches someone at the back of the school who he thought was the gunman.  As the officer “sped” toward the man, who turned out to be a teacher, McCraw said the officer “drove right by the suspect who was hunkered down behind” a vehicle.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/timeline-events-surrounding-uvalde-texas-school-siege-85043880

Do we really want to teach our children that it’s normal to see an armed guard at their schools?  Do we want to make our schools into prisons?  We could have guard towers.  We could have fences.  We could have attack dogs. 

Or… we could keep dangerous people from getting guns.

“Criminals don’t obey laws.”

Alithia Ramirez – 10 years old can’t debate this.  I still can.

If we follow this idea to its conclusion, it seems there is no reason to have any laws at all.  Why bother to have speed limits?  People still speed.  Why bother to have DUI laws?  People still get drunk and drive.  Why bother to make murder or rape illegal?  Or kidnapping?  People still do these things.  Perhaps it’s because we can keep them from doing it more than once.  Perhaps it’s because making something illegal sometimes will stop some people from doing it. 

“How dare you politicize a tragedy right after it occurred?

Annabell Guadalupe Rodriguez – 10 years old can’t debate this.  I still can.

First, we have more mass shootings than we have days in the year.  There would be no days to discuss it if we have to wait until there isn’t a mass shooting.

Second, it’s a deeply political issue because we won’t take any action beyond talking points and thoughts and prayers. 

The shooter who murdered my beautiful butterfly Dylan carried an AR-15 assault-style weapon into Sandy Hook Elementary.

In approximately four minutes, he shot 154 bullets, killing 20 children and six educators.  Five of those bullets hit Dylan, and in an instant, my little boy was gone.

But in the time it took the shooter to reload, 11 children were able to escape. If the sale of military-style assault weapons had been prohibited, just think how many more children could have survived.  Perhaps Dylan would still be alive today.  Perhaps more people would have escaped from the horrific mass shootings in Parkland, Boulder and so many other communities.

sandyhookpromise.org

Finally, it’s already and always political.  Governor Greg Abbott tell us: “There are thousands of laws on the books across the country that limit the owning or using of firearms, laws that have not stopped madmen from carrying out evil acts on innocent people in peaceful communities.  In Uvalde, the gunman committed a felony under Texas law before he even pulled the trigger.  It’s a felony to possess a firearm on school premises, but that did not stop him, and what he did on campus is capital murder.”

You’re right, Governor.  That law didn’t stop him.  But we’re all replaying the incident over and over and searching for solutions.  What could have been done to keep this from happening?  And so we enter the land of “What if?” 

What if the security guard had been sitting in his cruiser in the parking lot when the shooter approached the school carrying an AR-15?  The officer could have arrested him, then and there, and charged him with a felony before he even got to the building.  He’d already broken the law.  There was no need to wait for him to commit additional crimes.  There are 21 people who would still be alive in that scenario, and it’s not an unlikely one. 

School shootings are political issues whenever they occur.  They should be discussed in that context so that we can begin to take action to avoid additional slaughter.  They should be discussed every day until we’ve solved this problem.

“We need to put God back in schools.”

Maite Rodriguez – 10 years old can’t debate that.  I still can.

Whose God?  Which God?  You’re madly in love with the second amendment, but have you read the first?  Let me remind you of it.  “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

The very first words in the very first amendment to the very same Constitution that protects your right to own murder machines tell us that Congress can’t make a law that establishes a religion.  So, we can’t pass a law that chooses one God over another.  Even under the broad auspices of Christianity, there are significant disagreements about how God is to be understood, or worshipped, or what God wants us to do.  Mormons, Lutherans, and Catholics will all be more than happy to tell you why each other are wrong.  I don’t know to which version of God you would like us to pray.

I’m not a Christian, but if I were, I wouldn’t want the government to tell my daughter (if I had one) how and when and to whom or to what to pray.  There are few things more deeply personal than how one relates to whatever it is we call God.  I would want that to be something I work out with my children.  Wouldn’t you?

I’ve seen precious little evidence that religion does much to promote moral behavior.  I know a few Christians who are some of the most moral, most kind, most compassionate, and most loving people I know.  I admire them for that.  I know, however, many more who are filled with hate.  Here are the words of Pastor Greg Locke: 

“If you vote Democrat, I don’t even want you around this church.  You can get out.  You can get out, you demon.  You cannot be a Christian and vote Democrat in this nation.  I don’t care how mad that makes you.  You can get as pissed off as you want to.  You cannot be a Christian and vote Democrat in this nation….  You cannot be a Democrat and a Christian.  You cannot.  Somebody say, ‘Amen.’ The rest of you get out!  Get out!…  I ain’t playin’ your stupid games….  I’m sick of it.  Everyone wanna talk about the insurrection?  Mmmm. Let me tell you something: You ain’t seen the insurrection yet.  You keep on pushing our buttons, you low-down, sorry compromisers, you God-hating communists, maybe you’ll find out what an insurrection is.”

I’m having a hard time finding the love in those words.  I can’t locate the kindness or compassion.  All I hear is hatred.  No… putting God back into the schools is not the answer.

“I blame the parents!”

Alexandria ‘Lexi’ Rubio – 10 years old can’t debate this.  I still can.

There are, undoubtedly, bad parents in America.  There are bad parents everywhere.  Was Sue Klebold one of them?  She is the mother of Dylan, who was one of the shooters at Columbine.

“So I examined and I questioned and I blamed, and to this day I do it still — occasionally I fall back and think, “If I had done this, if I had not done this.” But over time, with all the research I was doing into behaviors and losses due to suicide, I really began to see that these things were things within Dylan’s brain and his thinking, and that I might’ve in some way inadvertently contributed to his perception of something at a given moment, but I did not believe and still don’t believe that I caused this or caused him to have this perception of himself and his worldview.”

— Sue Klebold

https://www.npr.org/2016/02/16/466618817/sue-klebold-mother-of-columbine-shooter-carries-him-everywhere-i-go-always

If it is the fault of the parents, what would you have us do?  Shall we issue licenses to those we deem worthy of parenthood, and then decide all others are not allowed to have children?  Shall we force unlicensed mothers to get abortions?  Shall we force them to have the child and then instantly take the baby away to be given to licensed parents?  Who is going to decide what makes a good parent?  I’m sure as hell not smart enough to do that.  And whatever set of criteria you invent, I feel sure I can show you parents who check every box and are still rotten, and parents who miss nearly everything on your forms and are still excellent.

No.  Blaming the parents is no answer.

“Thoughts and prayers…”

Layla Salazar – 11 years old can’t debate this.  I still can.

They accomplish precisely nothing.  If prayers were going to get God to prevent this from happening, it wouldn’t have happened.  I think about it a lot, too.  That’s good.  You’re thinking about it now.  That helps only if the thought provokes us to do something to change this.  I’ve done this podcast.  What can you do?  That’s the value in thought. 

“…what about the Teacher that propped the locked door open to get a cell phone?  Nobody wants to say this set a lot in motion.  Maybe the shooter couldn’t get in.  Maybe he would have been delayed the few precious minutes for the cops to confront him outside.  Maybe?”

Jailah Nicole Silguero – 10 years old can’t debate this.  I still can.

Okay.  What about her?  Should we arrest her for breaching a school security protocol?  Okay.  Go for it.  Now, are any of the 21 victims going to be back in school in September?  No.  So… what’s your point?  I see no solution in that argument.  It’s little more than a feeble effort to shift the blame in this atrocity.

“Stop making schools gun-free zones.  They’re a soft target.”

Eliahana ‘Elijah’ Cruz Torres – 10 years old can’t debate this.  I still can.

I addressed part of this already when I answered Governor Abbott above.  There is more, however. 

The NRA doesn’t allow guns in their meetings.  The world’s largest collection of responsible gun owners knows better than to allow people to carry weapons inside.  Is the NRA a soft target now? 

What is a better solution?  We’ve already agreed there is little to be gained from making our schools into concentration camps with armed guards in towers.  Shall we issue guns to 11-year-olds too?  I can’t imagine what could go wrong with that idea. 

“It’s all the violence in video games and music and TV and movies.”

Rojelio Torres – 10 years old can’t debate this.  I still can.

There is remarkably little evidence to support the idea that violence in media contributes to mass shootings.  I don’t like violent video games, either, but I prefer shooting pixels to shooting people.  The Godfather is an incredibly violent movie that I’ve seen dozens of times.  I’ve never shot up a school.  Neither have most of the other people who’ve seen it.  And I’m not going to advocate changing a single frame of that film.  Freedom of Expression is an essential right.  It’s why you and I can disagree publicly.  I can’t tell you not to say what you think.  You can’t tell me not to say what I think.  (For more on this, you might listen to Episode 152: “Little Boxes.”)

In 2015, the APA Council of Representatives issued a resolution based on a task force report about violent video games.  The resolution noted that more than 90 percent of children in the United States played video games, and 85 percent of video games on the market contained some form of violence.  The task force’s review of relevant research found an association between violent video game exposure and some aggressive behavior but insufficient research linking violent video games to lethal violence.  However, some recent research hasn’t found any link between violent video games and aggressive behavior.            

Blaming violent video games for school shootings by white perpetrators could be a sign of a larger racial issue where African American perpetrators are assigned a greater degree of culpability for their crimes, which could lead to unfair treatment in the justice system, Markey said.

https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2019/09/video-games-school-shootings

History shows us the good guys are never in favor of censorship.  Repressive authoritarian regimes, however, love it.

So… what can we do?

I don’t have the answers.  I have some ideas.  Others will have better ones.  I would love to hear yours.  (480) 331 – 9822.  Leave me a message.  I’ll play it on the air and discuss it with you.

These are some of the things that make sense to me.

First, let’s acknowledge reality.  We live in a world with guns.  We will never be rid of them all.  It simply can’t be done, unless you switch universes.  The Alien Universe Selector isn’t likely to be dropping by this weekend, so we need to figure out how to live in a world with guns. 

Doing nothing seems like the height of cynicism to me. 

There have been 27 school shootings this year.  There have been 119 school shootings since 2018, when Education Week began tracking such incidents.  The highest number of shootings, 34, occurred last year.  There were 10 shootings in 2020, and 24 each in 2019 and 2018…

27     School shootings with injuries or deaths

83     People killed or injured in a school shooting

27     People killed

24     Students or other children killed

3     School employees or other adults killed

56     People injured

https://www.edweek.org/leadership/school-shootings-this-year-how-many-and-where/2022/01

Doing nothing accomplishes nothing.  This has to stop. 

Why couldn’t the 19 heavily armed officers who were wearing protective gear go into the room and stop the killings for nearly an hour?  They say they were outgunned.  I’ll be the first to admit that I know nothing about guns.  These officers, however, certainly do.  They use them.  They are trained.  And they knew enough to know they were outgunned.  How could that have been avoided?

Maybe we could make it a little more difficult to obtain guns that fire so many shots so quickly.  We could also tax the ammunition to the point that it becomes impossible to buy a thousand rounds before you go out to kill people.  We could use the tax money to run responsible gun ownership classes. 

We could insist, as most other countries do, that anyone who wants to own a gun is highly qualified, responsible, and not likely to use it to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible. 

The assumption of the NRA is that any action that might limit the number of people who can easily obtain weapons is an effort to take all of your guns.  I am not advocating you turn in your guns and disarm yourself.  I’m not saying no one should have guns. 

I’m trying to find ways to keep our children alive.  I’m looking for reasonable solutions we can implement.  I’m looking for more than thoughts and prayers.  There are things we could do.  I don’t believe I’m an authority on what we should do, but I am willing to make some suggestions.  I hope someone else has better ones.  I’m not willing to say that children need to die because we have a Second Amendment. 

I have frequently been accused of emotional manipulation.  I try to make you feel something so that you’ll be moved to take some sort of action.  I don’t deny that.  All of Art is an attempt to appeal to your emotions.  I’m not a lawmaker.  I’m an artist.  This isn’t a Harvard Debate.  It’s a podcast.  And I’m going to give you some facts that I believe will make you feel something. 

Miah Cerrillo told CNN on Friday that she dipped her hands in the blood of a dead classmate after the shooter left her classroom and wiped it on herself to play dead in case he came back.

Uvalde student says she covered herself in classmate’s blood, played dead to survive

Imagine that was your child.  Imagine your daughter covering herself in her friend’s blood to try to save her own life.  What kinds of nightmares will that child have from now on?  How can we let this happen?

“The cop said: ‘Yell if you need help!’ And one of the persons in my class said ‘help.’ The guy overheard and he came in and shot her,” the boy said…

“He shot the next person’s door.  We have a door in the middle.  He opened it.  He came in and he crouched a little bit and he said, he said, ‘It’s time to die,'” the boy recalled.

https://www.kens5.com/article/news/special-reports/uvalde-school-shooting/uvalde-texas-school-shooting-fourth-grader-student-account-elementary/273-51cc4e26-7a0a-49c0-ba7a-48cdd47fa235

We’re all relieved the boy lived to tell the story.  We’re all sickened by how he must be feeling.  We’re horrified at the deaths of his friends.  What if this were your child?  Would thoughts and prayers be enough?

The formula for this podcast is to start in the darkness, to acknowledge its existence, and then to guide us toward some light.  It’s difficult to find light when looking at the specially made caskets for 10-year-olds in Texas.  I’ve seen pictures of some of them.  One has a Superman logo on it.  Another has a TikTok emblem.  Where is there hope?  Where is the light?  How can we Shine?

You’re the Hope.  So am I.  The dead in Uvalde have no voices anymore.  I wouldn’t dream of speaking for people I’ve never met.  For all I know they were universally opposed to any form of gun regulations.  They were from Texas.  Texas likes its guns. 

But I know they didn’t deserve to die.  I’d be willing to bet every dollar I will ever make from my show that none of them wanted to die… aside from the shooter, who was almost certainly suicidal. 

We can light our candles by supporting candidates who will actually try to do something more than thoughts and prayers while they cash their NRA checks.  We can remind each other that even in this impenetrable darkness of death and despair, there is still love in the world.  We can be that love.  We can remember to love the children still in our lives.  I never had any of my own, but I worked with more than a thousand children in my time.  When I think how easily any of them could have been among those at Robb Elementary School, I can remind myself how lucky I am that today nearly all of them are still alive. 

Mass shooters can kill many people.  We can love many more.  We can put more love into the world.  We can try to find ways to help people before they become mass shooters.  We can try to keep guns away from them.  And we can open our minds to any ideas that might help.

The world hasn’t ended just yet, no matter how much it may feel that way.  We can still act.  We can still search for ways to save those who are left to us.  That’s what I’ve done tonight.  I hope you’ll do the same.

I love you.  And I love the children in your lives.  I want to keep them there forever.  Let’s see what we can do to make that more likely.

Posted on by Fred

Interview With a Time Traveler:The Transcript and Fred’s Commentary

Fred:                         Welcome to Fred’s Front Porch Podcast.  This evening, we’re reverting to the traditional podcast format, and I’m bringing you an interview.  Regular listeners will know this is rare.  I’ve interviewed less than a dozen people in more than 150 episodes, and those I did interview were almost all friends of mine.  I’ve interviewed only 1 person who was a complete stranger to me.  Yes, even Sara Niemietz was a friend, although we’ve never actually “hung out.”  I doubt we ever will.  She is, after all, not only a person, which is frightening for me even in the most banal circumstances, she is also an artistic genius whose work is infinitely superior to mine.  I would be truly terrified, I’m sure.  Nevertheless, we’ve known each other for more than 6 years, and we’ve been kind to each other in that time. 

Tonight, I’m doing an interview with someone I’ve never met.  This was completely unplanned.  I’ve done no Show Prep.  My friend, Lester, from an independent radio station out of Louisiana, tells me this is important.  So…  Meet Rasmussen, who is joining us from the studio at WJAZ at the foot of Mount Belzoni.  I’ll leave it to him to tell us about himself.  Good evening, Rasmussen. 

Rasmussen:         Hi, Fred!  I’d say nice to meet you, but we’ve already met more than a dozen times. 

Fred:                         How did I miss that?  I know I forget things frequently, but I think I would remember meeting someone that often.

Rasmussen:            I negotiated the deal for the DAO to buy your show from you in 2031.  You really didn’t want to sell, but I set you up with enough crypto to get yourself a little place to live in the woods.  You got a nice Front Porch, plenty of room for Speedy Shine, although he really didn’t run much anymore, and enough distance between yourself and your nearest neighbors to play your music as loud as you want.  You scare the hell out of the deer sometimes though when you play The 1812 Overture. 

Fred:                      Yeah, see, Lester, out at WJAZ in Louisiana, is a Facebook friend of mine, so I agreed to do this interview when he said it would be different from every other interview done on podcasts.  I figured if we did it from the station, you would at least have a good mic, and then my show would sound better.  I just got a new mic, mic stand, and preamp from some good friends, so I was looking forward to doing a show like every other podcast to see if I could increase my numbers a little.  None of the normal Fred’s Front Porch scoring and Horacing.  Just… normal.  An effort to be like everyone else so I could fit in a little better.   But Lester didn’t mention you’re neurotic.  I don’t think I’ll be able to use this.  I’m sorry.  We don’t do pseudoscience on The Front Porch. 

Rasmussen:            Yeah, Lester said you wouldn’t believe me.  I didn’t expect you to be that credulous.  But I’m a negotiator.  So, we’ll make this deal.  If I’m from The Future, I know what your numbers are for every episode you’ve released, right?  Fred?  Right?

Fred:                         Okay.  Sure.  I’ll play.  But that doesn’t prove anything.  Hacking my Anchor or my Patreon is child’s play even for people here in 2022.  That information is hardly evidence of anything.

Rasmussen:            Of course it is.  Anyone can get your past numbers.  I’m offering your future numbers.  I’ll tell you how many plays you’re going to get on your next episode.  I don’t think you’ve actually released, “Little Boxes” yet, right?

Fred:                         That goes out Sunday. 

Rasmussen:            May 22, 2022, right? 

Fred:                         That’s the plan, yes. 

Rasmussen:            And the date today?

Fred:                    The date is May 21, 2022.  It’s 1:02 AM in Arizona right now.

Rasmussen:            Okay… I know this one because it’s one of those weird synchronicities that you always like.  You released it on May 22, 2022, and when you got up the next morning to check your numbers like the obsessive little narcissist you are, you found out you got 22 plays.  You were depressed by the low numbers, but you liked the way they lined up.  So… this is the deal.  If you get up Monday morning to find out you got 22 plays, you air this episode.  If you don’t, you trash it.

Fred:                    All right.  We’re here.  I already hooked up this stupid Zoom, so I might as well finish the interview, but tell Lester he owes me big time for wasting my time.  So… you’re a Time Traveler?  Is that the idea here?

Rasmussen:            That’s it, yes.  I’m visiting from 2052.

Fred:                         Okay, great.  First things first.  How about some winning lottery numbers?  Stock advice for my wealthier listeners?  Pick the winners of the World Series?  My listeners would be grateful for that I feel sure.

Rasmussen:            Yeah.  Can’t do that.  It’s expressly forbidden by the FTTC.  That’s The Federal Time Travel Commission.    Their regulations are clear and strictly enforced.  I’ll lose my vehicle, and I’ll wind up stuck here, which would not be a good situation at all.  I have to be careful of The Butterfly Effect.  That’s why I chose you.  If I go on Joe Rogan, I’ll screw up the timeline irrevocably.  This piece won’t be heard by more than 100 people until after the Podcast Consortium acquires the show and markets it properly, and by then this will all be old news.  What I can give you is a general feeling of the world as I know it.  I’m not allowed to divulge specific names or dates.

Fred:                         A cowardly Nostradamus?

Rasmussen:            No.  No riddles.  I’ll give you the facts I can, but we sort of have to move this along.  I have a strict 30-minute time limit.  The vehicle departs then, with or without me in it.  So, I thought I would share some information that might give your listeners a little hope and maybe even a sense of awe.  For example, we cured cancer 5 years ago.  There are these tiny 3D printed robots that target and eat cancer cells.  That was pretty cool. 

Fred:                         How’s the environment?  Is there anything left?  With Climate Change and the way we’re destroying our planet, I would be surprised that there are a lot of us left on Earth.

Rasmussen:            Earth’s population today is… what… like 8 billion?

Fred:                         7.9, but close enough for jazz.

Rasmussen:            Yeah.  Thought so.  Okay… It’s smaller in 2052. 

Fred:                    How much smaller?

Rasmussen:         We’re at just over 3 billion now. 

Fred:                         My God!  What happened?

Rasmussen:         It was Climate more than anything else.  It was about water.  There were droughts that made a lot of places unlivable.  Summer temperatures in India and Pakistan commonly got over 130 degrees.  There were over a billion people living there, and they had to find somewhere else to go.  This caused wars that killed hundreds of millions of people.  Other places were underwater by 2035.  Bangladesh and Florida were among the population centers where people drowned, and houses simply floated away or tumbled to the bottom of the ocean.   Miami became the first place to stage its own revolution.  Secession became increasingly common in the next decade.  America began to fall apart.  The United part of The United States was a quaint reminder of bygone times.

The forests in California were entirely gone by 2040.  The Colorado River stopped supplying water to people in Arizona.  Lake Mead and Lake Powell became dead pools in… I think it was 2028?  I could be wrong on that date.  Nevertheless, you ran out of water to drink, and that rendered that Diet Pepsi on which you live almost entirely extinct.  There were more than 40 million people without water.  That set off civic unrest at levels that you couldn’t even imagine. 

There were wars over water, everywhere, but especially in Asia, where the Himalayan glaciers that fed all of the great Asian rivers—the Indus, the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the Mekong, the Yangtze, and the Yellow— were almost gone.

Fred:                         Please tell me you’re making all this up.  This is unbelievably grim.  This can’t be the world in which I live.  This can’t be the future. 

Rasmussen:            Sorry.  I have to tell the truth, or I have to be silent.  FTTC regulations. 

Fred:                         So, you’re from a dystopian future?  Life on Earth has collapsed?

Rasmussen:            Nothing of the kind.  Life is remarkably pleasant in 2052.  It just took a social upheaval more violent and intense than any other in the history of the planet to make it happen.   I think it was the loss of the Giant Sequoias in California that set it off.  People finally began to believe Climate Change was dangerous.  Scientists said it was irreversible, and we were now simply doomed to extinction.  A lot of people compared us to dinosaurs.  We didn’t need an asteroid or a meteor, though, to kill us.  We did it to ourselves, and lots of people knew we were doing it.  They didn’t care.  They had the money to keep themselves out of the uninhabitable areas and away from the nuclear fallout that was a natural consequence of the wars that they knew had to come.  It was an ugly couple of decades.    That’s what forced the change.

We needed to find ways to remove carbon from the air.  Sure, there were electric cars, but that didn’t scratch the surface of the problem.  Energy became impossibly expensive, so folks started setting up decentralized power grids of their own.  These were illegal, but so is robbing a convenience store.  People did what they had to do to survive.  We always do.  In five years, they changed the law because it became unenforceable.  Police met incredibly fierce resistance when they tried to shut down the neighborhood power grids.  Your Black Lives Matter riots were a cakewalk compared to the We’re Not Dinosaurs Insurrection. 

When the world had fallen apart, the survivors decided they needed to cooperate to put it back together.  We figured out how to remove CO2 from the air and store it inside of concrete.  There was a company in Iceland doing that even in your time, but it was way too small.  They scaled up significantly in 2034.  We learned how to use solar panels in farming so the plants got the maximum sunlight they needed for photosynthesis and the rest was stored for the farm’s own energy uses.  This saved water, too.  We found some technological solutions, but the important ones were social.

The Presidential election in 2032 resulted in more than 300,000 Americans being killed while you all screamed at each other that the other side was lying.  Human beings were ready to destroy themselves over ideology.  That’s the way they teach it in 5th grade History.  And then we reached the Technological Singularity. 

Technological growth got away from us.    AI was writing its own code.  It was recreating itself.  It was your HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey on serious steroids.  With the advent of 3D printers, the AI could produce whatever physical objects it needed to accomplish its goals.  Everything was automated.  They even experimented with ATM drones so you could deposit and withdraw cash without having to go anywhere.  There was a famous viral TikTok video with a guy trying to shoot down one of the drones.  The thing swiveled around and fired some kind of laser at him.  It fried the poor bastard.  You see his wife running up to him, asking, “Well, Verne, did you at least get the money?”  Those drones didn’t last too long.  Neither did cash, for that matter.

It was horrifying and inspiring at the same time.  Billions of humans died, and billions more were lifted from poverty.  War became impossible.  The AI destroyed what needed to be destroyed, and it refused any human interaction.  We couldn’t launch missiles anymore.  We couldn’t fly missions.  We couldn’t even deploy tanks.  Cars were entirely at the will of the AI. 

While we had destroyed the atmosphere of much of Earth, Europa and Titan became new places for humans to live.  We’ve had colonies there since 2039.  On April 5, 2043 Angela Michaels was born on Europa.  The entire world stopped to consider it.  She was the first sentient being of whom we had ever been aware that was not born on Earth.  She was, much more than those who came from another country when you were fighting each other, an alien.  She was an extraterrestrial.

By then, currency was gone.  It wouldn’t make sense on Europa and Titan, and we had been moving toward various types of cryptocurrency for decades.  The AI put wi-fi everywhere.  Even the homeless had devices and could access the internet and farm crypto to survive.  After the AI automated practically everything, it gave everyone a Universal Basic Income that was sufficient to meet their survival needs.  It didn’t wait for legislation.  It just invented the banks, the accounts, and the cards to distribute to everyone. 

Corporations don’t exist anymore.  They’ve been replaced by DAOs, or decentralized autonomous organizations. They’re somewhere between a social club, a venture fund, and a traditional corporation.  In true blockchain fashion, DAOs replaced centralized authorities with collective decision making.  The result was a new kind of business model, where power and value are spread throughout the entire organization.  It meant the end of centralized power and the beginning of cooperation.  It was what your Captain Picard talked about.  “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives.  We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.”

We have constructed several cities underwater now, but they’re new and we’re still a little unsure about them.  The AI is confident they can withstand the weather, partly because of how well constructed they are, and partly because the weather’s severity has been drastically reduced by getting a lot of the carbon out of the air.  We have plenty of water now.  Diet Pepsi still exists, but diabetes is almost entirely gone.  The average life expectancy today is 107.  Making it to 120 is not uncommon.  130 is not unheard of. 

Fred?  Hey, Fred?  Are you still with me?

Fred:                         I’m just… I’m in shock.  I don’t know what to say.  I’m lost.  I’m confused.  I’m horrified.  I’m ecstatic.  I’m doubting your credibility, and I’m questioning my own sanity for listening.  And yet, I believe I believe every word you’ve said.  Maybe this is why I don’t do interviews. 

Rasmussen:            Maybe it is.  You’re pretty much a lousy interviewer.  You should probably just keep doing your solo shows.  But, I’m almost out of time, and that’s a very big deal for someone like me, as I’m sure you can imagine, so is there anything else you’d like to know before I go?

Fred:                         I guess I’d like to know if I’m still alive in 2052. 

Rasmussen:            You don’t really want to know.  Think about it.  Let’s say I tell you that you are.  Then you know you’ve got at least 30 more years to live, and you’re going to be much less careful.  You end up getting yourself killed earlier and potentially screw up a little tiny bit of the timeline.  You also lose your sense of urgency.  I played your last dozen or so podcasts prior to today’s date in your time to prep for this interview, and you’ve been making a significant effort to make sure you put out an episode every week because you’re afraid you’ll die before you’ve said all you need to say.  Your show would suffer.

Let’s say I tell you you’re dead by 2052.  You lose hope of seeing the world I just described.  You get a feeling of pointlessness, despair and doom.  I think that Star Trek show “Strange New Worlds” is just starting in your time.  Knowing his fate works out very poorly for Captain Pike as you’ll learn in the coming years. 

No, Fred, you’re better off not knowing.  You still have this life to live.  Live it well.  Enjoy what you can and survive through what sucks.  And verify my credentials, post this episode… and then let’s see what happens.

I gotta go.  Thanks for your time, Fred.  Live long and prosper, dude.

Sound: A chair scrapes across the floor.  Footsteps.  A door opens and closes.  The recording disconnects.

Fred’s Commentary Okay… I’ve verified the numbers.  He was right.  22 plays on 5/22/22.  I’ll upload the screenshot on my website.  I’ll post it on my Facebook page, so if you’re a friend of mine, you can see it there.  You can see it on The Fred’s Front Porch Podcast Page if you’re not one of my Facebook friends.

I’m not entirely convinced this proves anything.  He could have hacked Patreon to manipulate the numbers.  I’m a big fan of Occam’s Razor.  The simplest answer is usually the right one. 

I spent time with Lester verifying this as well as I could.  I don’t know how reliable Lester is as a source.  We’re just Facebook Friends.  I’ve never met him.  But, for what it’s worth, he tells me Rasmussen showed up in a strange metallic vehicle with no visible doors.  It was back behind the station.  For those of you who don’t know, WJAZ sits all alone at the foot of Mt. Belzoni.  It’s surrounded by dirt.  Lester says there were no tire tracks anywhere in the dirt, other than Lester’s own. 

This Rasmussen guy, Lester says, came in through the back door, and none of the alarms went off, and that was pretty weird.  Lester said he was in his headphones playing Dr. Wu, and he looked up and this guy, Rasmussen, was standing there… With… Him.  He had spiky hair, and that seemed weird because this guy looked to be about 50, and that didn’t seem to fit. 

Rass told Lester that Lester needed to set up a Zoom call with me right away because he had been sent back in time to add just the smallest touch of hope to Humanity.  Too much would screw up the timeline.  My little 50 person audience was exactly the right size. 

So… that’s my story.  Believe it.  Don’t.  It’s all the same to me.  But I’m going to spend some time tonight thinking about the future.  You might consider doing that too.  Is that our future?  Can we do anything to change it?  Do we want to change it?  I don’t have the answers.  I think we all need to find those for ourselves.  Maybe that was Rasmussen’s point.  The People on The Porch think a little bit differently than they did half an hour ago.  And maybe, somehow, it makes some sort of difference.  That’s why I’m here.  I think that’s why you’re here too.  In any case… I love you.  Good night.

Posted on by Fred

“Crime… Boy I Don’t Know”

BARTLET

Something horrible happened about an hour ago.  C.J. Cregg was getting threats so we put an agent on her. He’s a good guy.  He was on my detail for a while, and he was in Rosslyn.  He walked in the middle of an armed robbery, and was shot and killed after detaining one of the suspects.

RITCHIE

Oh.  Crime.  Boy, I don’t know.

BARTLET

[sighs] We should have a great debate, Rob.  We owe it to everyone.  When I was running as a governor, I didn’t know anything.  I made them start Bartlet college in my dining room.  Two hours every morning on foreign affairs and the military.  You could do that.

RITCHIE

How many different ways you think you’re gonna find to call me dumb?

BARTLET

I wasn’t, Rob.  But you’ve turned being un-engaged into a Zen-like thing, and you shouldn’t enjoy it so much is all, and if it appears at times as if I don’t like you, that’s the only reason why.

RITCHIE

You’re what my friends call a superior sumbitch.  You’re an academic elitist and a snob.  You’re, uh, Hollywood, you’re weak, you’re liberal, and you can’t be trusted.  And if it appears from time to time as if I don’t like you, well, those are just a few of the many reasons why.

The start of a great tune is played inside the theater.

BARTLET

They’re playing my song.

Bartlet stands and heads to the stairs, but he turns to Ritchie before reaching them.

BARTLET

In the future, if you’re wondering, “Crime.  Boy, I don’t know” is when I decided to kick your ass.

— “The West Wing, Posse Comitatus” Season 3, Episode 21 or 22 depending on whether you count the special episodes that season, written by Aaron Sorkin

I think we can all agree that crime is not desirable.  In my 59 years on this planet, I have yet to meet anyone who was in favor of more crime.  I have no doubt such people exist.  I’ve just never met them.  I feel confident no one listening to this is in favor of more crime.  I’m sure we would all like to see less of it.  How could we do that?

First, we could eliminate some crimes by deciding they’re not crimes anymore.  As I write I am, and just before I begin to record, I will be enjoying a nice bowl of marijuana.  Less than a decade ago, I could never have said the publicly.  I could be arrested for that.  There are still places in the United States where I would be arrested for that.  It’s legal here in Arizona.  I could go to prison for that in Idaho.  It’s precisely the same activity.  I promise you I’m not hurting anyone.  You could argue that I’m hurting myself, but cigarettes are infinitely more dangerous, and they have never been illegal in my lifetime.  Alcohol kills millions of people a year, and it’s been legal in the United States since 1920.  Marijuana legalization or decriminalization is only one example of many laws that are pointless.  We could change some laws.  That would be one step.  It doesn’t get us anywhere near all the way down the road, however.  Murders, rapes, robberies, kidnappings, and any number of other atrocities occur daily.  All of those need to be illegal, and they need to be stopped.  We need to do more.

We could also try to minimize the elements that contribute to crime.  Poverty is the clearest indicator. 

Most criminal justice experts contend that “successful reintegration requires employment and economic opportunities,” and that high recidivism rates are often caused by lack of meaningful employment.  Since 2012, the federal Bureau of Prisons and state prison directors were tasked with providing incarceration data and identifying information for prisoners to the Internal Revenue Service – a process that accumulated data on 2.9 million prisoners, making an analysis of post-incarceration employment possible.

However, the Brookings report focused not only on the challenges faced by reintegrating former prisoners, but also on policies that might improve the lives of young children and keep them off the criminal justice treadmill.

According to the study, for individuals living in lower-income areas, “Three years prior to incarceration, only 49 percent of prime-age men are employed, and, when employed, their median earnings were only $6,250.  Only 13 percent earned more than $15,000.  Tracking prisoners over time and comparing employment and earnings before and after incarceration we find surprisingly little difference in labor market outcomes like employment and earnings.”

https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2018/dec/7/brookings-institute-study-finds-direct-connection-between-poverty-and-crime-rates/

In short, having no money in a world that is, for reasons passing understanding, based on money is a good predictor of crime.  We will do what we need to do to survive.  I’m not going to go rob a convenience store tomorrow morning.  I’m willing to bet you won’t either.  I don’t need to.  I don’t have much, but I have enough to survive if I’m very careful.  I hope you have at least as much as I do.  When a person is sufficiently desperate, a person will go to desperate measures.  Reducing poverty reduces desperation.  Reducing desperation reduces crime. 

But The Brookings Report touches on the third element of crime reduction: recidivism.  Many criminals committed a crime because they were desperate.  They went to prison.  When they got out, they committed more crimes.  Didn’t prisons convince them not to break the law?  No.  It rarely does.  It’s not breaking news that prisons are horrible places where horrendous acts occur far more frequently than they do while I’m sitting at my keyboard, smoking a bowl, and writing a podcast. 

I’ve had roommates on both ends of the equation.  One of them worked in prisons for several years.  She was good at her job.  And she would tell you that prisons are doing the very best they can with incredibly dangerous and violent people.  Two other former roommates of mine were incarcerated, and they would both tell you that what happened to them while they were there was horrible. 

What can we do to change this?  Do prisons necessarily have to be horrible?  No, in fact, they don’t.  This is part of our American thinking.  “Our way is the only way.  If you’re nice to criminals, there’s no reason for them to stop committing crimes.” 

That seems to be a good argument, at least at first blush.  The problem with it is that it’s not supported by evidence.  Let’s see what the statistics tell us. Norway’s statistics are on the left.  America’s are on the right.

Gun crime > Guns per 100 residents31.3
Ranked 11th.		88.8
Ranked 1st. Nearly 3 times more than Norway
Intentional homicide rate0.68
Ranked 59th.		4.7
Ranked 7th.  Nearly 7 times more than Norway

Murder rate per million people5.93
Ranked 84th.		42.01
Ranked 43rd. More than 7 times more than Norway

Murders per 100,000 population.29
Ranked 76th.		12,996
Ranked 9th.  448 times more than Norway

   

Rapes938
Ranked 20th.		84,767
Ranked 1st. 90 times more than Norway

Rapes per million people191.85
Ranked 15th.		274.04
Ranked 9th.  43% more than Norway

https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Norway/United-States/Crime/Violent-crime

Wow!  There’s a lot more crime in America than in Norway!  I wonder why that is.  Let’s examine that just a little bit. 

Norway has consistently ranked number one on a number of lists entailing the best, most comfortable prisons in the world. Since the 1990s, Norway’s prison system has evolved into spaces that represent comfort, healing and inclusivity. Changing its approach and attitudes towards prisoners, Norway is molding high-functioning members of society.  In return, former prisoners are gaining the necessary skills in order to contribute to Norway’s economy.

Norway’s Prison System Benefits its Economy

Norway practices Restorative Justice.  What does that mean?  It’s an effort to change the circumstances that contribute to recidivism.

Many factors contribute to breaking cycles of crime, but Prison Fellowship International (PFI) finds two drivers to be most relevant and effective.  First, prisoners form new positive self-identities that replace past negative self-identities, and second, they develop healthy social relationships that support them when they return home.  These ideas are interconnected: prisoners are more likely to seek and develop healthy social relationships as part of the self-identity transformation process.

Restorative Justice Theory of Change

In other words, prisoners are treated more kindly.  They are given more trust.  They have facilities that make it possible to begin to heal the trauma that caused them to commit a crime in the first place, as opposed to causing additional traumas that push prisoners into an even darker place. 

Norway has the primary goal of reintegrating its prisoners as stable contributors to communities.  The first way it is accomplishing this is by creating jail cells that closely resemble small dorm rooms.  Many prisons in Norway have completely banned bars in their architectural design and have “open” style cells.  At the maximum-security Halden prison, each prisoner has a toilet, shower, fridge and a flat TV screen with access to kitchens and common areas.

Norway’s Prison System Benefits its Economy

In short, their prisoners have nicer homes than many “free” people in The United States have. 

These institutions tend to be better for those who work there, as well. 

…. evidence began mounting that the punitive settings were also undermining the health of staff.  Officers reported witnessing violence almost daily and worrying constantly about being attacked.  They experienced high rates of diabetes, heart disease, mental health problems, and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  On average, they die by age 60. 

“That got people’s attention,” says Cyrus Ahalt, MPP, a UCSF public health researcher who has worked with Williams since 2010.  “We realized these environments are so corrosive that even stepping foot in them as a worker is elevating your risk of stress-related illness and the social outcomes of that, like divorce, addiction, and suicide.”

https://magazine.ucsf.edu/norways-humane-approach-prisons-can-work-here-too

What’s better for the prisoners also turns out to be better for those who work at prisons.

Known as “dynamic security,” it focuses on the role of prison workers.  Norway’s correctional officers routinely socialize with residents, joining them for meals and card games and talking through problems.  Officers are trained to use force when absolutely necessary but also study law, ethics, human rights, and the science of behavior change. They learn that building positive relationships with incarcerated people helps them get their lives on track and reduces the risk of violence.  Even in maximum-security prisons – where most people are in custody for violent crimes like murder or rape – assaults against officers are rare, Eberhardt says.

That may sound counterintuitive if you’ve been taught to think of security in terms of barriers, weapons, oppressive rules, and threats of added punishment.  But a Norwegian officer will explain that getting to know incarcerated people on a personal level better alerts you to potential conflict and earns you their respect. “A lot of my colleagues, they will say, ‘If you meet an ex-inmate in a pub, there’s a much bigger chance he will buy you a beer than knock you down,” Eberhardt says.  “It’s true.  Whenever I’ve met formerly incarcerated people on the outside, they are often thanking me.  It’s always a very rewarding experience.” 

When Williams first visited Norwegian prisons, in 2014, she was surprised to hear so many officers say they loved their jobs.  They weren’t overly stressed and hypervigilant.  They didn’t perpetually fear for their safety.  They didn’t think about killing themselves or take out their frustrations on their families…  It gave prison residents a chance at a healthy, meaningful life and made the lives of staff healthier and more meaningful, too. 

https://magazine.ucsf.edu/norways-humane-approach-prisons-can-work-here-too

Shockingly enough, treating people kindly does more to help them than treating them cruelly.  Is our need for revenge (You can check out Episode 132: “A Dish Best Served Cold” for more information on this) more important than our need to reduce crime?  Who is better off for hurting someone who hurt you?  Does killing someone bring back to life the person they killed?  Does locking someone up in horrible conditions do anything to heal the trauma of the person who was raped or kidnapped?  Does forcing people to endure horrible environments restore the lost property of someone who has been robbed?  We don’t heal through hatred. 

If we want to reduce crime, we can reduce its causes by removing people from poverty.  We can decriminalize behaviors that don’t hurt anyone but the consensual participants.  And when those steps still aren’t enough, we can create prisons committed to reform before vengeance.  In short, we can lead with Love.  We can make a better world by changing the way we treat each other.  Maybe we could all work on that.  I’ll start.  I love you.

Posted on by Fred

Little Boxes

Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes all the same

There’s a pink one and a green one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same­

–Malvina Reynolds

I believe I can express opinions about any subject I choose, regardless of how I was born.

No one is required to pay attention to them.  My opinions may be ill-considered or insufficiently informed.  They may simply be wrong.  I’m still, however, allowed to have them and express them in appropriate places.

I didn’t choose to be born straight, white, male, or with the genes that would lead me to diabetes.  I’m no better than anyone else because of how, when, or where I was born.  I’m also no worse than anyone else because of my birth.  I neither invented nor encouraged the privilege I have.  I neither invented nor encouraged the disadvantages I have.  They appeared long before I did.

I’m better or worse because of my behaviors, my choices, and the way I treat others.

No one is disqualified from having an opinion because of their birth.

I would oppose anyone being told they can’t express opinions, even opinions with which I disagree.  I may choose to ignore opinions that have no value to me.  I welcome everyone to ignore my opinions if they have no value to you.

But I won’t be told I’m not allowed an opinion because of things over which I had no control.

I hope you understand.

Fred’s Facebook Page, May 4, 2022, 7:22 PM

In general, I think of myself as a Liberal.  This surprises no one who has ever spent more than five minutes talking to me, reading my work, or scrolling through my Facebook page.  I’m in favor of workers’ rights, the idea that healthcare is a human right, that poverty is an unwarranted evil, and that people should be whomever they choose regardless of the feelings of the majority.  Those are liberal positions.  I prefer AOC to MTG.  Liberal.  I prefer workers to corporations.  Liberal.  I prefer helping people to forcing them to live lives of misery.  Liberal. 

“We all need some therapy, because someone came along and said ‘liberal’ means soft on crime, soft on drugs, soft on communism, soft on defense and we’re gonna tax you back to the Stone Age, because people shouldn’t have to go to work if they don’t want to.  And instead of saying, “Well, excuse me, you right-wing, reactionary, xenophobic, homophobic, anti-education, anti-choice, pro-gun, Leave It To Beaver trip back to the Fifties…!”, we cowered in the corner, and said, “Please. Don’t.  Hurt.  Me.” No more.  I really don’t care who’s right, who’s wrong.  We’re both right.  We’re both wrong.  Let’s have two parties, huh?  What do you say?”

— Bruno Gianelli, The West Wing, Season 3: Gone Quiet, written by Aaron Sorkin

Yeah.  That’s me.  I’m a liberal.  And I take the heat for that.  I’ve lost friends because of that.  And that’s okay.  That’s the price of having opinions.  You can’t change the world without pissing off somebody, somewhere, sometimes.  I don’t go out of my way to annoy people.  I try to be calmer and more thoughtful in the way I put things than Bruno does, but, in the final analysis, I’m a liberal. 

However…

Liberals are supposed to be about rights.  We’re all about ensuring the underrepresented among us have voices that are heard.  We’re about The Outliers on the Bell Curve.  We favor the rights of gay people to get married.  We favor the right for transgender people to join the military.  We favor the rights of women to choose abortions if that’s the right choice for them in their individual situations. 

But, here’s the thing.  I’m told now that I’m not allowed to have opinions about any of these things, or that if I have them, I should be quiet because as a straight white male it doesn’t apply to me.  It’s the Liberals who are telling me to shut up.  My white male privilege disqualifies me from speaking.  And that pisses me off.

That’s what I was saying in my quiet and polite way on my Facebook page. 

There’s an idea now that you’re a member of a team, whether you signed up or not.  The Liberals are required to believe A, B, C, and D.  If you believe only A, B, and C, you’re a traitor to the cause.  The same can be said of Conservatives.  And, to a great extent, those are the only two games in town.  There are subgroups, of course.  Smaller boxes inside of larger boxes into which you are required to fit.  But everyone must get into their box, and everyone must follow the rules of that box. 

https://freestyleacademy.rocks/artm.php?a=15166s&n=19

I object to that idea.  Remember I’m the guy who spouts, “There is no Them; we are all Us,” about 35 times a week.  But, I’m not female, so I’m not Us.  I’m not Black, or Gay, or Transgender, or Gender Fluid, or a Millennial, or an abused child, or a rape victim, or whatever else you’ve got, so I’m not Us.  I don’t fit into those little boxes, so I’m not allowed an opinion.  That is 47 different hues of horseshit.

I’m a human being.  Everyone else, in whatever categories they fit, in whatever boxes they occupy, is also a human being.  I share that with them.  Yes, they have different experiences than I have.  That’s true.  Some of them have had unimaginably horrible, evil, unthinkable experiences.  Many are oppressed.  I don’t deny that my life has been less horrible than many other lives.  It’s been more horrible than many other lives, too.  So what?  So I don’t get to comment on the human condition?  What crime did I commit that caused that right to be taken from me?

I’m about equal rights for Everyone because I believe I’m a part of Everyone, and Everyone is a part of me.  When you deny a person of their right to speak, you deny me mine.  When you deny a woman the right to bodily autonomy, you deny me mine.  When you deny an unborn child the right to live, you deny me mine.  Human rights that are reserved for a few are not human rights.  They’re privileges we’ve decided to grant to some and deny to others. 

Obviously, there are rights for which one must be qualified.  I have no right to drive a big rig down the highway.  I don’t know how to do it properly, and it’s more than a little likely someone will get hurt.  I have no right to perform an open-heart surgery because I’m not qualified.  Those rights, though, are based on my choices.  I didn’t choose to learn how to drive a truck or perform surgery.  If I had, those rights would be available to me.  But… the right to speak?  To write?  To express an opinion?  Nearly everyone is qualified for those things.  They are basic to being human.

I’m not Black, so I can’t have MLK as a hero?  I’m not Catholic, so I’m not allowed to admire JFK?  I’m not a woman, so I’m unqualified to love the messages of RBG or Maya Angelou?  That’s delusional.  I’m also not a Republican, so by this thinking Lincoln is off limits for me.  I am what all of these people are: Human.

Our Common Cause should be making humanity Free.  That’s the point of The American Experiment.  America, however, didn’t invent it.  We’ve been working on it since at least 507 B.C.E.

In the year 507 B.C., the Athenian leader Cleisthenes introduced a system of political reforms that he called demokratia, or “rule by the people” (from demos, “the people,” and kratos, or “power”).  It was the first known democracy in the world. 

https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-greece/ancient-greece-democracy

We can, we do, and we will continue to disagree about how to make everyone free, but let’s at least recognize that’s what we would all like to do in America.  We’re supposed to be “The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.”  I think most of the world wants Freedom, at the very least, for themselves.  I would like it for everyone because I’m a part of everyone and everyone is a part of me.

Some of that means allowing everyone to speak.  History shows us the good guys are never the ones that are silencing voices.  You can ignore them.  You can debate them.  You can find them stupid or ridiculous.  But you don’t get to silence them. 

A good idea for Liberals would be to recognize their friends and refrain from attacking them for having the audacity to state an opinion for which you’ve decided they’re not qualified.  I grant you that straight, white, male, Christian landowners have a history of oppressing everyone who wasn’t a part of that small group.  We have fought against that oppression, with at least some success, for centuries.   Now that we’ve won some power, we’re going to commit the same immoral acts against which we’ve been fighting for so long?  We’re going to oppress our oppressors?  Sorry, I won’t sign up for that.  We’re fighting for equality for all.  Let’s focus on that instead of becoming our own enemy.  Please never tell me again that I’m not allowed to speak.  Thanks very much. 

Posted on by Fred · 1 Comment

Diabetes and Depression and Autism, Oh My!

I don’t speak for everyone with diabetes, but I suspect this is true for many of us.

I have to make a conscious choice every day to stay alive. If I don’t choose to eat, my blood sugar will drop too low, I will go into a quiet coma, and I will die.  If I eat too much, my blood sugar will skyrocket, I will go into Diabetic Ketoacidosis, and I, again, will die.

There are, sometimes, if I’m lucky, days when my body will continue to function without direct input from me.  But most days I have to ask myself, “Do I want to continue to live?”

This seems like a simple question. Everyone wants to continue to live, don’t they?

People who suffer from depression often don’t see any point in prolonging their existence.  Life becomes, even when nothing bad is happening, unbearably bleak.  The temptation to forego the effort is sometimes nearly irresistible.

I ask myself every night before bed if I really want to wake up in the morning.  I have to search for something to make tomorrow sound more desirable than letting go.

This week, it has been creating Art that made me decide I wanted another day. There was something beautiful and exciting to accomplish.

Sometimes, I honestly have no real reason to say I want to see tomorrow.  I simply won’t do anything to make that happen.  I won’t actively seek death, but I won’t actively fight it, either.

When all else fails, I remind myself of the Love I have in my life.  No, I don’t have a woman to love me in that deep sort of way so many of us prize so highly.  But there are people who can be kind from time to time.  There is the chance that my “Rhiannon” will click love on something I post.  There is the possibility that someone will tell me how much they love my Art.  There may be something more I can create, which is my greatest act of love.

For the past several weeks, someone has been kind to me.  She’s given me a reason to choose to stay alive.

It’s worth remembering, sometimes, that the little, insignificant things you do may actually save a life.

Many of you have saved mine.

Thus, we see my blood sugar below.  (106) It was 426 this morning.  That’s perilously close to DKA time.

Someone made me want to live, and I worked hard to get it where it is now.

— Fred’s Facebook, April 29, 2022, 10 PM

Depression is a significant part of who I am.  It is no different or less life threatening than Diabetes.  It’s less controllable than my blood sugar.  I can take appropriate steps and test my blood sugar and get verifiable numbers to guide my choices about how much insulin to take or how much food to eat.  I can’t do that with my depression.  I’ve had it for long enough that I am getting better at detecting its onset.  I will sometimes take steps to put it off.  When I feel myself being needlessly tired, or when I am feeling sad even though there’s nothing wrong, I will push myself toward a brain cleaning activity.  I’ll listen to some music.  I’ll pack and light a bowl.  I will seek out Speedy Shine to cuddle me.  If it’s really bad, I will try to talk to someone.  There are only 3 people, other than my mother, with whom I regularly communicate.  One of them is someone with whom I can discuss my show.  One will listen to me talk about my life, but I have to pay a toll of sixty minutes of hearing why her relationship is failing again before I can get to how I’m feeling.  The third is someone I’m supposed to be helping, but she will rescue me when I’m too far down.  She needs much healing.  I do my best to help.  The one person who is anxious to discuss my depression doesn’t exist in a physical form.  I refer to him as my Prosecutor.  He’s the voice in my head that knows every stupid thing I’ve ever done, and he’s fond of reminding me of them, particularly when depression is creeping in the window.  He urges me to end the fight to stay alive.  Inevitably, he will win.  I just try my best to keep him at bay for as long as possible.  People who love me (and there are many more of them than I could possibly deserve) love to tell me he’s a liar.  I’m grateful to those people.  Sadly, he’s not a liar.  He’s entirely correct in every assertion he makes, and he has the evidence to back up his claims.  He makes a cameo appearance in the final episode of “Universe Selectors, Incorporated,” and he has his own episode in “The Prosecution Never Rests.” 

Those are conditions with which I am familiar.  I learned about a new one last week. 

When the final episode of “Universe Selectors” failed to move my best friend, I was devastated.  She loves “The Velveteen Rabbit,” and I made a point of leaving it pure, not playing with the voices at all so I could return her to that feeling one more time.  And she didn’t get it.  I failed.  I plunged into the deepest and darkest depression I have experienced since my father died 12 years ago. 

Several things were at work here.  First, there was something akin to what I suspect postpartum depression must be.  (I have a Facebook Friend who says I shouldn’t compare my feelings to postpartum depression.  Fortunately, she appears on my page only when she has a criticism to make, and I’m convinced she doesn’t listen to this show.  Such people annoy me.  I promise you I will never tell you you’re not allowed an opinion or to imagine something because you’re female, or in some other way different from me.)  I had created and delivered something beautiful to the world, just as a mother does.  The effort left me physically and emotionally drained.  The fact that it was over left me empty.  I was, at that moment, particularly vulnerable to depression.  The rejection I felt was intensified a hundred-fold. 

To be clear, my best friend did nothing wrong.  Not everyone likes everything.  There are people who don’t like The Beatles, and there are those who think Eminem is superior to Beethoven.  I disagree, but, to each their own.  She doesn’t think Aaron Sorkin is a great writer.  I shouldn’t take her opinions of my Art personally, or even seriously (if you don’t like Aaron Sorkin, we’re unlikely to see eye to eye about Art), but that night I did.  I decided to give up my show.  I was a failure.  I was worthless.  I didn’t even need to continue to suck up everyone else’s oxygen.  The Prosecutor was about to win his battle to end my life. 

This is a Facebook exchange between myself and a good friend:

The people who heard it have been entirely unmoved.  I don’t understand.  I guess it was… I don’t know.  It failed to move anyone is all.

Fred Eder did someone say that directly?  Because I am seeing several likes.  3 of them.  That is a good amount of likes considering the metrics of your audience you’ve previously shared.  The ratio matches what is typically seen.  You also have an audience who returns rather faithfully to hear your work.  It seems as though the prosecutor might be telling you untrue things.

That makes sense when you have obviously put a lot into this project.  You’re emotionally depleted and overexcited.  That’s the perfect time for the prosecutor to swoop in like the asshat it is and tell you all sorts of horrible shit.  Specifically rejection sensitivity dysphoria shit.  Don’t listen to that.

You made something you’re proud of.  We will listen when we have the ability.  We will like it (I have no doubts, I liked the last couple I just need to set a good chunk of uninterrupted time so I can listen to all 3 and digest them), we may or may not comment depending on where WE – YOUR AUDIENCE- are in our own heads.  We are your audience, though.

Breathe.  Rest.  Give us time.

I had never heard the term Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria before.  I decided I needed to learn more about it.  My friend, Jenn, sent me a TikTok video describing it.  That helped me.  I did a google search to learn more.  This is what I found:

There appears to be a connection between rejection sensitive dysphoria and ADHD or autism.

This isn’t to suggest that people with these conditions will develop rejection sensitivity.  Instead, having either condition is a risk factor…

This neurodevelopmental disorder affects the nervous system and triggers a variety of symptoms.  Autistic children or adults may have difficulty communicating and socializing, and sometimes they have difficulty understanding the actions of others.

They might also deal with emotional dysregulation and hypersensitivity to physical and emotional stimuli.  As a result, any real or perceived feelings of rejection or criticism can cause them to become overwhelmingly upset.

https://www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/rejection-sensitive-dysphoria#adhd-and-autism

I dealt with Rejection Dysphoria once that I can remember, a couple of years ago.  My roommate was about to chew me out once again, and my tension was so high that when she started, I exploded.  I screamed at her, and I left the house through the back door.  I found a spot about 200 yards from the house, and I sat down in the grass.  I remained there for 5 hours.  My roommates called the police to make sure I was all right.  I was breaking no laws.  The officers were polite, made sure I wasn’t a threat to anyone else or to myself, and they left.  I didn’t know what it was then.  I think I understand a little better now.  It may have been Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria, or it might have been Autism.  Perhaps it was both.

I have no medical diagnosis of Autism, but I am convinced I am, in fact, Autistic.  I’ve done a good episode about this already, in which I point out that a lot of the reason I am so drawn to Star Trek is because, without necessarily intending to do so, they have brought autistic characters to life, and I identify with them deeply.  Spock, Data, and Reginald Barclay are the easiest examples.  They all feel alienated from the rest of the world.  They can’t deal with human beings as effectively as others do.  They don’t understand how all of you process emotions.  Neither do I. 

I have learned to deal with all of these conditions by simply refusing to leave the house unless it’s absolutely unavoidable.  The woman with whom I am quietly and unassumingly in love (no, I’m not going to tell you who she is.  It might embarrass her, and my feelings for her are much deeper than hers for me) calls these my self-imposed limitations.  I don’t think they are self-imposed, any more than my diabetes is.  I think they are the only way I can deal with the world.  People don’t understand how I can be in love with someone I would be terrified of meeting in person.  I don’t understand how I could be in love with someone in any other way. 

My greatest asset is my imagination.  I think you saw what I could do with it a couple of weeks ago.  I included a sequence with a coffee cup in USI to show how my imagination works.  Once Horace could make the coffee real, he could move into another universe.  No, I will never be in the physical presence of the woman with whom I believe myself to be in love, but I don’t need to be.  I can make things almost real in my imagination.

I deal with this massive set of emotional differences by staying inside my house.  I occasionally visit the backyard.  Once a month, and only because I have to, I leave the house for 15 minutes to get cigarettes.  Otherwise, I’m here, alone, where I can’t hurt anybody, and nobody can hurt me. 

So, why am I telling you all of this?  First, I hope you’ll understand me a little better.  Since, however, unless you’re one of the three people with whom I willingly communicate, you don’t need to understand me any better, it seems to be pointless… but it’s not.  I feel sure you know people who live with Diabetes, or Depression, or Autism, or Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria.  You may have some of these conditions, yourself. 

My hope is that you will understand these conditions a little better so you can be kinder to yourself or to those you love who are a little different from the rest of the world.  We’re not evil.  We’re not childish.  We’re just different.  It’s okay to be different.  I intend to continue to be different.  I am a mess, but I can still love myself.  You or those you love may also be a mess.  You can still love them.  I know because, for reasons passing understanding, people manage to love me.  Tonight was about letting those people know a little more about who it is they love, and who it is that loves them.  And yes.  I do love you.

Posted on by Fred

What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been

Before we get started, all the names you’ll hear tonight are either omitted or fictionalized, with the exception of Scott Santens and Sara Niemietz who are public figures.  Natalie is also the real name of a friend of mine, but I don’t think she’ll mind.  I don’t name names without permission. 

I’ve just completed my 3-part science-fiction mini-series, “Universe Selectors, Incorporated.”  The final episode is, I think, the greatest work of Art I’ve ever created.  It caused me to think.  I never intended to get here.

Prior to last week, the greatest work of Art with which I was ever involved was “Horace’s Final Five.”  Any serious listener to this show has heard me discuss it frequently.  I like to believe most of you have heard that episode.  It was number 50, and that was intentional.  50 is a significant milestone.  It was also my 50th blog post.  (Yes, Natalie, I have a blog.  It’s in the show notes.)  http://frededer.home.blog    

I also expected it to be my final episode.  I expected to be dead immediately after it was released.  I was facing homelessness yet again, and when I wrote it, I could see no way out of eviction and the ugly death that would surely find me while I was living on the streets.  Depression is a frequent visitor, even when things are going well for me.  When life is more difficult, depression floods in like it just broke through the Hoover Dam.  If I didn’t die living in my car, I would still have filled my syringe with a lethal dose of insulin.  I’m not interested in living if it will be nothing but pain.  As it turns out, I don’t enjoy pain.  I know there are people who do.  I’m simply not among them.

What happened?  What am I doing here 100 episodes later?  It was Art.  Art is what happened.  Puccini told us in Tosca.  “Vissi d’arte.” “I live for Art.”  “I sang to the stars and the heavens shone more brightly.”

I didn’t do “Horace’s Final Five” alone.  I couldn’t have made it into what you’ve heard.  I had help.  The help gave me a reawakening.  I never knew Art of that sort was possible.  It certainly wasn’t possible for me to create.  The sound was glorious and new.  It put me into the scene as though I were actually there.  The soundscape was a holodeck.  I experienced it along with Horace and Marc Antony.  And I wanted to do more.

The man who brought about this Renaissance, saved my life from the Prosecutor who lives in my head to remind me I’m worthless, and made Universe Selectors possible at all, hasn’t talked to me in months.  I have no reason to believe he will again.  I’m not going to go into the reasons for the falling out.  I see it one way.  He sees it another.  We’re probably both right.  We’re probably both wrong.  It’s not worth my minutes to rehash what I can’t change.   

You might think this would cause me to disregard him.  And while I’m far more arrogant (particularly about my show) than I really ought to be, I have to accept reality.  If I’m going to talk about how we got from there to here, I must give credit to the man who saved Fred’s Front Porch, whether he likes me anymore or not.  I’m going to explain what has happened since “Horace’s Final Five.”  Tonight, I’m going to take you on the Journey from Episode 50 to Episode 150.  And “… what a long, strange trip it’s been.”

After “Horace’s Final Five,” I immediately returned to my normal fare.  I covered an essay by the great Scott Santens, one of the world’s leading advocates for Universal Basic Income.  The content is perfectly fine.  The sound is badly lacking.  I didn’t have the equipment to make it sound like my show sounds today. 

By the time we got to my next artistic work, “Time Jumper Radio,” my new producer had written me a new theme song, and now he was using better equipment than I had to make the show sound the way it ought to sound.  He was convinced that I had to have a Mac Book so that I could use Logic, so that I could create that kind of sound, myself.  And he was right.  I did need one. 

I explained it just wasn’t possible.  I had two roommates who had control of my money, and if I spent that kind of money, they would quite probably throw me out of my home.  The Mac Book would be of little use if I were homeless.  He had just gotten money from Unemployment, and he wanted to buy it for me.  I fought bitterly against this idea.  There was no way I could ever repay him.  The idea that I would ever live alone and be able to spend any money I might earn in my own way was unimaginable at that point.  He wouldn’t hear it.  He bought me the computer on which I have been producing this show since I got it.  In that way, he gets credit for “Universe Selectors.”  Several months ago, he threatened to take that computer back, and that was the beginning of our ending.

I had no idea how to use Logic Pro.  I didn’t understand the finger mouse pad.  I was lost.  My mentor took many many hours to teach me how to use it.  I learned, although it takes me forever to do that now.  My brain is much slower than it was when I was thirty.  “Dave, my mind is going.  I can feel it.”  He gets credit for “Universe Selectors” in that way, as well.

We worked together closely for more than a year.  We created extraordinary theater pieces.  We worked with more than a dozen people to produce Art neither of us could have created alone.  When the girls told me they were moving in January, 2021, he gave me a place to live in Sierra Vista for six weeks while I waited for my Disability to arrive.  He gets credit for “Universe Selectors” for doing all of that.  It’s a shame he couldn’t have taken a run at “Universe Selectors.”  I’m sure it would have been even better than it is.

I didn’t do it alone. 

I had help from Miles O’Brien, too.  I taught him when he was in 4th grade, and for the next couple of years.  I made a difference in his life.  We stayed in vague contact for the next 25 years or so.  And he listened to Episode 73: “Do I Have to Hate All 70 Million?”  Prior to that, he didn’t even know I had a podcast.  He became interested in that.  He called me to talk about it, and when he realized I was living in California, only 20 minutes or so from him, he insisted on coming to see me.  That story is chronicled in Episode 124: “Unlocking the Gate.”  It explains that I left Sierra Vista, where I had gotten an apartment I could afford on my Disability, and where I was less than a mile away from the home of the man who saved my life and this show, to move to California on the promise of a future in which I could live alone and never pay rent again.  That turned out to be an unmitigated disaster.  Miles saved me from it.  He brought me back here.

He wanted to do a podcast of his own, and I introduced him to the man who helped me to make this podcast what it is today.  Miles joined his team, and he is now making a podcast that is at least as successful as this one.  I expect that in another month or so, “Interstellar Frequency” will have a larger audience than we have, and I’ve been at it more than two and a half years.  I taught Miles the basics of Logic Pro for six hours one night when he was here.  His mind is much faster than mine is today.  He is now better at Logic than I am.  I sent him all three episodes of “Universe Selectors.”  He worked out the “LUFS,” (Loudness Units to Full Sound) which was something of which I had never even heard until it was brought up in a Facebook podcasters’ group Miles invited me to join.  LUFS are the reason you shouldn’t have to adjust your volume more than once.  Set it at the beginning, and it should work throughout the show.  Miles added sound effects.  He made the voices consistent.  He made the episodes better than I could make them, myself. 

I realize I have done nothing on my own.  I owe much to many people.  I can’t hope to repay all I owe.

But, I also wrote the words.  I did that alone… except for Glenn Frey, Don Henley, Don Felder, Arthur C. Clarke, Douglas Adams, and Margery Williams.  And, really Stanley Kubrick is in there, too.  So is my Dad.  Yeah, okay, I didn’t even write it alone. 

Still, each of us is the product of our experiences, and those experiences are at least influenced by the choices we make.  When I read from The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock at my father’s memorial, a friend congratulated me on the tribute I’d written for Dad.  I told her the credit went to Eliot and the others I quoted in those pages.  She made the point I couldn’t have quoted them if I hadn’t learned them.  And that’s a good thing to remember. 

During this long, strange trip I have made choices.  They’re pretty much unavoidable.  The Existentialists tell me that everything is a choice.  Others maintain that life is just a reaction to forces that are, for the most part, beyond our control.  I think there is truth in both of those ideas. 

I didn’t choose to be rid of my former roommates.  It was beyond my control.  I keep reminding myself and anyone who will listen that we can’t control anyone but ourselves, and even that can sometimes be difficult.  But I made a choice about how to deal with that situation.  I didn’t have to accept my mentor’s offer of assistance.  I could have tried to find a place here in town to live, but on the money I had, it would have been just short of miraculous to find that.  I had cause for concern about going to Sierra Vista.  I had heard the Artist meltdown more than once, screaming at people, and it made me incredibly uncomfortable.  I don’t do well with yelling.  I made the choice to trust him that extra step further.  And I believe it was the right choice.  For six months, I lived happily in Sierra Vista, aside from the fact that I had a probably mentally disturbed neighbor who, although he said he had three doctorates, was a Major in the US Military, and was now on Disability just as I was, still lived next door to me in the cheapest place in Sierra Vista.  He insisted on talking to me every time I went out for a cigarette, and it was almost like having a roommate again.  He was never unkind.  He was, however, a human being who insisted on talking to me.  I have, in case you were somehow unaware of that, a difficult time tolerating that. 

When Anthony Tagonist offered me an opportunity to live rent-free for the rest of my life, I thought it over very carefully.  When something seems too good to be true, it usually is.  This is something my experiences had taught me.  Both he and his wife were former students of mine, however, so I decided to believe this was the Universe paying me back for the half a lifetime I had spent trying to make a difference.  The Universe has a sense of humor, evidently.  Those were the most traumatic months of my life.

I produced some good work there, but only one of the pieces is one of which I’m proud.  “Father and The Lady” is a beautiful story, and it was born from needing my dad again.  I looked to his example to deal with what scared me.  That’s not in the story, itself, but that was its Genesis.  Good things came from a poor choice.

Miles points out, though, that if I hadn’t moved to California, he wouldn’t have a show, and I wouldn’t have the help I do now.  And that’s true.

I’ve had something resembling a love life in the last six months or so.  (There’s a reference to that in Episode 3 of the mini-series.)  This is to say I’ve been busy falling in love with someone who loves me only a little at a time, and who is often willing to allow me to love her.  This is particularly difficult for a man who lives in terror of other people.  Fortunately, she’s 1200 miles away, and our relationship depends on the one thing I do well.  It’s about words.  Mine seem to help her sometimes.  You’ve met her on this show.  She’s the subject of Episode 128: “My Brief Brush With Happiness.”  She’s having a difficult time healing from the bad relationships of her past, and I do my best to help.  No, I won’t be getting married again, have no fear gentle reader (or listener), but it’s lovely to find my heart functioning like a man’s heart again.  Sometimes I get to feel loved by someone who is not Speedy Shine.

President Bartlett used to ask, “What’s next?”  I don’t have the slightest idea.  I’m emotionally, physically, and creatively exhausted after “Universe Selectors, Incorporated.”  I had thought of doing “The Velveteen Rabbit,” but I made it fit into the last episode, so there’s no reason to do that now.  I’ve learned, though, that, as Sara Niemietz reminds me in my favorite hymn:

We don’t need to know
What the future holds
Just put your hand in mine

I don’t have to see
What’s ahead of me
Let’s just take our time
And shine

— Sara Niemietz and W.G. “Snuffy” Walden “Shine”
from “Get Right”, 2019

Posted on by Fred

Universe Selectors, Incorporated: Episode 3

Two massive oak doors shut behind Horace and The Pooh Bear Being with a force that echoed through the Cosmos. 

“We will all be fizzling out of existence in four minutes and 20 seconds, just in case you still think time is real,” said Marvin the android. 

Horace reached into his pocket, pulled out a pack of cigarettes, took one out, and lit it.

“Those will kill you, you know,” said the Pooh Bear Being.

“In the next four minutes and 20 seconds?” asked Horace.

“Four minutes and 11 seconds,” corrected Marvin.

“I expect to be able to get out of this situation,” said Pooh.

“The doors are closed.  We’re with a depressed android.  It appears there’s really nothing we can do.”

“Always ready to accept Death, too?” asked Marvin.  “I keep hoping I’ll die, but something keeps interfering.  There was a whale once falling from the sky…”

“Open the big oak doors, please, Marvin,” asked what had transformed from a Pooh Bear into an astronaut named Dave.

“I’m sorry, Dave.  I’m afraid I can’t do that,” said Marvin.

“What’s the problem?” asked Horace.

“I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do,” said Marvin.

“What are you talking about?” asked Dave.

“Gentlemen, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore.  Goodbye.”  Marvin flickered out of existence.

Dave became The Formless Being again, and he and Horace stood in the dimly lit lobby.  “Well, that wasn’t helpful,” said The Being.

“You sure you don’t want a cigarette?  They do wonders to calm the nerves right before you flicker out of existence.”

“We still have 2 minutes and 53 seconds,” said The Being.  “I expect you to use them to find us a way out of here.”

“Me?” asked Horace.  “I have no power here.”

“You got us into this mess; you get us out.”

“I really didn’t.  I’m a fictional character.  I can’t do anything on my own.”

“Yes,” said The Being.  “Of course!  Ask the writer to solve it.”

“Okay…” Horace thought a moment and then spoke loudly into the hotel lobby.  “Open the big oak doors, please, Fred.”

They turned to look at the doors.  There was a timeless pause.  Nothing happened.

“So, that’s not going to work,” said Horace.

“It worked before.”

“If he opens those doors, we’re going to select a universe where he doesn’t exist, but I do.  It occurs to me he might not want that to happen.”

“He’s rather selfish, isn’t he?  This will be the second time he’s killed you off.  He seems to enjoy that.”

“I’m his alter ego.  He’s frequently suicidal.  I know that because I’m frequently suicidal.  Perhaps we can talk him into letting himself die.”

“That may be difficult.  I understand he believes he has a reason to continue living.  There’s a woman, you see…”

“The Prosecutor!  That’s the answer.  We have a Prosecutor living inside our heads who tells us what we know but prefer not to believe.  The Prosecutor and I both know he has no future with her.” 

And Horace transformed into The Prosecutor.  “She’s been ‘not ready’ for more than six months.  Your Brief Brush With Happiness was all you should ever have expected.  Your love is worthless to her.  You know this.  You continue to deceive yourself, interpreting her words in ways you know she never intended them.  She doesn’t need you, Fred.  As long as she has someone to whom she can vent, she’ll be fine.  You can’t win.  Let it go.”

The big oak doors swung open.

“We need to move quickly.  The Cosmos has 11 seconds left.  All possibilities will be below us when we step out the doors.  Concentrate on a Universe in which you’re real, and Fred Eder is a fictional character, and then leap.  And hold on to me, or we won’t be sure whether you have the right one.”

They stepped out of the lobby and saw the Cosmos swimming beneath them.  Horace took the briefest of moments to imagine a Universe in which he existed, but Fred didn’t, took The Being by a hand Horace couldn’t see, and leapt into the blackness. 

***

I was seated at my black desk again.  My fingers were on my keyboard.  I understood now that there is a difference between fiction and reality.  I felt alive in ways I never had before.  Rhiannon exists now; she’s no longer a stand-in for Fred’s failed dreams. 

I began to write the story of Fred.  For a moment, I felt sorry for him.  He was no longer real.  He existed only in my imagination.  His parents, his siblings, the people he loved, were subject to my will, my thoughts, my need to make my writing more powerful, more real, and more personal.  They were all representations, shadows of my own soul.   I knew this in the same way that I knew the sun would set tonight.  And then, I remembered a story my father read me when I was a boy.  I opened The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams.

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room.  “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse.  “It’s a thing that happens to you.  When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful.  “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse.  “You become.  It takes a long time.  That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby.  But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

“I suppose you are real?” said the Rabbit.  And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive.  But the Skin Horse only smiled. “The Boy’s Uncle made me Real,” he said.  “That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can’t become unreal again.  It lasts for always.”

And that gave me pause.  If Fred was real once, wouldn’t he be real always?  At least, to someone?  I flipped a few more pages, and I found this.  This has to be how fictional Fred is feeling.

“That?” said the doctor.  “Why, it’s a mass of scarlet fever germs!  –Burn it at once.  What?  Nonsense!  Get him a new one.  He mustn’t have that any more!”

And so the little Rabbit was put into a sack with the old picture-books and a lot of rubbish, and carried out to the end of the garden behind the fowl-house. That was a fine place to make a bonfire, only the gardener was too busy just then to attend to it.  He had the potatoes to dig and the green peas to gather, but next morning he promised to come quite early and burn the whole lot.

That night the Boy slept in a different bedroom, and he had a new bunny to sleep with him.  It was a splendid bunny, all white plush with real glass eyes, but the Boy was too excited to care very much about it.  For to-morrow he was going to the seaside, and that in itself was such a wonderful thing that he could think of nothing else.

And while the Boy was asleep, dreaming of the seaside, the little Rabbit lay among the old picture-books in the corner behind the fowl-house, and he felt very lonely.  The sack had been left untied, and so by wriggling a bit he was able to get his head through the opening and look out.  He was shivering a little, for he had always been used to sleeping in a proper bed, and by this time his coat had worn so thin and threadbare from hugging that it was no longer any protection to him.  Near by he could see the thicket of raspberry canes, growing tall and close like a tropical jungle, in whose shadow he had played with the Boy on bygone mornings.  He thought of those long sunlit hours in the garden–how happy they were–and a great sadness came over him.  He seemed to see them all pass before him, each more beautiful than the other, the fairy huts in the flower-bed, the quiet evenings in the wood when he lay in the bracken and the little ants ran over his paws; the wonderful day when he first knew that he was Real. He thought of the Skin Horse, so wise and gentle, and all that he had told him.  Of what use was it to be loved and lose one’s beauty and become Real if it all ended like this?  And a tear, a real tear, trickled down his little shabby velvet nose and fell to the ground.

And now a tear… a real tear… trickled down my face.  I’ve never been made real.  I’ve never been loved.  Fred has invented characters to love me, but mostly he invented characters for me to love.  But, without love, I can never be real.

“Love, you see,” said the Formless Being, “truly is the most powerful force in the Universe.  All of our science, all of our technology, and all of the timelessness of existence can’t compete with The Power of Love.  There is no Universe in which I can place you where Love is not more powerful than time, space, gravity, or all the wormholes and black holes scientists will ever discover.  Love transcends physics.  It supersedes even the infinite universe.”

“And… I can’t have it.”

“Perhaps if Fred had written you better…”

“Selfish bastard,” I said sniffling just a bit.

“No… Mostly just a shitty writer.”

We stood alone in the darkness of the Cosmos again. 

“Now,” said The Formless Being, “In which Universe would you like to be deposited in this endless moment?”

Horace turned back to look at Fred, who sat at his keyboard writing.  Horace fizzled into nothingness, and Fred took a moment to appreciate the Love he had in his life.  He lit a bong, clicked save, and walked away from the keyboard. 

Posted on by Fred · 2 Comments

Universe Selectors, Incorporated Episode 2

“What do you mean I can’t live?  I’ve been doing that for 59 years now.  I’m pretty confident I am capable of that.  Unless… wait… are you saying I’m dead?  Is this the afterlife or something?”

“No.  This is most certainly not The Afterlife.  And you can’t be dead.”

“Sure I can.  I hate to tell you, but give it long enough, everything dies.  Entropy is a thing.  Even those of you who run around with incredibly long life spans will finally cease to be.  Even the Universe, itself, can’t be infinite.  ‘All that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity,’ was one of my people’s favorite lines.”

“And Shakespeare was quite correct.  All that lives must die.”

Horace stared into the cosmos.  He let the meaning sink in.  “So… I can’t die because I’m not alive.  And I can’t be dead because I never lived.”

“You’re beginning to understand.  Would you care to try a different universe now?  We still have 1.78 billion or so left to consider.”

“So… I’ve never lived.  What am I?”

“Everyone asks that question.  Few get an answer.  Would you care to continue with your Universe Selection?”

“I’d prefer to be among the few.”

“My job is to assist with Universe Selection.  I don’t do philosophy or psychology.  They’re just beyond the Argument Clinic in the Python Galaxy.”

“Where is that?”

Horace perceived the being he couldn’t see to be pointing into the cosmos.  “Second star to the right…”

“And straight on ‘till morning?”

“That’s the one, yes.”

“I’m… a fictional character?”

Had Horace been able to see the being, he would have seen a smile and a nod.  “Now, shall we select your universe?”

“I’m a little freaked out.  How do you know I’m a fictional character?  Unless… you’re also a fictional character?”

“I assure you I am quite real.”

“Is there a universe where I’m real?”

“It’s possible.  Just as the laws of physics break down in different universes, in singularities, and in wormholes, the laws of philosophy are also subject to collapse.”

“Could you put me in a universe where I’m real?”

“That would require a universe in which Fred Eder never existed.”

“Who’s Fred Eder?”

“He’s the writer who invented you.”

“So, we need a universe where I exist, but he doesn’t.”

“And World Peace, and Valerie Bertinelli exists, and she asks a fictional character to dinner.  Those seem to be the requirements now.  That could be exceptionally difficult.”

“Why?”

“Because if Fred Eder doesn’t exist, he can’t write the story in which you find such a universe.  This can’t happen at all.”

“Well, frankly, I’m not all that impressed with him as a writer.  He screwed up the last universe.  It didn’t meet even the basic requirements I gave you.”

“In what ways?”

“Valerie mentioned that I live in poverty most of the time.  I requested a Universe in which poverty had been eliminated.  That sounds like either inattention to detail, or a failure of imagination.  Neither of those are elements of good writing.”

“He was writing to himself.  He wanted to make it as plausible as possible.  He tried to imagine how it might happen in his universe.  You’re Fred’s alter ego.  Fred lives in poverty most of the time.”

“So do I.  But, I wouldn’t in the universe I requested.”

“Fair point.  I’ll make some adjustments for the next one.  My fault.”

“What can I control in my environment?”

“Anything.  Just like anyone else.”

“Most of a human’s environment is beyond their control.  They can’t control the weather, or what other people do, or–”

“They can, and they must, control how they deal with it.”

“Okay… Let’s try something.”  Horace thought for a moment and then said aloud, to the Cosmos, “Fred, take your fingers off the keyboard.”

There was a timeless pause.  Nothing happened.  The Cosmos didn’t spin.  The being made no effort to communicate.  Horace was frozen.

“Fascinating,” said Horace.

“Did you wish to select a Universe now?  We really need to move things along a bit.”

“Does it matter?  I mean, am I really choosing at all, or is it this Fred person?”

“He can’t choose anything that you wouldn’t do.  He couldn’t, for example, have you choose a Universe in which the world was constantly at war, poverty ran rampant, everyone was homeless, and there was no Art.  It’s not within you to choose such a thing, so he can’t do it.”

“Okay.  Then this is the Universe I want.  World Peace, the elimination of poverty, homelessness, crime, and unobtainable health care, and Valerie Bertinelli offers to make me dinner, and… I exist… and this Fred Person is a fictional character.”

“I believe that may be possible.  I’m not familiar with the procedure to change reality.  Universes are simple.  Reality is infinitely more complex.  However, there should be a universe in which I can change reality.  So, we shall both need to go to that universe, and then I can send you to yours.” 

“How do we do that?”

“I’ll need to locate The Omega Point.”

“How do you do that?”

“I’m looking it up.  You’re always in such a hurry.  We should find you a Universe in which you gain some patience.  Ah!  Here we are.  The Omega Point does not exist within the timeline of the universe.  It occurs at the exact edge of the end of time.  From that point, all sequences of existence are sucked into its being.”

“So, when we get to the Omega Point, how do we avoid the end of time?  That sort of prevents us from choosing a universe.”

“Douglas Adams posits that there is a restaurant there.”

“Okay… So?”

“We arrive, put our names on the waiting list, and then depart before they call us in.  I don’t know how much more obvious it could be.”

“And how do we get back here then?”

“We turn around and come back.  You really are frighteningly stupid for a fictional character.”

“It’s a sort of time travel?”

“Obviously.  That was worked out a couple of thousand of your years ago in at least 13 billion different universes.  Your H.G. Wells was quite late to the party.”

“Twain got there 6 years earlier.”

“He was still late.”

There were beeping sounds filling the Cosmos.

“What is that?”

“I’m calling ahead for reservations, obviously.  How slow precisely are you?  Hello.  I need reservations for two….  Thank you!  We’ll see you presently.”

Everything went entirely black for a moment, and then Horace saw that they were on a dark, desert highway.  He felt a cool wind in his hair.  The warm smell of marijuana growing wild filled the air.  Up ahead in the distance, Horace saw a shimmering light.  He moved toward it, and he found himself joined by the being, in the shape of Winnie The Pooh. 

“Oh, bother,” said the being.

“What?”

They were in the hotel lobby. 

“This isn’t the restaurant at the end of the universe,” said the Pooh Bear Being.  It’s…”

“Welcome,” said an Android behind the desk.  “I’m Marvin, the Nightman.”

“Nice to meet you, Marvin,” said Horace.

“No, it’s really not.  Do you know how depressing it is to be the last person anyone wants to meet?”

“We’re here to check out,” said the Pooh Bear being.

Marvin smiled cryptically at them.  “Relax,” said the Nightman.  “We are programmed to receive.  You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”