Merry Damn Christmas

On December 25 the world celebrates Christmas. At least the Christian part of the world celebrates Christmas while the rest of the world acknowledges that the Christian’s are celebrating for the day.

Without Christmas in the US, the retailers would be lost. They do much more than 1/12 of their business in the month prior to the holiday. And yet, with the preponderance of shoppers buying Christmas rather than Hanukah or Kwanzaa presents, they insist on Happy Holidays. I guess that’s okay since they do want to sell for the several days of each season. And Kwanzaa is now almost thirty years old and so it is an established holiday.

But there is a push for total separation of church and state. Especially by people who want things like the Ten Commandments removed from federal buildings the words “under God” removed from the Pledge of Allegiance. If these people want separation of church and state, then I believe we should allow for complete separation of church and state.

That means that Christmas is just another day. That should mean that every single federal, state, and local government office, including Congress and the Post Office, along with sanitation workers and libraries – all those public institutions run for and by tax dollars, should remain open. After all, without religion, it’s just another day.

I would like to see a national push to have this become law. If we want separation of church and state, it evidently cannot be a halfway thing. It means that Christmas is a private holiday. It isn’t real. It doesn’t exist in secular public domain. It is just a concept created by heathen Christians. It should be shunned, eschewed, ignored, and disregarded by all government workers.

We may have to look into government offices being closed on Sunday, the Sabbath, but I think that should come after this most egregious lack of separation between the religious and the secular is corrected. I am sure that all government workers, especially those who are vocal about the need for separation of church and state, will gladly come to work on Monday, December 25, 2006.

Planning Ahead

Thanksgiving will soon be upon us. It is a day of feasting and football. I have no idea who is playing, but I know what the feasting is all about.

Turkey.

I have a 20 pound turkey that will be stuffed with homemade stuffing and roasted. Then there will be gravy. And potatoes. And Aunt Tillie’s potatoes even though I know no Aunt Tillies and the potatoes are from my family. My sister’s friend couldn’t remember our Aunt’s name and came up with Tillie. I have no idea how. The name she was searching for was Kathy. But the potatoes became Aunt Tillie’s Potatoes.

And then we must have sticky buns. Lots of sticky buns. And green bean casserole. And some acorn squash. And Jell-O salad of some sort. Something pretty for the babies. And drinks. We must have drinks – soda pop or wine or eggnog or beer. Then there is dessert to worry about.

And appetizers. When I make Chex Mix, I don’t really make it. I don’t use Chex cereals, but Crispix. I don’t use seasoned salt, but garlic salt. I don’t use mixed nuts, but cashews. But we call it Chex Mix.

Then I bought some pre-cut up cheese and will put that out with crackers for before or after dinner nibbling. Again, I’m not sure what football stuff will be on, but I assume there will be eating while it is playing. My daughter in law is bringing deviled eggs.

When I lived in Ohio, these big dinners were family affairs. Everyone brought stuff, my sisters, my mother, my mother in law – all helped with the work of putting tons of food out. Since I’ve moved, I’ve done all the cooking. My sons aren’t big on the cooking. They do the dishes after all is done and that is a help. But the cooking …

However, my daughter in law – bless her heart, as they say in the south – has insisted on bringing some of the food. I don’t have to do all the cooking. I am grateful for her help with this. She probably has no idea how nice it is to be able to lean a little again. I know that with three small children she really has her hands full, but her help is something that I am truly thankful for.

I took the turkey out of the freezer yesterday. I sincerely hope that it is thawed in time to cook it on Thursday. I had my menu worked out two days ago. I have coordinated who is cooking what with my blessed daughter in law. I wrote out a shopping list and headed off to the store. I will need to make one more run, closer to the day for some fresh vegetables.

It will be a week of planning for a seemingly effortless dinner to appear on the table for a bunch of hungry, thankful people. We are indeed blessed to live in a time and place where the sheer abundance of foods make the tables creak with laden deliciousness.

All it takes is a little planning.

Living Longer

There is an article in a recent Oprah magazine that says we may soon have a lifespan of 150 years, routinely. I find this idea appalling. How incredibly selfish and destructive to the planet and life overall.

The planet is currently supporting about 6.5 billion people in varying levels of comfort. Because of some dolt’s study that showed there was a 4% drop off in certain bird’s hatching from eggs, DDT was banned. In our industrialized, less humid climate of the US, that was okay. But then we decided in our Eurocentric authority and with the consent of other industrialized nations, that DDT should be banned worldwide. And if it wasn’t, we would withhold funds.

So there are millions in Africa now with malaria and other insect-vector diseases who are seriously ill or dying. But the bird eggs are hatching at 84% rather than 80% so the world feels pure and holy.

Then there is AIDS, which according to stuff I’ve researched is really a constellation of diseases under one umbrella. If you die of any of these different diseases, you died of AIDS because the medical community called it. The treatment for AIDS isn’t patently proscribed, but must be individually produced to meet the various types of HIV or AIDS infection because, as I said, it is really a variety of diseases.

In the industrialized world, those specific and costly remedies are available. Again, in Africa, not so much. The same is true for India and China. Large and poor populations simply do not have the resources to use or waste that we do in the Euro-American worlds.

So, now we want to live 150 years. There are already too many people on the planet to maintain our resource intensive lifestyle for any but a select few. The cost of that high resource lifestyle is that the unselect many have even lower standards of living. There is a finite amount of goods for use on the planet. If there were enough resources for each person on the planet to get 100 units, then simple math takes over. If Person A [Euro-American] uses 167 then that leaves Person B [poverty Third World] only 33 units.

The world is a closed system. There is only so much of anything to go around. One of the things we are supposed to do is get the hell out of the way. My own family tree is not all that large because the most children to any one couple was five. However, my husband’s grandmother was one of ten children and I didn’t count back that far. Out of the seventy-eight people born in the last 150ish years, forty-four have moved on to what ever it is that comes after life on earth. Thirty-four of us are still hanging around sucking up resources.

As much as I miss my mother and father, it was their job to move on so that I could meet my grandchildren. I am comfortable with the idea that it will eventually be my day to move on for my great-grandchildren, giving them my space and my allotted resources. It is the least I can do for the people I love.

To be so selfish, so piggy about resources seems to me to be the ultimate in resource hogging. Not only will it take some amount of resources to keep the coots alive, but they will have the experience and take the jobs away from the “youngsters” of sixty or so. What possible good can there be in this scenario? How long would it take to reach “adulthood” if you were living to 150? But biology would remain and so you would be stuck with teenagers and twentysomethings with raging hormones and not even a glimmer of a hope for a job and a way to support themselves or any offspring cuz the 125 year old has claimed that spot.

Whoever thought this out did not think it out very clearly. The ramifications are horrific. Certainly we can only hope that this never comes to pass. It would be the end of life. Those without the resources to purchase long life would be even more disadvantaged by the possibility. The outrage at this inequity could only lead to there being far fewer people of any age after the wars that ensued. Until everyone can live up to a certain standard of living, creating a larger gap in that standards is beyond the pale.

Are You Saxon?

I keep reading about the horrid Europeans who came to the New World and destroyed the entire place, ruining the land and killing off all the natives. Terrible, just terrible. But untrue.

Industrialization has made the globe a dirtier place. With all our science we have prolonged lives and thereby increased the population until it is nearly unsustainable. Certainly unsustainable without the technology we have produced. Who would feed the more than 8 million New Yorkers if the combine farms in the Midwest did not produce much more food than the hand tilled lands the natives used?

I’ve been reading stuff that intimates that Europeans are the first and only slave holders in the world. Stuff and nonsense, as an outraged 18th century lady might say. Enslaving others has been a worldwide endeavor ever since someone noticed that if he were more powerful and threatening, he could get someone else to do the work while he glowered. Slavery is now illegal worldwide, which doesn’t stop it from happening at all. Especially sex trade slavery, but that’s only women so …

Now for killing off all the natives. What? Are the reservations empty? Or are we decrying the reservations? What about all the absorbed natives? My husband, and therefore my children, are part Cherokee. Just like with my English heritage I am probably part Anglo or Saxon. Who ever hears of those nationalities today? They weren’t all killed, they were absorbed into the English landscape and now are called something else. And I’m Irish, where are the Celts?

How about Vikings? They went all over the western European coast pillaging and what-not. There aren’t any Vikings today, but I’m sure that they were not all destroyed, but rather absorbed into a newer, later culture. They are called Swedes or Danes now. They aren’t gone, only differently labeled. The Vandals were once a people, not kids spray painting graffiti. Anyone hear of any Prussians lately?

Buffy St. Marie sang “the tribes were wiped out and the history books censored.” That seems ludicrous since she is of the tribes and she seemed vibrantly alive while singing of her national pain.

The world is unstable and at war. It has always been so. To the victors go the spoils. That means they get to keep the land and change the names of things. Londinium was the Roman name for London. We can see the connection. In the English countryside is evidence that the Roman armies once occupied the place. But they don’t still speak Latin because following that invasion came the Angles, the Saxons, the Vikings, and myriad other people.

With all wars, people die. The same happened with the European influx to the New World. But not all the indigenous people were killed. The tribes were not wiped out. Many exist as tribes today. Many others were enslaved and lived on, possibly mingling the gene pool by force or by choice.

We are the world, there is no us and them. There is only us. Combined. Intermarrying. Interbreeding. Us. All of us. Together. For better or worse. We meld and merge and become a melting pot of humanity. Each of us individual. Each of us with a history of war and conquest behind us. Because … if our ancestors had not won some measure of safety, they would not have reproduced.

When Did That Happen?

The babies. That is how I refer to the grandchildren. They are three small babies. Well, maybe not as much as I pretend.

My sons are “the kids” even though they are old and bigger than me. They remain kids in my heart and I’m shocked each time I hear them referred to as “men” even though they are older than their father was when we married. I thought of myself and my husband as adults at the age of twenty. My sons are older, but they are still the kids.

The babies are not really all babies. One is a baby, just months old. She is smiling on purpose. She catches sight of her own hand and tracks the wondrous object as it moves willy-nilly. She eats out of a bottle and only out of a bottle, although when I put a bit of chocolate fluff on her lips, she did like that.

Her next older sibling is sort of still a baby. He is still counted in months, but we are getting close to being done with that. Like adults who are twenty-something, he is a baby twenty-something only in months. He is closing in on the second birthday. He walks and is beginning to talk with his favorite word being “no.” He will say no while doing yes. He is showing us who he is, but one of the things he is is the younger brother. And he follows the older brother with a touch of adoration as many younger brothers do.

The oldest grandchild is definitely not a baby any longer. He is three. Well, he is three-and-a-half plus a couple months. We can still count with halves at this age, but the whole month thing is really over the top. He walks and talks. He imagines and can converse. He is making the world, or at least his part of it, safe from any and all blue dinosaurs who would dare to intrude. He has mastered many social skills, like bathroom etiquette. His hair is no longer that baby-fine silk but the hair of people rather than babies.

I see the babies about three to four times a month. I’m not overly astounded by the change from week to week. But because they are so close in age, the differences are haunting. How do they grow up so fast? It doesn’t seem fast at the time. I remember it seeming like I would never be done with diapers and then I was teaching someone to drive.

Perhaps it is a function of getting older. It has been over half a lifetime since the last Thanksgiving for one grandson and about thirty percent of a lifetime for the other. The granddaughter has never seen a Thanksgiving, and like her brother before, wouldn’t remember it if she had. For me, it’s been not so long ago since I cooked the turkey.

Each day for me as an old coot is a mere rush of activity that goes by in a blur, especially when counted against the nearly 20,000 other days of my life. A day is about 1/100 of my granddaughter’s life, while it’s about 1/600 of the middle child’s and 1/1250 of the big boy’s life. The twenty-four hours of each day that we are given are a far larger piece for the babies. Even the kids have a lifespan of about half mine, but they are still in the five digits.

I understand the theory that states that perspective makes the time seem to fly faster as we age. I know that there are moments, however, that still blur past at warp speed. Then there are days that drag along like a lame turtle stuck in molasses. It’s not the present time which I believe is the same regardless of age, but looking back at the past that makes time dilate or contract.

When I look back and see the big brother as the infant I first met, it seems so near. But in the space of the three years, two more people have come into my life. The babies. The kids. The youngsters who are the legacy I always dreamed of. My family.

Learning is Fundamental

Teachers tell their students that learning is fun and key to a successful future. Lifelong learning is touted as the way to be in the world. And yet … I’ve heard of a teacher who does not feel that she should personally have to update her repertoire of teaching techniques. And another who finds his time overwhelmed and cannot be bothered with anything in the developmental stages.

My sisters, both teachers, love to incorporate the new ideas into their teaching tricks. One of my sisters is part of a trial for using Tablet PCs in the classroom. She has called me frequently for tech tips and how-to help with PowerPoint. She has experimented and practiced using her new toy and found that the kids absolutely love it and can stay focused for longer and be redirected more easily when they lose that focus.

She and her collegues in the experiment presented their findings and ideas to the staff at her school. A school that is supposedly a proponent of lifelong learning. One teacher was viciously against incorporating any technology into the classroom, one assumes that paper, pens, and pencils are permitted even though these technologies were new at one time. Another teacher mentioned that after all the bugs were worked out and all testing and extra meetings completed – then and only then – would that new thing be welcome in the classroom.

What’s up with this? These are the people in charge of instilling a love of learning into the students’ lives. These are the people who are given the task of making learning enjoyable and worth the effort. By their own behavior they demonstrate that this is not the case in their own lives. How are they getting the message across to their charges?

I do not have a teaching degree. But I have taught computers to high schoolers and in adult education classes. I also assisted in the teaching of grade school and junior high students. What I have noticed is that mirroring happens in the classroom. When I was excited about a topic, my students would be excited about that topic. That’s the good thing.

When I was angry, the students responded with anger. When I yelled, I lost control because yelling is not an authoritative behavior, but a behavior of last resort. When I whispered, the entire room became silent in order to hear what I was saying. Mirroring is a well documented behavioral concept. You and your listeners respond in kind to each other. I do realize that there are more students in the classroom than there are teachers and so the adult is outnumbered. I also realize that the adult at least should have more coping skills at his or her command.

When you, as a leader, enjoy your subject matter, that enjoyments is telegraphed to your followers. When you, as a leader, enjoy the followers – that, too, is telegraphed. The least we can expect from our teachers is that they bring a respect to the classroom. Respect for the students has been front line news for decades and even so it is not a universal part of education. But respect for the subject matter, respect for learning, respect for the pure joy of understanding are truly key to teaching. Teachers should learn this.