“I cannot live without books” (Thomas Jefferson to John Adams)

Posted on September 25, 2015 by BigBill

I love books. I also love to read, but the two are not necessarily the same thing. Reading is for pleasure, to educate and inform myself, to “listen” to other people’s perspectives and to give me something to think about after I’ve finished. I read both fiction and non; for fiction it’s mostly sci-fi and fantasy, the occasional mystery thrown in and of course the classics of fiction as well. In non-fiction it’s everything from history, philosophy, religion and politics to the hard sciences like neurology, nutrition and biochemistry. I’ve been known to read textbooks if I’m interested enough in the topic, but that’s admittedly somewhat rare.

I have an iPad that has the iBooks app, as well as Kindle and Nook, and they are great for when I travel (which is a lot, these days). I think it’s fantastic that I can carry a dozen books in my iPad with no additional effort. So when I got the iPad I thought that maybe my book-buying days were over.

But I was wrong.

As I said, I love books. I love the way they feel. I love to hold them as I read. If it’s a leather-bound book, I love the smell of the leather and the feel of the book in my hands. There’s something about the weight of the book and its texture that appeals to me. When I heard that the Encyclopedia Britannica was not going to be putting out a print edition any more (the Web is a much more appropriate system for a reference work than print), that I bought one of the last sets of the last edition. It’s currently still in boxes in a closet, waiting for me build new bookshelves.

I follow a forum called Quora. One of the questions posted recently was whether or not it’s possible to own too many books. This caught my interest, since Cathy believes that I am living proof of the affirmative. In any case, one of the responses got me thinking that maybe I should be doing more with my books than I have been. Below is the response:

“This was my father’s library.

Bookshelf_Zapata

Throughout my life, we’d all sit down to dinner as a family and talk and books would be pulled down from these shelves and brought to the table to prove, disprove or expand whatever we were talking about.

We all did our homework in this room and used the books as reference material.

Often, when friends came over, my father gave them a book related to the conversation we had held as a parting gift.

…Books should be loved and read and held and underlined and earmarked and referred to and given away.   Used correctly, you can never have too many books.”

I really like those sentiments. They were written by Dushka Zapata who writes a very interesting blog; (she’s an advertising exec from San Francisco). Anyhow, the more I think about it, the more I agree:  books should be referred to and shared.

The giving away part I have to think more about. That would be hard.

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An examined life: The Good Life

Posted on September 19, 2015 by BigBill

The movie Saving Private Ryan opens and closes with a scene set in the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial overlooking Omaha Beach. In front of Captain John Miller’s grave marker (the man played by Tom Hanks in the movie), Ryan as an old man asks his wife to tell him he’s “led a good life.” This especially poignant scene, where he reflects on the sacrifice of all the soldiers buried there, and in particular those who died getting to him to send him home, sets the stage for this post. It’s obvious that life for him has been good; he’s seems to be in good health, he is surrounded by a loving family (his wife, several children and grandchildren), and he’s apparently prosperous enough that his  extended family can travel overseas. But he’s asking something much more profound, and it has to do with whether the life he has led since World War II has adequately honored, or even justified, the sacrifice of Captain Miller and the others now buried in France, overlooking Omaha beach.

Examining one’s life has an additional and very important component, which may in fact pose a greater challenge than determining what type of person to be. The origins of this part also date back to the early Greek philosophers; Socrates, Plato and Aristotle all spoke of “the good life” from various perspectives. Each presented a slightly different nuance in the way they addressed the topic. I won’t go into how they defined a good life at this time, but suffice to say that each philosopher placed a great deal of importance to its consideration.

How we lead our lives is different than what type of person we envision ourselves to be, although there is considerable overlap between the two. And there has been a great deal written since the Greeks first posited a “Good Life,” so I’m not going to attempt to add anything here, except to talk about what it means to me.

First of all, I would differentiate between a “Good Life” and a “good life” (with upper and lower case). A Good Life carries with it more of an idealistic, society-facing connotation than a good life, which I view as a more personally-facing perspective. Everyone wants a good life, while not necessarily a Good Life. By that I mean people would like to have a life free of chronic sickness, pain or tragedy, where they are able to adequately care for themselves and loved ones (a good life). A Good Life to me means something more: a significant contribution to others or to society in general; this takes considerable work. Not everyone is willing, able, or even inclined to think through what a Good Life might mean, or to put the work into its achievement.

What are some of the things that might go into a Good Life? I think we could safely say that examples of people who have lived a Good Life would include Clara Barton, Florence Nightingale, Ignaz Semmelweis, Louis Pasteur and on and on; these are people who worked in obscurity most of their lifetimes, but what they accomplished has saved countless lives and prevented much suffering since. But I don’t think it’s necessary nor even realistic that we limit our description of the Good Life to these kinds of iconic figures; there are lots of people who have risen above themselves during their life to do good works and help other people, and maybe only in small ways. So while some may achieve posthumous greatness, in order for the Good Life to be meaningful as a concept, it has to be more grounded in reality or in the mundane of day-to-day living.

I think what’s emerging, as I think about this, is not so much that we actually achieve anything tangible, but that we create an image of a Good Life and try to work toward that. In that context it’s much like Plato’s “Form of the Good.” He stated that, while it may be hard to describe or define what a specific Form was (in this case, the Form of the Good), once it is present it’s possible to recognize all other Forms of the Good from that example. That’s not quite right in my context, but it’s close. What I mean is that, as you live your life, (hopefully a good life), you always keep in mind possibilities of something greater, or even more noble. So in a very mundane example, you try to put yourself in other peoples’ shoes. When driving, you not only drive defensively, but you look for ways to help other people. Let them merge in front of you, maybe. Or move over so they can pass. It’s actually little things, but they add up.

We may never rise to the level of Captain Miller (who literally gave his life so another could live), and hopefully it would not come to that for most of us. But we can, and should, aspire to become better. Not perfect; just better.

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An examined life (part 3)

Posted on September 12, 2015 by BigBill

I’ve already noted that the process of examining one’s life is more than figuring out who you are, but of determining the “ideal you.” Once the ideal is established, a critical examination of who you actually are in comparison to who you would like to be would come next. From this gap analysis comes the steps that should be taken to become that ideal person.

At least that’s how it’s supposed to work.

The reality is of course much more messy. Circumstances change along the way, as do values and perspectives. The person I was (or wanted to be) as a single man of course resembles, but is still quite different, from the person I wanted to be as a married man. It’s not just a broader perspective, either; there are real differences in how I look at the world, and how I want to be perceived.

Additionally, as I get older I find that my view of what’s important changes. Again, there is much more than a passing resemblance to what I thought important when I was a youngster, but there are important differences as well. Some of these are pretty obvious: when I was younger, having enough money to pay my bills was important; any thought of retirement took a distant second place to staying on top of my current obligations, and to doing (and buying) what I wanted. True, the things I considered necessities have also changed somewhat, but I gave little more than a passing thought to having a comfortable retirement. Add to that the rock-solid belief I had that Armageddon would have come long before I would reasonably consider retiring and the need to establish a retirement plan was small in the extreme. Or so I thought! I am now just a short jump from the age most people retire, and there’s no indication Armageddon is any closer than it was when I was a fresh-faced kid. If I ever was fresh-faced.

Anyhow, my basic point is that one’s mission in life, while a long view, must of necessity come under regular review, both to do a reality check to see if you are progressing toward that ideal, but also (and maybe more importantly) to see if that ideal might need to be tweaked a bit. Hopefully not abandoned, but certainly updated. Von Moltke (Prussian general and leader of Germany’s army in the latter half of the 1800’s) said “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy,” meaning of course that the best laid plans cannot possibly cover all contingencies and must be modified as circumstances dictate. Not necessarily abandoned however; simply modified.

Back to our mission statement. I think that part of Socrate’s thinking behind his statement is that one must regularly review where we are, compare that to our ideal, and then determine if a new course is required in our behavior to reach that ideal. At the same time, make sure that our ideal is still that: what (or who) we would like to be. Which sometimes changes.

Hard work, that.

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An examined life (Part 2)

Posted on September 5, 2015 by BigBill

So what exactly does it mean, to “examine one’s life”? As I’ve mentioned in these posts, what brought this to my attention so forcefully was the death of my friend Mike Katke a little over two weeks ago. There were over 200 people who attended his funeral/memorial service, each with their own story of what Mike did for them, what he meant to them or how they will remember him. The family gave me the very difficult but signal honor of officiating at the ceremony where four of us who knew and worked with Mike spoke of him.

A personal mission statement is a way of organizing your thoughts about who you are and what you would like to be. When I led the team that did the training for our new reps, one of the presentations we always gave during the first week of training was our mission statement workshop and exercise. Ryan Perry still does this; he did an excellent job when we worked together partly because of his commitment and passion for what we do. In any case, Ryan and I were talking about this in the context of Mike’s life (Ryan was a long-time friend of Mike’s as well). Obviously a mission statement is a way to examine one’s life, as its development begins with an introspective evaluation of who you want to be. We ask our reps to picture themselves at 90 looking back on their life, and think about what that life would represent. Not how many awards they got or how much money they made, but what they meant to others during that life; what those people would have to say about them. Then, write down those key points; they represent who you would like to be. Turning those points into the present tense, writing them down and reviewing them on a regular (daily) basis then activates a subconscious process (according to the view of some behavioral psychologists) that drives behavior to create the reality to match the mission statement.

Anyhow, all that is well and good but I don’t think it’s granular enough. We all want to be perceived as honest, loyal, with high integrity blah blah blah. But examining one’s life (to me, at least) carries a much more introspective tone. What, exactly, is important to me?
One aspect of this examination is the willingness to go wherever it leads you. This may sound either trite or “New-Agey,” but what I mean by it is this: If you carefully examine your facts, thoughts, observations, etc. etc. etc., what if the conclusion that results from that introspection means you have to change how you act? Let me construct an example. Cathy’s mom and her husband George have difficulty getting around (for lots of reasons), and have applied for and been granted handicapped tags for their car. It makes total sense for them to have them. The purpose of the tags being granted is so people can park in handicapped spaces and not have to struggle to get to where they want to go. Now, let’s say we are all going to dinner, and they ask me to drive. It’s easier to use their car than to have them climb into mine, so I drive George’s car with its associated handicapped tag. It is totally legal for me to park in a handicapped space. But I (the driver) am not handicapped. Shouldn’t I pull up to the front door, let Marcie and George out (which allows them to get even closer to the appropriate entrance than a handicapped parking spot would be), and then drive to wherever I find a parking spot? It seems to me that the purpose of the tags is to help people who actually need to park close to the entrance, to reduce their struggle. That does not include me, in this instance. Now, I know this is a silly example, but it does go to the process. Am I (or do I want to be) the type of person who thinks through the underlying reason for something, and adheres to the spirit of the situation, or am I a “legalist” who says “I have a handicapped tag, so by heaven I get to park in a handicapped space”?

There are lots of different situations where this could be applied, but the underlying premise is that an introspective nature is central to the process. If I want to be a particular person, then a fairly deep introspection is essential to sort out what that looks like. A second characteristic is honesty, particularly with oneself. If your introspection leads to a specific conclusion (one that includes a behavioral component), honesty would then compel you to act on that conclusion, and not try to rationalize it away.

For example, Mike developed Metagenics First Line Therapy, which is a form of lifestyle medicine. What that means is that the FLT program teaches people how to select foods that are more appropriate to maintaining health. Without going into specifics, it’s based on a low fat, modified Mediterranean-style diet. Mike lived that program. It meant changing the way he selected his food, prepared it, and consumed it. So let’s make this personal. Do I exemplify the diet that I tell our sales people (and doctors around the country when I lecture)? Or do I rationalize that dessert or soda that I want, even when I know they’re not good for me?

This applies in lots of areas: philosophical, physical, dietary, mental, and so forth. And it also goes to things like integrity, honesty and commitment.

Something to think about. And it may not be a very comfortable process, but I think it’s important to see where it goes.

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An examined life

Posted on August 30, 2015 by BigBill

Socrates is quoted by Plato as having said “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Over the last 10 days or so I’ve had the opportunity to think about this quite a bit. As the last couple of posts indicate, my good friend of nearly 40 years, Mike Katke was killed in a motorcycle accident about a week and a half ago; I was honored by the family to be asked to lead the memorial service. I’ve been following all of the Facebook postings of Mike’s friends, talking about what he meant to them and how his life affected theirs; Mike was a special man who was extremely highly regarded. My personal recollections only reinforce that impression; we shared great times over the years at Metagenics and I can attest to the significance of his many contributions as well as his character.

One of the things that the death of a friend will trigger is introspection. It’s hard to imagine that anyone confronted with such a tragedy would not then turn their attention inward and wonder if their own life is meeting the standards they set for themselves.

So how would you “examine your life?” I suppose some would look at their accomplishments or how much money they have, but I think a much more important consideration is who they are, not what they have achieved. Of course what one achieves could be used as a yardstick for who they are, but I think it’s a pretty crude measure and not very accurate. I know a fair number of wealthy people and a lot of “good” people and don’t see any correlation. Not that wealthy people are not good people necessarily; just that there’s no correlation.

It strikes me that an examination would begin with the obvious character markers: how do I measure up to characteristics like honesty, loyalty, integrity and generosity? These are pretty universal; most people would like to think that they exhibit them, and I’m no different. But let’s take a look at one of them. Integrity is not that much of a challenge when things are going your way, but integrity in the moment is probably a better way to think about it. Do you (do I?) show integrity to my standards/principles even when it’s not popular, or might be awkward, or when no one is looking? There’s a TV show called “What would you do?” where the producers stage a situation to see how the random passers-by will react. They’ll have a person tie up a dog or lean a bicycle against a fence and leave, then have another person come and pick up the dog/bicycle while recording the response to people sitting nearby who’ve watched the whole thing. Obviously if you knew you were being filmed, most of us would step up to stop what’s going on. Balanced against that is the “It’s none of my business” mentality. Interesting test, in any case.

But there are other facets of “an examined life.” What are things that are important to you? Do you have close friends? Close friends that you keep in touch with? I find that’s one of the things I need to work on. It’s too easy for me to allow day-to-day priorities to get in the way of my friendships. I have lots of good friends, many of whom I have reconnected with at the three (yeah, THREE) funerals or memorial services I’ve attended in the last week. So I’ve committed to make a special effort to stay in close contact with more of my long-term friends.

And not just the occasional Facebook “like” or “poke.”

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It’s a Facebook world!

Posted on August 25, 2015 by BigBill

It goes without saying (although I’m going to say it anyway!) that each generation looks at its own as the best. The most sophisticated, the most advanced, the greatest achievements, the best tools. The most modern. While this is true about some of these (achievements, advancements, etc.) we could argue at length about the level of sophistication (which is partly dependent upon how you define that term). The other terms used to describe generations are often simply the bias associated with the familiar. Either way, “modern” is usually defined as “current” or “what’s going on now.” The attitude that all previous generations were less “not as good,” less sophisticated or quaint usually carries more than a hint of nostalgia, of a yearning for a time less fast-paced; more relaxed.

Each generation views things as speeding up. And while this is a cliché you hear said (usually by old people), I do think the pace has picked up dramatically. My grandfather was a young man of around 20 when Wilbur and Orville flew the first airplane at Kitty Hawk, and he lived to watch man land and walk on the moon. In one lifetime! Twenty or so years after his death the internet was born; today it’s hard to recall what it was like when you actually had to pull your copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica from the shelf to look up Peter the Great. If you look at movies from the 40’s and 50’s and compare them to movies today, the difference is pronounced and obvious. It’s much more than color and CGI, too; the rapid camera movements and quick perspective changes has become a metaphor for the barrage of information coming at us in society today. By the time your brain has registered an image, a different one is being displayed. Instead of long, smooth and paced scenes, you get impression after impression after impression, in a staccato of brief images almost too fast to put into any kind of coherent pattern.

It strikes me that our lives have become like that (probably why directors and cinematographers are using that convention in films): we almost don’t have time to register what’s going on in front of us before the next event is thrust upon us. We certainly don’t have time to reflect. For someone with an introspective nature, that presents some challenges. When and how do you process these events? How do you learn from what’s going on around you? Or do you learn? Maybe you are supposed to just let all this stuff get absorbed intact, pushed down into your subconscious, and then gradually let Freud (or your Freudian nature, to be more grammatically correct), sort it all out. Not sure that I would define that as a good thing!

I was scrolling through my Facebook site this morning and it struck me how that site has become a reflection of this phenomenon. I have several hundred “friends” on Facebook (what that really means is probably a topic for another post!), but FB algorythms track what I do, who and what I “Like” or comment on, and then present me with what their programmers think are likely who or what I want to follow. The paternalism of that aside, I still get a ton of very short, staccato impressions of frozen moments in time of the people I follow. It gives what I think is the false impression of connecting with those people, because first of all, they have no idea whether I’m paying attention right now or even receiving their postings. And second, while most of our lives are pretty mundane, we put things on Facebook that show how much fun we’re having, or what our beautiful and incredibly talented kid/kitty/dog are doing right now. Or even worse, we “repost” something that someone else wrote or recorded (which takes no more thought or effort than clicking a button), as if we’re too lazy or busy to create our own lives, and we have to live vicariously through other people’s posts.

But I digress. My impression this morning was how quickly things become old news. I must have scrolled through 40 or 50 posts in a few minutes, and when I looked at how far back in time I had gone, it was less than a couple of hours. In order to find information from yesterday, I would have to scroll down through pages and pages and pages of posts. If you take a day off you can miss a lot! (I’m sure that’s part of the FB strategy: keep people coming back frequently or they feel they’ve missed out.)

To put this in some kind of context, I’m thinking about the death of my long-time friend Mike Katke, who was tragically killed in a motorcycle accident less than a week ago (4 and a half days ago, as I write this). Yet to find any FB postings about it, I have to use the search feature; it simply takes too long to scroll down. So what is a catastrophic loss for his family and an incredibly heart-wrenching event for me is practically lost in the background noise of Facebook in just a few days. While Mike’s family is trying to come to grips with this terrible shock, the rest of the world (at least as represented by Facebook) has moved on. And while that inevitably happens (and has always happened down through history), the speed at which it takes place means that whatever lessons were there to be learned from a tragedy such as this are missed. We don’t have time to reflect on the importance of our friendships and commit to telling friends and family that we love them. We don’t think about our own driving habits and commit to being more careful on the road. We don’t realize that life is short and if we really want to take that trip or learn Spanish or get back into woodworking that we shouldn’t put it off as we may not get the opportunity later. We don’t realize we’ve allowed friends to drift away and give them a call or write a letter.

And clicking the “Like” button on Facebook doesn’t do the job, either.

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Ephemeral

Posted on August 19, 2015 by BigBill

Ephemeral (adjective) ephem•er•al \i-ˈfem-rəl,\ Lasting a very short time; transitory

While all relationships, and indeed life itself, is transitory, it doesn’t have to be that all relationships last for a very short time. Of course everything is relative, but circumstances can make relationships, no matter how long they last, seem ephemeral and thus more precious. Let me explain.

This has been a bad couple of weeks.

First, I got news that Sterling Peterson died. He was the father of Greg and Dave Peterson, and I’d known him for nearly 45 years. A young woman I was dating introduced me to Dave, and since we shared a number of common interests, we got to be good friends. Dave was still living at home at the time, so when Jim and I went to visit Dave we stayed at Blanche and Sterling’s house in Mound. They became like second parents; always hospitable and welcoming.

My father-in-law Dwight was married to Dee when Cathy and I started dating, so from my perspective she’s always been part of Cathy’s extended family. When she was diagnosed with cancer around the end of last year, we all were very concerned but thought that cancer was not the death sentence it so often used to be. Unfortunately for Dee it turned out to be; she lost her battle earlier this month.

My friend of over 30 years, Mike Katke was killed in a motorcycle accident this week; I got the sad news one year to the day (almost to the minute) that I heard that my brother-in-law Doug died from a heart attack.

So now I have three funerals to attend in the next week, coupled with the anniversary of the sudden death of my good friend and brother-in-law.

Like I said, a bad couple of weeks.

The passing of Sterling and Dee, while not unexpected (Sterling was 90 and I already mentioned Dee’s illness), still make me very sad; both of them were generous, giving people and I was very fond of both of them. But the death of Doug and Mike, even though a year apart, were similar in the terrible shock we felt; Doug was in good health (so we thought) and had just gotten news that he was hired back for the upcoming school year (California has a weird budget that dictates that most teachers get laid off when the school year ends, then hopefully rehired for the next year). Doug and Sue were finally in exactly the place they wanted to be.

Mike was about my age and we worked together closely for 30 years. Even when I left Metagenics to work at Austin Hardwoods we stayed in touch; I helped him hang crown moulding in his new house as he was getting it ready to move in. We shared a similar sense of humor and had more fun times together than I can count.

Among the things that keeps bubbling up in my mind are how transient life is, and how quickly things can change. Of course these are clichés, but when you are confronted with tragic situations it’s hard not to think in clichés.

What these sad events also do (at least for me) is help me to reconnect with what’s important, and of course I’m referring to friends. Mike’s brother Tim and I talked fairly often after he left the company, and I had made arrangements with the other brother Chris to get together a couple of weeks ago but had to reschedule. But in both cases there is now the firm commitment to not only stay in close contact, but to put whatever energy it takes to maintain the friendship.

When I made arrangements to attend Sterling’s memorial service, I debated staying in a hotel in Minneapolis rather than at either of my friend Greg’s or Dave’s house. But I realized how I would feel if the situation were reversed: if I had room, I would have been hurt if they opted to stay in a hotel rather than with me. So when Greg invited me to his home of course I gratefully accepted. I’ve been friends with Greg for as long as I’ve known Sterling, so it was a wonderful thing to be able to spend time with the family. I got in on Saturday afternoon, we went to dinner and then hung out with Greg, his wife Debbie, daughter Mindy and son Jesse. I’ve developed a nice friendship with Mindy as an adult, and I hadn’t seen Jesse for many years so it was truly a wonderful time. It felt good to just spend time with them, reminiscing about all the great times we’ve had over the years. I’ve observed before that some relationships are such that you can not see or speak with your friends for an extended time, but when you do it’s like no time has passed. That’s what this weekend was like.

Greg and Dave live a short walk from each other so after the service we all got together at Dave’s house to read the cards people had sent in Sterling’s memory. Sitting out on their screened-in deck with Dave and Donna, Greg and Debby, Jesse and Donna’s sister as a soft rain fell and the day closed around us will be one of those vignettes that will evoke such vivid memories 20 years from now that I’ll feel like I’m right back there.

We get so easily caught up in day-to-day activities and concerns that it’s easy to say that we’ll make that call to an old friend next week or the week after. But life is too short to allow our relationships to become ephemeral.

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Drifting apart

Posted on August 18, 2015 by BigBill

My friend Mike Katke was killed in a motorcycle accident last week. He had finished up a sales meeting in Denver and rented a Harley to relax, unwind and enjoy a beautiful summer ride with his girlfriend Angel. I don’t know for sure, but I assume he intended to find some winding mountain roads and feel the wind in his face. In any case, on a flat, open stretch of road near Boulder (2 lanes in both directions with a median strip between) a driver in a Jeep going the opposite direction apparently didn’t see Mike coming and turned left in front of him. Mike hit his car on the passenger side, killing both Mike and Angel. The driver of the Jeep was unharmed (at least physically).

I first met Mike nearly 40 years ago. I was on my way to Minneapolis to meet with my friends and colleagues Greg Peterson and Jeff Katke (we were all sales reps for Greg’s brother Dave, who owned the distributorship for Nutri-Dyn) and we stopped in Eau Claire, Wisconsin to have dinner with Jeff’s brother Mike. He was a Witness and built garages for a living, which made him a kindred soul on two levels (I had worked in construction to support myself as a full-time minister, the same as Mike was doing). Anyhow, we had dinner in Eau Claire and then went on to our Minneapolis meeting.

Not too many years later, Jeff had moved to California after purchasing the Nutri-Dyn Distributorship there, and Mike had followed to join the business as a sales rep in the Los Angeles territory. So we would connect at sales meetings and the like, but it wasn’t until Jeff founded Metagenics with his family and Lyra Heller, I sold my Nutri-Dyn distributorship and moved to California that Mike and I became real friends. The company didn’t have a marketing department, so we all worked together to develop the sales tools we needed. I always felt like I was tagging along rather than truly contributing, because Mike, Chris and Lyra were such creative geniuses. It’s hard to imagine a Metagenics today without the products, programs and services that Mike contributed to.

Mike left the company a year or two after Jeff sold to Alticor. He had developed our FLT (First Line Therapy) program for doctors, which was (and still is) a major component of our marketing effort, but I think the new management felt that he represented too much of a connection to the “old Metagenics” and there was no real place for him any more so he left. He took a year off, then joined a different company where he was working as VP of Marketing when he was killed last week.

In the three or so years that intervened, Mike and I drifted apart. We would text or talk occasionally on the phone, and of course see each other at conferences and such, but busy schedules and differing priorities led to longer and longer gaps between contacts. Each time we connected we promised that we would call each other soon and get together for a beer.

And now we’ll never have that beer and that makes me very sad. I’m going to miss Mike.

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What do they really believe?

Posted on August 11, 2015 by BigBill

The next president won’t be selected until nearly 15 months from now, but the process is already in full swing. We’re here in August of 2015 and there’s a phalanx of Republican Presidential Candidate Wannabes; 17 serious candidates at last count with one website listing 38 declared (Declared Republican candidates). Granted, most of that number have never been heard of outside their own little corner of the globe, but 17 is still ridiculous!  Eventually, most of even the “main 17” will succumb to the realization that this is just not their year and drop out. Trump is getting a lot of press, mostly negative. It seems that virtually everything that comes out of his pie-hole annoys or embarrasses the majority of people (even my staunch Republican friends), so I’m somewhat mystified how the polls are being conducted (or whom is being polled) that show him the front runner of that motley crew. And for someone who claims he’s not in the least affected or influenced by polls (he says he never pays any attention to them), he’s been doing a lot of crowing about being out in front.

But the circus that is Trump is fodder for another time.

When the Republican debates of a couple of days ago were being advertised by Fox I was deciding which of my recent book acquisitions I should read first, or whether I should catch up on work emails, or almost anything but what time the debates would begin. I had no interest in hearing what any of them had to say; I figured it would just make me mad.

But I’ve talked here previously of the obligation that we have as participants in our society to educate ourselves. Understand the issues and carefully select from among the various option. So…How do you know what each candidate actually stands for?

I have found debates like the other evening to be a terrible way to find out. All the answers are carefully scripted in advance by teams of handlers (except for Trump; he seems delighted by the taste of his feet). I think they are more opportunities to see how a candidate comports him or herself in front of an audience.

Same with listening to the sound bites on the evening news. Those all seem too carefully scripted to tell anything. It’s a Catch-22:  at this stage of the process, the putative candidate has yet to be selected to represent their party; that happens at the national conventions. That means a centrist hasn’t a prayer of getting any traction; the people that get attention now are the ones that best represent the interests of the fringe (who are the most passionate and thus most activist). But a far-left-or-right candidate probably isn’t electable nationally, since most Americans are centrists. So after throwing red meat to the fringes in order to get on the final ballot, each candidate then has to about-face and try to remake themselves as a moderate (admittedly a Left-Leaning or Right-Leaning moderate, depending upon which party they’re in, but certainly way more moderate than they appeared to be in order to get their party’s nod).

So we (the voting populace) are left with a dilemma. Either a) the candidates left standing on the second Tuesday of November have been trying to appeal to a broader group in the actual campaign, and their real beliefs are what they expressed during the run up to the primaries, or b) what they said during the primaries doesn’t really reflect their views; they just said those things to get on the ballot as Republican or Democrat. How do we know what they will really do, once in office?

Which time are they lying to us? Oh, OK maybe “lying” is too strong a word. Which time are they being disingenuous?

Posted in General commentary on the world as I see it..., Political commentary | Leave a comment

Hello again; I’m back!

Posted on May 18, 2014 by BigBill

It’s been nearly a year since I posted anything. A lot has happened in this past year, so it’s not for any lack of material that I’ve not written anything. For one thing, Mom passed away just before memorial day last year after a long struggle with declining cognitive function; it was probably a blessing when she died but no less difficult for the three of us.

That’s maudlin and only ancillary to my going dark. Mom’s passing of course makes me very sad; we miss her and realize our lives are diminished with her absence; but that’s a topic for another entry. If I needed one, I guess that’s a pretty good excuse for not feeling much like writing.

But maybe it began to feel like this blog was really an excuse for writing an anti-JW screed, and I had to think about that.

A short explanatory break. Or maybe just some introspection. In any case, indulge me. Or move on to the next posting if this becomes boring.

Anyhow, this line of reasoning started after my sister Kathleen observed that I seemed to spend quite a bit of time on this blog talking about things I no longer believe. Actually, I think “obsession” was one of the words she used (or maybe I’m inferring). She did say “What are you trying to prove? Why is it so important to you?”

So I went back and re-read some of my posts with a fresh perspective, and she’s right. It DOES look like I’m trying to prove something.  I probably would not have seen it without Kathleen’s pointing it out to me, but there it is.

So I’ve been giving a lot of thought to why I’ve been focusing on my life as a JW in my blog. Of course there’s the possibility that deep down I am questioning myself. I no longer practice as a Witness; more significantly I no longer believe much of what I once thought was incontrovertible; those are pretty strong reasons to be introspective. That said, as I examine my intent I believe it is not so much to prove anything (either to myself or to anyone else), but instead to write down a thought process. This allows me to think through and re-examine the reasoning, kind of like checking your work on a math question before you turn the test in.

I’m not done thinking about it though; I may choose to expand on this later.

Posted in Religion and philosophy | Leave a comment