coarse world

This is the kind of coarse world I see around me.

My father, even if senile, even if a member of the category "frail elderly", is yet a human being deserving of respect and dignity.

He is not a child, and it is wrong to condescend to him if he makes an attempt to please you through humor.

He has suffered disrespect in his life---indeed, at an early age.  He was told, when quite young, that his father was "too poor" to pay for a college education.

And, so naturally, the fact that my father achieved a college education is important to him.  (And, it was an important fact for my life as well.)

So, today, if you speak to him as if he were a child, and do not listen to him, if you do not attempt to grasp in some measure that he has had a long life, and he was once young and full of life as you are today, then you do him wrong.

If your powers of imagining are so limited that you cannot understand that his "stories" are glimpses of a past you do not know, then you do him wrong, and you impoverish yourself as well.

I don't feel that my father is getting the respect he deserves.

ethical dilemmas

In the trite and reductive way in which ethical philosophers spin their yarns, I now offer the following:

Imagine that a family member who you love is drowning.

They have fastened their arms around your neck.   They are fearful, but also grateful that your neck is available, as they find amazing strength to squeeze it.

You can, for a time, support them.  However, let us suppose, that the desperate energy in their grasp is slowly pulling you down with them.

If you extricate yourself, have you done something wrong?

Would it be better that you both drown?

And, imagine that, at the same time your loved one is pulling you under, small sea creatures are nipping away at your legs, or that birds are poking your skull, attempting to eat your brain.

Now, that's getting close to my current situation.

compare and contrast: capitalism and communism

As I prepare my morning coffee, I worry that sounds from the kitchen will wake my elderly parents.

I recall that in Slovakia, in the high rises built by communists, the kitchens had doors, allowing you to seal off the noises and smells from the bedrooms.  (Do you say the communists don't deserve credit for that?  They didn't design the layout.  Perhaps, but it doesn't matter to the point I'm making.)

No such possibility exists in this house where my parents live, a house constructed after the Second World War in the U.S.A..

How annoying.  How thoughtless.  How characteristic of the sort of massed-produced lives that we enjoy in the land of the free.

totalitarianism watch

As I've just written friends describing the difficulties faced by my elderly parents,
I can confidently await the response of the email provider:  advertisments targeted to me,
as if they knew a g.d. thing about me.

The sheer arrogance of it is breath-taking.

No, this new intrusiveness is not welcome or helpful.

I do wish, however, that I could punish these intrusive assholes, but merely to catalogue
the outrageousness of it exhausts my vocabulary and my power of imagination.

No thank you.  I am not grateful to the geniuses of the internet for what they have done,
and what they are doing.

Long live Trotsky!

what do these assholes think?

Here I sit in El Paso, Texas (which I have sometimes described as the asshole of the universe, and at other times as the desert outpost of a cruel empire)..

and it is that day of peace and goodwill toward all exploiters,

and there's a dog barking himself hoarse,

and he's been doing it for twenty minutes.

What does the asshole neighbor think:  Fido is sooo cute.....

Having purchased the dog, the neighbor has property rights, etc.

Get me out of here.  This is a miserable place.

What a cute dog!  How cute to hear him bark!  How could anyone possibly find it disturbing if my dog barks for hours, and hours, and hours, .......

trite axioms of thought

"What you can't imagine, you won't imagine..........."

Yesterday, the perfectly good care-giver for my elderly parents did the grocery shopping.
I was encouraged by my mother to stay home because there are so many drunks and bad drivers on the road, and, tired from lack of sleep, I did so.

Today, I may yet have to go out, on an official holiday, to impose upon people who are forced to a labor during an official holiday, to buy items not on the CG's list.

Does the word "holiday" mean anything any more?

In effect, the CG was not just shopping for my parents, but for me as well; but she's got no idea of my eating habits.

Is it petty of me to complain? She endures the penalty meted out to care-givers:  poor pay, insecurity, and a lack of respect.  Indeed, the prettiest point of such jobs is that employees are simultaneously expected to follow orders and not complain, but also expected to exercise creativity and independent thought in order to prevent the management from experiencing any discomfort.

The need to accumulate capital always wages war with the attempt to be human.

"I hate you."

In my mind, "I hate you" is a childish, or overly-dramatic saying.

Nonetheless, a couple of years ago, when pushed into a corner, I could find no better way to register my opposition to the suggestions being made to me.

Moreover, I had, at that time, endured three years of lost autonomy on account of giving in to the suggestions of family members.

Recently  apologized to the target of that childish saying. Yet, I worry that an apology went too far.

More words are needed.  By saying IHY I did not intend to convey a desire to do harm to the person.  Rather, I was engaged in an act of self-defense.  I wanted him to cease pushing me.  In truth, he had arguments of a sort.  But, in actual fact, he also made assumptions I did not share.  And, I'd not got the energy to unearth those assumptions.  Nor, I think, would he have been interested in discussing them.

In that context, IHY was, whilst childish, probably the best I could have done.