Postcards to the future

An annual tradition in our family is to go to Mohonk Mountain House on President’s Day weekend. It’s a tradition started by my wife’s father and stepmother and we are happy to take part in it.

This year Mohonk Mountain House is celebrating its 150^th anniversary (called a sesquicentennial if you want to use a big word and impress yourself). As part of its observation of this milestone, the historic resort plans to create a time capsule to be opened in 100 years. They invited all of their guests to fill out postcards to be sent 100 years into the future, presumably to be poured over by historians or glanced at by bemused guests in the next century.

One hundred years ago, much of the Western world was still recovering from the First World War, though no one would have called it that at the time because another 20 years would pass before the next World War would start. World War I was called simply “The Great War,” and Western civilization had not seen anything like it. Technology had helped nations create weapons that had not been used in large scale before and casualties were enormous. In fact, there are still areasof France off limits today because of the plethora of unexploded ordinance from the First World War.

Today our world is not in the after math of a great war but rather adjusting to the dissolution of the world order that was began after the Second World War. We have a new dominant world power in China and the world’s greatest superpower, the U.S., deeply divided. There is no shortage of conflict in the world that is taking a drastic human toll.

The world is still a scary, violent place, just in different ways than it was in 1919. We didn’t have mass school shootings in the U.S. in 1919, but we had a flu pandemic that killed more than 180,000 people. We didn’t have MS-13 gangs, but we still had anarchist bombings and labor and race riots. It’s not a bold statement to say that the world of 2119 will be frightening to the historical researchers who read our Mohonk postcards. Between now and then the world will change dramatically in ways we can’t predict, but human nature and the existence of conflict will remain.

But what is also constant, and what I tried to convey in the card, is that while conflict is never ending, so is hope and the human drive for improvement. As long as people have killed one another and destroyed past civilizations with sloth and greed, they have also constructed new communities and sought out the better angels of their natures. 

In the postcard we left for the 100-year time capsule at Mohonk, I wrote to a future that would be as conflicted and fearful as our own. I conveyed to them that now, as will be the case then, people gathered to see the beauty of nature and share good times with the people they loved.

I added our postcard to the gathering mass of missives to the future, hopeful that maybe one of my great grandchildren will be enjoying some time at the Mohonk Mountain House and get to read our note from the past.

Political enemies make the best friends

There is a popular meme being widely shared on social media. It depicts several of current crop of presidential candidates and says, “If you are voting for any of these candidates, please unfriend me now …. Just kidding. I’m not twelve.” 

It’s a funny meme and one people ought to take to heart. I learned long ago that political views and personalities are not one and the same. Just because someone agrees with you on political philosophy and public policy doesn’t mean they are agreeable people are even good people. You will find that you will completely loathe some of your own allies more than your sworn enemies. A person’s personality is not dictated by their politics.

Some of my most productive and pleasant conversations have been with people on the extremes, the outside of what is considered proper or viable political discourse. These people could speak honestly with me because they had nothing to lose. They didn’t have to put on airs to convince themselves or the world around them who they were. Their outlier status bestowed on them an easy confidence that meant they didn’t have to prove who they were or make a dramatic demonstration to establish their identity at every turn.

I have friends who span the political spectrum from far left to far right. Some of my friends would be horrified that I’m friends with communists, cops, Black Lives Matter protesters, white nationalists, transgender activists, Republicans, Democrats, Green Party activists, Libertarians, and more. I’m friends with active duty military members as well as pacifists, anti-war demonstrators as well as veterans (and some of the most fervent anti-war people I know are veterans).

I didn’t set out to cultivate friendships from every political persuasion, it just happened that way. I’ve met lots of interesting people from all walks of life. I value the friendships I’ve made along the way even though I will always disagree with many of my friends on the important issues of the day. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I don’t want to live in a world where everyone agrees with me. That would be a strange place and no fun at all. Life is better when your ideas are challenged and you are exposed to ideas on all sides. Many of the opinion writers I read are people I rarely agree with but their arguments are so well written I can’t resist. Also, how will you learn to defend your ideas unless they are challenged by worthy adversaries?

Also, human beings are complex, many-sided beings. The person who may be very conservative on one issue may be very liberal on another. No one worth knowing is a completely blank slate of ideological talking points. No one with a sound intellect can be pigeon-holed into a stereotypical ideological bracket on every matter.

There’s nothing wrong with despising someone’s ideas or speaking your mind when it’s appropriate. But trying to pick and choose your friends by an ideological litmus test will lead you to quickly paint yourself into a corner. 

The Wounded Warrior Project Should Not Exist

Memorial Day is a day when millions of Americans pay lip service to people who gave their life in service to our country. It’s happening at a time when the government’s treatment of our veterans has never been worse.

Laying a wreath for the dead is not a substitute for respecting the living. And our veterans have been mistreated in ways that ought to shame a nation that claims to be a serious military power. The current state of neglect of our veterans is about as respectful as taking a piss on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Why are there celebrities making commercials for private charities that care for veterans? Why should any private charity exist to support wounded veterans? Our government accepted full responsibility for the health of our veterans when the veteran signed on the dotted line to join. There should be no issue with veterans getting the things they need.

Yet our TV broadcasts are teeming with entertainers taking to the airwaves to beg couch potatoes for money on Memorial Day weekend to help wounded American veterans.

Ours is supposed to be the most powerful military in the world. Our armed forces operate drones that can send a missile up a camel’s ass two thousand miles away but can’t afford a few shekels to build a wheelchair ramp for a crippled soldier? Am I the only person in TV land who thinks this is horrifying horse shit?

Health care for your soldiers is a basic, like ammunition for rifles, boots and helmets. You wouldn’t send a soldier or Marine into battle without ammunition, you don’t bring them home without the ability to provide health care.

What better way to tell our enemies that the U.S.A. is a paper tiger than to let them see that private charities have to help care for wounded U.S. service members?

And it’s gotten worse. The Bureau of Veterans Affairs was shown to keep secret waiting lists at some of its hospitals to cover up the terrible waiting times for medical care. So upper management knew how bad things were and tried to cover it up rather than fix it.

So while the efforts of the Wounded Warrior Project are noble, such charities shouldn’t exist because they shouldn’t have to. Veterans with serious injuries should have all of their health needs tended to. They shouldn’t have to raise money for wheelchairs or artificial limbs. Those benefits should be a given and not subject to debate.

We have an all-volunteer military and haven’t had a draft since the Vietnam War (although the “stop-loss” programs and activation of inactive reservists during the George W. Bush administration served as a kind of draft, with the lottery restricted to veterans who had already served). So it behooves the government to make good on its promises to veterans. Among the outraged public are potential new recruits. If the military is willing to break its promises to the aged and the infirm, why should a patriotic American want to join. (N.B. – Years ago a family member who was then enlisted in the armed forces described recruiters as “hired liars.”).

So while I hope everyone at least takes a moment to reflect on the brave men and women who have sacrificed their lives for our country, we should determine that there won’t have to be private charities tending to the needs of our veterans. 

Getting More Women Killed For “Progress”

The Department of Defense announced that it will end its ban on women in combat.

I don’t oppose putting women in combat because I believe women are incapable, I oppose sending women into combat because I believe in civilization.

As someone who’s been rejected from all four major branches of the armed services (maybe I should have tried the Coast Guard), I’m the last person who has the right to catalogue the horrors of war or detail military service with any first-hand war experience. I spent most of the Iraq war typing angry libertarian screeds against foreign intervention or denouncing George W. Bush from the comforts of various New York bar stools, so if you ask me what combat credentials I have, I have none.

No one questions that women have served with distinction in uniform and many women are capable fighters. If I’m blessed with daughters, I will certainly teach them how to shoot. The responsibility to defend the country ultimately falls on every citizen, male or female.

But being put into front-line combat is not the same thing, and the government’s move to put women into combat could indicate two very troubling things: either our military is stretched so thin that it’s throwing women into the relentless deployments into the Middle East or our President is so ensconced in his own vision of himself as a progressive hero that he’s abandoned any serious leadership as Commander in Chief.

Of course the supporters of this policy are trotting out all kinds of medal-laden Pentagon brass to reassure us that this is a thoughtful policy and how dare we question the contributions to women in our society, etc. etc. All the false cultural battle lines will be drawn and manned by the same predictable caricatures.

I’ll take my lumps as a sexist civilian villain and retreat to the confines of science, biology and knowledge of the world at large. Sure, men are more likely to be trigger-happy meatheads, but a man cannot get pregnant. Of course many women are capable of the grueling endurance needed for difficult missions, but women are more likely to be raped. We can’t stop our own servicemen from raping women in the armed forces. How is it a tribute to women to put them into the hands of our enemies?

This policy separates the people who live in reality versus those who prefer their own progressive version of it.

I hope we can all agree that men and women should be treated equally under the law. The disabled and the elderly should be treated equally under the law, but we don’t send the disabled and the elderly into combat, even though I’m sure there are senior citizens and paraplegics who are crack shots with a rifle. That’s not “ageist” or “able-ist,” that’s just damn common sense.

When women, the old and the infirm are on the front lines of combat, it means the country sending them into battle is close to defeat, when its population of military-age men has been depleted by the ravages of war.

What kind of country would send women into combat when it didn’t have to? A self-defeating one, a nation so obsessed with identity politics that we’re blinded to the cold hard facts of life and death.

This policy is a sad, sad mistake. It confuses the value of treating all people equally under the law with a mandate to wipe away any meaningful standards that acknowledge differences between the genders. That’s not progress, that’s self-satisfied ignorance at the expense of women’s lives. 

(Image taken from Reuters.)