Lex Anteinternet: 2021 Thanksgiving Reflections

Lex Anteinternet: 2021 Thanksgiving Reflections: 

2021 Thanksgiving Reflections

In some prior years I've put up a Thanksgiving Day post. Some years, I don't.

There's a lot of hubris in writing a blog, a principal part of that being the thoughts that 1) you have anything meaningful to say; and 2) anyone cares to read it.  In large part, probably neither of those are true, so no blogger should feel compelled to write an entry.  Still, some years. . . 

So started off the Thanksgiving Day post last year.   The one that was entitled:

2020 Thanksgiving Reflections.

The comment about hubris is exactly correct.  Lots of bloggers put up posts like this, but frankly, there's no guaranty that anyone reads them or cares what you have to say about anything.

Moreover, this blog has zillions of posts as it often has more than one daily.  Indeed, that's the case for today.  There are a lot of Thanksgiving posts up for November 25, 2021.  People might wonder how much time is actually devoted to this blog (not much), as that would be misleading.  I should invest the small amount of time that goes into this into my slow moving novel, as it would read like War And Peace by now.

Well, anyhow, I wasn't particularly inclined to do this post this year, but given as there was one for the exceedingly odd year of 2020, and 2021 turned out to be a followup to it in oddness, I thought I would.  Which leads me to this.  

So much of what I wrote last year is even more the case now, that I was tempted to repeat a pile of it.  As repeating an essay in its entirety just burdens the reader, who probably doesn't read it, I'm going to forego it, however.

I think the essay was a good one, and I'd suggest linking back in and reading it, perhaps prior to completing this one, assuming anyone is going to do so.

Since November 26, 2020, when I wrote that gloomy essay, a lot has happened.  

It was already the case, of course, that Donald Trump had lost the 2020 Presidential Election. It wasn't clear to me, however, the extent to which he'd go on to full deny losing it, and the extent to which a large section of the American public would buy into that.  Indeed, I was shocked just a month later when I heard for the first time somebody that I knew really well express the stolen election line.  Just a little over a month following Thanksgiving the former Presidents acolytes would attempt to put him back in power while a full scale attempt at a coup was being engaged in by the former President's political minions and operatives.  It failed, but only barely so.

Had it succeeded, I don't know that it would have succeeded, as odd as that may seem to state.  The majority of Americans, and it was a majority for a second time, who voted against Donald Trump would not have accepted him as President, and it would have gone right to the United States Supreme Court.  Predicting the Court is always difficult, but its first instinct is self-preservation, and I think it would have struck the effort down.

I also think there would have been violence, and I think that American democracy would have been damaged for generations.  I'm not entirely certain that had the Supreme Court not have declared Trump's election invalid, that there wouldn't have been a violent removal.  Advocates of force to cause something to occur frequently forget that the invitation of force often causes, in the human world, a greater, opposite, reaction.  

We can all be thankful, therefore, that this scenario did not play out.

We can be worried, however, about what may develop going forward.

The US is now already on the list of countries, according to an international group, that has been backsliding on democracy as there's a large section of the Republican Party that actually believes what Trump has been saying. Trump remains the head of the GOP and will run again, assuming that his advanced old age doesn't catch up with him first. And also assuming that due process of law does not.

That's an open question.  Mitch McConnell made it clear, during Trump's impeachment proceedings, that he was guilty of sedition.  He hasn't been charged.  It's not impossible that he shall not be.  If he is, and I'd lay even money on it, that will create its own firestorm, reminding us once again why it is important to strike while the iron is hot, something that our society, led by it is by the ancient, increasingly has a very difficult time doing.

It might prove to be necessary, however, for this to occur in order for the Republican Party to overcome the direction it seems to be headed.  Elements of it clearly want to.

Part of where it's headed in Wyoming is a dedicated effort to eject a Congressman whom conservatives loved prior to her deciding to stand her ground on principals.  It's shocking. We don't know where this is headed yet, but there's reason to believe it will fail, and a reckoning may be coming inside the state itself.

Anyhow, as Americans head towards their Thanksgiving Day meals, there's less reason to be calm about the fate of the nation than there has been at any point since the Civil War.  But there's some hope that we've started to very slowly round a corner.

And that's not all.  Last year at this time COVID 19 vaccinations had not started.  Now over half the eligible population in the country has been vaccinated, and the vaccines now extend down to childhood ages.  There's real hope that the Pandemic may be beat, but there's still a bizarre politicization of the virus that continues to haunt the nation.  And that's certainly something to be thankful for.

As part of this, this past week a person I knew, but I can't really say that I was friends with, died of COVID 19.

I haven't asked the details, but I was shocked as I was aware that the person passing was younger than I.  I was somewhat surprised to learn that the person wasn't that much younger, 54 years of age, as I would have guessed it was a decade or so.

I didn't ask the details, but I know that the person was almost surely not vaccinated, and I know why.  That makes this a death that surely could have been avoided.

At one time I wondered, along with people like Fr. Dwight Longnecker, if the Pandemic would cause a big reassessment of some things.  I still wonder that, although I'm less hopeful about that than I had been.  Some reassessment is going on, however, as the press has been reporting that the country is in the midst of the Great Resignation, an event reflecting people walking off from their jobs, post COVID lockdowns, and refusing to return to them.  While people are worried about that, I'm hopeful, even though it's hoping against hope, that this reflects a reconsideration of the Industrial economy we've bought off on for so long, and maybe a bit of a wandering back to a Chestertonesque one.

Closer to home, I suppose, it's been a very odd year and perhaps one of turmoil.  As I've noted elsewhere, I never did stay at home during the pandemic, but I was often the only one at work.  As part of that, during part of that time frame my two college age kids were back home, confined to Zoom U.  This past semester that has not been true, so my wife and I, who went from empty nesters to full housers went back to empty nesters.  It was somewhat disorienting. 

Also disorienting was watching the law evolve during the time period. Zoom came in and like the detective in Brecht's Maßnehmen Gegen Die Macht, it's grown fat and won't leave.  Doing in person depositions now is almost a thing of the past, it seems, although some older lawyers, such as myself, are bucking the trend.  Some younger ones basically don't leave their houses anymore.  The legal world is in transition and, at age 58, I don't like that.

Something that I also don't really quite like is the realization that I'm past the point where there's any point in my pondering the judiciary, which I used to do.  Oddly, I saw a comment from a figure associated with the judicial appointments expressing concern the other day about the lack of applicants.  Part of that is that those like myself, of which there were quite a few, who had lots of experience in the civil law were basically not welcome as applicants, so we quit applying.  In the meantime it seems that most younger lawyers have decided to eschew the courtroom.  Indeed, I received comments from a lawyer I tried a case against about being baffled on being in the process as it just doesn't happen much.  It still happens for me, however, and more than once last year.  I'm feeling like Crazy Horse, in being an acknowledged anachronism, fighting on.

As that anachronism, this past year I've worked heavily and that keeps up.  This Fall has been the worst hunting season, a season I highly value, since I was a law student.  I just haven't been getting out, and keeping up at work is why, or so I believe.

This past year something that's been a shock to see is the friends of my children all getting married, which means that my children are of that age.  Indeed, they both have fairly long term girlfriends/boyfriends at this point, all of which causes some angst for a parent.  All I'm really concerned about, at the end of the day, is metaphysical final destinations, and I think it's easy to get diverted on that trip.  Life offers a lot of stopping off points and compromises, some of which can be hard to get back on the train from.

In the meantime, however, that train and the changes to the scenery it brings roll on, and that can be a shock for those watching the passengers.  2022, just coming up, promises big changes here in the smaller nest.

Well, perhaps it's time to set all these things aside.  We're a year past an insurrection, and there's some hope that we may be putting it behind us. We're well into a final cycle of vaccinations, and there's hope that the Pandemic may be starting to get behind us. And its clear we're rethinking a lot of things as a society.  

All of that is something to be thankful for.   And perhaps more pacific pastures are on the horizon, even if there are a lot of breaks to struggle through to get to them.

2020 Thanksgiving Reflections.

Thanksgiving Reflections

A Thanksgiving Passing

Lex Anteinternet: Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving

Lex Anteinternet: Foothill Agrarian: The Emblem on the Wall.

Lex Anteinternet: Foothill Agrarian: The Emblem on the Wall.: 

Foothill Agrarian: The Emblem on the Wall.

This entry from one of the blogs we follow here is well worth reading:

Foothill Agrarian: The Emblem on the Wall:   On the wall of the FFA classroom at Placer High School hangs an FFA emblem, made entirely of vegetable seeds. It’s a remarkable piece of w...

I just started following this blog, but in reading it, while there are certainly some differences between my experience and his, and  my world and his, there are a remarkable number of similarities and many of the sentiments expressed on it find reflection in various posts here.

And here's one.

I've split the rural/town divide my entire life.  I'm a rural person, but I've always had a town address.  Had it been possible to simply become a rancher in the early 1980s, when I graduated from high school, I would have done that, no matter what it meant.  I.e., while a friend of mine claims that I'm so intellectual I could only have found a career as a lawyer or a priest, in his German view, that's not really so.  I would happily have spent my days around cattle, horses, cats and dogs if I could have.  Being born in 1963 meant that wasn't possible, just as it would have been impossible had I been born in 53, 43, or probably even 33.  Realistically, it's probably only my grandparents who last lived in a world where that was a realistic option, i.e., to go from a city street to full-time employment in agriculture.  I've made it part way there however, and indeed but for the more realistic economic concerns of my spouse, maybe I would be full time there.

Anyhow, my father was the first member of his family to go to university, let alone obtain an advance degree.  Of his three siblings, two more attended university, but I think he's the only one that obtained a degree.  An uncle ended up in the Army before he completed his studies and then had a long career as a fireman, a job he loved.  One sister was married fairly early after high school and another did attend university, but I don't think she graduated, although I don't know.

They were all highly intelligent.  Indeed, their father, who left school at age 13, helped them with their calculus homework when they were in high school.  I didn't take calculus until I was in university and I found it extremely difficult.  I can't imagine how smart you have to be to pick it up on your own.

My mother was not a high school graduate, or the Quebec equivalent of it, but she did obtain an associates degree in the 1970s. Her schooling was cut short by the Great Depression.  Both of her parents, however, were university graduates, with that status being very unusual for a woman such as her mother at the time.

The point, well I'm not sure if there is one other than to note that all of these people were really sharp.  On my father's side, they were very sharp people associated with the cattle and sheep industry, which my father was to until that was cut short by my grandfather's death.

I guess that's all background to something noted in the linked in article.

When I was growing up, the rural/town divide was there, but the lines were very blurred compared to what they now are.  Many of us kinds in town were quite feral, so to speak.  I.e, being a town kid meant, if you were male, that you were probably at least somewhat of a hunter and/or fisherman.  But things worked the other way around too.  Of my father's friends, quite a few of the men were ranchers or had come from ranches and farms before they went into professional jobs in town.  A doctor or lawyer was as likely to have grown up on a farm or ranch than in a city, and to retain rural interests.

Ranchers in my region have always been pretty conservative.  They haven't always been 100% Republican.  Part of that has to do with the way that the parties have evolved, but as an example, a ranching member of my wife's family was such a Democrat that he always voted a straight Democratic ticket, no matter what.  The point is that as late as the 80s, at least, a diversity of views existed beyond the city limits.  For that matter, a diversity of views existed within the city limits. 

Political party diversity has all but died in my state, starting for some reason with the Clinton Administration.  Up until that time the Democratic Party here was a minority party, but a strong one.  At one point in the 70s our Senator and Congressman were Democrats.  We had an entire string of Democratic Governors, having had one up until fairly recently.  Something started to fall apart during the Clinton Administration, however.

Anyhow, conservatism has always been strong in the rural areas outside of town. And its expressed itself a couple of times in huge divides between agriculturalist and everyone else, including other people, that resulted in near political uprisings by the regular folks.  All of these have involved efforts by ranchers and farmers to take over, in some fashion, the public lands or wildlife.  This is massively unpopular with average Wyomingites and it's been put down, as noted, a couple of times, but that hasn't stopped our Congressman from supporting it or Sen. Barrasso from getting it inserted into the 2016 GOP Platform.

What's become really remarkable, however, is the absolute elimination of diversity of views in the countryside.

Now, in fairness, diversity of views has been much reduced inside of town as well.  It's still there, but it's much more likely to show up in the break room or in closed door office conversations than openly.  It does occur, however.  Indeed, one of the things I've noted about Rep. Harshman's recent off color remarks about Rep. Gray is how many people, if they know you, will now say "he said what we were all thinking".  I'm really pretty surprised by it.

We vaccinate cattle.

Eh?

Now, that's not a sudden non sequitur.

I note that as the resistance towards COVID 19 vaccination was an epic level out in the prairie.  Not so much anymore, but it took some people dying in order to change that.  And even now, at a recent gathering, I was hesitant to mention that yes, I'm vaccinated.

Now, in town there are people who will subject you to a blistering lecture about being vaccinated.  But they're a minority.  Most of the people who are avoiding vaccination on a whatever basis will at least cite individual rights as part of their view and that people shouldn't be required to get vaccinated on that basis. That's an entirely separate topic, but in some rural quarters the opposition to vaccination was really so strong that you just avoided the topic if you could.

As noted, that changed when people started getting really sick and some died.  A lot of the hold outs started getting vaccinated at that time.  It baffles me a bit, however, as we vaccinate our cattle and horses, and nobody seems to think it inconsistent to vaccinate them, and not ourselves.

But then there's politics.

Ever since the election of President Obama there's been a turn towards polarization in politics that's had a disturbing corrupted aspect to it.  And coming up with it there started to be a set of beliefs that oddly you had to subscribe to.  Indeed, the one real sharp distinction, I think, at this point between conservationist who are sportsmen, and agriculturalist, is that conservationist have adopted the mantra that "you are entitled to your own beliefs, but nobody is entitled to their own facts".

Like it or not, you really aren't entitled to your own beliefs. That's an American bromide, but it's completely false. The truth, and much truth can be objectively determined, dictates what you are entitled to believe.  This is true of the physical and the metaphysical, and therefore it not only dictates what you have to believe about physics and science, but religion and philosophy.

Now, as Shakespeare noted, human knowledge is quite limited, and can be much in error, which provided the basis for the quote from Hamlet that:

There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio,Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

In that quote, it should be noted, the bard was referencing "philosophy" as science, the two being a combined discipline at the time.  And what it also doesn't mean is the left wing position that somehow science and religion are diametrically opposed to one another.  They are not.  Indeed, I'm a Mass attending, Confession going, Catholic, and I have a degree in the hard sciences and there's no conflict at all, something that every Catholic agreed upon until very recently.

So what's my point?

Somehow, in the last twenty years or so, people went from being in camps to nearly being in cults, politically.  That is usually the end stage for a democracy.  When members of the opposite party become the enemy, in your mind, you become the enemy of democracy yourself.  And we're darned near there.

There are now those in the local GOP, and more than a few, who are at the point where the only thing they can see is whether or not you agree with Trump populism or not.  Whenever a Republican legislature shows an inclination to ponder or debate, if he's not right in line with Trump populism, he's criticized simply on that basis alone on a basis that shows no inclination to thought.  To depart from the line is to question, apparently, something held to be dogma.  One Republican figure at the time of the last election seriously backed a proposal to boot Republicans who didn't unyieldingly adhere to the official platform out of the party.  The leadership of the party more or less officially takes the position that the January 6 insurrection didn't happen and is pretty close to maintaining that the election was stolen, which is simply untrue.  

That's not the point of this post.  But this is.  Nobody, in any occupation, should take their beliefs from a political party unthinkingly.  But people out in the sticks should do that least of all.  The political parties didn't come up with their platforms at a branding or at a lunch break during the harvest.

What everyone should do is to have reality inform their political beliefs.  You can believe what you want to, in other words, as long as it isn't contrary to nature, science and reality.

And, we might add, as long as it isn't contrary to the true principals of your Faith.  Faith is supposed to inform your world view.  Your politics doesn't inform your faith.

But, for a lot of people, it seems like it does.

Anyhow, some points to ponder.

For those out in the sticks, there's a lot more of them, than us.  When people tell us that the election was stolen, we ought to consider that we're a tiny minority and that what natural and obvious in our political views probably doesn't seem that way at all to most people. The amazing thing isn't that so many liberal politicians are elected the US. . . the amazing thing is that any conservative ones are.

In other words, you might not have wanted Biden to be elected, but the fact of the matter is that Trump only was President in the first place because of the Electoral College.  He lost the popular vote twice.  Most Americans don't want him as President.  The surprising thing was that he ever was, not that he lost, and he did lose, in 2020.

Most politicians aren't ranchers or farmers and there's a lot of money in politics and it didn't come from us.  People don't invest money in something and not expect to get a return.  Being a member of a conservative political party, therefore, is one thing, but buying off on everything it says about everything else, including science and industry, is something a person shouldn't do without really thinking it over.

Neither political party is the Agricultural Party, or the Rural Party, or the Agrarian Party, and frankly they don't really have that much interest in the topic at the national level.

Just because agriculture is an industry doesn't mean that what's good for other industries is good for it.  Far from it.

Science is science and you can't ignore science as you don't like what it means for you personally.  You don't get, for example, to smoke cancer free because you like smoking.  

Agriculture has much more in common with conservationist movements than any other movement out in the wider American landscape. The two should be allied, not at each others throats.

We should be adaptable, and there are a lot of things we may have to be adapting too.  Ironically, unless you are Amish or eccentric, almost everything you are doing today features some sort of adaption that your grandparents or even parents made in the first place.

Moving forward sometimes means moving back.

Lex Anteinternet: Momento mori.

Lex Anteinternet: Momento mori.: 

Momento mori.

I can't recall exactly when it was, but it was some point while I was in university. As I don't remember it being right when I first went down to UW, I suspect it was when I went to law school, which I would have started in the fall of 1987.  I was supposed to start in the fall of 1986, but I had reservations about it, so I held off for a year, and my mother was also deathly ill as well, so I had reason to return home.

I'll leave that story for some other time, but what I recall is that I went back down to UW and at the start of law school I was under the impression that it was going to be really hard. Truth be known, law school, and I suspect any law school, is an incredibly easy course of study.  Indeed, one of the first deflating things about becoming a lawyer, at least for me, was to realize how easy law school was. ^[1]   I'd just gone through an undergraduate course of study in geology, and that was very hard.  Law school involved readsing cases and knowing what they held.  Any idiot can do that.

Anyhow, the first year I didn't come home much to my old hunting haunts as I thought the finals as the end of the semester were going to be really hard and I couldn't afford the time off.  M'eh, they were not.  That did establish a course of conduct, however, in that throughout law school I didn't come home for Thanksgiving. It was right before finals and I always used it to study for finals.  I didn't go home for Spring Break either.

Somewhere in there, I came home and found to my surprise that my father hadn't gotten his antelope.  He had gone out after I had come home and got mine, but he didn't get one that time and didn't get one at all.  It was a shock.  Even my mother, who was quite ill, remarked on it, and she'd gone out with him, whihc was also very surprising.

More surprising is that he hadn't hunted waterfowl at all.  

It concerned me as it didn't seem like him.

When I returned from law school, he was much his old self, but slowed down.  He still fished regularly when the streams opened back up.  He went with me when I hunted antelope and sometimes deer (he never took weekdays off to do these things ever, but back then I would).  He helped, and by that I mean did almost all the work, butcher a moose and an elk I shot back then.  But he also was getting a little absent minded, enough that I noticed.

The year he turned 62 he was too sick to go antelope hunting with me and my good friend Tom.  I knew he must be really sick, as he'd never cancelled on anything like that ever.  He died the following April, never recovering from what started off like a cold.

This has been on my mind.

It's not on my mind as I'm missing hunting season.  I'm not.  But it has occured to me that I've become so busy in recent years that I'm now like my father.  I don't take weekdays off to go, unlike when I what I did when I was younger.  At some point my father went from a schedule that was six days a week, with half a day off on Wednesday and half a day off on Saturday, to all of Saturday off, and retaining the half day off on Wednesday, but he still started work incredibly early.  For my part, over the years I've reached the point where I work six days a week nearly every week and sometimes seven days a week.  

The past year, or indeed ever since the onset of COVID, I've been really busy. Things may have slowed down for oether people, but they sure didn't for me.  So I've had my whithers to the yoke the entire time.  So I'm a bit tired right now.

Which is what my wife tells me is going on here.

Well, during the really busy run up to a trial I started waking up early, as in 4:00 a.m.  Recently that retreated back to 3:00 a.m, then a couple of times after that, it started crowing 2:00 a.m.  At that point you have to do something and so I'm not back to sleeping into 5:00 a.m., thank goodness.  But I'm just back to that.

Deer season has been wrapping up.

I didn't make the weekend before last out, as I had to work one of the days (I ended up working on Sunday) and we shipped cattle on Saturday.

No problems there, up at 3:00 a.m., worked all day, came home, ate out, and then up for Mass the following morning.  And off to work after that.

That meant that I didn't go out for deer that weekend, but I met my son in a new area that we tried the following weekend. And that went fine.  Up at 3:00, drove to Medicine Bow, met him there and hunted all day, without luck.

That takes me to this past weekend.

It was a frustrating week for a lot of reasons, some of which I'll not go into detail with but which make me feel a lot like John Daly, the saddle maker, in the 1920s.  Anyhow, I had to work again on Saturday, which I did until a little after 2:00 p.m.  About that time I knocked off and stopped by Our Lady of Fatima for confession. That took a little longer than I'd anticipated as the pastor was ill and a substitute priest came from downtown, but he was a bit late.  I stopped at the sporting goods store after that, thinking about getting a replacement 15 watt gmrs radio for the Jeep to replace one I'd recently bought which was defective.  I went home after that, getting home a little after 3:30.

I'd thought about going to Mass that night, and asked Long Suffering Spouse about going, but in the end we went to the across town sporting goods store instead.  I was just pretty fatigued by that point for some reason, with the suspect being that I"d bee up since about 2:00 a.m.  I'd have been better if I went that night, as that would have given me all the next day to go deer hunting, but I was simply worn out.  I ddin't even get ready to go the following day.

The next morning I slept in to about 4:00 a.m., much later than I'd bee doing, and felt pretty good.  While I was tempted to skip breakfast (I think eatinng three meals a day has contributed to my earlier rising for reasons I'll skip going into), I intead made two breakfast sandwiches with eggs, Canadian bacon and cheese, which is a gigantic breakfast for me.  I don't really know what I was thinking, quite frankly.

I continued to feel fine until about halfway through Mass.

About that time, I was hit by a wave of fatigue that's difficult to describe.  I attributed it to eating a big breakfast, but about the same time I began to feel odd.  By the time I left Mass I was definitely feeling odd.  At home, I briefly considered staying home for the day or switching to nearby duck hunting, but that was conceding I didn't want to, so I loaded up and got ready to go.  By that time, I didn't just feel sleepy, I had a toothache where my one remaining wisdom tooth is located.

Now that might require a little explanation.

I was born with wisdom teeth, having a full set of four.  When I was a teenager they started to "erupt", and my father pulled out the top two when it was convenient to do so.  We always think of oral surgeons doing that work, but he did it for me as a result dentist.  And both of them were removed without pain or inconvenience.  I amazed at the time when people complained about how painful this process was, as it wasn't for me.

But he didn't get to the bottom two before he died.  For the most part this hasn't been much of a problem.  They'd erupt from time to time, but generally that would pass with there being only a little pain while they were erupting.  

Once I was in my fifties, however, I began to break molars.  And I broke one that was near my back left wisdom tooth. When that one was pulled by the oral surgeon (it was cracked right to the base in three pieces), the wisdom tooth in that area was removed as well.

That left just one.

This wasn't a problem until just the other day.  I cracked the molar over there, and it was crowned, just like its opposite on the other side, leaving one molar between it and the wisdom tooth.  The crown came in just last week.

All of a sudden, on Sunday morning, the wisdom tooth made its presence very much known.

It started hurting, and that went from annoying to really noticeable.  I ignored it however, hoping it would go away.  I packed up, and drove off.  By the time I left the gas station, I had an incredibly dry mouth, and it was really hurting. This grew worse and worse as I drove out to where I wanted to hunt.  I finally reached a place I wanted to check my maps and stopped.

By that time I was incredibly sleepy and in a huge amount of pain.  I got out a canteen of water I had with me, checking its appearance (I filled it up about two weeks ago), and took a drink. The drink tasted good and I sat in the truck for a while contemplating the maps. By now it was foggy and wet and had snowed, I was tracking mud, and we still had a very long ways to go.

Normally I  would have done that without hesitation.

Well, I hesitated.  I felt so sick, I turned around to head back in.

Driving back in quickly became dicey.  I was driving much slower than normal just due to the fatigue and the pain.  To add to it, my tongue started to swell up on one side, the side that the wisdom tooth was on.  I began to worry a little, but just a little, that I wouldn't be able to make it all the way back in, but then I was calmed by the double realities of being in far too much pain to accidentally fall asleep and that I had no other choice.  No other choice really focuses a person.

I hit the highway finally, by which time I took the truck out of four-wheel drive as it seemed like the weather had improved.  I started coming on in the hour-long highway speed final leg of the trip, still keeping my speed down.  I was doing highway speed, but not high speed, which was in part because of the road still being wet.  As I crossed the road where the bridge over the Power River is, I realized it was more than wet.

As I approached the accident scene, I knew what had happened. The Dodge truck, just like mine, had slip on black ice, its sudden disaster created in part because it was towing a trailer.  It had happened on the bridge.  It' had made it over the bridge, by which time the disaster was on.  It had gone off the road and the trailer had rolled.  One of the truck's windows was out.

I was headed towards the bridge myself of course and I knew that it had black ice, and I was in two-wheel drive.  I'll go into four-wheel drive at the drop of a hat, but there was no time to do it now.  Normally this would be pretty tense for me, but it wasn't.  Just hurt too much.  Up the hill I drove through what I knew to be a fatal accident site in bad weather from just a couple of years ago.  I stopped in Powder River and went into four-wheel drive.

By the time I got home, I didn't feel so bad, but I didn't feel great.  My wife recommended I take some Tylenol, but the tongue swelling had gone way down.  About 4:00 I drank a glass of Irish whiskey, very slowly.  I had a second over dinner, very slowly, and started to feel a lot better.  I stayed up as long as I could, but when it was obvious that no Trick or Treaters were going to common in the 20F weather, I went and took a shower and hung on for bed.  

On Monday I mostly felt a lot better.  The mouth pain still comes and goes.  I probably ought to call the dentist.  I recall my father telling me that oral infections have the risk of being fatal, simply due to their location.  The plan was, after all, to take that tooth out.

So, what of this experience, and those leading up to it?  When I was a kid in the 70s I recall watching in math class in junior high, for some inexplicable reason, a Disney cartoon that was filmed in the 40s, probably for industrial workers, reminding them to stay home if they were sick. The film took the position that a cold was nature's way of making you take a day off.

Maybe.

Or maybe it's an opportunist predators chance to take something out, as it's worn down.  Slow moving member of the herd so to speak.  Or, more accurately, somebody who have worn themselves down through long hours and stress has a bit of a weakened immune system, maybe.

Still, maybe that means take some time off.  That's hard to do, however, with things rolling on by.  Or at least so I imagine.  Perhaps it's often we imagine things that way.  Not like a month or anything, but a day or two.

World War Two Office of Defense Transporation poster.  Vacationing at home was no doubt easier prior to the cell phone and all of its electronic intrusions.

So perhaps none of this is as ominous as a person might suspect.  At 58, I'm in a lot better shape than many, probably most, my age.  But other than trying not to pack on too much weight (something I've always tried not to do, but I've always had to be careful about it), and being the beneficiary of my father's strong genes and my mother's athletic ones, I haven't been as active in any fashion as I used to be.  I don't have a regular exercise routine like I once did, which was based simply on the 1980s Army Physical Fitness Test and walking or riding my bicycle to work. ^[2]  And that's not really good. For some time, I've thought I should get back at it, but that's difficult when there are reasons you need your car at work and that you don't feel like doing much when you get  home.

Still, as noted in a prior entry, the scene from No Country For Old Men put in above makes more and more sense to me as time goes by, and like Servant of God Black Elk, I agree "“Death? There is no death, only a change of worlds.".  That's pretty evident.

And I'll be back out there next weekend.  Probably for waterfowl.  Deer has closed.

Footnotes.

1.  There are a whole series of things like this.

Being a lawyer is really hard work, but you soon find as a lawyer that the field isn't populated by super genious of a Wil E Coyote level. There are huge intellects in the law to be sure, but you also encounter some folks whom you know aren't Albert Einstein or  Richard Oppenheimer.

One of the big deflating things is the poor quality of oral argument, I'd note.  I've been to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals twice, and when you do that, you sit there waiting for your turn, listening to the prior arguments.  As a rule, they aren't great.  Indeed, all in all the arguments I've heard at the Wyoming Supreme Court have been much better.

2.  I'm not a "gym" guy and simply couldn't bring myself to do that, even though some of the gyms around here have swimming pools.

My mother was a fanatic swimmer and bicyclist which probably helps explain her remarkably physical condition after she recovered from her long illness.  She basically went from somebody on death's door to somebody in their high 70s who was incredibly fit.  Indeed, her really fit condition helped stave off, in my view, her ultimate mental decline, and when she suddenly quit her physical activities, I knew that something was very badly wrong.

Lex Anteinternet: "All along the watchtower".

Lex Anteinternet: "All along the watchtower".: There must be some kind of way outta here  Said the joker to the thief  There's too much confusion  can't get no relief Bob Dylan, &...

Churches of the West: Pope Francis restricts the use of the Extraordinar...

Churches of the West: Pope Francis restricts the use of the Extraordinar...: Immaculate Conception Church in Rapid City, South Dakota.  This church has been doing a daily and a Sunday Latin Mass for years.  It's a...

Lex Anteinternet: We should have told John F. Kennedy to stuff it. ....

Lex Anteinternet: We should have told John F. Kennedy to stuff it. ....: 

We should have told John F. Kennedy to stuff it. . . and we still can.

In trying to pressure Biden, the Catholic bishops forget the lessons of JFK

So runs an opinion headline in the Washington Post.

Well, as the sage Bart Simpson would have it, au contraire, mon fraire.

Or more accuaratley, I suppose ma soeur, as the author is Karen Tumulty.

The article by Tumulty is completely unoriginal, I'd note, with no brilliant insights whatsoever.  Rather, it follows the standard line of thought on this noting John F. Kennedy's 1960 address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, who were all Southern Baptists.  Kennedy, as Tumulty and others have noted, famously stated:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials; and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

This speech has been hailed again and again as brilliant strategic move by Kennedy, which it truly was.  But the overall impact, on a really cosmic scale, has rarely been analyzed.  

It may have been good for Kennedy, but it was a disaster for Catholics, and continues to be.  What the US Bishops are doing in some ways is reacting to that disaster, but only at the pint at which they almost have no choice but to do so.

Let's start with Kennedy himself.  He was a Sunday and Holy Day Mass going Catholic and part of an extended Catholic family, but not too surprisingly his own family bore little resemblance to the the Irish Catholics of the Catholic Ghetto who identified with him due to his Irish surname.  The Kennedy's were, and are, extremely wealthy and while as Catholics they were on the periphery of American life, they were on it in the way that wealthy Catholics could be as any member of a minority who was wealthy could be.  I.e., they were part of the in crowed in significant ways.

And as a member of that elite group John F. Kennedy carved for himself liberties that the Catholic faith never sanctioned, and he did so promiscuously literally.  Kennedy had a string of affairs that went beyond that which a person might normally be tempted to somewhat trying to excuse away.  He wasn't Franklin Roosevelt with a long time paramour, something inexcusable but at least not libertine.  

Indeed, under modern definitions, at least one of his affairs in the White House started with what moderns would be tempted to regard as a sort of rape.  It's debatable whether this category is truly applicable or not, but it was shockingly disgusting.  His behavior here, however, didn't stop with that, in regard to this individual, who descended pretty quickly into shocking behavior more expansively.  

We'll forgo detailing this more as its not necessary to this entry.  The point is that knowing what we now know about Kennedy, his willingness to make such a statement really ought to be put in a different light.  If he was declaring that he'd never let his religion directly dictate his actions, well, he wasn't in regard to personal behavior in a significant way, already.

This isn't an attempt to judge the state of Kennedy's soul at the time of his death.  We don't know that.  But what we can say is that in regard to his overall character, Kennedy really wasn't whom he seemed to be.  

And frankly, the statement wasn't that bold.  Catholic leaders of numerous nations had been in power in various places (including, we might note, Rome) since before the time of Constantine the Great.  The Church had never laid claim to a right to tell leaders how to rule, which was the real fear that the Southern Baptists at the time had.  Much has changed in regard to how Protestants view Catholics since 1960s, but some evangelical Protestants at the time, and now, held highly erroneous views of how the Pope's relationship to average Catholics, including politicians, worked.  Indeed, the political cartoon with the Pope directly pulling the strings of American Catholic politicians was a common feature of political debate up until the mid 20th Century.

The irony was that in 2020 the average Catholic is a lot more in tune with the Pope's views, in knowing what they are, than in 1960s, even though the way the Church actually works seems to be no more clear now than as opposed to then.  The current example is a good one in this regard. The Pope seems concerned that the US Bishops are going this direction.  The US Bishops are going this direction anyhow.  The Pope hasn't stopped them.  This is pretty typical over the ages.  When the Pope actually acts in regard to local Bishops, something has usually gone wrong on an extreme level.

And so too with politicians, as for the papacy.  And this overall situation is highly instructive.

Since the Second World War there's been a lot of attacks on the Papacy of Pope Pius XII, even though the actual historical record shows him to have done a remarkably good job during the crisis and the attacks against him unmerited and, to some degree, to have originated in a post war Communist smear campaign.  The Pope did speak against the Nazis during, and before, the war, in the form of proclamations on moral matters with the most noted being Mit Brennender Sorge.  Often forgotten is that some of the most direct attacks on the Nazi regime, however, came from the German Catholic Bishops themselves, one such example resulting in the White Rose movement.

What the Church didn't do is to issue a list of instructions to Catholics in power on "do this".  It did provide stout moral guidance, however.  It is of note here that in both the White Rose instance, and the July 20 plot, the prime movers were Catholics and Catholics were heavily represented.

How's this relate to what we're now seeing?

Well, pretty heavily.

In 1960s, when Kennedy gave his speech, the social issues that exist today and which are so much in the forefront, didn't.  No fault divorce didn't exist until 1970.  Abortion was just coming in as a state issue and didn't become the forced law of the land until 1973's Roe v. Wade.  The millennia old definition of marriage was completely unchallenged anywhere.

Things were moving, to be sure, and that should have been a warning.  The Kinsey report started being popularized right after World War Two and was given serious treatment even though the statistical methodology was grossly inaccurate and the conduct used to generate the badly skewed data heavily skewed. This played right into the hands of a new breed of pornographer lead by Hugh Hefner.  Starting in the 1950s an assault on conventional sexual morality commenced that would explode in the 1960s, but this wasn't obvious to most Catholics. The warnings were there, but they were not fully nor naturally appreciated.

Given this, in the enthusiasm that there might be a Catholic President, most Catholics joined the bandwagon and the Church didn't pull Kennedy in and say "be careful". After all, he wasn't really saying anything that generally shocked Catholics in any fashion in the context of the times.  Charles DeGaulle was a sincere and devout Catholic, for example, and nobody had any thought that the Bishops in France or the Pope was running France.

This would have been harmless enough, and still would be, but for the fact that very rapidly Catholics adopted, due to Kennedy and his speech, something that many evangelical Protestants never did, which was the concept of a completely personal separation of Church and State.  Where as everyone agrees that there should be no state church, many in the evangelical Protestant community do believe that a person's faith should fully inform their political conduct.  Many Catholics do as well, with most sincere ones believing that, but Kennedy's massive popularity, combined with the concept of his being an Irish Catholic, caused average American Catholics to believe that a full separation was a okay.  I.e, as long as I don't personally engage in . . . . it doesn't matter what others do.

The Church has never believed that in any form.  The declarations during World War Two show that.  It was never the case that the Church took the view that individual Germans could participate in the atrocities of the Third Reich and have a clean moral conscience as long as they had purity of heart.  Knowing that is what caused some to attempt tyrannicide.  But in the United States, which had no such overarching moral issue at the time, and where Catholics were on the side of liberal civil rights efforts, it was easy for things to became blurred pretty quickly.

By the 1970s there were liberal Catholic religious in political office.  And liberal Catholics began to side with things that seemed to square with at least some aspects of Catholic thought.  Where as some Catholic clerics had urged Catholics to participate in the fighting in Vietnam in the U.S. military early on, as it was a struggle against Communism, some Catholic clerics were openly opposing it by the late 1960s. And you can see how either view can be squared with the Faith.

But what never could be were developments in social issues that attacked marriage and the nature of sexual conduct, and which were contrary to Catholic views on the sanctity of life.  None the less, acclimated by the 1970s to a personal separation of Church and State, and being Catholic only on Sunday, lots of Catholic politicians went right along with these developments.  Pretty soon, in the tumult of the times, and with other developments inside the Church itself in the 1960s, average Catholics also did.

Unexercised muscles atrophy.  But failing to exercise for somebody who has, doesn't come overnight.  Any single man who used to have an exercise routine is probably aware of that.  The pressures of life and busy schedules, and just the thought that you'll stay home and watch TV lead to a situation sooner or later in which the former athlete has put on fifty pounds and is pretty tired just getting through the day.

Moral authority works the same way.  Things that should have been said decades ago weren't, and after awhile an entire body of Catholics convinces themselves that they're really good and observant Catholics even while omitting anything the Faith that's personally difficult.  Any Catholic with Catholic associates knows this.

At some point, however, there's a point at which you reach that you have no choice.  A person has a heart attack and is sent home with doctor's instructions.  People who smoke are told to knock it off.  You get the point.

And with moral authority, you reach some point where you have to exercise it as you have no other moral choice. That's where we are, and that's what I noted the other day in this entry:

Lex Anteinternet: A Corrective Warning.: We started off to comment on a couple of newsworthy items from the Catholic news sphere the other day but like a lot of things here, we only...

The Pope is saying be careful.  He isn't saying don't.  That's up to the Catholic Bishops in the United States. And looking at where we are now, they really have no choice but to act.

Individual Catholics, of course, also have individual free will.  The history of the world shows that people make difficult choices only when somebody is backing them up, and only when others are obviously doing the same.  There are exceptions, but those exceptions are heroic for that very reason, they're exceptions against the tide.  Observant orthodox Catholics have nearly been that exception for some time now, but things seem to swinging around to them.

Standing in their way, really, is the generation that came up in the 1960s, or just behind them. A lot of them have had nice lives riding the high point of American economic exceptualism, an era that's now really over, and are really not in tune with the world as it is. They're comfortable with the American Civil Religion, which is basically Christian as long as it isn't too hard, and which still, in spite of the Trump assault on democracy, holds that God basically listens to our vote on thing where we find it too hard.  As Catholics, they've acclimated themselves to the erroneous belief that they can omit big chunks of the Faith, as they have for so long.

That isn't Catholic, however.

The Church never acts very quickly.  So what the US Bishops will do, they won't do until fall.  That gives Joe Biden, who attends Mass every Sunday and on Holy Days, and who is openly Catholic, lots of time to comport his conduct to the tenants of the Faith.  But like men who go home from the hospital with instructions not to smoke, not to drink and exercise, that won't be easy.  Physicians state that most people don't actually clean up their personal health issues, but simply carry on.  And that doesn't involve the issue of pride that comes with decades of going down a certain political path that now needs to be corrected.

A path that John F. Kennedy started us out on.

Lex Anteinternet: On Empathy

Lex Anteinternet: On Empathy: 

On Empathy

I really pondered whether to post this at all.  Ultimately, I decided to, but with some hesitation.

When people who intend to go to law school, or those in law school, are asked "why do you want to become a lawyer" a common answer is "I want to help people".

Indeed, if you read interviews of young lawyers that tends to show up  as well, and if you read late career interviews of lawyers, there sometimes, but not always, is an effort at autohagiography in this regard.

Any occasional reader of this blog would realize that there's a lot of cynicism that's expressed here about certain things, and one of those things occasionally has to deal with this topic.  Suffice it to say I've been deeply skeptical of a lot of the propaganda lawyers put out about their occupation and, additionally, I've occasionally pondered why they put it out.  Is it advertising, or is it verbal laudanum?  Or both, or some of each.

Anyhow, for almost all of my career as a lawyer I've been exposed to the really vigorous propaganda that's put out by "trial lawyers" on the nature of their purpose.  

I should note here, before I go on, that "trial lawyers" are far less than 50% of all lawyers.  Lots of lawyers don't go anywhere near a courtroom.  Probably less than half engage in litigation frequently.  Of those, most who do are lawyers in the criminal law arena, whom "trial lawyers" don't really count as "trial lawyers" unless they also do that in addition to plaintiff's work in civil litigation.  And, for some weird reason, "trial lawyers" don't include those who do defense work as "trial lawyers", even though they very clearly are.

So we're talking about a minority of lawyers here.

Anyhow, it's really common to read trial lawyer assertions about their deep compassion for mankind.

And for some, it's really, really true.

But I've come to the conclusion that for a lot of them, that's pretty much merely propaganda.  

Now, some of that may be my cycnical nature, to be sure.  But the origin of this post comes from an event last year in which I spent almost all day, on a Saturday, as a defense lawyer working to make sure that a massive disaster didn't happen to a plaintiff, working to contact people and arrange for a type of rescue, if you will.  I was aware of the situation as the pliantiff's lawyer informed me, but that lawyer didn't do anything to effectuate the rescue.  

It was as if they really didn't care.

More recently I've experienced another incident in which it seemed as if the plaintiff's lawyer really didn't give a carp about the fate of plaintiff.  In another situation I sat through an event in which the plaintiff's lawyer somewhat made fun of an excused a deeply held belief of the plaintiff as it wasn't something, probably that, he expected a middle class lawyer to understand or even accept.  Frankly, being eclectic, or having a very different world view, I didn't find the subject's belief to be odd at all and I was appalled by the subject's representatives reaction.  Following that, I endured another event in which I tried to make certain that a result wasn't going to have a detrimental effect on a person in real terms to sort of receive a yawn from the person representing them.

More recently, however, and the event that sort of pushed me over the edge here, I was out for a family medical matter of real importance and received a series of pushy emails from an impatient opposing lawyer until I reacted extremely sharply to it. Even then, I didn't really receive an apology for it.

Having said that, I did receive a real expression for concern, under somewhat similar circumstances, from another lawyer representing a plaintiff.

One of the really dispiriting things about practicing law is the long slow disillusionment that accompanies it. Law students are told by their friends and family that lawyers are really smart, and the fact that you are in law school means you too are really smart.  Soon after practicing law you learn that there's a lot of lawyers who are very far from smart.  And if you are like me, and had an unusual background before going into law, you were already shocked to find that law school is extraordinarily easy.

A later shock comes when you realizes that the concept that all jurists are chosen from the smartest and wisest simply isn't the case.  There are some extremely smart judges, and there are some extremely good judges who may not be geniuses, but they're really good.  But it becomes clear after awhile that politics and political agendas enter the selection process.  Indeed, at one point a friend of mine, a really good lawyer, was told by somebody in the know, that lawyers with established civil trail practices really ought to stop putting in for judgeships as they "didn't need" the positions and therefore wouldn't be considered.  I'm not going to go into criteria on what it takes to become a judge, but after having been asked to apply again and again, it became pretty clear to me I lacked some criteria that I really couldn't do anything about, but which really ought not to matter. That was disillusioning.

And as a sort of final disillusionment, at some point it becomes very hard not to view civil litigation as being mostly about money, and mostly about money for the lawyers engaged in it.  It's hard to feel that its about justice, or redressing wrong, when so many of the lawyers engaged in it really don't seem to care about the actual parties.

Not that this is universal.  Oddly enough, in litigation, I've found a fair number of defense litigators who actually are deeply empathetic towards people, and towards the plaintiffs they're opposing among those.  And I've seen some plaintiff's lawyers that even though they had a rough exterior, would go far out of their way to help people, including strangers.

So maybe I'm just deep in my cups due to recent events.  But I don't think so.  I think the law, or rather civil litigations, has an empathy problem.  Money is the root of that.

St. Paul wrote that "the love of money is the root of all evil."

That's pretty much what civil litigation has become for lawyers, I fear.  An expression of the love of money.