Crabs and Other Crushed Asians

That is a malapropism from one tourist who wrote lamenting that, “Alan just can’t eat certain foods and crushed Asians” - we all know he meant crustaceans.  Now, I’m going to savage that - to which you will promptly say, “You mean salvage, don’t you?” Yes, that’s what I’ll try to do with some of these unfortunate misspoken gems. You see if there were European cannibals traveling in Cambodia and one of them was discussing another’s dietary restriction, the sentence may make sense.  I may have savaged it after all.  But that’s the world of malapropism.

Then there was someone quoting a Loretta Lynn’s song as, “Cool Minor’s Daughter” (correctly, Coal Miner’s Daughter). That can still be explained if one were describing a baby girl whose mom is a trendy teenager.  You have a few moments to think about that one… Got it?  You see, don’t be too quick to judge if you hear someone malaproping (if this is not a word, it should be. Or consider it a neologism – just a fancy way to say, making up a new word, inventing, if you will). That’s what I like about the English language because words get made up all the time.  I’ve come to embrace it though it is not my native tongue because it is a very efficient language. That will take up more to explain so we’ll stay with malapropism, meanwhile.

Mrs. Malaprop was a character in a 1775 play by R.B. Sheridan where the character would use the wrong words that sounded the same for the meaning she intended, to humorous effect. The comedic results in that play caught on and malapropism became an English word. That’s the beauty of the English language – what took one whole sentence at the beginning of this paragraph to explain was distilled into just one word. I read that the author Sheridan came up with the name, Mrs. Malaprop, from the French “mal a propos”, meaning “poorly placed”, hence the inappropriate use of words.  Of course, two hundred years prior to that Shakespeare had already used that technique for laughs on stage when one of his characters in the play, “Much Ado about Nothing”, officer Dogberry, butchered much of his speeches.  “Dogberryism”, though not as popular as malapropism, mean the same thing today.  Archie Bunker in “All in the Family” made malapropism his natural form of speech but I couldn’t find any that can be salvaged, tried as I could.  Try salvaging, “Buy one of those battery operated transvestite radios”. Or, “Last will and tentacle…”

I’ll try to salvage a few from others.  Comedian Norm Crosby said, “Listen to the blabbing brook”, a far cry from the more soothing “bubbling brook”.  But then he could have been talking about a tall model/actress who talked too much and whose last name was Shields. You may want that one to sink in slowly…take your time.  She was at one time married to tennis star Andre Agassi and she was known for the then controversially famous line she said of her blue jeans on a TV commercial.

Here’s a challenging one, “Having one wife is called monotony”. There is only one way and that is to make this a Freudian slip spoken by a Don Juan, or a Don Giovanni in Italian.  Speaking of Italian, how about, “Michelangelo painted the Sixteenth Chapel” (Sistine Chapel is a Vatican landmark).  Well, this malapropism works if there were more than fifteen chapels in Rome (very possible) and Michelangelo was indeed a very busy painter, who took on every commission to paint all the churches around.  “He is a wolf in cheap clothing” could be describing a philanderer who buys his suits from Goodwill or budget clothing stores. “He had to use a fire distinguisher” may require a lengthy explanation but a techno-geek may have no problem with it at all.  A thermal imager can determine accurately fire temperatures, as in furnaces, remotely with an optical sensor.  So a fire distinguisher would work to describe the thermal imager as the “iron horse” worked for Native Americans in describing the locomotive when they first saw it.  No need to call the Political Correctness (PC) police on this one, please.

By the way, genuine malapropisms (not the ones scripted in plays or television) are just mere mental lapses and not any kind of mental disorder. It’s not that difficult, for example, to say, “You don’t send me flour anymore”, mildly mutilating a love song. Of course, that could also come from a baker complaining to his supplier about not getting the most important ingredient for his business. Rest assured that if you’ve committed one you are perfectly normal (however, I’m not a psychiatrist, so don’t take my word for it). Speaking of normal, it is perfectly all right to add extra to your salad as when you say, "Be sure and put some of those protons on it."  However, if you were a particle physicist it would have been the thing to do if you were looking to stabilize a mix of sub-atomic particles that had way too much electrons in it.  And speaking of electrons Yogi Berra mused that, “Texas has a lot of electrical votes”.  As with many of Yogi’s gems, it’s best to just leave them alone and just smile. But when he did say, “When you see a fork on the road, take it”, he could very well have been referring to a silver ware of value, and we should take it indeed.

So when you hear a malapropos just smile, or better still try to think of a way to salvage it.

  

Another Day, Another Chance

We were on the 8:30 commuter train from Baltimore to see the sights of Washington, DC on a typical June morning in Maryland.  I honed in my attention momentarily to the burly train conductor, with greying beard, looking like he was less than five years from retirement, who was very chatty as he was checking for tickets, asking everyone how he or she was doing.  One responsive passenger asked back how he was doing, to which the conductor replied, “Well, another day, another chance.”

Not everyone may have paid attention to what he said; I did.  How and what did he mean by it?  I certainly could have asked him that and removed all the mystery and be done with my inquisitive thoughts.  But there was an hour and a half of travel time to go, so introspection and an opportunity to muse over it was the thing to do.

I was sure he had a personal attachment to the phrase with a funnel-effect-focus towards his own life but to me it tended to scatter my thoughts as to where it applied best.  It would have applied to anyone of every age, I thought.  From a growing infant to a 90 year old, from street vendors to high finance brokers but also from mole hills to mountains. For the baby, another day is another chance to grow stronger; for the 90 year old, getting out of bed for another day is a gift; a street vendor may have earned enough to feed his/her family, the financier could save a company or offer a portion of his money for under-privileged city kids during a fund raising.  

Another day is another chance for glaciers to move an inch or two; for rivers to flow; for the sun to rise once more. For the non-romantic it is another day for the sun and every star in the universe to fuse billions of tons of hydrogen into helium, releasing energy radiating to everywhere that can be reached.  One tiny blue planet turns one face for a day to absorb its daily dose of life-giving, life-sustaining sunlight.

Another day is for some of the iron to turn into rust but it is also another day for grapes to turn into wine; for bacteria to spoil food but also for yeast to make dough rise or for barley to make beer.  It is another day for schoolchildren to learn another new thing, for the sick to heal and for broken hearts to mend.  I can go on and on.  As I looked out the window of the speeding train that simple phrase continued to scatter my thoughts as old buildings and new structures blur by, like the daily pages on a desk calendar on fast forward.

As the train stopped at the various stations passengers got off as others came on board.  My wife and I were tourists so we knew what kind of day we wanted to have although we may not get to do or see everything we set out to do.  On excursions like this our expectations were not set too high, so disappointments will be low.  But, what about those folks coming and leaving at each stop?  Will some of them have a productive day, or at a minimum, a good day?  A well-dressed gentleman in a suit boarded with a diet soda in one hand and a briefcase in the other.  He had to find a seat quickly before the train started moving.  Was he a lawyer, or a mid-level staff at a lobbying firm?  An old lady was slow to get up from her seat to get to the exit door.  She did make it in time before the train closed its door.  I watched her moved slowly through the elevated platform.  I did not get to see her walked down the stairs as the train started to move. Her stop was miles away from Washington D.C. and she didn’t have a brief case, a laptop or smart phone so a high power job may not have been what she was commuting to.  No, my preferential thought was that she was just visiting a friend or better still she was going to see her grand kids. The gentleman and the old lady each had another day.  What was it going to be for them?

Actually, we need to ask that of each of us.  What kind of day does every person have as each sunrise draws open the curtain for another scene at the stage of our daily lives?  Should we account for it at each sunset?  More than that, we need to make each day count.  The train conductor was right - if there is another day, we all get another chance, to do just that – let’s make it count.

 

Twilight

“The soft, diffused light from the sky when the sun is below the horizon from daybreak to sunrise or from sunset to nightfall”, known as twilight, comes from “time of two lights” - the open and closed parenthesis of life, all lives, yours and mine, without exception.  

My apologies to Stephenie Meyer because this is not about her Twilight novels, later turned into a TV series. Her books and the shows became a hit with teenagers and vampirologists (if there is no such word, there should be one).  This is certainly not about civil, geographical or legal twilight either.  But if the reader must know, yes, there is such a thing as legal and civil and geographical twilights. The erstwhile “The Twilight Zone” series aside, this is neither about that as well - sorry, Rod Serling - although truth be told when I was growing up I was a big reader of the comic books version of it, which meant we didn’t own a television then.  It is actually a more intriguing subject to ponder but I’ll stay with, “the time of two lights”.

Sunrise and sunset are essentially the same phenomenon that bookends the illusion of the sun’s movement in the sky.  It is an illusion because it is not the sun that is moving but the earth’s rotation on its axis that is giving us sunrises and sunsets.  The soft diffusion of light on the sky just over the horizon whether sunrise or sunset are similar “special effects” from nature on an IMAX screen of cosmic proportion. There is just one difference between them - cooler mornings usher in sunrises while sunsets signal the end of a warmer afternoon. Either one paints the sky from light gray to a mix of orange and yellow and purple and red and indigo. The direction of the color change depends on whether it is sunrise or sunset.

Here it comes - the metaphor of the sunrise and sunset of our lives.  We sense the world for the first time at the sunrise of our life, with everything already in its place and everyone that matters, especially the mother who brought us out of the darkened womb.  Although we’ve heard her well before we came out, followed soon after birth by a cacophony of sounds and other noises, it will be awhile before we could even see gray.  It will be another while when flashes of color will begin to stimulate and the blobs and blotches take shape.  The familiar voice, the warmth and comfort we associated it with is now a face, a smiling face when we looked content and uncomplaining to her.  The voice is even more soothing and comforting at the slightest sign of a grimace in our face.  A hum, a song, a whisper helped to calm us.  Such is the sunrise of our lives although we will not remember any of it. Not the first walk, the first word – even the first “no”, the potty training, and almost every detail before pre-K.  But it was a twilight that preceded it all.

Our memories begin at the early morning – the formative years of building our personalities, learning early on the things we can and not get away with, knowing right from wrong.  Mid to late morning we will have gone through the rebellious teenage years, high school and college or our first foray into earning a living, skipping college altogether. Between noon and two would be the hottest time of the day.  We would be busy with starting a career or engaging in business, cementing our place in the hierarchy of the workplace, our social status, friendships and the choice of a partner and perhaps the beginning of a family. The busiest time of the day, the most hectic, stressful and fulfilling perhaps would be that time.  Mid-life begins after two and for some the experience will be called a crisis, for others it will be taking stock or doing inventory of what he or she has done so far. For others it could be about what they had amassed in terms of material things, what glory, what accolade they have had already.  By four or late afternoon, many will begin the more serious contemplative moments of their lives. It could for many the ebbing of the internal fire of the driving motivation and ambition, the feeling of vulnerability is a nagging reminder that one could still lose some if not all that he or she has or the things one enjoys the most.

By five o’clock we will have realized that the great novel we wanted to write is shelved farther and farther away from our attention or priority; if we didn’t get to it by now the pinnacle of the corporate totem pole shall remain unreachable; scaling Mt. Kilimanjaro will forever be lived vicariously on the National Geographic Channel; or, the business we started had gone as far as it could, what we’ve saved thus far will determine the quality of our lives after six p.m.  Where our health and physical well-being are concerned, it is now a series of medical bulletins and advisories – the choice topic of everyone our age. Ailments and conditions are treated like badges of honor, or a way to top one another. 

The invincibility and know-it-all era of the teenage years and the fearlessness and adventurism of being twenty one are now memories long gone and the mid-life phenomenon is best fondly remembered as sometimes amusing, embarrassing and even bordered on the ridiculous.  Where once as children we’d gladly say we were six and a half years old, making it sound closer to seven, a longing to grow up and grow older, now we round it all off into the chronologically broader term, “seniors”.

“Middle age is when work is a lot less fun and fun is a lot more work.”

----- Author Unknown

Twilight is inevitable and deemed a destination that everyone may dread. It is the reckoning we’ve been warned about.  The story line on the stage of life is set to conclude, the dimming switches are at the ready and the curtain riggings of pulleys and weights are all in the proper calibration, the epilogue music is on cue...

Wait a minute! Not so fast, we need to say.  Twilight should be the best time of our lives.

“There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want.”

----- Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes

Let us not be fooled by such cliche as the twilight of one’s career, the retirement bell has rang and you’re out, etc.  Bill Watterson was just kidding, I’m sure, because doing nothing after retirement is not a reward or rewarding; in fact, retirement is the freedom to do what we had always wanted to do – “do” is the operative word, an active verb! So let’s break this “twilight of our lives thing” down and distill it to the realization that we now have the power to make Mondays feel like a Saturday or any given Sunday.

“The trouble with retirement is that you never get a day off.”

----- Abe Lemons

What used to be such a big hoopla in anticipation of a long weekend is one big ho hum, yawn … yawn. A cold, rainy Monday morning that used to be such a struggle to get out of bed to go to work is now merely an ecstatic reminder to stay in bed even longer and cherish the euphoric effect of a tranquilizer prescribed by the Director at the Retirement Activity Center who said, “Sleep in but if you must get out of bed take two cups of coffee and don’t worry about missing ping pong, pool, or the bonsai class today”.

The twilight of life is not such a bad thing after all because the truth is that to get to it is a privilege not everyone may get to have, regardless of financial, social or political status.  Twilight is extra bonus points; it is overtime to an exciting Superbowl; it is a three-song encore of a favorite concert.  Yes, we’d all have to reach a certain age to live long enough to enjoy these extras.  Twilight may not be the most important time but it could be for some, and it should be the best for many if not all because it is the penultimate period to life’s denouement.

One other thought before I conclude is this one metaphor on the time of two lights. Light that comes after dawn, the sunrise that follows immediately, is virtually if not merely the beginning bookend of a day. Often we may turn away from the bright morning sun while we tend to enjoy staring at sunset. At both times, by the way, we would cast long shadows. The shadows we see in early morning, with our face away from the sun, is what we saw ahead of our childhood and youthful days; the shadows we cast behind us as we face the sunset are the memories we have created, the trails of the past days lived and those lived by others  around us, and they're all there for us to cherish, not lament, to be cheerful for and not regretful, to look back to from time to time but never to forget that we still need to move on.  

“Aging seems to be the only available way to live a long life.”

----- Kitty O'Neill Collins

Again, as another proof to "there is no such thing as a free lunch", the entrance ticket to long life is not one that nature doles out so easily and those who get there are privileged indeed. So, there it is.  Twilight is exciting, albeit soft in a diffused kind of thrill but remember that the ticket to ride is only available for purchase by those of a minimum age of 65 or older. 

Retirement is a mere pit stop, not a final destination.

Beauty is in the Light of the Beholder

Eyesight, of all our senses, is the most far reaching in that we don’t have to be close to an object to make sense of it. Our eyesight is many hundreds of times more powerful than that of hearing and smell, while taste and touch had to be up close and personal.  Sight is powerful indeed that first impressions are largely through our eyes and even after a time when we change our initial assessment the metaphor we use is still visual when “someone shows his or her true color”. “As far as the eyes can see” is a phenomenal superscription of that ability but what we see and how we see is probably the most disputable of all human experiences.  Courtrooms attest to that when witnesses to a crime or accident give varying accounts of the same event.  And what about the seeming universality of disagreements that occur when we put together referees/umpires and athletes and fans watching the same game? Then we have this mysterious appraisal of beauty that not only confounds ordinary people but poets and philosophers as well.

“Did my heart love till now?

Forswear it, sight!

For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night”

-  Romeo and Juliet.

While browsing in an arts and craft store in a small town somewhere in Texas my eyes came upon a plaque, hanging by a wall that proclaimed, “Beauty is in the eyes of the beer holder”. I asked the sales lady if they sell a lot of the plaque and who buys them?  She said they do sell a good number of it but surprisingly it is wives buying them for their husbands’ man-caves.  Perhaps, as a reminder to the men that beer, lots of it in most cases, is nothing more than calorie-laden beauty enhancer.

While Aristotle called beauty "the gift of God", Socrates called it "a short-lived tyranny" and Theophrastus has a different idea all together because to him beauty was apparently "a silent deceit”.  I don’t know what Benjamin Franklin meant when he said, “Beauty and folly are old companions."  The most intriguing quote I’ve read is that of Kahlil Gibran with this, “Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror”.  I don’t know how to even begin to decipher that one unless by someone who is a lifetime subscriber to narcissism.

Sometimes when I muse on any subject I can’t help but include when appropriate the perspective from some of our animal friends which, by sheer power of imagination on my part, acquire the ability to talk.  We need that because animals see the world differently.  I mean, literally some animals see what we, humans, have no ability to see.  From the time Isaac Newton split ordinary white light into its various wavelengths it followed quickly our discovery of the limitations of our vision.  We see only in the middle range of the spectrum of light. From both ends of the spectrum the short wavelength of ultraviolet and the long infrared are invisible to us. 

A viper, specifically a diamond back rattle snake, was accused of killing and consuming an endangered field mouse somewhere in California.  It acted as its own lawyer and this was her defense. Addressing the judge, a javelina, which the snake respects because it is too big to be its prey, “Your honor, with all due respect to the prosecutor who should know better, I had no way to know it was a field mouse that I ate because I could not have recognized it since I only see in the infrared.  I cannot distinguish in detail the features of the field mouse from that of an ordinary one.  They both look like red blobs as they move.  It was at night too when it happened and if I may mention I am carrying eggs that will need nourishment.  The prosecutor, your honor, is a cayote, so he too would not have been able to recognize the difference because he only sees in black and white as all other canis species, to wit dogs and wolves, who cannot perceive color”.

The judge had its own visual limitation of nearsightedness as all javelinas have, so it was oblivious to the flicking forked tongue as the viper slithered to and fro as it made its closing statement, presenting only a bluish/green silhouette to the judge. The viper’s eloquence won. Not guilty.

The training manual for some birds of prey include recognizing the urine trail of rodents which become visible in ultraviolet.  Here is what one raptor said to another, “That field down there across the stream has got to be littered with voles. Do you see the whole place is practically a quilted patchwork of ultraviolet? Let’s go swoop”.

 The question then is why we who have a very sophisticated brain and the extraordinary physiology supporting it cannot see in all the spectrum of light.  I’m sure many would like to see in infrared and ultraviolet giving us a full range of visual capability.  

Actually, we should be thankful for the limitation of our vision because a full range of the spectrum will actually overwhelm us.  Just imagine trying to admire the beauty of a garden full of roses of various colors.  Along with the yellows, pinks and, of course beautiful red roses, our field of view will include infrared blobs of bees and butterflies hopping from one bloom to another and tracks of all rodents like squirrels and even rabbits the night before will further muddy the view with all kinds of ultraviolet patches on the ground.  Campers who seek the darkness of night to contemplate the vastness and wonder of the universe will be denied the view of countless stars that form the band of our Milky Way galaxy extending from the horizon diagonally upwards into an endless blackness of space.  Instead, their eyes will see blobs of insects flying above and around, bats and migrating birds and even fireflies – anything that has body heat – will register their presence in infrared and don’t forget anything that reflects ultraviolet.  The beauty of the night sky as we know it will not appear as such because seeing the full spectrum of light will make individual stars smudgy and blurry.  Even a crackling camp fire will not be so inviting when everyone around it will appear like ghostly apparitions from Hades, exuding with the redness of infrared reflecting the energy of the fire and the human body itself.  Oh, and those meat eaters among us may not find it so appetizing if their preferred rare or even medium rare steaks glow in ultra-violet.  Hot soup and warm desserts like bananas foster will luminesce in infrared.

Great renaissance artworks by Rafael and Boticeli would not have been possible because how will those artists have painted them had they seen everything in full spectrum?  Why our eyes are sensitive to red and yellow is supposedly part of our evolution so that our ancestors could recognize ripened fruit and berries.  Green is pleasant to us because vegetation is a welcome cover, let alone it is the color of fruit bearing plants.  Paul Cezane made a living painting apples and oranges when he put to good use bright reds and yellows in all kinds of lighting themes.

In a small seaside community where I grew up there was a man who was born blind.  His eye cavities were completely shut at birth, eyelids permanently closed, devoid of eyelashes even, and if he had corneas behind the skin we could not tell.  He goes around the neighborhood, walking but not using a cane.  He walked by sliding forward one foot at a time to “feel the ground” and warn him of any obstruction, including potholes.  What I remembered most was that he never seemed to show any self-pity and the people in the community treated him almost like everyone else.  I mean people, younger or older alike, would listen to him and respected his opinions on a lot of subjects.

I marveled at his eloquence in conversation and his grasp of the world from local to national politics and social issues.  He never did go to school so he could not read or write obviously, but he listened.  He listened to radio and to every conversation within hearing distance.  He had an uncanny ability to remember voices which was how he recognized everyone.  He “saw” and remembered people through their voices as normally sighted folks would recognize faces.  He also had the ability, as if he can see the people in conversation, to know how many were there and he could respond specifically to whoever was speaking or making a point.  I met him for the first time one day and it was several days later when I talked to him again and he effortlessly remembered who I was just from my voice.  I asked him how he would remember.  He said, “The same way you remember someone you met last week”.  That was the first time I realized that if vision had its limits the mind didn’t seem to have one.

What we lack in our inability to see in full spectrum is more than made up for by this one faculty that no other creatures have.  It is our ability to see the inner beauty of another human being.  We can see character that is behind the façade of skin and clothing; look deeply into someone’s eyes and see the true meaning of his or her true feelings; and we can feel the depth of expression when someone looks at us with pride, sympathy, happiness or sadness.

Physical beauty that our eyes can see is all reflected light. True beauty is one that penetrates through to our mind where there it will reside for as long as we live.  Memories are the paintbrushes of true beauty because with them we are able to touch up, refresh, even change the tone and color of the images of our youth and experiences that may have faded can be restored to even brighter hues.  Beauty then are in the mind’s eyes of those who remember.

A Half Filled Glass

Such is life and such is our world – it is filled with optimists and pessimists – where a half filled glass is either brimming with all kinds of possibilities or that the other half is horribly empty and therefore inadequately needful, depending on who is looking at it.  Here is something interesting.  Before the 1830s, the Webster Dictionary did not have the word pessimist.  It could, in fact, have been as late as 1865 before it was commonly used.  Whereas the word optimism was already in the English lexicon since between 1730 and 1740, it took a whole century for its antonym to find its place in language.  One must wonder, “Why”?

Then, as soon as both words co-existed folks immediately began to correlate the two in fundamental terms like one would look at a proton and an electron.  Another interesting tidbit is that the negatively charged electron was discovered ahead in 1897, while the positively charged proton was only later identified and scientifically proven to exist in 1918. No relevance whatsoever to the point I will be making but I thought you might want to know that.  Or, perhaps the mere mention of “negatively and positively charged” could trigger a metaphoric effect towards wherever this musing will lead to.  Anyway, soon philosophers, political leaders, writers, ordinary people could not resist the inevitable contextual references between the optimist and the pessimist.

“The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”

--- Winston Churchill

“An optimist may see a light where there is none, but why must the pessimist always run to blow it out?”

--- Rene Descartes

As it turned out the side-by-side pairing of the two words has resulted in the most number of quotes attributed to so many people and nothing even comes close to the number of posters, picture frames and plaques produced.  Could it be that just as the glass example suggests we are equally divided 50-50 into optimists and pessimists?  Not quite but close for Americans according to recent polling, although pessimists exceed optimists today.  A few years back most Americans were positively inclined.  Depending on which polls and when they were taken, it was 49% and 47%, switching back and forth between optimism and pessimism, and apparently there is always the remainder of folks (4% or so) who are either indifferent, don’t have an opinion, or they simply belong to a separate class of people – the “Oh, well, whatever” group.  But it is not true that the latter are mostly teenagers!

The Greeks are still the most pessimistic people in the developed world while Latvia and Lithuania are the most optimistic.  The most optimistic people in the third world may defy expectations because they are from some of the poorest regions of Africa.  The countries of Burkina Faso and Comoros have 95% of their population believe that there future lives will be better than their current ones.  Coming in second at 94% are Niger, Benin, Guinea and the Somaliland region.  The reason cited is that perhaps people who live at or near the abyss of the economic strata believe that their current situation could only get better, since there is no place to go down anymore but up, hence the reason for widespread optimism in those countries.  Unfortunately, the saddest countries are also mostly in Africa as well.  On top of the list is Chad, followed by Central African Republic, Congo, D.R and then there is Afghanistan.

So, what countries have the happiest population?  From last year’s survey, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, Netherlands and Sweden in that order topped the list.  And we say, “Hmm”.  By the way, the U.S. is at no. 11.  What is surprising is that three of the top five countries also have some of the highest tax rates – over 50% of personal income.  Ranked 2, 3, 4, in the top ten highest tax brackets are Sweden, Denmark and Netherlands, in that order.  To which my Democrat friends inevitably proclaim that there is a method to the current administration’s maddening goal to raise taxes in America.  Yes, there seems to be a method to their madness.  Or, is that just simply madness to their method. 

So, let’s get back to the half-filled glass.  No relevance whatsoever is the fact that the country’s electorate is divided almost down the middle between Democrats and Republicans while the Independents swing back and forth like an unregulated pendulum. 

At a personal level, what should we be?  States of optimism and pessimism had been there all along before there were words for them.  If you ask anyone optimism is the one we should adopt, should we not?

“A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists.”

--- Don Marquis

“The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.”

--- George Will

And let us not forget the realist.  Although I will have to say that a realist is really either an optimist or pessimist who hedges his or her bet.  Generally speaking humans should be realists as grizzlies are too, but let’s set that aside for the moment.  My favorite wild cats – the cheetahs and lions – are optimists by nature.  The cheetah’s hunting success is only one kill for every ten attempts at a chase while lions, even hunting as a pride, catch their intended prey about 25% of the time.  A journeyman major league baseball hitter does better than a cheetah and about the same as the lions in terms of their statistical successes. However, the cats somehow remain optimistic since they keep chasing despite the potential for being kicked or gored by their prey and despite the dauntingly low kill percentage average.  Both man and the grizzly are realists because they hedge their bets by varying their dietary habits.  They can go vegetarian if meat is not readily available, or a mixture of both vegetable and fruits with fish and meat to balance their food supply.

We, humans all, have every reason to be optimistic.  Why not?  We’re the dominant species, we’re on top of the food chain and we’re the only ones who contemplate and can think and reason.  Yet, it is exactly the ability to think and reason that makes some of us optimists and others pessimists.  A realist is someone in a momentary state of mind when he or she is torn between feeling hopeful or dreadfully worried – a state of “Oh well, whatever”. 

“In my last year of school, I was voted Class Optimist and Class Pessimist. Looking back, I realize I was only half right.”

--- Jack Nicholson

Apparently, there is no one who is totally 100 % indifferent to a situation.  We are either okay with one thing or not so thrilled about it.  To be independently neutral of opinion is rare.  “Oh, well, whatever!” is something teenagers may say, of course, but not with any kind of definitive conviction one way or the other when faced with the choice of being hopeful or suffer with forlorn hope.

A half-filled glass is not half empty because technically there are trillions of air molecules above the liquid line up to the brim.  So the glass is full after all.  And there the optimist brandishes his or her ability to see when it is not even faintly apparent to others.  The pessimist may claim to be cautious and rightfully so but only if that were the only condition. 

Yes, the pessimist worries most of the time; the optimist is constantly hopeful; the realist shrugs.  And here is where the positive proton and the negative electron come in (I can use them after all).  So, if one were an optimist, he or she is best paired with a pessimist, and vice versa.  The most common element in the entire universe by a huge margin over carbon (second most common) is the hydrogen atom – it has one proton (+) and one electron (-).  It is an unstable element but if two of them can grab just one oxygen atom (it has 8 electrons and 8 protons), we get water – the very same that can fill half the proverbial glass.  One could say that that is neither here nor there but think about it for a minute. With water we now have a stable molecule that has ten electrons (-) and ten protons (+), negatively and positively charged particles in equal number and in tight finger clasps.  Allegorical perhaps but it does tell us that optimists and pessimists could co-exist with the right balance.

One who is exceedingly ebullient should pair up with one who often is paralyzed with caution.  And if you’re by yourself you can adapt the Jack Nicholson state of mind – an optimist at one time, a pessimist at another.  The “whatever” crowd is the neutron – neither positively nor negatively charged.  The problem with that is that you never get to participate, especially not in a charged up action between protons and electrons.

Is it always bad to be a pessimist?  I don’t think so.  General Custer and his officers and men must have been all optimists at Little Bighorn and so were the cavalry of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War in 1854.  We know what happened.  Perhaps a few pessimists or a temporary state of pessimism could have changed the outcome. General Eisenhower on the other hand first postponed the invasion by a day, pessimistic about the prospect on June 5^th, then gave the go ahead the following day, D-Day, confident and optimistic but a realist because in his breast pocket that morning of June 6^th he kept a short note to read just in case the invasion failed.  He was also known for the quote below:

“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”

--- Gen. Dwight Eisenhower

If you read carefully into that sentence, Eisenhower was pessimistic on one clause and, with a simple conjunction, optimistic on the other.  He was an organizer and a stickler for thorough and detailed planning but also believed that however best laid plans were, circumstances that ensue during execution will shred everything to pieces and the discipline in planning is what will save the day in order to adapt to unforeseen conditions.

So, there it is.  You can either be the bottom half of the glass or the upper half, or you can be just the glass (indifferent to whether it is half-filled or empty) but be prepared to switch whatever state of mind you were in if necessary when the situation calls for it.

Who Wants To Live Forever

Will our attitude about aging, dying or desire to live forever be different if, say, our average lifespan is 200 years, 500 years?  Or, put another way, what would our outlook be if we do not get past our tenth birthday?  A short book, more like a novelette, “Logan’s Run”, tells a futuristic story of a society where people’s lives were “terminated” at the moment they got past their 21^st birthday (in the movie version the individual’s “lifeclock” was changed to end at 30, perhaps because producers could not find enough named young actors twenty one or younger; in fact, Michael York, the lead actor, was already 34 years old during filming).  The book was set in the year 2116 – that is exactly a hundred years from this year.  (Book is free online and the movie, I’m sure, is available from Netflix or Amazon).  The popularity of that and many fantasy stories in that genre are an indication of society’s fascination, if not an obsession, with aging and dying. 

Today we’re told the average human lifespan in the developed world is above 70 years and more and more are getting up to the high 80s and reasonably living a fair quality of life; this puts aging by far in a better stage than three decades ago.  Now, for perspective, in ancient times men were old and dying in their 30s and 40s. Baby boomers realized that it was not too long ago, growing up, that to be 60 years old was not only a retirement terminal age but that there was not much to be expected beyond that.  Today, we’re told that sixty is the new forty.

Here is the thing though.  We look across the whole spectrum of living things and we find life expectancy that can be very short as in an individual microorganism to a very long one as in one bristlecone pine that is supposed to be 5065 years old (tree ring counts prove it). The mayfly, a breathing, metabolic insect lives only for a day!  As a mayfly, that is.  It is not only a fascinating life span but one that is so fleeting yet observable within a 24-hour period.  However, I must disclose that the mayfly has a previous life as a nymph living as an aquatic insect, its activities mostly underwater, which makes it a wonder of adaptation.  It could live as a nymph for years before turning into a mayfly, to surface from its watery world, develop wings, mate, lay eggs and die within a day.

On the other hand a jellyfish is immortal.  It can keep on living unless eaten by predators or physically harmed in some other way.  It is in my opinion one of nature’s weird sense of humor because a jellyfish does not have a brain, let alone a structured backbone, with only a primitive sense of sight but with no ability to hear but it is endowed with immortality.  Why couldn’t humans have that gift? Tortoises can live up to 150 years, a few known to have lived beyond that, but a bowhead whale will be just about middle age as the tortoise reaches its age limit.  Here we are with our advanced brain power, an unlimited capacity to imagine, dream, and think up these wild questions about immortality and our lifespan is comparatively short lived compared to these creatures that will never understand simple philosophical questions, let alone ask the basic meaning of their lives.  I know we ask and we propose answers or speculate or offer conjectures but undeniably we do not have answers to the meaning of life either; but at least we try.

Meanwhile, since the dawn of time we asked, we pondered, we philosophized, we developed over a hundred different expressions of faith in the form of religion. We’ve come up with natural and scientific explanations of the world around us, theorized about everything as we seek for answers and indeed we did get some but not all the answers. Into the future we can expect even more as we begin to remove the cloak of mystery on many unanswered questions but only to ask even more. 

Out of all the questions we can come up with, nothing is more compelling, more intriguing, or sometimes more frightening to ask than what happens after death. It is such that we’d rather use a phrase like “passing into the great beyond” or use the alternative substitute like the “afterlife” as a way of coping. Quickly, you will note that such words are always more hopeful, stressing even that there must be something better after death.  I, like almost everyone I know, was raised in the tenets of Judeo-Christian faith but aware that there are other households all around the globe where different faiths are subscribed to including atheism and agnosticism. As a result children and adults grow up with particular biases already built in to their existing belief system. We know, or at least we can know if we spend the time to read up, that there are major and minor differences or just simply nuances in every religious belief from organized systems, including sects, cults, and sometimes from the fringes of the occult. What about someone who has never had such influence, completely devoid of such biases?   

Meet ELB, the Everlasting Being. He has knowledge of the natural world through science which includes math, biology and physics but he is indifferent to philosophy, morality, ethics, politics and religion. All he would like to work with is what he knows of everything that can be explained by hypothesis and proof.  He does not know his age or if his life has a limit but he does know the workings of the cells in his body and as much knowledge of all living things, the planets, the galaxies, the stars, and the workings of the universe to the extent that he has access to the most recent discoveries.  Here is ELB and his thought provoking views of the world. 

“I am made of recycled material and because of that, more than anything else, I am immortal. The iron in my blood is recycled from billions of years ago when it was first created at the belly of a supernova. All of the iron we find on earth today came from an exploding star that was many times bigger than our present sun.  In fact, all the elements beyond and including iron in the Periodic Table came from such an explosion. Our sun, as all stars are too, is a fusion reactor, a thermonuclear plant, and producer of but limited to the basic elements up to iron.  Its base material is hydrogen which when fused becomes helium. Helium when fused becomes lithium, and so on and on. Each element up to iron is a product of fusing elements together through extreme pressure and heat within the star’s core. However, as soon as the star produces iron it collapses in an instant! If it is just an average size star it will shrivel into a white dwarf or brown star, as what will likely happen to this sun in another 4-5 billions years.  A very large star will first collapse but immediately explodes as a supernova. It is during that explosion, when ultra-extreme pressure and heat will create the other elements heavier than iron – again by first fusing iron to cobalt, which will fuse to become nickel, and after more and more fusions later we get to silver and gold, and so on and on. Each fusion makes the next element heavier than the previous. More fusion will make uranium and plutonium. (I am taking liberty with the process by just labeling it as fusion because it is more complicated than just “fusing” the elements. The elements must combine and bond together in a particular way to create the next material).

The simplicity of the universe is what makes me immortal and its complexity is proof that I am.

The universe may only seem complex but in reality it is very simple since everything in it – from viruses to mountains to clouds to the planets, stars and galaxies – came from one basic element: the hydrogen atom that has just one proton and one electron, the simplest element there is. It was the first element created from out of the soup of highly energized particles that condensed from pure energy a few hundred thousand years after the moment of the big explosion that started the universe; hence, it is the most common element in the universe.  All that I see today through my eyes around me and everything that can be observed by every device that ranged from optical to radio to infrared telescopes were at one time located at a single point smaller than an atom. Nothing can be any simpler than one infinitely small dot of near nothingness. Then, as if from nothing, came what I see today as the universe after 13.5 billion years from that moment when it all began.

I will neither know nor can I ever know what was before that big explosion. But this I know. Once created nothing is ever destroyed. The rule the universe goes by is that matter may be converted to energy or energy can be converted to matter but nothing ever goes into nothingness.  The other rule is that everything is recyclable. Every molecule of water I drink today came from two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen that had been around for billions of years and as I expel them from my body they could go on as a water molecule in a water vapor or settle into a piece of iron. Well, three oxygens may go together and link with two iron atoms and combine to become rust – the oxygen and iron elements clinging together as the hydrogen is expelled to find another element to combine with. It has many possibilities of creating another molecule. If two of them together find sulfur they make an acid.  It may even find a grouping of seven other hydrogens and six carbons and six oxygen atoms and voila! Create vitamin C.  These three elemental characters will hold hands in many different configurations and they could become carbohydrates.  I ingest them and they could form with other compounds in my body to build up fats and other tissues.

Everything in me, everything around me is recycled. Even a single cell that “dies” is recycled; cancer cells included. Nothing anymore is created to add to the bulk or energy of the universe; but neither is anything ever deducted. What the universe has today is what it will have forever. However new something is, it has to come from somewhere or from components from somewhere else. If today I am at the tip of an endless recycling processes since creation then have I not always existed since?

The universe is matter, energy and information.  Where matter and energy are interchangeable, information exists to keep track of events caused by matter or energy or both.  A photon of light from across the universe coming from a star carries information about it for millions or billions of years until it is stopped and absorbed by another object, such as the retina of my eye or the sensor of a telescope. When I see starlight the photon has information about the star as it was perhaps many millions of years ago depending on how far it is from me.  Countless photons had left that star at different times but even if a group of them (numbering in the quintillion trillion) left at the same instant different observers from different locations in the universe will have differing perspectives on the star but the information will be the same.  One observer will see the star as it was a few thousand years ago while another may see it as it was four billion years hence but the information the observers see will be exactly the same. If matter, energy and information in the whole universe are eternal I must conclude that I too must be eternal.

If I had settled the question of my physical immortality then it follows that I must address the immortality of my consciousness?  Is my consciousness immortal? That is the question and I must say that it is. If I am the only one right now who can contemplate or at the very least observe everything around me, the universe is what it is because I am here to marvel at or ponder it.  Without me to think about these things that surround me who is to say that they exist or not?  How do I know that my consciousness too is not recycled?  I cannot know that but the physical vessel where my consciousness resides gives me the ability to receive and disburse information to and from the world around me. I have information, therefore I know.

Was it not Rene Descartes who said, ‘I think, therefore I am’? Descartes declared that the only thing he could truly believe to exist was his own mind.  Whether he does or does not have a point is not something I can judge, which brings me to the issue of philosophy, faith and religion. I am indifferent and I take a neutral stand for just one simple reason. Among the many differing religions and branches of philosophy that are out there, there is not one with a premise I can put to a test.

As interesting as these premises are, I cannot prove or disprove them but I am intrigued.  Let me look at some of them.

The Hindu religion is about as close to the premise of the recycling of consciousness as a parallel to the recycling and evolving development of species.  Below is a direct quote of a response from a Hindu scholar when asked about re-incarnation.

“Carnate means ‘of flesh,’ and reincarnate means to ‘reenter the flesh’. Yes, Hindus believe in reincarnation. To us, it explains the natural way the soul evolves from immaturity to spiritual illumination. Life and death are realities for all of us. Hinduism believes that the soul is immortal, that it never dies, but inhabits one body after another on the Earth during its evolutionary journey. Like the caterpillar's transformation into a butterfly, physical death is a most natural transition for the soul, which survives and, guided by karma, continues its long pilgrimage until it is one with God”.

“I myself have had many lives before this one and expect to have more. Finally, when I have it all worked out and all the lessons have been learned, I will attain enlightenment and moksha, liberation. This means I will still exist, but will no longer be pulled back to be born in a physical body.”

A Buddhist has this to say:

“To Buddhism, however, death is not the end of life, it is merely the end of the body we inhabit in this life, but our spirit will still remain and seek out through the need of attachment, attachment to a new body and new life. Where they will be born is a result of the past and the accumulation of positive and negative action, and the resultant karma (cause and effect) is a result of one’s past actions”.

The Judeo/Christian faith and Islam do not subscribe to reincarnation since each adherent only has one life to live and will have to account for everything he or she has done throughout the time of one’s life. There is only one physical body, one consciousness, one soul. A future event – a judgment day, a tribulation, an arrival of a Messiah or a second coming – is that time when everyone who had ever lived will be made to account for what they did or didn’t do during their lifetime.

I cannot say which one is right nor would I be capable of judging so I will only say this. One side says a person has one chance at life and one’s conduct will be judged accordingly, no opportunity for a do over. The other side says that there are actually many multiple chances to get it right; improving and evolving at each successive stage until one has reached the ultimate level; or sometimes be punished to a lower level, to suffer and pay for a life not well lived. One side sets aside a place, a heaven where good souls go to and a hell where bad ones are destined to live forever.  The other side creates a better state of life during rebirth on earth, or be reborn to a state of despair and suffering, re-learn the lessons during that tenure and perhaps be re-born to a better life on the next stage.  One creates one’s heaven or hell in the next life depending on how one conducted one’s present life.

The one common theme is the belief in the eternal state of consciousness and that is all where I can agree. I cannot know what mechanism will be the true one but I believe in the immortality of consciousness because of what I know about this universe. Matter, energy and information are known to prevail".

That is ELB and that is his opinion

I will continue to believe in my Judeo Christian faith because that is how I was raised and I am satisfied with its moral teachings. ELB is in fact a composite of everyone who believes that one life in the scheme of the vastness and age of the universe may not be enough to be held accountable for a mere ten, twenty, ninety years of life, or for that matter the short lives of babies, young children, or of everyone not given the opportunity to learn from the teachings of one or another faith and belief system. I leave that to anyone who cares to ponder during their own idle moments.

For a similar theme but with a different twist, you may want to read a prior blog, "My Conversations with Theo" by clicking below:

   https://abreloth.blogspot.com/2016/04/my-conversations-with-theo.html

SERIOUSLY

I must get to the point right away because the world we live in and the society we have become is now almost behaviorally immobilized by some inexplicable fear that is so difficult to deal with, or even recognize with a clear definition because what seems to be perfectly all right to say or do today could be by tomorrow a deplorably wretched thing to put into words or even attempt to act on.

I will not sprinkle this musing with hints and little clues or tap dance around the subject because this is about political correctness gone mad.  It is not political correctness, let me be clear, if we are simply and rightfully observing proper manner of speaking and acting politely in a way civilized society expects civilized people to behave.  I am talking about what only a few people might openly discuss in public but what the majority of folks have in their mind and choosing to keep it there because in a nutshell what we have today and where we are is captured in the following anonymous quote:

“The world is a magical place full of people waiting to be offended by something.”

Perhaps not exactly “full of people” but this is what makes it so ironic because it is actually not the majority of people who are so easily offended.  In fact, never has social behavior now being influenced by so few. I modified that phrase from and hereby thank Winston Churchill for his quote on a different subject.  Let me mention, of course, that although Churchill was not the first to be politically incorrect, he made that a sporting event during his career.  Centuries earlier Plato said the following,

“One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors”.

That, as far as I know, is the earliest reference to being politically incorrect that happens to directly address politics.  We only have so few politicians, thank goodness, but that does not keep them from making the lives of the general population deliberately drastic.  And it gets worst when the very same population is curtailed from speaking out because:

“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize”. (Voltaire)

Since I am just musing here and hopefully you can go along with it, let us find out where this all started. We may begin at how our government functions. The public expectation is that whoever serves the taxpayers must focus some, if not most, of their efforts to disambiguate legalese so as to be easily understood by the average citizen.  Instead …

Bureaucrats started it all.

They began by filling the ranks of government bureaucracy with appointed, faceless, academics of every variety that turned the evolutionary path of language (English, in our case) to mud and quake sand. What they’ve achieved was to invent an exclusive world of “Bureaucratese”. 

For example, we found one such sentence like this to describe, “An act of a legislature authorizing money to be paid from the treasury for a specified use: “In 1977 the Pentagon tried slip funding for the neutron bomb unnoticed into an appropriations bill by calling it an enhanced radiation device”. Slip funding was, of course, a euphemism for hiding a budget item from close scrutiny. While a neutron bomb already sounded less lethal, enhanced radiation device made it looked even more benign. By the way, only in government where a simple word like cash or money is called a funding stream while a tax increase is enhanced revenue and we all know that when a politician calls for investing in this or that they actually mean spend on this or that. The military bureaucracy was very good at sugar coating what would otherwise be a weapon of mass destruction.  Rockets tipped with hydrogen bombs with a flight span that covers halfway around the globe were simply called ICBMs for Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles without ever having to say “bomb”.  And when there is a cluster of bombs at the tip of even more massive rockets that could hit several targets, the acronym MIRV came to mind, or Multiple Independently Targeted Re-entry Vehicle.  As we can see, bombs with the destructive power of many thousand tons of TNT sound like a space probe returning to earth; and indeed these rockets are launched into space only to come back down on a parabolic path to disperse several deadly nuclear warheads. These are all precursors to politically correct language. These were not too bad but it went downhill from there.  Two decades ago, government and scientific “experts were working in the anomaly investigation”.  That “anomaly investigation” was the explosion of the Space Shuttle ‘Challenger’.

Then we now have:

The Dis-Mantling of an otherwise Great Language

English is the ultimate survivor, proving to be the fittest and most efficient in the evolution of language.  If Latin was the dinosaur, English is the modern day bird. But now it is under indirect assault as a collateral victim of political correctness.  It is suffering from the unintended consequence of a misplaced effort at propriety.  I’ll make an example of the military once more because once it used to have immunity from “gender-mandering”.  I made that up from gerrymandering – a political ploy to manipulate a districting advantage for a political purpose.

The U.S. military just recently mandated the revision of certain military ranks, such as the abolishment in the Marine Corps the designation of Infantryman to Infantry Marine. That is just one of already several changes, with many more to come, as the military is being asked or required to remove from the rank male gender designations that, up to this point, had prevailed through centuries of military tradition. Soon the once unambiguous meaning of military manpower may no longer suffice.  So far, but perhaps not for very long, the Naval Academy may have to revise the designation of midshipman which has always been a rank for everyone enrolled there for over two centuries. Today, whether male or female at the U.S. Naval Academy he or she is a midshipman by rank. Arguably at some future time it is not too farfetched to anticipate that application forms for military service may have to be revised from when it used to have either of two box options to check, M or F for male or female applicants to now having to choose from six boxes. And we better not pretend to not know what the additional four boxes are for.

Will future dictionaries and reference books be several pages lighter because words like maneuver, manage, manipulate, mandate, demand, even mentor, and many more will be expunged? And, is it all right to keep mendacity because it connotes something only men are capable of doing? This is just musing, mind you, but who would have thought that infantryman as a rank can be so discriminatory?  I can add more but let your imagination come up with more threatened words in English.

Are we getting closer to George Orwell’s “1984” thought police?  Not yet but we definitely have “Newspeak”.  There is a glossary of Newspeak that the book defined so clearly but in a doublethink way.  If you’re confused by that that is exactly what an Orwellian world is like. You see, “Doublethink is the act of simultaneously accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct, often in distinct social contexts”.  Observe very carefully when politicians talk, particularly answers given by the current President. It gets eerie because from the book we read, “A thought-crime is an occurrence or instance of controversial or socially unacceptable thoughts,” or when a face-crime is an indication that a person is guilty of thought-crime based on their facial expression.  I am not making this up – these are from “1984”, written in the aftermath of WWII. Facial expression could today simply be someone’s unspoken reaction to what he or she thinks of the new age social value or liberal behavior that the few and the elite have begun to embrace. Face-crime and thought-crime were Orwellian as today’s liberal go-to phrase of bigotry once conservatives express disapproval of or disagreement with progressive ideas. It is very difficult to argue against “Newspeak” that uses what used to be a perfectly acceptable but profoundly deep expression of fear because when one harbors an opposite view or sentiment, one is adhering to xenophobia, homophobia, Islamophobia etc. Phobia used to be within the purview of psychological analysis; today it is another liberal’s Newspeak word – “duck-speak” – to speak without thinking.

George Orwell wrote the book because he actually feared for another totalitarianism to rise up, even as the demise of Hitler was thought to have been the end of it.  Totalitarianism or Leader-worship can only be possible today, despite the free flow of information, if that flow becomes monolithically unidirectional – when the media can be controlled. Big Brother – a very significant element in an Orwellian landscape – was thought to be a farfetched idea decades ago that is not so improbable anymore.  The new totalitarianism will employ Newspeak to control social and political behavior.

New Rules at the “Corporatory” and Universities

Over the last two decades or so millions of dollars had already been spent by corporations, school administrators and government agencies on diversity and sensitivity training.  This is because one day many years ago deep thinkers and academics and behaviorists recommended that such places of business and learning should adopt new sets of behaviors so as not to offend anyone. That about sums it up, doesn’t it? They simply ignored centuries of societal development arrived at by natural progression of good behavior, which brought us today’s civilization. In other words, bad conduct and crude behavior have a way of self-annihilation because the general population will reject them in the end.  Forcing behavior upon society by the elite and self-appointed intellectuals to determine ethical or just simply refined behavior in the eyes of the few is usually not effective.  Totalitarian societies have always failed.

We know it has gotten out of hand when we hear folks warning and correcting for micro-aggression or demanding safe space for people deemed to be vulnerable to deep emotional hurt because of what they hear or see.  Those phrases should be called out for what they are – versions of “Newspeak” from “1984”.  We are not talking about racist or bigoted comments that these vulnerable individuals claim to suffer from.  Just wearing a T-shirt or cap endorsing a candidate or commentary criticizing any kind of social agenda or ideology at a university cafeteria or campus activity is being micro-aggressive. Saying something about anything but well within the rights to free speech, protected by the First Amendment, could be construed as an invasion of safe space of certain individuals who happen to hear or see them.

Another Newspeak is black-white- The ability to accept whatever "truth" the party puts out, no matter how absurd it may be. Orwell described it as "...loyal willingness to say black is white when party discipline demands this. It also means the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know black is white, and forget that one has ever believed the contrary."

What used to be one sovereign nation’s prerogative to protect its border is now labeled xenophobia, or emigre-phobia. People should realize that attaching phobia to almost anything liberals can think of is Newspeak.  Newspeak is the liberal’s most potent weapon against other people’s ideas or beliefs.

George S. Patton was a brilliant commander and patriot but much of his accomplishments were sometimes overshadowed by his politically incorrect statements. 

He said this, “Politicians are the lowest form of life on earth …”

I push back a little bit on that because indeed it is not true of every politician.  They have a role in a democracy and they provide continuance of policies or revisions of such, succession and stability in the functioning of government.  However, today many of them fall into using Newspeak because that is what gets votes and political incorrectness could be a lethal political blow to their career.  But if we continue to find that acceptable and acquiesce to too much political correctness we will be followed by a generation of extremely social and political compromisers.  A weakened society is one that is gripped by fear of expressing an opinion because someone may be offended.  The founding fathers offended a very powerful world power at that time and had they stayed politically correct this nation may not have been born. 

Here is another Anonymous quote:

“PC stands for:

1)      Politically Correct or

2)   Petrified Chicken … meaning … so frozen with fear that they don’t even know they’re petrified chicken!

 I end with a quote from another famous general of the Greatest Generation:

“History fails to record a single precedent in which nations subject to moral decay have not passed into political and economic decline. There has been either a spiritual awakening to overcome the moral lapse or a progressive deterioration leading to ultimate national disaster”.

General Douglas MacArthur

Speak but not newspeak,

The Idle Mind