Thursday, April 2, 2020
* Why I've drafted instructions to give the ventilator to someone else
https://www.cleveland.com/
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At the end of my mother's life, the ventilator, or breathing machine, had made it impossible for her to speak, so during her 118-day ordeal on the ventilator, she could not insist on her wish not ...
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Thursday, February 27, 2020
* Mrs. Hastings' Problems of Democracy
http://www.countytimes.com/
Never talk about politics or religion my mother told me. So I won’t go off on the particulars of the 2020 presidential impeachment which seem to have driven so many Americans to despair over the last few months. People of all persuasions claim that impeachment has proved one thing; Democracy doesn’t work.
Mrs. Hastings and 11th Grade Impeachment
Paul Keane is a
retired Vermont
WORD COUNT: 756
My 11th grade history teacher, Mrs. Elizabeth
Hastings, was married to an FBI agent
and she taught a popular course at my high school about democracy. Everybody
knew her husband was a “G-man” but nobody mentioned it except in whispers.
Never talk about politics or religion my mother told me. So I won’t go off on the particulars of the 2020 presidential impeachment which seem to have driven so many Americans to despair over the last few months. People of all persuasions claim that impeachment has proved one thing; Democracy doesn’t work.
Tell that to Mrs. Hastings, at Hamden
(Connecticut
Mrs. Hastings proudly taught a course called “Problems of
Democracy”. Students just called it
P.O.D..
Notice it was called Problems of Democracy not Solutions of
Democracy. And democracy had plenty of problems.
It is thanks to Mrs. H. that I understood every twist and
turn of the fully televised Presidential Impeachment Hearings of 2020.
And it is thanks to her that I can give you my own verdict
about democracy: It is not failing. It
is not declining. It is exactly where it
should be. It is doing exactly what the founders intended and what Mrs. H. made
us understand they intended: checking and balancing all three branches of
government, as if there was a scale with three weighing pans instead of two;
the executive pan, the legislative pan and the judicial pan, all of which
needed to be kept somewhat level.
We all knew that Mrs. Hastings had first-hand contact with
democracy with a big “D.
But that first-Hnd
contct was a secret never to be mentioned in public for fear it would endanger
her husband’s life . Mrs. H. was married to an FBI agent who would disappear
from home for weeks, maybe months at a time on secret missions for the
government.
We all imagined him with men in trench-coats and fedora hats
in dark alleys, but when the American Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba
It was thrilling to think that my own history teacher’s
husband had to disappear from his home for months at a time and nobody was
allowed to mention it.
So why do I say democracy in America in February 2020 is
doing just fine when half the country thinks impeachment was a failure and the
other half thinks it was a victory?
It’s because Mrs. Hastings taught us that impeachment is
only half the process. The other half is a trial and a verdict, and we all know
in 2020 just how unpredictably maddening verdicts can be: just recall the trial
of O.J. Simpson.
If you look it up in the dictionary you discover that the
word unimpeachable means “not able to
be doubted, questioned or criticized:
entirely trustworthy.”
The House found behavior that was not entirely trustworthy,
not unimpeachable. The Senate after hearing the House’s evidence disagreed.
And there it stands.
So why do I say democracy worked? Because the entire country saw the trial:
House prosecutors vs. Executive defense
attorneys. Because the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court heard every scintilla
of evidence presented in the trial. Because
all 100 members of the Senate, were required to be in attendance,
without their cell phones or any stimulating beverages other than water or milk
(chocolate apparently allowed.)
In other words, the machinery of the U. S. Constitution
turned its gears in exactly the manner the Constitution envisioned, with the
exception of televised hearings, a possibility no signer of the Constitution
could have imagined in 1787.
One can argue about the justice of the outcome, but that is
what America
But nobody can say any branch got to tip the scales.. And those scales were unique: Lady Justice
had three weighing pans not the usual two: a legislative pan, an executive pan
and a judicial pan.
Impeachment in the House and trial in the Senate , however
raggedy both may have been, went through to the end.
And the three weighing-pans of Democracy, and its problems
as Mrs. H. taught me, continue their endless rebalancing act. But three pans
can’t achieve a stable balance.
Mrs. Hastings taught us the Constitution provided a fourth
weighing-pan: The Press.
Democracy thrives.
Friday, April 12, 2019
Wednesday, February 13, 2019
Monday, February 11, 2019
* My Life with Clutter
Everyone
can’t be Marie Kondo
- By
Paul Keane
If you walked through my house, you would be amazed at how neat
everything is: A place for everything and everything in its place.
Except for half an inch of dog and cat hair, it is remarkably clean
too.
But lurking behind this deceptive exterior order, is a secret life
of clutter.
Clutter increases exponentially. I know this truth from living in
my house for 27 years.
No matter how many times I’ve had Oakes Trucking and Disposal cart
away truckloads of outdated and broken or just plain unwanted stuff, the
remaining clutter multiplies even faster, and fills my drawers, my closets, my
cellar, my garage, my file cabinets (and my mind) with more and more clutter.
I even had a carpenter come in and turn my closets into bunk beds,
with upper and lower poles to hang things from, thinking I would give breathing
space to the dozens of shirts and pants that were jammed together inside. And
instead of breathing space like you see on Home and Garden TV closets, I soon
had two levels of stuff that was jammed together instead of one.
Unintended consequence: the cat could now reach easily the lower
level clothes and pull down shirts to make a comfy little nest to sleep in on
the floor.
It’s not that I had never seen neatness.
My 88-year-old Uncle Walter had a great way of organizing his
workbench. Nails and screws and tacks and rivets, nuts and bolts and anonymous
tiny metal junk all went in pickle jars.
He nailed the tops of the pickle jars to a 2-by-4 over his
workbench and filled each pickle jar with a different species of metal junk,
screwing the jars back on to the stationery tops he had nailed there.
In other words, he could see at a glance where his nails and screws
and bolts and nuts were located.
When I set up my own workbench. I rejected that idea as old
fashioned and risky because the glass of pickle jars could shatter and make a
dangerous mess.
Instead I collected coffee cans and used them to organize my work
bench. Unfortunately, they took up space on the bench so I had to build
make-shift shelves so they would only take up a coffeecan width of space.
Gradually my work bench was shrinking to accommodate the cans and their
shelves. It was becoming more like a large shelf itself.
In addition, since I couldn’t see what was inside the coffee cans,
unlike Uncle Walter’s pickle jars, I had to leave “some items” out of the
coffee cans and on the bench in front of the shelves for easy access, making
the bench even narrower and less useful for working on projects that require
space.
Soon “some items” became more items and more items became buried in
piles of items and the whole method of organization fell apart in my impatience
and annoyance every time I heaved a wrench or a hammer or a broken part of a
project back on the bench.
Then many of the nails I had put on the wall for the neat hanging
of tools soon went unused or used just as random hangers.
This mess, plus my jammed closets, have convinced me that there is
a genetic component in clutter that makes it multiply the minute its owner
attempts to enslave it into an orderly process called neatness.
Take my kitchen drawer, which has everything in it from tape to
extra hammers, glue, screw drivers, and missing pieces of light fixtures,
electric tape, and more.
I have organized that drawer three or four times over the last 27
years and it looked great for a day or two until I put “something else” into
it.
“Something else” leads to something else and that drawer became a
kind of game in my head: I know in my mind’s eye what is in there and if I just
rake my fingers through it long enough it will turn up.
It’s almost like hide and seek. I have been promising to organize
that drawer again for months now, but I know I will throw things away to make
everything fit neatly and then I will regret having thrown away exactly what I
am convinced I will need sometime in the future.
And besides, neatness isn’t everything. Quantity reigns. I can fit
more stuff in that drawer if it is chaotic mess, than I ever could if it was
neat.
Let’s not even talk about my “digital drawer” in the dining room
china cabinet with the dinosaur bones of Polaroid and digital cameras and flip-open
cell phones and dozens of tangled wires snaked together, surely breeding into
dozens more wires the minute I close the drawer and am not watching.
And the linen closet? Forget that. Tissue boxes, toilet paper, and
dozens of mismatched pillowcases and sheets are constantly falling out when I
open that sedate looking door.
I love watching Home and Garden TV and the modern houses with
walkin closets the size of my bedroom. My experience teaches me, that if I had
such a closet, it would become a breeding ground for shirts and jackets and
sweaters that I just can’t “bear to part with” but wear only once a year, if
that often. I still have a leather vest I wore as I hitchhiked across America
Recently my android phone sent me a message which says “You have
created too many files.”
I went to “settings” and clicked on “device maintenance” and
selected “clear”. Voila! The junk files were gone.
Maybe the new world of houses with internet intelligence will offer
such a feature: a “device maintenance” button that removes clutter from the
house by simply hitting “clear.” Poof.
There goes the charm of my secret life of clutter.
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