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Nothing is free.

~ All the Right that's left ~ 2 Comments

There’s a story about Abraham Lincoln stopping on the side of the road to free a pig stuck in the mud. When his companion asked why he did it, he said he wasn’t being altruistic, he did it for himself. He didn’t want to hear the pig screaming for help all the way home.

There is always a price or payment. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, there are plenty of things that I’ve done, not for a paycheck, but personal satisfaction. To stop the sound of pigs squealing in my head. Probably because I think too much, always have. I realized that I have debts to the people who helped me along the way. So, I pay it forward. Helping where I can.

Some things just take money, either taking or paying. A paycheck is just part of the cost. What we are selling our time and effort for. I think I would rather invest in the future. Take my pay in kind. I’ll teach, mentor, give some kid a car for his first job. I guess the job I’ll do for free is just what was done for me. But like I said nothing is free. I’ll pass the cost on to the next generation; some lucky kid will pick up the tab. Maybe he’ll resent the cost.

I’ll just keep digging pigs out of the mud for free.

Daily writing prompt
What job would you do for free?
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Nadia’s Theme

~ All the Right that's left ~ 1 Comment

I am a child of the 70’s. I remember watching Seattle Slew and Secretariat. The Apolo Launches. The Bi-centennial, Nixon, Ford, Carter and the mess our economy was in. The Cold War. Duck and cover air-raid drills. The OPEC oil crisis. I also remember the Olympics. Our best against the world’s best athletes. There was talk about boycotting the whole thing and crush the dreams of so many.

Then there was Nadia Comaneci. The first ever Olympic gymnast to receive perfect score at the Montreal Olympics. I watched those performances on a 13-inch black and white television. I remember that there were comments about the Russian judges pressuring the other judges to deliver those scores. I remember being excited by the way she seemed to bubble and glow, the joy on her face as she went through her routines. She was amazing. The music for her floor performance, Nadia’s theme.

Maybe it’s a hangover from the 1976 Olympics. I still love watching the gymnasts do the impossible. Simone flying through the air, defying gravity. Mary Lou bouncing along with a smile that barely fit her face. It’s the gymnastics that catch the eye.

Daily writing prompt
What Olympic sports do you enjoy watching the most?
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Arm everyone!

~ All the Right that's left ~ 17 Comments

Yup. I said it. Give everyone a gun. I understand that there are people who don’t want them; will never use one. There are even people who think guns are evil, that there is no reason to take a life, nothing is worth someone’s life. I disagree. My family is worth it, so is yours. I’m not advocating wild gunfights in the streets or rampaging violence. I just think everyone should have the means and opportunity to protect themselves.

I was a cop. I know how long it takes for the police to respond. I also know that there are times when you don’t have time to call 911. You do have time to protect yourself. You can say things aren’t that bad but, the news doesn’t report all the crimes that occur every day. Five hundred homicides a year is bad, but it doesn’t talk about the thousands of aggravated assaults, people shot, stabbed, beaten, raped and left where they fell.

Criminals, by definition don’t care about the law or you, your family, that you work hard to provide for your family. The legal system is being degraded to the point of uselessness. Murderers are being released without bail and often commit more aggravated assaults or murders before they go to trial for the first offense. Soros District Attorneys are offering plea deals, reduced sentence for offenders so they can be released back into society sooner. It doesn’t matter how many times the police arrest a suspect, if the DA doesn’t prosecute and the jails don’t hold them, it’s wasted effort.

So, arm everyone. Defend yourselves and your families. If you don’t think it is worth a human life to defend what you’ve worked for, don’t. But if criminals knew that every adult had a way to defend themselves and their families, they would be a lot more circumspect in their actions. Look it up on Youtube, people pissed off that someone shot and killed an armed robber or car-jacker. Look up the interviews with inmates about how they choose their victims. An armed society is a polite society.

Daily writing prompt
How would you improve your community?
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Morning Rituals… Jaun Valdez was a prophet.

~ All the Right that's left ~ 1 Comment

“All you need is the Columbian sun. and rich Columbian coffee…”

The first hour of my day probably isn’t pretty. I’m bald, so bedhead makes me look like I have corduroy for skin. I stumble into the kitchen and make strong coffee by instinct because thought is beyond me. If you encounter the uncaffeinated me in the wild, do not approach. While my anti-murder juice is brewing, I’ll stumble around confused and scratching myself. After the first cup I can usually manage more than a grunt and clothing if I haven’t done so yet. By the third, I’m human again. By the end of the first pot, I’ll be able to face the world.

I like to blame a lot of things on growing up in a Cajun house. I started drinking coffee at about 3 years old, cafe au’ late. Now, it’s strong and black with a touch of sugar. Now it’s a habit of almost 60 years. That’s what my morning looks like a cup of coffee. Well, a lot of cups of coffee.

Daily writing prompt
What are your morning rituals? What does the first hour of your day look like?
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I lived my childhood dream! Now what?

~ All the Right that's left ~ Leave a comment

My dream was to be a soldier, policeman and firefighter. The first two were kinda easy, but we never think of the scary part of dreams when we are planning our glorious, successful lives. What good is a dream if reality has to sneak in and ruin it. In my dreams I never woke up wondering what the hell just happened. It was a dream, silly. Of course, I never got hurt. People were always glad to see me. I was the liberator and peacekeeper. There were pretty girls who wanted to kiss me. It was great.

The fireman, that was a tough one. See, I didn’t know it but I didn’t realize how terrifying a burning building is when you think about running into it. Stand back and wave a hose? No problem. Run into a building? Don’t know about that. I did a couple times, smoke inhalation is a booger, took weeks until I felt like I could breathe again. I’ll leave firefighting to the heroes that everyone really are glad to see.

So, I lived my childhood dreams or learned enough to know that I wasn’t the one to run into burning buildings.

Now what?

Daily writing prompt
When you were five, what did you want to be when you grew up?
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It’s not about you…

~ All the Right that's left ~ 3 Comments

It’s not about you, it’s about me.

We are self-centered creatures. Everything is about “Me” even if it isn’t. That helps explain why people you don’t know insist on explaining their pronouns, sexual preference, and victimhood affiliation. It’s not hate or fear that makes people avoid people they don’t like or trust, they just don’t care.

The sad truth is we don’t matter enough to most people to be hated or feared. The riots and protest on television aren’t about you. They may peripherally touch you in a small way, but not much more than that. All the shouting and protest just seems like a way for small people to make themselves feel more important; waving their arms and shouting “see how important I am”. It’s like survivor’s guilt, stolen from the victim and coddled to draw the attention it can bring.

That’s my rant. It’s not about you. It’s not about me. We are not responsible for the past, only ourselves and the future we try to make. If we could take all the energy wasted on screaming victimhood slogans and hating people who have never hurt them, and turn it into productive effort, like self-improvement, things could change. Maybe for the better.

Daily writing prompt
What’s something most people don’t understand?
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Al Madsen, mentor, friend and role model

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I was young, stupid and cocky about it. As a young Private in the Army, I thought I was everything they wanted. I was wrong. My first Platoon Sergeant looked more like a dancing master than what I thought a soldier should look like. He was short, thin and a little stooped, always had a smile unless I provoked a frown because I wouldn’t listen. He was the best soldier I ever had the honor to serve with. I learned more about what it took to succeed in the military and being a man from him than anyone else I’ve ever known. After I started becoming more of a man and soldier, we became friends and I learned even more. Because of him, I started paying it forward as a way to honor him. I trained the men trusted to me with dedication if not always his level of patience. I hope he can look back over what and who I became and appreciate how much he influenced me.

Daily writing prompt
Who was your most influential teacher? Why?
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Landfall

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Hurricane Irma, Landfall

As I start writing, I can hear Band of Heathens singing “Hurricane” in my head. I was born in the south and lived on the Mississippi Gulf Coast off and on for several years. The storms would roll in off the water and the raw power would thrill me. The waves would build up and slam into the seawall, throwing up huge sheets of spray. Before they dredged the channel, the shelf ran more than half a mile offshore, smooth and shallow, it made the show more spectacular. Lightning strikes were so close that light and sound were simultaneous.

I wasn’t even 3 years old when Hurricane Camile came in. No one remembers it now. People want to take about Katrina or Hugo, but then, at that time, it was Camile. The weather started rolling in days before, the northern front is a huge basket of wind and rain that sweeps ahead, moving east to west. The gust front alone will destroy the best man can offer. Driving in behind the front is the tidal surge, deceptive because before the surge, the water recedes from the shoreline, only to come back in a wall that washes inland taking out anything that resists too hard. It will pound you for hours with howling wind and rain, so much pressure in the air that breathing is hard. When the eye passes over, it feels like a blessing, you aren’t free yet, but you can breathe again. The southern wing moves from west to east, almost gentle with half the wind and lighter rains than the front.

What I remember most is the mad run to safety, when my mother realized that our shabby trailer wouldn’t survive the storm. She loaded us up in the car, four kids and a gassy hound named Boondock and we made the run. I-10 wasn’t even built yet. We rode Highway 90, the coast road, literally right on the beach with the hurricane bearing down on us. The old concrete span bridge between Mississippi and Alabama was being washed over by the high water. My mother timed our sprints as the water rushed over, we moved. I still remember the feeling of the bridge shifting under the car, rising and falling with the tidal surge.

Camile made me feel its power, the fury of her existence. The awe. I’m probably smart enough now not to throw a hurricane party on the beach with a hurricane coming in, but it’s tempting. Whenever I’m near the coast and a storm is brewing, I want to go out and meet it, just to feel that awe again.

Daily writing prompt
What is your favorite type of weather?
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Morality (3) Wrong and Evil.

~ All the Right that's left ~ Leave a comment

I noticed that I skipped over trying to define what wrong and evil are. Those are tough words, complicated by degree. How wrong? How evil? Where and how do we draw the lines?

I was going to take the easy way out and say that wrong is something that causes harm to another. That is simplistic and indefensible. In war, law enforcement, medicine, or any situation where a decision needs to be made and you can likely come up with a way that someone may be harmed. We can also skip for the time being, the numerical arguments that are based on the “Greater Good” or “Greater Harm”. Triage is triage, making decisions based on economics, in the classical sense not financial. There are only so many lifeboats or X- number of doctors for Y-patients. You can use the resources wisely and save the people with the highest chance of survival or waste it trying to achieve an equal outcome for all, in which case is probably death.

That leaves the other two sides, moral good and societal good.

Moral good is inwardly focused but outwardly observed, virtue based on a particular creed that dictates actions. It also seems responsible for the Patriarchy, men leading, working, fighting and sacrificing for women and children. Also, those who took the rights of patriarchy more seriously than the obligations. Witness the scale – in the former we can see virtue in a man who sacrifices for his family or community. In the later someone who may contribute to the family or community, but lacks virtue because, inwardly his actions are directed by self-interest. The simple definitions do not take into account things like an abusive or unfaithful spouse, emotional trauma or exhaustion, financial strains that seem insurmountable, just virtue and evil.

Societal good is even trickier. What constitutes good for a society? How do we measure it. This question is answered in ethics, the outward actions of individuals, whether they are people, communities, corporations or governments. Whose self-interest is the deciding value? Peter Singer brings this up in an offhand way in “Famine, Affluence and Morality”, an essay he wrote in the 1970’s, arguing that it is immoral to spend money on luxuries when there are people suffering that can be helped by financial support. Failure to do so, is by Singer’s argument, evil. I’m not convinced, a logic box is a logic box. Solipsism is a fine argument to waste time on, but it’s just a logic box, it is true by the parameters placed around it.

Center stage in America is the Trans debate, exclaiming that it is good and essential to acknowledge and support anyone who feels that they are closer to being identified as a sex not supported by their biology. They would be happier if they could simply transition, emerge from the cocoon of hormones and surgeries to be what they believe they are. The next step is to support the beliefs of minor children if they believe or are convinced that they are Trans. With children, it becomes more difficult, do we allow half-formed minds to determine their future because we believe they truly know themselves? When I was a child, I believed I was a fireman and a police officer. Should I have been given a gun or allowed to run into burning buildings to support my belief? We have laws preventing anyone under 18 from getting tattoos, but they are allowed to castrate themselves because they believe it will make them happy?

What about the harm or risk to others. Mixing biological sexes in ways that thousands of years of societies have avoided such as bathrooms, mixed changing rooms, letting boys and girls share a room on a trip because one claims to be Trans. Why do we neglect protecting children because they believe they have a right to make decisions that are beyond their experience?

Another view? Is it ethical to allow the government to take extraordinary measures to save Social Security for the Baby Boomers? There is no way to do this without imposing on the still working Gen-X and Gen X groups, who will have to rely on the Millennials and whoever is next. The program is insolvent for simple reasons. When it was started, the expectation was that it would provide additional income for a limited amount of people for a short period. The average life expectancy in the 1930s was 58 for men and 62 for women, so most would not have reached the age of 65 to receive payments. In 2017, those numbers had risen to 77 for men and 82 for women. On average, most Americans will live to collect a portion of benefits for up to 12 years, when the original program did not foresee many receiving any benefits. Would it be ethical to reduce the benefits paid instead of passing the burden to the next generation.

Of course, we haven’t touched on Medicare and Medicaid. Heroic measures for life saving interventions for the elderly who are simply waiting to die and served by machines. Estates and lives crushed under the cost of paying for health care that cannot restore health and does not care for the welfare of the patient or families.

So, evil…