Category Archives: Thoughts

Dystopian Future

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I spent the weekend at the Boston Sea Rovers 62nd Annual Clinic. Despite the fact that the  the talks were better this year than in the past, they’re not what stuck with me the most. There was a side room of undersea artwork done by middle and high school students on display there, winners of the Bow Seat Ocean Awareness Awards. The quality of the work was truly amazing. Even the works by the younger students showed a degree of control and mastery that I couldn’t have aspired to then. But the thing that was noticeable was that they all dealt with pollution, and the ways we’re mistreating the planet. It was so consistent I had to ask about it, and in fact, that was the theme of the contest. And it made me sad.

It is true that I have seen things that will disappear by the time they’re my age. It is true that they will have to deal with the consequences of a rising ocean. It is undeniable that humanity has not been a proper steward of the oceans.

And yet, I feel doom and gloom is the wrong thing to be teaching kids. There is so much that is awe inspiring about the oceans, even today. The whole show, especially the film festival last night, is a testament to the beauty and wonder of the seas, and I would rather have kids exposed to that first, before being weighted down with the threats to the planet. I want them to see the wonders first, because if they learn to love the ocean, the desire to conserve it will come naturally.

I Expect My Leaders to be Grownups

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One of the things the media enables is bomb-tossing. It encourages extreme reactions on both sides. And so, it was disappointing, but not surprising, that within hours of the announcement of Justice Scalia’s death, the Senate Majority Leader was talking about not allowing a nomination for his replacement to come to a vote.

Just as parents expect good behavior from their children, I have certain expectations from my leaders. In neither case, is an expectation a guarantee. In both cases, when expectations are not met, there should be consequences. 

I expect my leaders to do their duty.

I expect them to fulfill the requirements of the jobs they chose to run for, and were elected to. If they want to grandstand or pontificate, they should get a job in the media. At the end of the day, I expect them to be grownups, to understand they can’t hold us hostage until they get exactly what they want. I expect them to come to an accommodation with each other.

It’s absurd to expect the Court to run with a vacancy for a full year. It would mean too many tie decisions, too many cases put over for re-argument, too much delay processing certiorari petitions.

It’s also absurd to say that there can’t be nominations made during an election year. Many justices have been confirmed in presidential election years, including Anthony Kennedy.

What I Expect From the President:

I expect the President to nominate someone Senate Republicans can live with. I’m not saying he should nominate someone they would whole-heartedly endorse, just someone they can accept. The President needs to accept the fact that the majority of the Senate is controlled by conservative Republicans. I’m not saying he needs to nominate another Scalia; I’m saying it’s not a time to nominate another Kagan (not to disparage Justice Kagan; I like her a lot).  He needs to find a middle of the road candidate. He should in fact, solicit the advice of both sides of the Senate. He would probably be better off if he did this privately.

What I Expect From the Senate:

I expect the Senate to give whomever the President nominates an honest consideration and an honest vote. I expect the Senators to recognize that he is the President, and that, according to the Constitution, it is his duty to make the final nomination. They need to recognize that whoever replaces Justice Scalia is not going to be as conservative as he was, just as liberals in 1975 had to accept that whoever President Ford appointed would not be as liberal as Justice Douglas.

If the President solicits their advice, they should give it. It would be more productive if they gave it to him directly rather than through the media.

I do not expect the Senate to rubber stamp a nomination. If the President were to send them a nomination that was clearly unsuitable, constitutionally, they do have the right to withhold their consent. But they need to recognize unpalatable is not the same as unsuitable. I do expect them to act on his nomination.

What I Expect from the President and the Senate:

I expect both sides to remember that the other party has prerogatives, and a Constitutional role in this process. I expect both sides to realize that the Court should not be expected to limp along for a year. I expect them all to be grownups, and realize that they are all not just members of political parties, but Officers of the United States of America, and (like any job), their office requires them to sometimes do things not exactly the way they want it. Realistically, I also would remind them that what comes around goes around, and at some point, their political fortunes will be reversed.

I expect them all to do their duty to the country I love.

You Can Learn To Write

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An acquaintance emailed me a little while ago to tell me that she was following the blog off and on, and had been touched by my piece about my father, and ended with “You’re a good writer.” This would have been a shock to my teenaged self — I hated to write, and didn’t think spelling, grammar, and the mechanics should count towards my grade. Somewhere entombed in the floorboards of my room is still a report from my sophomore year in high school that I hid because I got a D on it.

I recognized that I needed to work on my writing skills, so in my junior year, I deliberately took an English elective called Research Reports, knowing that I would hate it, knowing that I would be putting myself under deadline pressure, but also knowing it was something I needed to do. From that course, I learned how to structure a report, how to write an outline, and the art of footnoting and citing sources. I got better.

I still wasn’t as good as I could be. I had a wonderful English professor at Boston College, Margaret Ferrari. She based her grades on a set of short papers of about 1000 words each. My first couple of papers weren’t great, but she worked with me during her office hours. She taught me that a report wasn’t a random collection of facts; you needed to have a point to what you were writing about, and needed to marshall your facts to support the point you were trying to make, or the story you’re trying to tell. She taught me to listen to my inner ear, and pay attention to the sound and rhythm of the words I was choosing. By the end of my two semesters with her, I was generally getting very good marks for my writing.

I don’t believe that you have to have an inborn talent to write. It’s something you can learn. I’m still learning.

There are a number of skills that go into learning to write well. The most basic ones are the mechanics — spelling, grammar, and usage. For example, when to use “there” and when to use “they’re”. The good thing is that it’s all mechanical, and once you learn the rules, you have them, and you don’t have to worry about them anymore.

At a somewhat higher level is learning to express yourself, and organize your thoughts. What’s the best way to say what you want to say? What facts do you need to cover to make the point you’re trying to make? Why is this fact important? What needs explanation? What’s doesn’t fit in and should be cut? Here’s where an outline can help.

Personally, I still have a tendency to ramble. Writing this blog, I’m learning to drop little asides that I might find interesting or amusing, but would bore the reader or don’t fit in with the rest of the post.

As you get more practice, you start to develop your voice. You learn to pay attention to the sound and rhythm of the words so they flow together. For example, in the second paragraph of this post, I repeated the word “knowing” three times, on purpose, setting up the contrast between the first two (unpleasant) things, and the third instance, “knowing it was something I needed to do”. And you learn to edit yourself, to learn to ask yourself what works, and how to fix what doesn’t work. This post went through twelve revisions before I published it (and one after).

It helps to be a “natural”, but it’s not necessary. I’m not, but I learned. You can too.

The Performance and the Score

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This afternoon, I was thinking about something my sister said a couple of years back in connection with last night’s post. She’d been remarking on something my brother Tom had said. It was something to the effect that yes, my pictures were good, but of course, I adjusted them all after the fact. There was the implication that it was sort of cheating.

Poppycock. As Ansel Adams once said, “The negative is the equivalent of the composer’s score, and the print the performance.”  It’s what you do with the negative that counts, and the same goes for the relationship between the camera’s RAW file and the final result. What you shoot in the camera is the starting point. It needn’t be the end point.

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Hard to Believe,
and Not Hard to Believe

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It’s hard to believe its been 35 years since the day my Dad died. I remember the summer of 1980 all too well. I remember going to see him at Carney, before his operation, when it was hoped that they would be able to remove the section of his esophagus with the tumor, and I remember coming home from finals to find out that it was inoperable. I didn’t realize then how bad the news was; I foolishly believed the optimistic stories of how effective chemotherapy could be, and wondered why he was getting radiation treatment instead. I didn’t learn until later how intractable esophageal cancer is.

I remember watching him waste away over that summer, in constant pain and fatigue. I remember sitting with my sister in the living room, and hearing him retching in the next room. Should we go try to help? Not much we could do. Would it embarrass him? Probably. We wound up doing nothing.

I remember my uncles and cousin coming to the house to insulate and finish it, and install a wood stove, to make things easier for my mother.

I remember having to explain to my college advisor, after a meeting about not missing any part of student teaching, that my father was very ill, and it was very likely that there would be a problem.

I remember taking the Riverside Line out to the host school the first day of school, and looking up at the distinctive parking garage of the Deaconess Hospital, and thinking that’s where Dad was. And I remember about an hour later, the principal of the school, who surely did not want this job, coming to tell me that my Dad was gone.

I remember the end of that week, after the funeral, walking through the empty house, and feeling how strange it was that he was gone and not coming back, and that this was the new normal.

And yet, it’s not hard at all to believe. Thirty-five years, after all, is a long time, and there’s been a lot of water under the bridge.

His children, who ranged from 21 down to almost 14, are now all grown, and three of them are married. I think he would have liked his sons and daughter in law.

There are now five grandchildren that he never knew, and never got to know him. He’s just a name and a fact and a set of pictures to them, the same way I never knew his father, which is a shame. Dad was great with kids. He would have played with them, and taught them how to do stuff and teased them and explained things to them. He loved having kids around. I remember, still, watching him paint when I was little, and the gentle tone he had as he explained how he created the shading on the sails he was painting.

I think he would have loved to have tagged along on the trip my brothers and my brother’s sons took out to Colorado.

Dad was a great photographer, and in his last couple of years, he was starting to let me use his cameras, and share his interest in photography. I’m not sure he would have gotten into digital photography, but he would have loved SLRs, and being able to compose through the viewfinder and switch lenses and meter automatically. I really wish we could have gone shooting together.

Dad loved the outdoors in general, and the Blue Hills in particular. I remember, about twenty years ago, renting a mountain bike, and riding through the network of paths there, and thinking he would have loved it. I think he would have enjoyed the company of his son-in-law Paul walking through the woods, and perhaps he would have even developed an interest in birding. And often, when I’m kayaking, I think, “Dad would have loved this.”

It’s hard to believe I’m now older than my Dad ever was.

It’s hard to believe my mother has been a widow longer than she’d been a wife.

Dad I am so grateful that we kids, out of ignorance, set up a twentieth anniversary party for them, because we thought that was the big number, rather than waiting for a twenty-fifth than never came.

It’s hard to believe that had he lived, he’d be 88 this year.

It’s hard to believe his brother has grown children who never knew him.

It’s hard to believe his son has a grown son who never knew him.

But it’s not hard to believe that we still miss him.

The Olympics

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I’m very relieved to see that Boston’s Olympic bid is over. Personally, I’m not a sports fan, and have never cared about them, but I’ve also felt that it would be like the 2004 Democratic Convention – great for the money folks, but a huge inconvenience for anyone who actually has to live or work in or around the city. Lots of construction, lots of restrictive security, lots of disruption, lots of money spent on infrastructure with a very short active life.

Given the huge outlays needed to host modern day Olympic Games, I’ve long thought the idea of rotating cities needs to be re-examined. The Olympics need a permanent home. One where they can set up shop with all the facilities the Games need, in exactly the form they need them in. The expense of the infrastructure could be amortized over several sets of Games, and could be gradually grown and improved. Facilities could be custom built for the events they’re designed for, without worrying about winding up with an expensive white elephant that serves no purpose.

The permanent Olympic site would obviously be a draw during the Games, but I also think they would draw tourists during the off years, and facilities could host other events as well.

So where to put the permanent Olympic Games? To my mind, the obvious choice is Greece, their ancestral home, assuming the cost of building it was borne by the International Olympic Committee, and not the Greek government. It would have the added benefit of increasing Greek tourism, which would, hopefully, help the Greek economy dig out of the hole it’s in.

Thoughts on Newtown

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It’s been a little over a week since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary. I suspect for most people, the enormity of it is still sinking in. Last week I saw a clip of the opening Saturday Night Live used for their show–a children’s choir singing Silent Night, and nearly lost it.

Gun Control

It feels like there might actually be a consensus finally developing that there needs to be some sort of meaningful gun control. There is no reason for a civilian to be carrying around an automatic weapon. You don’t need an assault rifle for hunting. The best analogy I’ve seen is one by David Gergen – people have a right to drive, but the states get to regulate who can drive and can insist on certain minimum competencies. It should not be easy to get a gun without passing background checks.

Gun advocates are fond of saying that guns don’t kill people, people do— and that’s true to some extent. But we need to be keeping guns away from the type of person who would use a gun to kill people. If a madman can’t get access to a gun, yes, they may choose some other tool. But the results might not be as lethal. I noticed in Wikipedia that about the same time as the Sandy Hook shooting, there was also a mass stabbing in China. Those victims are still alive.

I think the proposal by the NRA that teachers and school personnel should be walking around armed is nuts on its face. You can’t go around putting guards everywhere, and I’d also be worried about the possibility of accidents, like the man who shot his son because he thought the son was an intruder, or by the possibility that one of the students could get their hands on the teacher’s gun and use it, either to intentionally hurt someone, or just as a result of play acting.

Mental Health

I saw the blog post by the mother of the child who was disturbed, “Thinking the Unthinkable“, about being the parent of a possibly dangerous child. She’s right of course; more needs to be done to identify and, if possible, treat people with mental illness before something happens. But, this is much easier said than done in both cases. Not all mentally ill people are dangerous—do we err on the side of protecting society, at the expense of possibly over treating, or worse, locking up, innocent, non-dangerous people, or do we err on the side of protecting the rights of people to be let alone if they wish to be, and possibly miss someone who will cause problems? I don’t know the answer to that. In addition, the author notes that her son has already received several forms of treatment—what if he turns out to be simply untreatable? Then what?

The Media

I think what the media has done to Newtown is unconscionable. The night it happened, we watched the news for a while, and then it started getting repetitive. It became obvious that there was nothing else to say and that they were simply milking things, and I had to turn it off. The media needs to shut the fuck up and let that town alone. There is no excuse to be pushing microphones in the face of some kid. There is no excuse for going up to an overwrought parent, and asking them, “How do you feel?” There is no excuse for every two-bit local station to send their own camera crew and reporter to the scene, flooding the town with tv trucks. It used to be that local stations covered their own local area, and left the other news to the network; I think they need to return to that practice. The people of Newtown need to be left in peace to grieve, and hopefully, to recover.

The People of Newtown

Finally, we come to the most important part, the people of Newtown. I don’t think anyone who hasn’t been in their shoes can imagine what they’re going through. I know I can’t, and I’m not going to try. Their lives will never be the same. People talk about healing, but I don’t think it’s the kind of wound that ever truly heals. It’s going to be part of their lives for the rest of their lives—and the survivors, siblings, classmates, friends, and even the parents are, for the most part, all young. They will be living with this for a long long  time. Hopefully, they will be able to support each other, and the rest of the town will support them, as they go through this process. What we can wish for them is that they are able to move past the pain, learn to live with their loss, and finally, be able to move on with the rest of their lives.