My Daughter's Perfume

Brushing my teeth this morning I had a horrifying insight into my own worldview. I am not sure about other people, but I am terribly bored by brushing my teeth. (This, by the way, is NOT the horrifying insight—that will come soon enough.) I do it every day at least twice, but it always feels like a chore. Often I will leave the bathroom as I brush, using the time to do little tasks like moving dirty laundry from my room to the washer or putting clean towels away or opening windows to let some air in. This morning I left the bathroom and went to Isabel’s room to turn out the light in her closet. While in her room I caught a whiff of perfume and assumed she had just put it on as she was getting ready for school. That whiff of perfume triggered a cascade of thoughts and feelings that ARE the horrifying insight. I am not sure what to do with what I have seen about myself, but my first impulse is to write it down and get it out into the light to help me make sense of it. Mostly, that whiff of Isabel’s perfume made me feel achingly sad.

The chain goes something like this: my daughter is growing up a bit..she is no longer playing dress-up when she wears a touch of perfume…it is part of her morning routine…soon enough she will be in high school…and she will, at some point, start dating people…and she will be lied to and manipulated and have her heart broken. How twisted is that? A whiff of perfume leads to real true sadness about the broken hearts my daughter has not yet suffered? Why is it that I go directly to the future sadness rather than the future joy? I remember how thrilling it is to have a crush on someone. I remember the jolt when you realize they might feel the same. I can still feel the explosion of that first kiss with someone you really like. Relationships bring giddy joy as much as they do deep sadness, so why do I ignore the upside and go straight to the down? Am I someone who sees life this way?

Be Strong, Mr. President

The Tea Party crazies in the House and their lead-from-behind “leader” Speaker John Boehner have a simple choice to make: do they want to raise the debt ceiling or do they want to force the United States Government into default on its previously incurred debts?  If by their childish intransigence they force a default, the economy will be dealt another severe blow, postponing a return to 6% unemployment for a few more years.

If Speaker Boehner backs away from this fight, he will have lost the little remaining faith his Tea Party caucus has in him.  They might even vote him out of the Speakership if they retain the majority after the 2014 elections. If he sticks to their guns and forces a default, he and the Crazies will have cost the Republican Party any chance it may have had of winning the Presidency in the next two or three elections.  He will have made it clear that Party is more important than Country to these bomb-throwers.

Meanwhile, the Republicans in the Senate are having to deal with their own Tea Party-inspired madness.  Ted Cruz wants to shut down the government rather than implement the Affordable Care Act. His fellow Republicans have told him what a dumb idea that is, but he is clearly more concerned with playing to his fanbase than actually governing.

In the end, all rational Republicans have one hope of coming out even slightly okay in this whole mess.  That hope is Barack Obama.  They need him to stand his ground against the hostage-taking Tea Partiers.  In this way, the voting public will see how utterly Unpatriotic these Tea Party Patriots are.  They just want to burn the whole thing down if they can’t have it their way.

At the next mid-term, the Republicans will lose seats in the House and will continue as the minority party in the Senate.  And the fault will lie with the Tea Party Caucus.  Maybe the national leadership of the GOP will be able to start exercising a bit of control over the monster they unleashed.  But to do that, they would need to have a spine—something I have seen little evidence of thus far.

Speaking of spines, President Obama needs to do what he has said he will do.  He needs to stand firm and NOT negotiate over the debt ceiling.  This is the biggest fight of his Presidency and he needs to be strong.

A Question About Farm Subsidies

    This week the House voted to cut food aid to needy Americans by $40 billion over the next ten years. Back in July, the House passed a farm bill that raised subsidies to farmers and agricultural corporations by billions of dollars.  If there is a clearer example of the hypocrisy of the Republican members of the US House of Representatives, I would be shocked.  These are the so called “deficit hawks” who believe the government that spends least, governs best.  Yet they voted to give more money to rich people, and in the process drive food prices higher?

    Someone please explain. (And by “someone,” I mean Mike Dawson, Richard Dawson, or anyone else I know who tends to vote Republican.)

Lean on Me (RTB 2013)

Once again, Reach the Beach kicked ass.  The Rosie Ruiz Fan Club came thiiiiiiiis close to not running the race this year, but at the last minute several adventurous runners stepped up and filled slots on our team in the place of teammates who had to drop out.  It really was touch-and-go up until a week before the race.  I had started to make peace with the idea that we would not run this year, but I was not very happy about it.

We tried something new this year and it really worked out well for us.  We joined a newly-created category of team called Freestyle.  The 12 members of a freestyle team are able to choose which of the 36 legs they run without having to stick to a predetermined order.  We get to choose how we cover the 205 miles from Cannon Mountain to Hampton Beach.  We came to this category out of necessity this year.  Several of our runners were recovering from injuries and were not sure of how many legs they could run.  Being a freestyle team allowed us to fill in for those runners if it turned out we needed to.

Happily, both of the recovering runners were able to handle all of their legs.  Nobody got stuck taking more than three turns on the course.  As a team, we were all over the place in terms of pace.  Some legs were long and hard and run through a pounding rain.  Others happened in the middle of the night on no sleep.  Some were short and flat and fast.  Our pace ranged from 10:00 per mile to 5:50 per mile.  Altogether, we ran the race in 26 hours and 47 minutes, for a pace of 7:49 per mile.  We had no idea about how many other teams were in the Freestyle category until we got home and looked at the results on the Reach the Beach website.  Turned out we came in third out of 156 teams.  Holy Shit.

Personally, this year’s RTB was great.  I met some new friends, got to reconnect and spend an intense amount of time with some old friends, and I got to make friends with some trees.

If you are a runner you know that most of the endeavor is mental.  If you have trained, then getting through the tough stretches is all about playing mental games and tricks on yourself.  My legs this year included two long and hilly stretches in the dark.  I knew going in that I was not going to be fast, but I also knew I could get through the hills without dying.  Nobody likes running on hills, but I have recently moved to Ithaca, New York and I have to run on hills no matter which direction I go from my front door.  So I figured I might as well do some of the hilly RTB legs.

My first foray out of the van around 10:00 pm had me going up three big hills in a span of 5.11 miles.  Two of the three hills were well over 200 feet high.  It was dark and it was difficult, but I did it.  My next leg, (Leg 19), at around 3:30 am, had me again going up three big hills, this time over a span of 8.3 miles.  There was a 350-footer, a 150-footer, and a 400-footer to close it all out.  The first two hills were hard.  The last was near-impossible.  It was still dark and it was still difficult and my mind was having a hard time getting my body to the end.

The final mile-and-a-half was straight uphill and I didn’t have much left in the tank.  I tried my usual trick of giving myself a goal that was visible and then making that the focus of my run.  I told myself, “Just get to that telephone pole on the right—that is your goal.  You can surely make it that far.”  And then once I reached that telephone pole I would choose the next goal and go from there.  Normally, this trick gets me through to the finish of any hard run.  Not on that second leg of Reach the Beach.

I found myself picking closer and closer goals, and yet I was still tempted to shut down and just walk the last half mile.  I had to come up with a new trick quick or my body was going to take control and start walking.  At this point in the course, I was on a road in the woods.  There were no houses, just trees as far as I could see—which was not very far given the low-powered head lamp I was wearing.  I am not sure where it came from, but inspiration hit just before I shifted from run down to walk.  I looked ahead, identified a particular tree on the roadside, and mentally reached out to it.  I introduced myself and asked for its help.  I asked it to loan me some of its energy and help pull me up the hill.

Generally, I am not a spiritual person.  I don’t believe in God or a soul.  I don’t credit stories of spirits and life energies.  I am a firm believer in science.  And yet, I found myself asking the trees for help.  Crazy, I know.  Yet there it is.

I chose wide, tall trees, figuring they were strongest and most likely to be able to help me fight gravity and despair.  And they did not let me down.  I could feel the boost they gave me.  I started to feel stronger and picked up the pace just a bit.  I started to feel a bit selfish—making it all about me me me.  So as I neared the top and the end of my leg, I told the trees I would repay them by doing what I could to help them whenever I could. I told them I would print two-sided.  I would recycle everything I could.  I would become a better steward of the land.

I made it to the top of the hill and collapsed into the van.  I did not tell anyone about talking with the trees.

In the cold light of day the next morning I knew that my mind made it all up.  It was effective and it got me through my second leg without walking, but I know I was not really communicating with the trees and they were not really lending me a hand.  Right?  In any case, do me a favor.  If you are tempted to share this post with anyone, do so digitally.  DON”T print it out on paper.

How is a bullet better than poison gas?

Imagine how you would react if China launched their version of cruise missiles at Israeli military targets because the Chinese Government did not approve of the way the Israelis had conducted a military operation in the West Bank.  You would probably be outraged, right?

Now tell me why the United States has any standing to launch a punitive attack against Syrian forces in the wake of their likely use of chemical weapons on Syrian rebel-held territory.  How has it come about that we have appointed ourselves in charge of punishing nations who do things the global community of nations disapproves of?

If the world is outraged by the use of chemical weapons in Syria, the world should do something about it—not just the United States.

And while I am ranting, how are chemical weapons different from more traditional ways of brutally killing your own citizens?  The Syrian regime of Bashar al Assad has killed between 20,000 and 40,000 rebel fighters.  The rebels have killed near 30,000 Syrian soldiers and police.  By all accounts, more than 100,000 civilians have been killed in the fighting. 

How are the deaths of those 100,000 children, men, and women any more acceptable than the deaths of the 1000 killed by a chemical agent last week?  This distinction between conventional weapons and chemical weapons is stupid.  Weapons are weapons and dying is dying. 

President Obama and those who support a limited strike on Syrian military capacity say they are sending a message that the use of chemical weapons crosses the line.  I would agree that a limited strike does send a message.  But I would also argue that supporters leave the second half of the message it sends unstated.

“The use of chemical weapons crosses a line—that the use of old-fashioned bullets, landmines, mortars, and shells does not cross, so you should feel free to rain those more traditional weapons down on civilians all you want.”  Is this really the message President Obama—and the rest of the world—wants to send?

I have no solution here.  In an ideal world, the UN would be unanimous in its condemnation of the Syrian regime and all of their actions against civilians.  It would also deplore any rebel actions aimed at civilians.  The UN has proven time and again to be a terribly flawed and mostly powerless institution when it comes to preventing violence.  

But this is far from an ideal world and bad actors have forever, (and probably will always), use whatever means at their disposal when they are feeling like they are out of options.  For the United States to have any credibility, we need to either stand up for innocents EVERY time governments use any weapons against them or we need to be much more cold-hearted and practical and respond only when our self-interest as a nation is at stake in a real and strategic way.  Our selective moral outrage drives me crazy and only serves to lessen our credibility around the world.

A weapon is a weapon, whether it be a suicide bomb strapped to the belly of a 12-year old girl, a drone-launched missile fired at a Land Rover in the desert around Marib in Yemen, a smallpox-infected blanket left as a gift for relocated Native Americans, or Sarin gas deployed against a town in Syria.  The people who die, die.  One way is not any more morally reprehensible than another to me.

I hope in the coming days President Obama will see the futility of any sort of military strike against the Syrian regime.  But I doubt it.