Well, this should be interesting; for the first time, I'm typing up a post on a tablet. I usually put on a good number of images and details so that I almost have to use a keyboard. Anyway, it should be instructive.
(That was too hard. Back to the keyboard.) This is typical behavior of soldiers all over the world, and we need not be particularly surprised. It is just that that particular generation of US soldiery have traditionally been especially venerated, and their foreign escapades during the war, and the scrapes they got into shortly afterwards were kept out of the media for the most part, and, perhaps misguidedly, the US propaganda machine was able to portray them as being a cut above typical soldiers: the Great Generation. All this public misconduct perhaps detracts from their greatness only a tiny bit, but it is just one more instance of the less-than-fabulousness of the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave (and extremely red-blooded, ahem).
What can one do, when one is besieged by information that piles horror upon horror, misfortune upon misfortune, calamity upon calamity? The environment, the economy, society, the bees, the genetically modified foods, Monsanto, Sara Palin, Cayman Islands, Social Security, Home Mortgage Crises, Congressional Lobbyists, Syria, Somali Pirates, Polygamy, and Fracking? It's almost as if let there be one more hurricane, and you're ready to shoot yourself.
Well, all our friends --well, most of them-- are just as concerned as we are, but we're surrounded, out here, with determined conservatives. (However, we're told, that the conservatives in our part of the world are pretty nuanced in their positions. They're pro gun, but some of them are pro choice; they're conservative Christians, but some of them are not Creationists; they're pro fracking, but they're unhappy about Big Oil and pollution.) We're careful about broaching Liberal Politics with people we don't know. Mostly, we keep in touch, rather desperately, with like-minded people we know across the country, who post liberal stuff on Facebook. I cautiously "Like" these posts, knowing that almost all my "friends" on Facebook are conservatives! But they're my friends; it is weird.
People deal with this onslaught of unpleasant information in many ways. (I'm talking about people who think like we do.)
For instance, one of KT's friends posts pictures of animals that were rescued. There are horrible photos of the condition of the animal before the rescue, and after a period of recuperation, the animal looks perfectly happy and normal. I'm not sure that the lady in question has anything really to do with animal rescue operations, but she appreciates what they do, and I am confident that if the opportunity arises for helping the operations financially, she would probably contribute.
Another of our friends fights tooth and nail to prevent drilling for gas in wild areas in Pennsylvania. (The gas-friendly GOP administration has moved to open portions of Pennsylvania State Forests for drilling. Drilling requires, of course, a lot more of a footprint than just the drilling pad.) She attends every public hearing about opening up new areas for drilling, and speaks up. She supports the only state representative from our area who has stood against drilling in nature preserves generally, and who has kept up the pressure to make gas companies pay more taxes specifically for the purpose of repairing roads and addressing spills and pollution caused by the drilling operations. She runs for public office, and we're hoping she gets an opportunity to influence the process. (Fiscal conservatives tend to equate energy with lower unemployment and an improved economy, generally. This is probably true in the short run, but it will be a very short run indeed.)
Another of our friends is active in addressing the rising xenophobia across the country. Even those who have generally regarded foreigners with some suspicion are beginning to see the danger of the rapidly spreading racism, and hostility towards Muslims. A large proportion of African Americans are Muslims, and have absolutely nothing to do with religious extremists. As one banner puts it, Islamic fundamentalists are to the typical Muslim as the Westboro Baptist Church is to Christians.
My few Liberal friends on Facebook keep up an onslaught of liberal propaganda, which, on the positive side, make me feel each morning that the world isn't completely coming to an end. If all I could see was conservative opinions and disinformation (and there certainly is a lot of it) I could not deal with each new day! This seems to be the hallmark of rational folks that I know, that they tend to be determined to keep up the pressure, hoping that the ignorance will be gradually eroded.
A lot of them are teachers. A teacher is in a particularly vulnerable position, because if they incur the hostility of the parents of the kids in their classes, all sort of problems will arise. So a teacher, for sheer survival, has to adopt a policy of teaching by example, rather than preaching.
In many foreign countries, of course, enlightened policies are usually adopted well before US authorities consider them seriously. For instance, it appears that in Australia, where citizens were initially just as alarmed about gun control as they were here, the legislation has recently been passed, and gun-related crime is significantly down. US citizens have an unreasonable faith in the superiority of our gun-toting criminals, and refuse to consider similar laws for gun control.
Few foreign countries permit religious lobbies to have a say in teaching of science, especially geology and evolution biology. Americans alone are more religious than rational. Even in Italy, the home of Catholicism, evolution is taught. But across the US, there are science teachers who stubbornly refuse to toe the line in those school districts in which Creation Science is required. Hooray for them.
The Boy Scouts of American finally adopted a policy that openly homosexual boys would be permitted to participate in Scouting, thus putting to rest a regrettable chapter in their history, and in the history of the US.
To summarize, I can only say that despite the gallons of bad news we get every day, I make it a point to focus on the few ounces of good news that do make it past the censors, and I cheer. We are helped by the fact that we do not watch TV. (On those occasions when we're forced to watch it at a doctor's office or some such place, we're more amused than appalled at the degree to which local newscasters will go to dig up some dreadful little nugget of sensationalism with which to disgust their loyal viewers.) I can only assume that people have been doing stupid things for millennia, but it's only recently that news organizations have become convinced that it's bad news that pushes up the ratings. Is this true? At any rate, I'd rather know now, however belatedly, that there were a good number of rapists and public adulterers among the Great Generation than to have been kept under the misconception that they were a more saintly lot than either their predecessors or their successors! We've been scum for a long time, and it's good to know that we were consistent during WW2! It doesn't bother rational people.
[Added later]
I was racking my brain to think what we do ourselves, KT and I, to put our spiritual finger in the figurative dyke, and I think it is recycling. We put as much as we possibly can in our recycling container, and KT religiously takes it out to the recycling center whenever she has a spare minute. Sometimes she takes the dog (but we're not ready to recycle the dog yet). It turned out that Best Buy does not take in used batteries for recycling, which is the best thing Best Buy could possibly do for community service, quite honestly. So we have an enormous pile of batteries, which we're going to regretfully throw in the trash, unless something better comes along pretty soon.
We recycle so aggressively that we often later discover that we've recycled things we happened to need. Woe is we. (Or woe is us, whichever is correct.)
On a slightly related note: a recent post by a Libertarian friend on Facebook asserted that many of the most popular charities, such as the Red Cross, and Goodwill, reportedly had CEO's who made enormous amounts of money. They claimed that, generally speaking, very few cents of each dollar they received in contributions were actually used in charity.
Well, we have to put this in perspective. A quick look at Snopes.com revealed an article on their website addressing this very problem. (If you follow the link, make sure to go down to their response, which is quite far down the page, at the heading "Origins". Everything that comes before only summarizes the accusations.) A tool for measuring the effectiveness of charities has been developed (by, I believe, Charity Navigator) called their efficiency ratio, by separating the total budget of a charity (which has to be public, except where it is a religious organization, another good reason not to depend on religious charities, in my opinion) into (salaries + benefits), and (everything else), the latter presumably going towards their mission. Today, it is not unusual to see the CEO of a charity earning an annual salary of around $400,000. The U.S. President, for comparison, earns somewhere in the region of $350,000, as do members of Congress and Senators. So yes, these people do earn a lot of money, but they're drawn from among the educated elite of the nation, and that sort of money is not out of line for a person who has to live or work in the vicinity of the bi-coastal megalopolises. Most charities, it turns out, have an efficiency ratio of around 75%, the Salvation Army having a higher efficiency, and the Red Cross maybe a little on the low side. So you decide: is the financial efficiency of your favorite International charity in line with your expectations? If it is, then you should continue to support it. If your standards are higher, you have to find more satisfying ways of spending your charity dollar.
If you'd like to contribute your mite where it really counts, here are some ideas.
* Hire someone to do your recycling for you regularly! Some enterprising high-school kid might haul your stuff to the recycling center and sort it for you for $20 a week. Okay, so you can't claim it on your income tax return, but if you persuade a neighbor who might be between jobs to do it, (or his wife, who is probably a little more likely to actually spend the money usefully!) you've done something really useful. Two things, actually: you've spent money in your neighborhood, and kept some junk from the landfill! (For those who live outside the US: The Landfill is the US euphemism for the enormous pile of trash that sits outside most towns.) Three things, if it inspires the neighbor concerned to recycle his or her own trash. Don't forget to recycle printer cartridges, cardboard cartons, and junk mail. Note: if a company sends you regular junk mail, put it in a large envelope and mail it back to them. Junk mail companies usually have a budget for recycling their own unused stuff, and will have to deal with this bounced-back junk mail in an acceptable manner. In some communities, businesses such as mailing / sorting agencies are required by local laws to recycle. Our local college, for instance, is required to recycle flat white paper; not nearly enough, in my opinion. They should be recycling magazines and brochures too, because faculty get a lot of junk mail.
* This hiring someone to take care of things that you might be too unmotivated to do just struck me as a great idea. I might hire a kid to organize my record collection. I have spent close to $100 on duplicates of CDs that I already owned, because I had misplaced them, or put one in the wrong case, and then lost it.
* Cleaning up a section of highway is another great idea, especially if you can arrange to do it regularly with some friends. This sort of thing is boring by yourself, but with a crazy buddy along, it might not be a chore at all, even if the buddy doesn't do much work. I just had an idea: I wonder if our little honor society might not be persuaded to take on a section of highway ...
* One thing I must do, is to volunteer at the local library. KT and I have found that our local library and its staff are always interesting people to be around, not to mention that the Library itself is just amazing. They have a wonderful multi-purpose collection, and have all sorts of creative people putting together a storytelling event for kids, or a summer reading program, or an adult literacy initiative. I would be content to shelve books, but I suspect that they have enough volunteers for whom shelving books is about as sophisticated as it gets...
So, listen to Lake Wobegon, and keep the good stuff in your sights, though you know that there's a lot of crap out there that does need addressing.
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