Tag Archives: Life

Papillon

Posted on August 19, 2011 by | 4 comments


Hi blogsters:

A couple of days ago I came across a tattered copy of Henri Charrierè’s, Papillon on the bookshelf.   I’d read it many times over the decades, but there’s always one more read left in it, it seems.  This might be the last.

Charrierè’s autobiography always has something new to tell me, depending on where my life is when I re-read it.

Papillon (Charrierè) was transported to the French prison islands of Guinea in the Caribbean in 1931, where thousands of prisoners were kept out of sight and mind of the French citizenry.  Devil’s Island was the most well known, but it was only one of the camps where 80 percent of the prisoners died before serving out their sentences.

The book is a story of courage, determination, brutality, as Papillon goes through a series of escape attempts, dungeons, unthinkable tortures, solitary confinements at a time in history when the ‘civilized world’ was no more civilized than it was before, or since.  Eventually, he escaped and became a worthy citizen of Venezuela from 1945 until he wrote the book in 1967.

In some ways the writing and the stories both remind me of the fiction works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Strange how some nationalities get all the credit, while others manage to escape notice.  The Spaniards and Portuguese take their battering from the waning memories of the Inquisition.  The Russians from the Gulag camps.  The Chinese from the Great Cultural Revolution.  The Belgians from the terrors they poured onto the Congo.  The Cambodians, the Ethiopians and the Germans have all been held up to the light and examined with appropriate repudiation.

Somehow the Brits and the French just managed to escape notice when the recognition for some of the vilest institutionally sanctioned acts of human brutality in modern human history.

Papillon.  A book worth reading and thinking about by all you ‘jail’em-til-they-rot’ enthusiasts.

We haven’t caught up to the French, Brits, Spaniards, Cambodians, Chinese, Russians, Belgians, Germans, and other civilized nations yet.  But we have the ingredients.

Plenty of prisoners and prisons.  A freedom-loving population of the same kind of jurors, courts, prosecutors who sent Papillon and thousands of others off to a life and deaths they’d never tolerate for any cute animal that appeared in a Walt Disney film named Bambi.

Old Jules

Papillon Trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DARD1l-tr6g

Papillon（1973） – Theme from Papillon
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNp_3dpiTno&feature=related


4 Comments

Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Human Behavior, Reading

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Challenge of Quietude

Posted on August 15, 2011 by | 16 comments


Things could seem fairly grim to almost anyone trying to stumble through this new century.  Somebody always walking into a schoolhouse with a gun, someone always bombing someone else, shooting someone else.

  • A cop probably feels things are middling dangerous for cops, feels things have gotten out of hand, feels threatened.
  • Store employees fearing their bosses, merchants fearing their employees, all of them fearing the dangerous potential of every customer.
  • Politicians fearing the opposing party, fearing the voters, fearing the prez.
  • Gang bangers fearing opposing gang bangers, fearing the cops, fearing their brother gang members knowing they’ll sell them out for a plea-bargain in a minute if faced with a long-term sentence.
  • Druggies fearing the dealers, fearing the cops, fearing the high cost of a habit, fearing other druggies, fearing their families, fearing do-gooder mammas and sisters and angry wives who might give them to the cops ‘for their own good’ after a long series of attempts to kick that didn’t work.
  • Christians fearing Muslims, Muslims fearing Christians, everyone fearing what the price sign above the gas pump’s going to show the day after the November election.
  • Single women fearing they’ll grow old without a man, married people fearing they’ll lose their partners to disease, to war, to accidents, to infidelity, to abuse.
  • Everyone fearing for the kids, for their safety, their increasingly brainless approaches to reality, for their futures.
  • Everyone watching the television screen, everyone shaking his head with the latest thing happened somewhere.

We’re in one of those niches in human history during which mass hysteria prevails.  An erosion of faith, a lapse of memory as a result of the bombardment of news submerging the mass-consciousness into the goldfish bowl of NOW.

The reality is that things aren’t worse now than they’ve ever been. 

Death still comes one-to-the-customer.

Kids, cops, gang bangers, birds, whales, baby seals, druggies, Christians, Muslims, every living creature is going to cross the finish line, same as they always have.

People aren’t killing one another more frequently than they’ve ever done.  They’re doing it about the same amount as they always have.  Killing and stomping one another, enslaving one another, robbing one another, invading one another.

Life’s a tough gig if we forget we’re going to die.  It always has been.

The challenge to man has always been putting himself above all that.  The courage to accept he/she will die, the kids will die, their kids will die.

The challenge is in the courage of acceptance, of distancing the self from the daily events creating the illusion death is somehow foreign, unnatural.  Tragic.

The challenge lies in living in the knowledge we’re going to die while behaving as though we aren’t.  In the courage to transcend the inevitability and allow ourselves to understand those other folks, the kid-killers, the gang bangers, the druggies, the cops, the government goons, the Christians and Muslims, the sheeple, all of them are just the same as us.  All stumbling around trying to get through this life.

The challenge lies in forgiving them for forgetting, forgiving ourselves for forgetting, we’re going to die and submerging ourselves in fear and brother hate.

The challenge lies in transcending the forgiveness enough to be grateful for the moments, every one of them, between the crying and the dying.  Grateful for the pain, the hardship, the loss, and the spiritual growth potential.

The challenge of acceptance that it ain’t all flowers and honey, never  has been, never was supposed to be.  That this life isn’t about what happens across the ocean, in Washington, in the crack-house down the block, or in the next bedroom where the kids are sleeping.

This life is about this side of the ocean, this city, this block, this house, this bedroom, right there where you are sleeping.

The impression you are making in that mattress, that pillow is where the minutes are ticking away, that’s where opportunities to become something better are located somewhere in a flash of life and time that’s ticking, ticking, ticking, trickling sand into the bottom of the glass.

The courage to repudiate the mind-games of others.

Others shouting to you that where someone else dies matters.  Others demanding you pretend you won’t have to die, if you hire more cops, hand more of your personal decision-making over to the government, watch more television, put more people in prison, send the army off to stomp bad guys somewhere.

Ignoring the cowards whispering if you avoid different ingredients in your food, buy the latest health miracle and don’t breathe second-hand smoke you won’t have to die.

That’s the challenge.  Same as it’s always been.

Old Jules


 

Four Sacred Mountains- R. Carlos Nakai (Song for the Morning Star)

16 Comments

Posted in Communication, Current Issues, Human Behavior, Solitude

Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

Amazing Synopsis

Posted on August 13, 2011 by | 4 comments

Have you ever considered how much time, energy, money and lousy grades could be avoided if world history could be summarized for the kiddos into videos lasting a few minutes?  For instance, consider the European conquests of Africa, the American continents, and India.  The chillerns spend all kinds of time having to memorize the nigglingest details and names the teachers can’t even pronounce.  Pizzzzarrro.  Montezooooma.  Courtessss.   Geroneeemo.  Krazyhorse.  Not to mention the even worse ones in Africa and India.

But the hilarious fact is that all that isn’t needed.  All those books didn’t need to be printed.  All those names and dates didn’t need to be memorized to understand the basics of the European conquests of more-primitive geography.

Here it is.  The incredible 4 minute 56 second summary of the European conquest of Africa, the Americas and India:

http://youtu.be/1csr0dxalpI

If the video doesn’t play the link below should work:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1csr0dxalpI

Those kids can now go back to playing on the computers with a total understanding of the history of their ancestors.

I’m going to search around to try finding some more good summaries of other hard-to-remember history.

Old Jules


4 Comments

Posted in Education, History, Human Behavior, Movies

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Could you choose to live on the street?

Posted on August 13, 2011 by | 19 comments

That little farm you see down there is the place where I spent a good many of my formative years after my mother remarried and we moved to Portales, New Mexico. As you can see, we’d had a pretty good year for hay, which dates the picture to 1949, or 1950, before the big drought hit.

When we sat outdoors in the evening the red neon lights blinked “Schumpert Farm Supply” across the top of the long building running diagonally to the railroad tracks until I went to bed. From my limited perspective the Schumperts were ‘rich’. In that small town that railroad running through didn’t identify who was rich but it did identify who wasn’t. That little farm I lived on and no other property that side of the tracks had any rich people.

In the rigidly established social structure in Portales business men generally came down on the side of being ‘rich’, along with professors at Eastern New Mexico University, bankers, physicians, preachers, school teachers and a few elderly ladies who lived in houses big enough to be thought of as mansions. Farmers, ranchers, Mexicans and people who worked in the businesses weren’t ‘rich’.

I doubt the adults paid a lot of attention to the social strata, but school teachers did, and the kids adopted it more firmly than a religion. Rich kids were easy to recognize because they made good grades, weren’t hassled by teachers, got elected to everything, brought cookies to school Christmas, Easter and Halloween, and had the best bicycles early, cars later. For the most part they were insufferable snobs.

But not the Schumpert boys. I was in school with Stephen and Billy, and there was a precocious younger one I don’t recall the name of. Stephen was a year older than me, Billy a year younger, and there wasn’t a breath of snobbery in the entire family. Stephen, particularly, had a knack for getting in just the right amount of just the right kinds of trouble to keep from qualifying as a goody-goody. Good solid boys from a good solid family. I had a lot of respect for all of them.

I left that town early and stayed mostly away for several decades. I lost track of almost everyone I ever knew there.

But after Y2K when I moved into town to Grants, New Mexico, I came across Billy Schumpert being president of a bank there. Naturally we got together and talked about whatever we each knew that might interest the other. Billy’s the one told me what happened to Stephen.

Stephen worked as a bank examiner several years, then became president of a bank in Colorado, maybe Denver. Had a regular family, seemed to be destined to follow a career path and eventually retire. But one morning he didn’t show for work late in the 1980s. Nobody had any idea what became of him. He wasn’t a drinker, didn’t use drugs, didn’t have a ‘secret life’. He just vanished for no apparent reason.

Over time the police and other agencies gave up, assumed he was the victim of some crime, dead. But the family put up a reward for information about Stephen, sent private investigators and others searching for him. Eventually, six, seven years later they located him living under a bridge in Seattle.

Over time everyone who loved Stephen went up there trying to talk him into returning to real life, return home.

“No! I had enough!” That’s all he’d say and he never came back.

I’ve pondered Stephen a lot during the years since I learned what he’d done with his life. In some ways I think I understand, though I’m not sure. My own life has been a long series of reversals in direction. It’s meandered, cutting as wide a swath of human experience as I was able to pack into it. So, from that perspective, I can gnaw at the edges of understanding Stephen’s behavior. But I was a wild kid and I’ve always pushed the envelope, all my life.

Stephen was ‘tame’.

I’d like to see old Stephen again if he’s alive. He’d be 70, 71 years old now and maybe wiser than he was in the 1980s when something told him he’d had enough. I’d like to sit on the porch and talk with him a long time to come to know how he came to make his choice to isolate himself, to impoverish himself.

Simon & Garfunkel – Richard Cory 1966 live
http://youtu.be/euuCiSY0qYs

19 Comments

Posted in 1950's, America, Human Behavior, NM, Parents, Senior Citizens, Welfare, Youth, YouTube

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Runaways, 1947

Posted on August 5, 2011 by | 10 comments

Causey, New Mexico, was a dot in the road.  Pavement from nowhere to nowhere running between a scattering of frame houses, a small roadside store and gas station.  A rock schoolhouse, a church, and a few rusting hulks of worn out farm machinery in the weeds. http://www.ghosttowns.com/states/nm/causey.html

Our cottage was on the same side of the road as the schoolhouse.  Most of the village was on the other side, including the windmill across the road from our house where my sister and I went for water and carrying the bucket between us to tote it home.

To my tiny, four-year-old mind, the center of town was the store, diagonally across the road, to the left of the windmill.  Everything of importance happened there.  Cars from other places stopped for gas.  The store had Milk Nickles.  Ice cream on a stick, covered with chocolate.  Pure heaven that didn’t come often.

If the store was heaven, behind our house was hell.  The toilet.  A ramshackle tower with dust flecks floating in the shafts of light that came through the cracks between the boards, light coming through underneath where the ground had caved away from the wall.  Home of black widow spiders and the occasional rattlesnake.  The place was a chamber of terrors for me.  I was always certain I’d fall through the hole to the horrors beneath when I used it.

Our little cottage had two rooms.  A sort of kitchen, living area in front also had a little counter where my mom tried to operate a little variety store.  Keychains, trinkets, a handkerchief or two.  Things that wouldn’t be found across the street at the store.

She was also a seamstress.  Most of my memories of that time include her huddled over a treadle sewing machine working on the felt curtains she was making for the stage of the school auditorium.  Mom was a woman twice divorced.  In 1947, that was no small thing.  In that time and place broken marriage was considered to be the fault of an untrained, unskilled, unwise, probably immoral woman.  Two divorces, three children, and no resources made my mother the subject of mistrust by the woman of the community, and disdain by the men.

Memories have probably faded and altered with the half century since all this happened.  The perspectives of a child plagued with fears and insecurities seem real in my recollections, but they, too, have probably been twisted with the turns and circles the planet has made around the sun; with the endless webs of human interactions, relationships formed and ended.

My sisters went to school in that village.  Frances, my sister who died a few years ago, must have been in the second grade.  Becky, maybe in the 5th.  I hung around doing whatever preschoolers do in that environment when everyone else is busy.  I have flashing memories of standing by the road throwing rocks at cars; trying to get the little girl down the road to show me her ‘wet-thing’.

I remember being lonely; of wishing aloud my mom would give me a little brother to play with.  “I wish I could,” she’d reply, “but you tore me up so much when you were born, I can’t have any more kids.”

That trauma of my birth was a favorite theme of my mom.  She was fond of telling me how the doctors were long arriving when I was ready to be born;  how a nurse and my dad held her legs down so I couldn’t emerge until the proper people were there.  How it damaged her insides and caused her to have to undergo all kinds of surgery later.

I recall I felt pretty badly about that.

During harvest season it seemed to me the entire community turned out to work in the fields.  We’d all gather in the pre-dawn at the store, then ride together to the cotton fields in the back of an open truck.  Mom and the girls were all there, along with the neighbors and some of their kids.  Two of the kids were about my age:  Wayne and Sharon Landrum.

In retrospect I doubt we preschoolers helped much.  My mom had put a strap on a pillowcase and promised a Milk-Nickle every time it was filled.  This was probably more to keep me busy and out of trouble than it was to pay for the ice cream bar.  I can’t imagine that a pillowcase would have held the ten pounds of cotton it would have taken to pay a nickle.

The lure of sweets weren’t sufficient to occupy smaller kids, I suppose.  There came a time when Wayne, Sharon, and I wandered off from the field.  At first it was just to take a walk, but the road was long and we must have made some turns.  Before too long we’d gotten so far from the farm we didn’t know the way back.  We were frightened and kept moving.

In the end we found the lights of a farmhouse sometime after dark.  The family brought us inside and fed us something.  We sat around a stove trying to keep warm until some of the searchers came and picked us up.

In the morning at the store all those field workers who’d had to lose part of a day of wages wanted vivid descriptions of the spankings we got.  They wanted to make sure.

That was my first experience with running away, at least on my own part.  My mom had done some of it, running away from my dad and her second husband.  My dad had done some of it, letting his kids go off, first to Arizona into the shelter of a brutal, drunken step-dad, then into the shack in Causey.

Old Jules

Johnny Cash– In Them Old Cotton Fields Back Home
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vCK8mSyhb0

10 Comments

Posted in 1940's, Adventure, Country Life, Creative Writing, Human Behavior, Parents

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Internet Wisdom

Posted on August 3, 2011 by | 8 comments

I spent a while this morning visiting various blogs, groups and reading blasts.  Stayed mostly away from the news feeds, however.

But I came away renewed, refreshed and relaxed from all the exercise dodging ricochets of wisdom, originality and profundity.

  • Found out Love’s a big deal however it happens to be packaged, especially if it’s universal and unconditional (not making any demands), and I was appropriately edified with the knowing of it.
  • Found out pets are cute and smart, which I hadn’t noticed before,
  • Found out wild animals wouldn’t hurt a flea, mostly, unless it’s the fault of some human,
  • Found out humans mostly wouldn’t hurt a flea if they’re properly loved,
  • Found out millions of chickens spending their lives in lines of 3′ wire cubes a mile long and three deep from egg to hatchet were capable of being subjected to some irony  called legal cruelty if they died prematurely by some other than the normal method,
  • Discovered there’s an amazing breadth of conflicting, mutually exclusive truths floating around,
  • Discovered the wisest folk on the planet and those most prone to pass one-sentence fragments of that wisdom along to others are those who wish they’d been born with a Tribal Census Number of one sort or another, but who almost certainly weren’t (though they, followed by I, would be the last to say so).  The good news is there are plenty more of the same tribe willing to shoot it back at them.

I suppose I’ve almost exhausted that source of wisdom for the moment.  Thinking next I’m going to study the labels on food cans.

Old Jules

http://www.pcworld.com/article/137100/the_10_funniest_sites_on_the_internet.html

8:00 AM afterthought

I probably should have mentioned something else I’m noticing and find a lot more humorous than any of the above:

The emergence of the “I fought in [name a war the US indulged in during the past half century] syndrome.  Most don’t come right out and say so, but the great majority attempt to convey a distinct impression they were infantry point men, or at least out where the bullets were flying.  And it was tough.   The PX, pizzas and whores were all off somewhere different than where they were.  Tough and scary with all those meanies trying to get through the wire every night and them laying ambushes on the jungle trails, crawling in tunnels full of snakes and little brown brothers with hand grenades.  Unspoken implications they weren’t among the 150/1 REMF [rear-echelon MFs] in Vietnam, not among the 500/1 in everything since.

Naturally all this gets followed by a lot of fawning modern day patriots thanking them for protecting all this freedom we now enjoy, frowning about how little thanks and respect vets get for being vets.

If you hold your mouth right you can get a smile out of this phenomenon.  Twist it around a little further and you can even squeeze out a laugh.

REMFs circa 1963

[Edit:  Sheeze.  Just got an email from someone thought I was saying I was a Vietnam Vet.  I’m not.  This pic is Korea, 1963.  Nobody ever heard of Vietnam yet.  That 1st Cav patch – in those days was “The horse we never rode, the line we never crossed and the yellow is the reason why”]

I took the picture but I’ve since then metamorphosed into a point-man with a nasty scowl figuring on getting a Veteran bumper sticker and some thanks for all I must have sacrificed so you modern patriots could stay free, etc etc etc etc etc.

Sometimes I think we old people really are as pathetic as young people believe we are.

10:00 AM afterthought

If lip-service croc-tears patriots actually wanted to say thanks to someone who made a sacrifice they’d pay a visit now and then to a long-term care VA hospital instead of displaying “Support Our Troops” stickers and sloganizing a lot of easy, empty rhetorical cliché.  The wheel chair population wasting away forgotten in those hospitals sacrificed something they wanted to keep, even though they probably never believed they did it to protect the freedom of anyone else.

Likely it gets lonesome in there being a has-been swept off into a corner so’s they don’t distract from the enthusiasm for the ones haven’t done their unintentional sacrificing yet.  Paying them an occasional visit, taking them a pecan pie, sitting around exchanging lies about wars we fought would get a lot nearer to sincerity than a thousand flags and bumper stickers.

And those guys would welcome it, though they’d have every right to be suspicious and wonder whether the world’s coming to an end.

8 Comments

Posted in 1960's, America, Human Behavior, Internet, Liars, Reading, Senior Citizens

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Civility and Civilization

Posted on August 2, 2011 by | 12 comments

Hi blogsters:

Taking a breather here and got to thinking about something that happened a few years ago that might be worth relating.

During the post-Y2K financial challenges I substitute taught in the public schools for a while.

Those situations often leave the sub in front of a bunch of kids without any obvious means of spending the time. The regular teach, say, didn’t know he was going to get into a car wreck or have a terrible hangover, so there was sometimes no agenda.

One week I found myself in front of several days of classes of high school seniors. Rather than let them use it for a study hall, I decided to get them talking about what they believe in. Try to get them into a mode of defining it and possibly thinking in ways they hadn’t done so before.

One of the days was spent talking about civilization. What it is. What are the characteristics of a civilization, as opposed to merely a complex society or culture with traditional, defined behavioral norms?

From the beginning, every classroom full of kids believed a society couldn’t call itself a civilization if it condoned slavery within it. They continued believing that (after some discussion) even after I pointed out the fact the US allowed slavery until a century and a half ago. Almost every group of humans we dub ‘civilized’ in history had slaves.

Watching those kids absorb, then adopt the realization that by their own definitions the US couldn’t possibly have been a civilization until the end of the Civil War was fascinating. But they were universally adamant about it, even after thinking about it. When I pointed out further that slavery existed almost all over the world in one form or another until fairly recently in history….REALLY recently they gradually decided most of their recent ancestors weren’t civilized..

Once they’d decided there couldn’t be civilization without civility defined as a respect for some degree of freedom of the individual, they hung tight on it. Those kids decided human beings weren’t civilized anywhere until ‘way after a lot of civilizations (by other definitions) had risen and fallen.

Those were smarter kids than I figured on them being. And perfectly willing to stick by their guns on something they believed in.

Over the course of a few days these kids decided they absolutely believed, following a lot of debate, that due process is the foundation of civilization. They believed wars without due process were criminal, that they were the antithesis of civilization because they failed to respect human life enough to follow their own prescriptions and procedures. They believed killing, mayhem are serious matters worthy of reflection, debate, and a profound respect for doing things thoughtfully and exactly according to law. They believed failure to do so is a symptom of a society withdrawing from the condition we call ‘civilization’.

Toward the end some of them must have ratted me out to their parents. I didn’t get many sub-teaching jobs after that.

Old Jules

12 Comments

Posted in Current Issues, Education, History, Human Behavior, Senior Citizens

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Black Hole Sucks in 140 Trillion Times the World’s Oceans

Posted on August 1, 2011 by | 6 comments

It’s no doggoned wonder we’re suffering drought.  This news piece lets the cat out of the bag.
Black hole sucks in 140 trillion times the world’s oceans:
http://news.yahoo.com/black-hole-sucks-140-trillion-times-worlds-oceans-163503124.html

Seems there’s a moon of Saturn spewing water out into space faster than Saturn Moonians can catch it to make proper use of it.  That whole Saturn ring fiasco is mainly chunks of ice out cluttering up what would otherwise be a nice, clean see-through piece of real estate with nothing in it to offend drought-stricken city people who have grass needs watering, golf courses needing to be kept green, swimming pools and hot-tubs to frolic in, and other important uses.

But that’s not the worst of it.  A growing body of evidence argues Mars used to have plenty of water for golf courses and whatnot, but it got ripped off and wasted by parties unknown.

Investigators among the astronomical community recently discovered a black hole off a few hundred million light years away is doing something similar there.

They’ve been bragging for some while about creating ‘baby black holes’ in the super-colliders and at Sandia National Laboratory.

Another dramatic climb toward fusion conditions for Sandia Z accelerator:
http://www.sandia.gov/media/z290.htm

Probably no connection to this little drought we’re suffering though.

Old Jules
Creedence Clearwater Revival– Have You Ever Seen the Rain:
http://youtu.be/TS9_ipu9GKw

6 Comments

Posted in 2011, Astronomy, Current Issues

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Slouching into the Millennium – August 1998

Posted on July 29, 2011 by | Leave a comment

The Beginning

We staff members of the New Mexico State Emergency Management Planning and Coordination Bureau [EMPAC] didn’t laugh much.  We were a collection of old guys mostly retired from something else, except for a few youngsters, mostly support and training staff.

Radiation Response and Recovery [the RAD catchers] was a retiree Bird Colonel from the US Army named Sam.  Hazardous Materials Response and Recovery was headed by Joe, a retired US Air Force Lt. Colonel who’d piloted B47s for the Strategic Air Command in his youth.  Joe sat at the end of a runway in a B47 loaded with hydrogen bombs for two weeks during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Natural Disasters – Earthquake Preparedness was a shot-up in-Vietnam old Lt. Colonel, infantry.  And so on.  My program was Flood Plain Management and local coordination and training for one of the regions.  Too long out of the military to remember whether I was enlisted or an officer.

Our Bureau Chief, Larry, was a retired Master Sergeant, US Army Search and Rescue, another Vietnam vet. An enlisted man coordinating the activities of field grade officers, giving instructions, approving their work and their per diem expenditures would have been a potential source of laughter if we’d all held our mouths right, but “That’s what happens when you put an enlisted man doing the job of an officer,” was a frequent grumble every time something went awry.

The staff meeting was in the bomb shelter of the old National Guard Headquarters building in Santa Fe where our offices were located.

“I had a weird call from one of the aids to the Governor this morning.”Larry’s eyes searched our dozen blank faces. “Any of you know anything about Y2K?”   Calls from the Governor’s office to anyone at EMPAC was bad news.  We liked to think we were invisible, nobody knew we existed.  This particular governor, however, we considered a space cadet.  A flake.

We all exchanged scowls while my mind toyed with the phrase. “Y2K. Y2K? Where the hell have I heard about Y2K lately?” The thing rang a bell in my head, but I couldn’t think why.

“The Gov just got back from a meeting of the Association of State Governors. They did a big program on Y2K. He’s all excited about it. Evidently there’s some damned thing going on with computers to make them all fail January first, 2000.” Sneers and a chuckle or two.  We all agreed on something.

“Do any of you know what other states are doing? Any ideas what we should be doing? We have to send an answer over to the Gov’s office. We have to put together a plan of some kind.”

Background rumble around the table.  “Y2K?  Why the hell would all the computers crash when the 20th century turns over?”  “Damned idiot governor.”

“Hmmm computers. That’s it.” Now I remembered.

“It’s all a farce, Larry.” I was remembering a conversation and exchange of emails I’d had with my ex-wife. “Carolyn heads the department in Texas that’s supposed to be preparing for it. She told me a while back they were spending a lot of money on it, hiring a lot of people. Pissed her off when I said it was just another bureaucratic scare plot to build more empires.”

Larry stared at me, mind busy with what I’d said. “Could you find out what they are doing over there?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“Also, get on the internet. Find out what people are saying is going to happen. Find out everything you can about what all the other states are doing.”

The others in the room relaxed a little. No one wanted this project and now it was clearly mine. “How much time do you want me to spend on this?”

“A week. Two maybe. We just need to put together a plan that makes sense.”

As I left the staff meeting I was feeling pleased with the diversion this offered me. Something away from flood plain management and routine emergency management coordination. I didn’t expect it to be any problem at all.

I began by sending an email to Carolyn. This was the response I got:

“The Year 2000 deal is a real threat. Lots of people have been doing lots of
work to mitigate the consequences, and we’re still ‘influencing the future’.

The real problem is that we can generally fix what we know about, but there is
so much we don’t know.

For example, the power grid – there are many many power generators and power distributors in this country, and many “embedded systems” in each company. Some companies are taking the problem seriously by contacting their suppliers (of power grid equipment, as an example) to see if components will work.

Afraid of litigation, the manufacturers hem and haw around and provide no definitive data. Yes, I think there will be power outages, thus water problems, heating problems, etc, but I don’t think the whole US will go dark, and we still have some time to work on it.

One scenario I’ve heard is that elect. companies will work to distribute what power they have so that rolling black or brown outs will limit the negative affects of the power failures.

Some good news, the banking industry in the US is in very good shape. Our only
fear there is fear itself. I think a lot of IT systems are being corrected at a
more rapid pace than originally anticipated, and governors like yours and mine
are at least anticipating problems so they can prepare for them. I think if the
people anticipate the problems, and know that someone has already developed a
work around, we’ll be fine.

Any disruptions will probably be short lived.
I could go on, but duty calls.
C.

I trusted Carolyn about as much as any man can trust an ex-wife after 25 years of marriage.

I didn’t know it yet, but for me this began the end of one lifetime and heralded the start of another.

Old Jules

Creedence Clearwater Revival– Bad Moon Rising
http://youtu.be/5BmEGm-mraE



Leave a comment

Posted in 1990's, Adventure, Emergency Preparedness, Human Behavior, Y2K

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Don’t know much about Human Beings

Posted on July 28, 2011 by | 5 comments


I don’t know much about human beings these days, though I used to think I knew everything worth knowing about them.  Putting a little distance between myself and the daily onslaught of news, spending my time in my own company instead of in the company of other people, and watch/listening instead of speaking when I’m around others has forced a realization that I don’t know spit about these creatures.

But it’s also clear to me that I didn’t know spit about them back when I knew a lot about them.  Including me.  I was in too close and personal, too much a part of the herd, to see what was happening around me.  A person inside a jetliner going several hundred miles an hour can throw a rock from the tail section all the way to the pilot and when it plunks against his scalp that rock will have traveled further than Babe Ruth ever hit a baseball.  A fly inside the cabin of a jet fighter is supersonic when it goes from the back of the cabin to the front.

In a sense, the same phenomenon is at work when humans are in the company of other humans.  Bunched up together in a stadium, concert hall, skyscraper, there’s an invisible wall around them disguising the fact the rocks they throw are going further and the flies are flying faster than anyone had any right to expect.  The person in the next seat, the stewardess serving meals and drinks, the movie playing  seems real to them, while the 20,000 feet to the ground doesn’t, while the outside rushing by doesn’t seem real at all, and all that microscopic activity on the ground below them doesn’t count for anything.

Back when I rode airliners, worked in buildings full of people, drove around inside a vehicle in heavy traffic and kept track of events I knew a lot about human beings.  Same as you do now.

But now that I’ve backed away, put some distance between myself and humanity, to me they look more like chickens than they ever looked like human beings.  I understand chickens fairly well, but I don’t know squat about human beings.

Old Jules

Simon and Garfunkel — I am a Rock
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My9I8q-iJCI

5 Comments

Posted in Human Behavior, Solitude

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,