Category: truth

Eddie Izzard

The first trans person I ever met was in about 1976 at Thomas Beach on Lake Calhoun in Minneapolis. This was all very new to me at 13. I was sitting on the curb waiting for my friend, Ben, to come back from wherever the hell he was. Up walked this very tall woman in a bikini but covered with a beach jacket of sorts. She sat down on a picnic table and looked out over the lake. Then she looked over at me, staring right back at her. She smiled.

Lovely day, she said.

It’s hot.

One day you’ll grow up into something hot, son.

I’m sure I blushed, but it was summer in 1976 and I spent every waking hour outside, sans sunscreen, but soaked in Coppertone oil, so I was already some dark shade of reddish brown that probably hid said blushing. Someone shouted and she stood up and waved. Enjoy the beach, she said and ran toward the person. I’d heard about “cross dressing” and some talk of people transitioning through surgery and hormones. I believe they had to go to The Netherlands or somewhere to get it done. But now I saw one and talked to one. That blew my mind.

Somewhat related, I was reading an article yesterday about Eddie Izzard and remembering when Ms. Izzard was in the news for coming out as transgender way back in the mid-eighties. She’s been busy, real busy over the last 40+ years as a comedian, stage and screen actor, pilot, very active in LGBTQ issues, and is now again running for Parliament in the UK. She’s also a crack athlete and has run hundreds of marathons (more than a hundred for charities). Here’s what really blew me away:

“It’s not just the sheer number of marathons that Izzard has run that’s impressive: it’s that she runs them one after another. In 2009, she ran 43 marathons in 51 days. In 2016, she ran 27 in 27 days. And in 2021, she ran 32 in 31 days.”

Got that? She ran 32 marathons in 31 days. Damn.

#eddieizzard

Here’s a (Maybe Dumb) Idea

This would be a program designed to bring families out of poverty, enhance and fill in their education, and set them on a path to a new life. And I just made it up so it might not work, or the numbers are wrong, or just an all-around bad idea, but here goes:

Create a gated community outside the city, with 25-50 1,000 – 2,000 square foot homes, outfitted with quality furniture and appliances, all very simple and very clean. The gate, by the way, is serious, for a host of reasons. There would be lots of trees and green spaces, a main hall to meet, play games and celebrate, an office for administration and a pole barn/garage for groundskeeper/gardener and for training residents to work on the grounds and garden.

Other employees would include a caseworker for every ten homes (5), a part-time bookkeeper, banker or accountant to work with families on financial literacy, 3-5 admin positions, security (2), said groundskeeper, and a professional childcare worker and residents working as child-care employees.

Buses would run from community to city and back every two hours from 8a to 10p, with some small number of stops (close to or at mass transit pick-ups). Residents would be required to work from the age of 16 and over. High schoolers 16 – 18 could get out of work requirements when playing a sport or doing other school-related activities. Residents would also be required to sign in and out when they come and go. Allow each family to bring in enough of their own stuff to fill a 10 x 10 shed in the back. 

We assume although are not certain that this venture should bring in lots of willing support through donations and in many other ways, doctors, psychologists, nurses, dentists, chefs/nutritionists and others might donate their time, etc. Bring in artists, musicians, athletes and actors to entertain and to teach art, music, athletics and acting. 

Illegal drugs and drunkenness would be prohibited. 

$4,000,000 to $5,000,000 for land, to build and other start up costs
$1,200,000 for yearly salaries 
$200,000 per year for general upkeep
1,500,000 / 50 = $30,000 per family, per year
2,000,000 / 50 = $40,000 per family, per year

As residents work, they pay some sort of rent out of their paycheck; it would be low, but something to keep them in the paying for things mindset, that would be true of utilities as well. They would be expected to buy their own groceries and everything else once they get settled in and working. Families would be parent(s) and one to four kids. Once the kids are 19, they must move out. Parents move out when kids are out, or before if they desire it, or if it is felt that they’re ready to do so, which we would hope would happen the most often. 

Just thinking out loud here…

Numbers

I find it fascinating how numbers are portrayed in the media, mostly news media. I’ve thought about it myself as I was writing, like, should I write “two hundred million”, or “200,000,000”? Each will have a different effect on the reader. Sometimes I think that the full nine-digit number will seem larger than the written number. I guess I’m not sure. Different for everyone, I suppose.

I was reading an article in the newspaper about Oakland and their struggles as a city. Toward the end they wrote, “The city has lost 15,000 residents since the pandemic began…” That’s a very small city or large town, depending on your point of view, that up and moved out of Oakland since the pandemic. Then, I looked back to the front of the article and reread, “…Oakland, a city of 420,000…” and wondered what percentage it was and what it would look like if that had been presented as such. %.035. So, “The city has lost about %.035 of residents since the pandemic began…” Different. But the same.

Cut and Paste

“Leaves are staying on the trees of northwestern Ohio a month longer than they did a century ago.”

And

“The number of stars visible in the sky will fall by 60 percent in the next eighteen years.”

And

“…and windy outdoor conditions were worsening bacterial contamination on chicken farms in the America West.”

And

“Five-year-olds will believe a trustworthy robot over an unreliable human, even if the robot is shaped like a truck.”

Too many Americans continue to believe in the trucks long past five years old.

From Harpers Magazine, “Findings”, June 2023.

A Biblical March and Two Babies Switched at Birth

Two fascinating articles from the New York Times yesterday, both of which stopped me in my tracks. The first is about the protests in Israel and how one woman – a particle physicist – has become the “face” of the protests. This paragraph is what surprised me:

“Dr. Bressler sealed her status as a symbol of the protest movement last month when she led a miles-long column of demonstrators on a multiday march to the hills of Jerusalem from coastal Tel Aviv. It evoked a biblical pilgrimage, and they picked up tens of thousands of supporters during the journey.”

If you look at the accompanying image (below), you cannot not be struck by how that is exactly what it looks like – a pilgrimage (with lots of flags), and what Jewish communities have been doing for millennia – walking, marching, traveling, in this case, to the capital city, to stand up to those intent on suppressing them and their freedoms.

The next story is two babies accidentally switched at birth. One baby was born of a French Canadian father and a mother who was Cree and French Canadian, a Métis. He was given the name Richard Beauvais. The other’s parents were the children of Ukrainian immigrants. They were prosperous farmers and also had a general store and post office in a town. That baby was named Eddie Ambrose.

So, the kid with Ukrainian ancestry was taken home with the Cree and French Canadian mother, and ended up on the reservation after the death of the other baby’s father. The child of the Metis mother ended up with the well-off Ukranian parents. They both came to figure this out recently after family members convinced them to do DNA testing while researching their respective family’s history.

It’s an amazing story all-around and destined for a movie, I would think, but I found it absolutely fascinating what the Ukrainian boy endured along with his family as a child and at the hands of the Canadian government. The article states:

Then, when he was 8 or 9, came what he called “the worst day” of his life. Government workers swooped into the log house to take custody of the children, who had been left by themselves.

Mr. Beauvais remembers hitting and kicking a worker who had slapped a sister, who was crying, then being thrown off a low roof. The children were eventually taken to a room with pink walls where, he said, they were picked “like puppies” by foster parents and he “was the last one to go.”

“There was no compassion,” Mr. Beauvais said. “If you were Native, the government workers didn’t care.”

But he was not Native, right? Or is he, for all intents, purposes and a lifetime of living, and being treated, as a Native? Fascinating! I won’t comment any more and allow you to read the stories, if you’re interested.

Cats are weird, but you can still learn from them

Cats are creatures of habit. Some years ago my schedule changed a bit and I was always sitting in this upstairs room from about 10 to 12 AM. And one night both cats came up and I petted them for a really long time. The next night they came back up and the next night and the next night, and the next night, always at the same time. Which became frustrating. Because not every night I wanted to pet them.

And sometimes I would quit for a while and not go up there at all, so it would all stop and then I would go back up there, for whatever reason, and they would come back and I would pet them, and they would come back every night again at that same time for more petting.

Well, it’s happened again, but this time I realized that rather than getting mad at them because they’re sitting there, staring at me and waiting for me to put down the ukulele and pet them, I quickly put down the ukulele and pet them, and off they went. Just like that. And then I picked up my ukulele again. Isn’t that just the way life works? You gotta work with it.

🌎🌕☀️

Hyperbole

“There is no better place to hide than hyperbole.”

I don’t remember where I saw that written but wrote it down because I love it. How true is that! Exaggerate! Oversell! Just keep talking and you’ll never have to reveal a thing. It’s really the perfect hiding place.

Everything that’s been written about Donald Trump and we really have no idea what he thinks. We know he lies constantly and makes shit up and screams it at his base and they love it and eat it up, but none of them has any idea what Trump actually thinks either. When he talks – or shouts – he hides, he reveals nothing. Can you even imagine a mellow Charlie Rose-type interview with Donald Trump, talking about things, slowly, quietly, focused? Nope. You can’t.

Engage and Enrage

It’s the art of politics on the right side of the aisle here in the good old USA. But if you see us as one nation, under God and all of that, shouldn’t y’all be working harder to engage and assuage? Why would anyone want to pit one group of Americans against another? What are they hoping to achieve? 

And beyond just politics, we do in general very much like our groups, those with whom we share something important to us, be that an address, a job, a style of dress, a place of worship, a school, a sport, a pop star, a hobby. And we are proud of those groups and so when our group pride is somehow hurt, we rally our group against other groups, ostensibly our enemies, but almost always just a bunch of Americans who ultimately share the same beliefs about life, love, family and friends.  

So what do we do? We resort to inflating the importance of small issues, things that might look or sound bad or wrong or weird, but are ultimately no skin off our backs. And we say these things over and over to keep people thinking about them (they say that hearing something 14 times will lead a person to action). It’s called propaganda, and it works.  

Anger, distrust, unhappiness, jealousy, and ultimately violence; that is what they’re hoping to achieve.  And when you think about it, the more we’re beating up on one another down here in the trenches of life, the rich and powerful stay busy, accumulating more power, and getting richer and richer and richer.

Thich Quang Duc and Wynn Alan Bruce

Most people my age and older have some knowledge of, and may have the image (above) seared into their mind of when Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk, set himself on fire to protest the police and Vietnamese army’s massacre of Vietnamese people during a celebration that turned into a protest. At the time Vietnam was 90% Buddhist but the current ruler, Ngo Dinh Diem, was Catholic and wanted to “westernize” the nation and so banned the display of religious flags. On May 8, 1963, they celebrated Phat Dan, or the day of the birth of the Buddha, religious flags were displayed, and the massacre ensued. A month later, on June 11, Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk who was not at the massacre, sat down in the middle of the same street, began meditating, set himself on fire (doused in gasoline) and sat motionless as he burned to death.

An American photographer happened to be on the scent and got the iconic, jaw-dropping photos that exploded across the globe. Thich Nhat Hanh, another Vietnamese buddhist monk, prolific author and teacher, often brought him up in his writings, and while I never committed the man’s name to memory, I never forgot that image since I saw it as a teenager in the 1970s.

Recently, a blip in my online, 24-hour news feed, filled with stories of mass shootings, war in Ukraine, awful American (and worldwide) politicians and people, and the ongoing, ever-expanding destruction of the planet thanks in large part to human-induced burning of fossil fuels, was something about an American who did something similar in Washington DC. I’m appalled and embarrassed how little attention I paid.

Reading the obituaries in the local paper this morning I stopped cold when I saw: “on the steps of the Supreme Courthouse…”

“Bruce, Wynn Alan
Born in Green Bay WI Aug 25, 1971 and died on Earth Day April 22, 2022 on the steps of the Supreme Courthouse in Washington DC. His father, Douglas Bruce (Holly), mother Martha, stepbrother Eric (Jamie), extended family and friends in Minnesota and Boulder, CO and around the country are greatly saddened by his death but respect and honor his commitment to the issues of climate change and the environment.”

Unless you’ve got your head jammed straight up your ass and/or have been fooled by extremely effective but idiotic right wing media, you understand what is happening right now to our climate due to humankind. I’m human and not at all pretending I’ve been doing much myself. In fact, my passion for doing something about this has been washed away, shall we say, having watched the world (and more importantly, individuals like you and me) do absolutely nothing about it.

Scientists have been warning us for decades, and year after year, the climate has been proving them almost exactly right, but to pretty much no avail. So I’m now at this point hopeless we’ll do much about it and wondering what we’ll do about the consequences. How will we handle the flooding of coastal and inland low lying areas? What will we do about the incredible heat waves that will make many places currently filled with humans uninhabitable? How about the massive fires that will only get worse and worse? Who’s going to pay to rebuild after the super storms keep coming and damaging property, farmland, and infrastructure? And in the current pandemic of xenophobia what will we do with the mass migrations due to heat, flooding, fires, storms and water shortages?

Of course, we’re already paying for increasing storm damage, controlling and putting out growing fires, cleaning up and relocating people after massive flooding, but it’s that last one that I really worry about. Here in the U.S. people are filling their pants because there are 60,000 people at the southern border trying to get into our nation of 330 million people. What about when there are 10, 50 or 100 million people clamoring to get in? What big beautiful wall is going to stop them? How about when the entire population of Southwest U.S. starts running north and east? What happens then?

We’ll see. Then, by the way, is only a few decades out, maybe sooner. But here we sit, doing nothing and not even noticing, when Green Bay’s own, Wynn Alan Bruce, sits down in plain view and burns himself to death in an incredibly brave warning to all of us of what’s coming. Blip.