Why like Ike?

"Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose. Because this need is so sharp and apparent I confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment. As one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war -- as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years -- I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is in sight. "

This is how a former general and leader left his post as president of the United States: with words that were elegant and prophetic. The most striking thing about his speech, if you read it, is how intelligent he sounds, how polished. His attitude towards his audience is one of respect and he displays a basic assumption they understand what he says. There is no folksy cuteness, no dumbing down of what he has to say and certainly no sugar coating the truth to make it palatable.

Remember this was in 1961 and how far we have come since Eisenhower gave his farewell address. Consider how sophisticated most people feel themselves to be these days, how much more media savvy and aware, then look at the difference between how a president spoke in the late 50's/early 60's and how our political leaders speak to us today.

To see the speech, here's a link to a video

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/dwightdeisenhowerfarewell.html

And to follow along with a transcript of the speech which includes the first use of that great phrase, military-industrial complex, here are the words: http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/indust.html

And he was true soldier, he'd fought battles and would never send his troops anywhere without knowing first the situation he was sending them into or without what we now call 'an exit strategy. He wore a uniform and there are many photographs taken with him in it but he never wore one just because a camera was around.

insomnia

It's one of those things that happens now and then, more often to those of us inclined to it. In my case there seems to be a family pattern - at least myself and my oldest daughter find ourselves sitting up in the middle of the night staring at the ceiling.
I've learned over the years, starting when I was around 14, I think, to just get up and either read or putter with a pen and paper for a few hours. Now the computer has replaced the pen/paper old school thing.
I suppose it is an improvement to do something that may be read by someone - makes it feel more like actually communicating. On the other hand, it is rather presumptious of me to think whatever thoughts are staggering through my head at this time of night are of any interest to anyone besides myself. The presumptuous part is that the thoughts make any sense.
For a few years now it has been aggravated by those expected symptoms of the hormonal balance fluctuating once again, this time to signal the end of child bearing years and the beginning of the cloak of invisibility that age seems to confer on women.

where are you going laddie?

Here's a statistic to start your day: every 15 minutes a member of the “baby boomer” generation prepares to move into the last chunk of real estate they'll ever need. Of course the current options don't restrict a member of this trend-setting generation to the simple pine box and turf condo or brass urn with lid. Nowadays we can be sent into space, packed into fireworks, turned into diamonds or put in jeweled pendents for the bereaved to wear for a few days before moving the momento mori reverently to the back of the sock drawer. There seems no end, so to speak, for the ways one's ashes can be stored, scattered or fashioned. Your cremains, i.e. ashes and bone fragments, can mix with the concrete forming an artificial reef off the coast of a favorite winter holiday spot or be comingled with procelain fashioned into a small statue of your favorite golf bag and clubs It will look simply darling on the side table next to that cloisonne lamp where cousin Max awaits the final trumpet call.

Even the traditionalists who choose to go to their final resting place on the shoulders of six to eight friends and family can settle down in a mausoleum complete with flat screen tv. Death is no longer an excuse to ignore one's responsibilities to visitors. The more socially adept can provide a range of entertainment options from a solar powered screen set into a headstone that shows 10 minute loop of photos and video clip highlights of the life now complete to a luxuriously appointed tomb with plasma screens showing a custom produced movie starring the tenant of the crypt. Of course this second option requires a little bit of planning so it can be filmed in happier and less recumbant times.

It seems my generational siblings are taking the concept of disposable income to a whole new level, both in the literal and figurative sense. The positive side of all this is that death is finally being recognized as the flip side of life, the completion of the circle and the first step towards the next stage of our existence, be it celestial, infernal or compostable. There is a certain denial involved in all this: "I won't really be gone if I'm sitting on the front lawn as Grumpy, Sneezy and Doc in a tasteful ceramic tribute to Snow White."

Modern memoral services still tend to gloss over the fact that the guest of honour is in fact deceased. Not that it isn't a good thing to celebrate the life of the significantly absent – funerals give those of us left behind a chance to remember and share the living memories with others. Just so long as we keep the tears and sorrow to a decent level. None of the wailing, tearing of garments and other displays of loss found in less civilized cultures.

I don't know. I think sometimes those other cultures are on to something. They wail, drink, sing, dance and wail some more. The dearly departed is part of the party; talked to, joked with and occasionally fallen upon by a distraught family member. This is all part of getting it out and not viewed with any censure by those who merely want to commune with the spirit of the deceased and spirits of a more distilled nature. Of course this takes place in cultures where there is a firm belief the body is now an empty shell, that the soul, the identity of that person, is still present, there but invisible, celebrating right along with everyone still clad in their mortal clay.

Once the deceased has been given a decent farewell, be it by wake or vigil, they are taken to their resting place with ceremony and rituals designed to send that incorporeal personality on to it's final reward. Some rituals are performed expressly with the purpose of ensuring that departue does takes place, lest Auntie Celia hang around the house moving pots and pans, rattling chains and curdling the milk.

After Halloween, when most North Americans are struggling with a Mar's bar hangover, in Mexico there is a two day party with their dead family members as guests of honour. It isn't spooky, it isn't morbid. Great Grand-dad is greeted with warm words and given a run down on what's been happening in the family over the past year. Auntie Celia is invited to the picnic, a plate of her favorite foods laid out on her neatly groomed grave, and she meets the newest members of the family.

The difference is probably in our cultural visions of where we are actually going once the curtain is rung down on our brief moment on the stage. Do we exit stage left to be greeted by angels or by a dresser who pushes us back out in a new skin – rich or poor, human, animal, vegetable or insect depending on the karma critic's review of our previous performance? Or do we simply leap off stage into a black abyss? It's a question we all face and some of us resolve with faith, others by planning a disco party on a hilltop. Then there are those like Woody Allen who said, "I don't believe in the afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear."

As for me I don't anticipate exiting stage left for several years yet but when I do take that final bow, feel free to stop by after Halloween for a visit – you bring the popcorn and I'll have the movie.

There are some good things

Among the surprisingly many positive aspects of keeping this side of the sod is remembering the way things were before....(fill in the blank). This isn't going to be the usual drooling tirade about how it was in my day and the food tasted better, the rivers were cleaner and a dollar was worth a dollar (unless you were in the United States where the Canadian dollar has always been looked upon with the same suspicion as a wooden nickel and a deed to land in Florida).

No, this is going to be a tirade about why we really need to keep some of the things that have happened along since I was a little nipper chasing a rusty steel hoop down the street and dragging home a bucket of lard for dinner...I'm old enough - just barely, mind you, to remember when there was no medicare. You know, socialized medicine.

A lot of people here don't even think about walking into a clinic, slapping down the BC health card or whatever each province uses to monitor its citizens health-care consumption, and walking out again ten minutes later (or twenty or thirty) with a reassuring diagnosis and a prescription for a generic placebo guaranteed to cure whatever ails you and add to the chemical stew pouring out into the oceans after a brief filtration through your kidneys.

When I was a child, doctors made house calls but they left this thing called a bill when they left. If you went to visit the doctor in his office, you left with the bill or paid up front, depending on your relationship with said physician. My parents were on a first name basis with our family doctor - and once you have children, you will be equally familiar with your medical care giver, I can promise that. Not only did my parents know him, they were on a first name basis with his pets, two de-scented skunks called 'Stinky' and 'Phewy'.

But I digress.

How does this affect my life? Well, I can remember a few occasions, when due to the length of time till my father's paycheque was due to hit the bank and whether it was summer or winter determining the need to take my sister or myself to Stinky's dad. My dad was a teacher. This was in the days when teachers were paid at the end of June and not expected to come around, cap in hand, knuckling their foreheads and respectfully seeking the next generous gratuity for having beaten good citizenship, math and some grammar into the the towns young'uns until the end of September. In other words three months would go by without any income whatsoever.

So, if one has to pay the doctor and is too proud to ask for credit when standing in the waiting room in front of all the other parents and respectable folk, then it had damn well better be an emergency.

That is why I spent two days with a fractured wrist before my mother decided I wasn't deliberately making my arm look swollen from the elbow down to get out of my chores. Which, admittedly, I didn't have anyway. Finally she took me in after seeing if the doctor was going to be in the hospital anyway and would he mind taking a quick look. I had a cool cast for 6 weeks right in the middle of summer and swimming season - boy was I happy, sitting in the wading pool holding my left arm out of the water while my sister, mom and dad frolicked in the real persons pool at where ever it was we had gone that summer - Radium, I think.

Actually, mom would have been sitting on a towel beside the pool because she very rarely went into a pool or lake. The bathing suit was not the problem - she cut a fine figure in a bathing suit and dark glasses - it was that she was terrified of drowning. Which I didn't learn until much later.

Anyway, over the years we have taken for granted the ability of walking into a doctor's office or the emergency ward or a clinic and receiving treatment. Some of us over use the system and some of us under use it. But the fact remains it is there for us when we need it.

I hear a lot of young adults complaining about having to contribute so much of their pay to something they never use - except for skiing accidents and the like. They look at old farts like me who has specialists booked 3 months in advance for the next ten years and for the past ten as well. I'm a huge drain on the system. As we age we drain more and more. Yup, no argument here.

So, next time you want to sound off about it, ask yourself if you plan on living to the age of 40? Of course you're going to keep yourself healthy and fit and go to the gym ten times a week plus jogging in between. You won't need a doctor - except for the stress injuries to your knees and ankles. And by the time you're 4o when you're rotator cuff blows up while playing a little friendly soft ball. But that's different. You'll save your money up to pay for these things.

But then you get married and decide to have kids. They won't change your life at all. I'm sure you will avoid all the pitfalls your parents landed in and have a mid-wife there to hold you in a pool of warm water while your infant, dolphin like, swims out of your body and into the arms of a loving family. Cue the soft, melodic 'rainforest' mood music.

Maybe you will. And you'll leap from the pool, do a few sit-ups to get the whole abdomen back into shape and return to work in a few days. A unicorn will bring your child to work so you may suckle it at your desk while co-workers look on, their barren eyes welling with envy.

Or maybe not.

Maybe your blood pressure will skyrocket in the second trimester and your blood sugars will jump around like the Pussy Cat Dolls on ecstasy and you'll need close monitoring for gestational diabetes. Yes, even if you are eating all the right foods and taking all the supplements and exercising faithfully.

Maybe your baby will come a few weeks early and you'll be rushed to hospital - perish the thought, what the hell do they know there about health? And you'll find your perfect child on one side of an incubator and you plastered to the outside of it looking in.

That's about $20,000.00 right there, not counting the extended care time for you to recover from the premature birth and finally be sent home. And the cost of the Neo-natal doctor and special Neo-natal ICU nurses.

You don't have to wait till you're an old fart like me to need the medical system and it's harder to afford if you've just started a job and still treading water at the bottom rung of the salary ladder.


So, where was I? Oh yes. I do remember what it was like before socialized medicine began in this country and I can see what it is like in countries where they don't have it or have allowed it to be monkeyed with until it doesn't resemble anything universal or caring or healthy. And it scares me to hear people who are either in the pay of big american medical insurance companies or have more money than brains talk about how awful it is here and how we'd be much better off with private insurance.

Just say no. They are idiots. They are acting out of financial self interest. They don't know because they either don't remember or don't care. Take your pick but take a moment to look into the issue and light a candle at the shrine of Tommy Douglas .

Original Owner

Standing in line at Timmie's - a line made longer by the person at one till ordering for everybody back at the shop one item at a time, aka as the large coffee with 1 milk and 2 sweeteners is place on the counter asking for the crueller that person wanted and when that goes in the bag and put on the counter "and a large coffee with 2 milk and 2 sugar" "a double double?" "no, 2 milk and 2 sugars"...and so on. It was a very long list. At the other till was someone from the base ordering the morning coffee round for the ship...Anyway, this is how it goes quite frequently at my Timmie's so I've learned to be there early on the way to work or to be patient. Yeah, okay, I still feel like grabbing the guy's list, doing a quick look over and give a full real order like "3 large, 2 double double, 1 black; 4 extra large .... 3 cruellers, 1 blueberry fritter ..." you get the idea. And as for the guy from the base, hell, there are days I'd pay the freight on their order just cause I'm an old lady and still have a thing for young bucks in uniform.

But, the thing that I was starting off with here is what I saw out the window. Just a quick flash and it took a minute to sink in. There was a beautifully maintained Mustang - A '69 or '68 with a full roof-hood centre racing stripe (which makes me think it's a '68 with the whole Shelby Cobra look happening). Dark green, stripe was orange and a post-production spoiler on the back (I don't remember them being in production before 69-70 but then I was but a mere babe in arms then). What a gorgeous car. And hanging from the rear view mirror - where the baby shoes or fuzzy dice or collection of crystals (if it was a chick's car...y'know sometimes female types drove muscle cars too) would be hanging - was a disability tag.

Yup, and that's how I knew it was the original owner. Fortunately I can say I was too young when the car came out to own or even drive one. Unfortunately I wasn't too young to have a crush on the guys who drove them...