The Fourth of July floods on the Guadalupe sure took the buzz off this Fourth of July weekend. I can’t stop thinking about the loss of life and especially the children, and especially the ones at camps away from their parents. If any good can come of it, I hope it’s something to help future generations remain safe. It seems the least we can do. And I hesitate to say more because the camps are already regulated, and I really have no idea what’s in place.

I’ve got four little cups of seedlings on my back porch. They’re starting to sprout. Alamo Vine and Morning Glory.  July is probably not the best time to start new plants, but I’ve got a relatively shady spot for them, and even if they don’t make it into the ground I’ve learned something from the experience that I’ll put into play going forward, and bless the internet for its help.

Humanity. Sometimes I despair. It seems as though we spend an inordinate amount of time and energy trying to figure out ways to blow up people and things. Then, because we can, we do. Blow up people and things. And it seems as though everyone is fighting someone these days. Of course, it’s probably just the way of the world. Someone is always wanting something someone has, or someone has done something someone doesn’t like, and off we go.

It’s the Army’s birthday today, and there’s a parade. In a cost conscious, budgeting cutting world, however, I wonder why we’re spending millions of dollars to drive tanks through downtown Washington D.C. to celebrate. Then we’re going to spend millions of dollars fixing the damage to the roads. To me, and I’m just an old guy, in the boondocks of Texas, it seems it might have been wiser to continue funding Alzheimer research and leave the tanks at home. Let the troops march, because that’s what troops do, but I don’t need to see the hardware.

Today is June 6. The Anniversary of D-Day and it’s odd to think that today, in the 21st century, 81 years later, it’s probably better remembered as a scene in the movie Saving Private Ryan than it is as a real scene from the lives of mothers and fathers who actually lived through it or fought and died in it. Of course, that feels pretty normal since the same thing happened with the Civil War and Gone with the Wind. Memories fade, wounds heal, and movies need scripts.

Software. Well behaved in most cases. It will do exactly what you tell it to do. Unless… Hidden in the code is the little trick that always says, unless. My work experience taught me that syntax is everything. If you phrase the command or request correctly, magic happens. Add a space. Add a dot. Ask the wrong question. And the machine just stares at you. 

I just saw a story that people coming out of college with degrees in computer science are having a hard time finding jobs. It appears we might have oversold the opportunities. And artificial intelligence is playing a role as well. Because it also appears the programmers might have programmed themselves right out of a job, or at least the sort of job Artificial Intelligence seems to do pretty well which is the grunt work.

There’s a story in the June issue of the Atlantic asking if American Pop Culture is in decline. I read it, but a debate is not worth the time because it seems to me that decline is hardwired into any form of popular culture. Things come. Things go. Tastes change. And a desire to talk about it critically is usually someone shilling for something he or she likes, and acting as though it can be measured and evaluated against standards. As though there’s an ideal to which we should strive.

An American Pope. My boyhood, Catholic school kid heart is happy. My mother would be beside herself as would be the nuns who taught me, mostly Sisters of Charity in their starched, white-winged habits. I doubt any of them ever imagined that a kid from the South Side of Chicago who graduated from Villanova would make that journey. But here he is and we can talk to his brothers and they’re telling us all about him. He likes the White Sox. A baseball Pope. It feels good.

I think I’ve really settled into this retirement thing. Granted, I’ve been at it for a while, and my wife’s illness and death threw a kink in the works, but life seems to have evened out. I write in the morning, run errands, and do yard work. Take yesterday. I wrote. Went and got a haircut. Had my oil changed. Stopped for lunch. Talked to a friend on the phone. Came home. Cleaned the pool. Watered a few plants. Took a walk. Talked to my oldest son on the phone. Ate a light dinner. In the end it felt like a successful day. A nice older man’s day.

I’m like a dog with a bone, I guess, I find something and I can’t let go. Which means, as I dig through my life and find something interesting, I want to write about it even if it might be a topic that makes someone uncomfortable. That’s how I came to write about my wife’s dementia and eventual death. And that’s how I now come to write about politics. It’s a thing in my life, and it interests me even though I’m not a political scientist with tons of studies, and degrees to match. Although, in this day and age, when you can get a degree from a search engine, the latter means nothing.

Here I am again trying to make sense of the political turmoil, which may not be turmoil at all for a lot of people. I suspect because some people think it’s totally out of their control anyhow, so why worry about it, or they’re happy with what’s going on, because they agree with Grover Norquist, who famously said, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” Which means they probably think Reagan had it right when he said the government was the problem.

Every once in a while, after watching an event unfold, I like to ask myself, what would I have done? I did it yesterday, for instance, while reading up on the events that led Immigration and Customs Enforcement to take Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish national and Fulbright scholar, here on an F-1 student visa as a doctoral student, into custody and strip her of her visa. Apparently, she was picked up because she was one of four authors of an editorial piece last year in the Tufts student paper protesting Israel’s actions in Palestine.

I wonder. Who were the men and women who arrested Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk? Were any of them married? If so, did they kiss their wives or husbands goodbye that morning and tell them they loved them?

There is so much going on these days in the world outside my fence that it’s hard not to notice, but one thing’s for sure, trying to get reliable news about anything, is a little bit like drinking from a fire hose. The stories come at me in bits and pieces and new bits replace old pieces before I can figure out what the first bit meant and follow ups get lost in all the confusion if any follow ups come at all. It’s enough to make someone want to run and hide, except that may be the point, although that just might be me trying to give purpose to random events.

My world is getting turned upside down. In addition to learning I have to hate Canada and love Russia now I’m starting to hear that empathy might cause the fall of Western Civilization. That’s going to kill the sympathy card business and lord knows what florists will do. And talk about re-thinking history. It seems as though the success of the various civil rights and civil liberties movements for blacks, women, and gays was a direct result of empathy, of people walking a mile in someone else’s shoes, and thinking, “Wow, that’s uncomfortable and why do they have to do that?”

I think the AI revolution has started and it’s more insidious than I thought. Yesterday, without warning, six large fingernail clippers showed up on the island in my kitchen. I have no idea how the hive mind communicated with them, but it did and there they were. Of course, there might be another less fun explanation. Whenever I’ve needed a clipper I get one from a place where I know I keep one–my dopp kit, my car, the bathroom, my guitar case, or a drugstore. Then at the end of the day, when I empty my pockets I put the clipper on the island. Although I did not know I possessed six of them, and I don’t know how I failed to see them gathering. That was a revelation and an interesting discovery.

I wanted to be an altar boy in the strongest possible way when I was in the fifth grade in 1956. I wanted to wear the black cassock and white surplice. I wanted to be part of the mass.  And I did it in 29 Palms, California. I was thrilled the first time the priest said the opening lines, “Introibo ad altare Dei,” and I replied, “ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam.” Which when translated means, “I will go to the altar of God, the God who gives joy to my youth.”, and not only did the mass give joy to my youth, but so did the gospels. And even today when I see the acronym DEI, I think of those lines and how the mass and the gospels infused my response to the civil rights movements for blacks, women, and gays.

Inclusion. This is a hard one, because on a personal level it’s likely we spend most of our lives excluding people and things from our lives. And while it's logical to argue that diversity is good and exposure to different foods, and music, and art will enrich our lives, most of us find ourselves settling in with the familiar religion, music, people and food that we like. And that feels pretty normal. There are even laws to protect our ability to choose, and laws to protect us from people who want to get too close to us.

I like the word equity. I have some in my home, and I try to have it in my life. It’s about fairness, but like its brother, diversity, it has gotten a bad rap in some quarters recently. What I don’t understand is why? Equity is baked into almost everything we do in our lives, especially sports. We handicap golfers and bowlers to even the playing field. We divide fighters into weight classes so that fighters are evenly matched. Horses and race cars are managed. Our public schools are divided into classes based on size. It’s about equity.