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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Saturday, March 15, 2008

On Being A Parent, Chapter The Upteenth 

...I've always maintained that one of the most stark failings of the medical community has been it's willful failure to provide any sort of comprehensive operator's manual for new parents facing the prospect of dealing with that first child. Sure, in a classy facility, they may chat with you about feeding strategies and not putting cornstarch in the diapers, but nobody every gets down to the root of the matter about dealing the meaningful issues like poopy-headed classmates and faithless 'friends' and cliques and all the issues surrounding what Mrs. Jack K. and her biologist cultish friends would call "fledging" were the subject about bald eagles and not one's own children...

I've had the opportunity to get better at this whole gig with the addition of a second subject on which to practice, but that whole "letting go" thing is something that I clearly will never be good at. Case in point: my first-born is currently attending college at a small school on the Georgia coast. Aside from all the logistical problems inherent in trying to support a college freshman on the entire friggin' other side of the continent, I am faced with a parent's ultimate horror: seeing the prospect of harm coming toward one's child and not being able to do a damned thing about it. I sit here tonight watching a relentless nasty band of ugly red "tornado warning" splotches marching inexorably across the National Weather Service maps toward her, and all the advanced technology in the world won't let me reach out and say "so....you might want to be looking out the window occasionally, OK, sweety?"...

It's probably a failing of upbringing...mine, not her's. My whole life, more than half a century's worth, has been spent in the Pacific Northwest. Tornado sightings are about as frequent - and as credible - as Big Foot sights 'round these parts. It is perhaps as a result of a perverse bit of kismet and of my choice of careers that I have been personally placed more at risk by erupting volcanoes and large furry carnivores than I have by tornadic events...

Ahh - Breaking News - it gets even more 'interesting'. My first-born just called me (right at the word "kismet" above) to ask me - on the other side of the continental United States - if I knew "what was going on" with regard to Savannah, Georgia, weather. She is at the moment of this writing huddled with other students in the basement of her dorm, the power is out, and nobody knows what's going on or where the severe weather actually is. So here I sit, trying to drag current weather maps and situations out of a 28.8 kpbs dialup lash-up...

In the course of the "other duties as assigned" fire-fighting portion of my federal land management career, I have stood at the lip of the 'live another day/never mind' chasm a couple of times when only fate or rum luck or God made the difference between having a good happy hour story and being some name that people vaguely remembered. That is an entire universe worth of different from a situation where my 'little girl' - the child I promised as I held her squalling little body in my hands a long time ago that I would protect at the cost of my own life - would be sitting in a dorm basement three time zones away asking me if I could tell her what her weather was looking like...

For a parent, there isn't any such thing as letting go. There is no line of demarcation between "mine" and "not mine" that you can draw in the sand so that it stays visible. Far beyond any financial considerations, they are still your little girl or little boy and you fear for and fret over their safety and decision-making as much as you did the first day you put them on the bus to kindergarten...

If you'll excuse me now, I have some NWS weather maps over which I must obsess...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:54 PM 0 comments

Friday, March 14, 2008

The Never-Ending Iraq Occupation 

...if there ever was a point when it would become abundantly clear that the time had finally come to expand the grey wolf reintroduction program to include the highly secure enclosure at 1660 Pennsylvania Avenue in the District of Columbia - immediately, by parachute, without environmental analysis or advanced notice, now is most certainly that time. We have finally closed that perfect circle of incompetence encompassing the very circumstance that the Bushies claimed with such full-throated vehemence that we Needed To Invade Iraq to prevent...

There really isn't much more to say. Military commanders are confirming that what more than enough smart people feared would be the outcome of a mismanaged invasion of Iraq has come to pass. This artificial construct of a nation that was held together by the brutal force of one dictator's will is now home to the very sorts of people he would never tolerate because of their direct threat to his rule. We fixed that one up, though, and we fixed it up good. The 'genius' that put our country in the hole in which it finds itself came from within the White House. The expansion of grey wolf habitat is critical to restoring wolf populations so that they may become viable and be removed from the Endangered Species list. We may have a win-win situation here....
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:34 PM 0 comments

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Wake Me When The "Countdown" Nightmare Is Over 

...Keith Olbermann has clearly been adversely affected by the wrist-tapping suspension that David Schuster received for having decided, after years of children being directly involved in their parents' election campaigns, that it was somehow ok to say that Chelsea Clinton's efforts on her mother's behalf were little more that a form of prostitution. That is the only explanation I can come up with for the recent shift in tone that KO and Countdown have been displaying toward the Clinton campaign...

I'm neither a Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama supporter. My guy was a different guy and I will support and vote for whichever candidate emerges from the Denver convention as the standard-bearer. I'm not even much of a Hillary-lover in a larger sense. I am, however, smart enough to know when someone is screwing with me, and MSNBC and Keith Olbermann have been doing that for a little while now, ever since little Davey Schuster made the sort of comment that would have gotten his ass personally kicked in a truly physical sense had he said it about my daughter...but, hey, I'm one of those crude small-town westerners with an inadequate land-grant college education who can't properly deal with the nuance of sophisticated urban, urbane Washington political discussions...

My failing; my problem...but in the meantime, would somebody please let me know when Olbermann finally gets back to bashing righties and wingers - which is why his viewership grew to begin with -instead of Democrats. It will be nice to know when I'll be able to start watching the show again...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:27 PM 0 comments

Fiddling Around While Rome Burns 

...you won't be able to drag out the Sharpie® to draw a grim black box around the day that it all began, but the simple root fact is that, somewhere back down the road behind us, the people who were supposed to keep us healthy and well and fulfilled (think of them, if you will, as the Republican party) have let us down in so many ways that it will take entire battalions of historians to actually document the failure that will be delivered upon our children. Today's glimpse into the coming horrors is the news that the entire salmon fishing season off the Oregon and northern California coast may well be cancelled because of obscenely low numbers of available fish...

It really doesn't matter where one wishes to focus one's attention when it comes time to talk turkey about how we got to this point. Whether it is as a result of changes in ocean temperatures and the changes in available nutrients that results from that change, or whether it is a result of degraded anadromous spawning and rearing habitat along streams contribution to West Coast salmon habitat and the failures to take steps to improve those habitat conditions, you can be sure that Republicans have been in the front wedge of the charge against fixing these problems. Gordon Smith, who has been working hard over the last year to restyle himself as Oregon's newest mod/lib neo-Democratic Senator despite a lifetime as a conservative Republican (a transmogrification we have grown accustomed to seeing every six years or so), is a classic and primary culprit in this whole sad saga. A couple of years ago, back when becoming a defacto Democrat didn't seem to be so terribly important, Gordon Smith grabbed all sorts of credit for engineering a water use dispute in the upper Klamath River basin in southern Oregon that eventually resulted in a spectacular die-off of Klamath River salmon that drove commercial and sport fishing along the northern California and southern Oregon coast to its knees...

Everything is on fire around us, but we can't see all the burning because we don't understand what we are seeing. The years of holding actions by a host of Republicans, such as Gordon Smith, may well have protected the inland interests of those constituents (link is a view from the inside) whose money they have relied on for so long, but the brutally painful reality of their actions is coming down hard on other Americans who had the poor taste to choose a career that didn't rise to the level of political interest that big-time campaign donations can generation in elected public officials. All that is coming home to roost now, in ways that the environmentally unskilled - like ol' Gordo - could never have anticipated. It may well be a tough time this November for anyone who bumped old ladies and small children out of the way to be in the middle of the photo opportunities during the bucket brigade protests by Klamath Basin farmers back in the day...

If nothing else, one can hope that they can finally smell the smoke from all that burning. These particular Republicans can decide whether it's coming from the surrounding environment or from their own electoral chances...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:14 PM 0 comments

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