Author: oldned

Five Truths

Approaching the end of eight-and-a-half decades living, for me five truths seem self-evident.  None is original.  I’m too lazy to look up the sources.

  1. Happiness is our default.  Suffering is a choice.
  2. Now, this instant, is the only time there is.
  3. I only control my thoughts, muscles, and impulses.
  4. I act out of ignorance, fear, and anger, or wisdom, courage, and love.
  5. I’m only here to help.

The Big Lie

Folks who’s purposes it serves, trumpet and repeat the Big Lie.  Their followers kowtow to a leader, fail to exercise reason and common sense, or yearn for a Savior.

In the previous century, Adolph Hitler’s Big Lie was blaming the Jewish people for Germany’s woes.  Today Donald Trump and a cadre of archconservatives’ Big Lie is, by “rigging” and “stealing” America’s 2019 presidential election, Liberals installed Joe Biden in the Oval Office.

Trump’s Kool Aid

With cyanide-laces Kool Aid, the Reverend James Jones murdered 918 acolytes. A number of United States Republican Senators and Representatives seem convinced that, to survive politically, they must drink Donald Trump’s toxic Kool Aid.  Because the ex-President’s absolute lack of a moral or ethical compass, plus his lies and vitriolic pronouncements, fly in the face of time-honored Conservative values, these legislators’ choice is both puzzling and alarming!

Who, in their wildest fantasy, can imagine Republicans Dwight Eisenhower, Thomas Dewey, Barry Goldwater, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George W. H. Bush, Bob Dole, John McCain, Mitt Romney and, I’m convinced most grassroots Conservatives, embracing Trump’s dishonesty, delusional thinking, and meanspirited rants?

Republicans still committed to the party’s precepts, take heart!  You are not alone!  In runup to our 2020 election, eight noted Conservatives founded the Lincoln Project opposing Trump.  In the President’s first impeachment trial, Senator Mitt Romney sided with Democrats voting to impeach.  Fourteen months later, Republicans, Richard Burr, Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Ben Sasse, Pat Toomey joined Romney voting for impeachment.  Today the “U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol” includes Republicans Liz Chaney, Adam Tinzinger and five Democrats.

For the common good, Americans we must hope that real Republicans reject Trump’s Kool Aid and take back their party!

Pugilists

Jeff had been a boxer, a prize-fighter, what Grandpa Leslie called a “pugilist.”  Decades after his final bell, Jeff’s appearance bore witness to long-ago and subsequent physical and emotional bouts. 

Jeff’s dad was his trainer.  With a wry smile, the erstwhile combatant would recount, at the end of a round, crumpling in his corner with Dad leaning in, forefinger under Jeff’s nose, reminding his young contestant, “Remember lad!  You don’t have to block every punch with your face!”

We are all pugilists.  Having our “bell” rung too many times, we might recall the old trainer’s advice.  We  can cover up, block, weave, sidestep, counterpunch.  We don’t have to block every punch with our face!

Playing The End Game

I understand, the game of chess is seen as having an “opening,” “middlegame,” and “endgame.”  Apart from how the pieces move, that’s all I know about chess.  Looking back over eight decades, I see human Life has its “opening,” if we’re lucky a “middlegame,” and, luckier still, “endgame.”

Every game of chess begins with two rooks, two knights, two bishops, one queen, one king, and eight pawns on the predetermined squares at opposite sides of the board.  Each unique human Life begins with genes and environment arranging the “pieces” higgledy-piggledy across the board.  Compounding this challenge, our opponent and his pieces are invisible!

Through training and study chess players learn various openings, middle-, and endgame moves.  With no prescribed opening, success in the game of Life depends on experience, especially if we learn from our bad moves.  As I see it, most of us continue making, often repeating, bad moves until checkmate.

For me—I believe everyone— Life’s the first eight years, its “opening” moves, were decisive.  Caprices of nature and nurture arranged my pieces in close-to-ideal positions.  But, ten days after my eighth birthday, the phantom opponent took my King, Daddy, checkmate!  Game over. 

But I still had my Queen and faced the specter of a middlegame.  The only move I saw was somehow to protect Mama.  My game strategy became, “Be a good boy and don’t cause problems.” 

My sorely foreshortened opening made for an overextended middlegame.  With fractured, chaotic notions of how to move, to become a man, I blundered forward.  The ensuing two decades was, at best, a stalemate.

Through serendipity, pure dumb luck, I found a Master!  Psychiatrist, Dr. Eugene Chernel saved my game and my life.  His genius guided a lonely thirty-three-year-old bachelor, me, and a twenty-seven-year-old divorcee with two children, Karen, in creating a, I like to believe, minimally dysfunctional family. 

If three score and ten marks the end of the middlegame, despite taking advantage of my allotment of botched moves, over the past decade and a half I’ve been blessed with the sweetest endgame any man has a right to expect.