My Mom said...

My Mom said…
Date tall women if you’re a tall man.
Wash your hands before dinner.
Wash your hands after you use the bathroom.
Take a bath at night.
Don’t bite your nails.

My Mom said…
Enjoy eating.
Learn to cook.
Eat Swiss chard.
When picking a partner, find someone who makes you laugh.
Cook things you and your partner like to eat.
Never stop romancing her.
Never stop romancing him.
Stay on pitch.
Tell the truth, but if you can’t say anything nice don’t say anything at all.

My Mom said…
Read books.
Practice every day for 20 minutes.  Preferably music.
Tend to your relationship with God.
Raise a pet; dogs, fish, snakes, cats, doesn’t matter.
Have children.
Love those children and your partner as if your life depends on it.
Make enough money by working hard to take care of yourself, your partner, and your children, and then a little bit more, just in case.

My Mom said…
Go camping.
Play a competitive team sport when you’re young.
Play sports when you’re older, even if you’re competing with yourself.
Take care of your joints.
Don’t drink too much.
Don’t smoke.
Stand up straight.
If something makes you angry, get mad; then move on.
Get your teeth, eyes, and body checked by a doctor once a year.
Know your body; listen to it, and like it.

My Mom said…
Sing in a choir.
Respect your parents.
Fear no one, not even your parents.
Put something in the basket at church, or into the donation bin
behind the library.
The teacher is right.  But if he’s not, work with him and the school directly to fix it.
Keep your eyes on the road when you’re driving.
Pack sandwiches.
Play games with your family.
Do jigsaw puzzles.

My Mom said…
Do manual labor, especially if you get paid to think.
Do yard work.
Plant a garden and eat from it.
Learn to play an instrument well enough that you’ll play for your own enjoyment as well as others’.
Go to college and live on campus.
Get a live Christmas tree.
Send birthday cards to the people in your family.
Don’t spend too much on a gift but don’t get something cheap.
Buy good quality clothes and take care of them.
Don’t lose your jacket.

My Mom said…
When disciplining children, speak quietly.  A look, a cluck, or a finger may do more than words.
Boys, treat girls and women as special.  They are.  They made you.
Go to live performances as often as you can afford to.
Don’t give a standing ovation for a mediocre performance, even if it’s your child’s.
Breastfeed.  But don’t overdo it.
Keep meeting new people.
Speak your mind.
Make the effort to visit friends or family when it’s important to you.

My Mom said…
Explore America.
Explore Europe.
Learn to vacation.
Take a nap.
Don’t waste time.
Be still.
Listen.
Smile.


My eulogy for my Mom, who died on August 6, 2014.

GOP Betrays Reagan

Today's GOP has betrayed its most venerated modern-day icon:  Ronald Reagan.  Whether it's Trump building big, beautiful walls. or Cruz or Rubio talking about crackdowns on illegal immigration, no one in a leadership sounds anything like the President they all like to invoke as their party's hero.  Watch this and then explain to me how today's GOP can square their position on immigration with the Gipper's?

Who knew I'd pine for the days of Reagan.  What's happened to the party of Lincoln?  One in three Republican voters say they'd pick Trump if the primary was today.  One third agree with the man endorsed by former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke.  One in three Americans back the guy who quotes Mussolini.  WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT??

My Dad sent me this today.

It got me to thinking about who the Federal government helps most.  So I looked up the states who get the most help from the Federal government (ie, me).  An article from The Atlantic citing independent analysis is here. But to summarize, here are the top 10 States ranked as most dependent on Federal dollars as a ratio of Federal Income tax paid by each state.  These are ranked in order of "receive most/pay in least":

1. SC

2. NC

3. FL

4. LA

5. AL

6. HI

7. MS

8. NM

9. KY

10. WV

The colors show which states are solid red, light red, blue, light blue, or purple based on how they've voted in the last 4 Presidential elections.  That data came from here.  But if you want the color key, here it is:

Summary of results of the 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012 presidential elections:

  States carried by the Republican in all four elections

  States carried by the Republican in three of the four elections

  States carried by each party twice in the four elections

  States carried by the Democrat in three of the four elections

  States carried by the Democrat in all four elections

If this analysis is right, 7 of the top 10 States getting more help -- in terms of Federal aid -- from the government than they're contributing via Federal income tax, are voting for Republican Presidents most or all of the time over the last 4 races.  Three of these states are blue, light blue, or purple,meaning they're voting for Democratic Presidents all, most, or half the time.

SO, I agree with the Gipper to a great extent.  But it seems his Republican disciples in SC, NC, LA, AL, MS, KY, and WV are all hat and no saddle.

Vox, Velocity and Vectors Vaults to Victory

I was treated to an amazing performance at Dickinson College on Saturday night when I attended a joint performance mounted by the music and dance departments.  The evening drew together modern minimalist music from Philip Glass and others, piercing light show visuals creatively projected on the black main drape, and helium balloons.  Taken together I found myself at turns gasping, laughing, and scratching my head.

Sometimes we were in deep space as depicted above.  In this piece the dancernaut may well have been working alongside Anne Hathaway in Interstellar for her ability to move across the stage untethered from Earth's gravity.

Later we attended a cocktail party that viscerally captured the social energy, awkwardness, venom, and gayety one often experiences when music and adult refreshments mingle.  When the twirling dancer above was slain by the party at the close I jolted in my seat at her sudden demise.

But my favorite piece came at the conclusion with the homage to one of my childhood favorites,  The Red Balloon.

We were shown this movie year in and year out when I was in elementary school.  The entire school was brought together to journey with a young boy and his red balloon through the streets of Paris.  No words are spoken yet we come to love the boy, his balloon, and their friendship.  Here the dancers evoked that same feeling with the help of real red helium balloons as one dancer discovered, selected, and eventually lost her red balloon.  The emotions from the whole movie were beautifully evoked transporting me to my primary school in suburban Philadelphia, circa 1973.

Were it not for my intrepid freshman daughter, Carrie Gillespie, my son -- her twin, Ben -- and I would never have spent such an luscious evening surrounded by light, music, energy, and emotion all showered upon us by the amazing talent on display at Dickinson's Mathers Theater last Saturday night.  For more on the performance, go here.

Thanks to everyone in the performance. Bravo!

When random is calculated

This report from today's Dallas Morning News carried the jump page headline, "KC killings called quick, random".  The online version doesn't have the jump page so this headline doesn't appear here.  But trust me, it is in the print version today, April 15, 2014.  Click here and read the story if you want to know why I wrote the letter below to the Editor of this award-winning paper:

Who defines "random" as "calculated"?

Your jump page headline of the Cross killings grossly misleads readers at best, and at worst it frames his calculated, heinous slayings as unpredictable, chance events that could have happened to anyone anywhere.

The report chronicles Cross's lifelong anti-Semitism, bigotry, and fanatical devotion to the twisted ideology of white supremacy.  When he went to the Jewish Community Center to hunt and kill Jews he was taking the next step in his lifelong quest.  How can you describe this story as "random" just because a local cop used the word?

I'm from Boston, birthplace of ideas like the 2nd Amendment.  I suspect and fear that the Texas tilt towards gun rights quietly bends your word choice to promote notions like, "Hey, well, you can't outlaw crazy; look how he randomly killed his victims?" when in fact Cross was hunting Jews.  Change the headline to "Jews hunted down" and next you'll have to consider the fact that the Founders enshrined our right to bear long rifles that took several minutes to load and fire one shot that usually missed its target...not the right to bear the military-grade hardware Cross so loved.

Make Docs Pay for Healthcare

I find it intriguing that no one is asking this question: why, when doctors choose to give away their services, are the rest of us forced to pay for their largess?

The Regan era law requiring ERs to treat the uninsured sure doesn't help.  But that law feeds upon the medical profession's ethic that drives docs to give free medical service to those who can't pay.  I'm not saying they shouldn't treat people who can't pay.  But if one of my advertisers (I sell ad space for Newsweek Daily Beast) asked for an ad in the magazine but said they didn't have the money to pay, I'm fairly sure management wouldn't raise every other advertisers' rates by 1% to cover the cost.

Advertising isn't healthcare.  But somewhere along the line docs who are duty-bound to give away their services successfully passed the buck to me and everyone else who pays for health insurance.  Let's ask the medical profession to back up their ethics with action.  Rather than forcing consumers to buy health insurance let's force medical accreditation boards to allocate X% of doctors' time to serve the uninsured.  Remember Northern Exposure?  Kinda like that.  But on a national scale.

With the exception of legal defense against a criminal charge, I can think of no other profession in which services provided for those who can't pay are underwritten by everyone else who can pay.  Since healthcare is a unique service with limited price elasticity, a universal potential market, and morally freighted in every dimension, it has to be treated differently than other markets.  Turning our legislative guns to the root of the problem -- doctors who have to give away their service -- will lead us to a more just and effective solution.

People die in war

The mess in Afghanistan over the civilian victims of Robert Bale's shooting spree got me to thinking about some basic facts we seem to have forgotten about war.  People die in war.  War is horrible, unpredictable, and must be avoided if at all possible...but not at all costs.

2,551 civilians were killed in the 9/11 attacks.  That's when this war started.  Don't be fooled, we are at war with the people who launched those attacks.  The problem is that this is a modern asynchronous war with an enemy that doesn't hail from a sovereign nation or wear a uniform.  If the people, nay the government, of Afghanistan hadn't given harbor to our enemy we wouldn't be there.  But they did.  So we are.

So, this is a war and we are in it.  I'll go a step further.  We should be in it.  And we should finish it...or, as hawks like to say, win it.  And that means more people are going to die. But since our enemy won't wear a uniform or follow any international laws of war (a term that always brings a wry smile), we are going to kill civilians.

All we can do now is prosecute the offenders and keep fighting the war.  An NPR headline asked whether Robert Bale's shooting spree will alter White House policy in Afghanistan.  I hope not.  Bale is, at best, a troubled soul who should've been removed from the field of battle sooner.  But my suspicion is that hundreds of "Bales" went undetected in Vietnam.  Thousands probably went undetected in Hitler's army (and I'm not talking about the ones who were following orders when they murdered millions upon millions upon millions of Jews, Catholics, gays, Poles, and anyone else who was unlucky enough not to be born with the right stuff).  And in the history of peoples at war I'd guess hundreds of thousands of "Bales" have gotten away with murder.

The good news?  We're still a nation of laws, not men, so Bale will be punished.  We're also a nation that hates war so we're likely to end this one as soon as we restore some level of pre-9/11 security to America and our allies.