Franksummers3ba's Blog

I’m very much aware that I can now recognize the fact that I participated in a public ritual in my home town during the first observance of Earth day. It makes me proud and pleased that I did. I was just a young boy.

There has been a great deal of good work done on environmental issues since that day. However, mostly I am aware that these days I am turning away more and more from the really big issues. I am going in a direction of narrowing horizons and more limited resources. That doesn’t suit the part of me that takes up grand causes. So this Earth Day I am not doing much.

This is a glimpse of how the black and white film was presented to the world. The local papers ran black and white promotional and reporting spreads.

Double rainbow at Big Woods in August of 2015

The St. Mary Magdalene Catholic Church Where I was baptized, made my First Communion and was wed.

Time is a complicated and simple , momentous and ordinary thing about which much has been written. One of my favorite films is largely structured around observing the close and almost exact passage of time. That film is High Noon. Many different things have been written about the film on the right and left of American politics. But the film like all great art transcends the mere positioning of ideas and motifs on the political spectrum. I watched the film on a Tuesday morning when I was feeling a bit worse for wear and doing some emergency laundry at my parents house. Drama has been on my mind as there is a major play production impacting my life in various ways. I helped a friend go over some lines yesterday, Monday the thirteenth. I also spent some time organizing other projects for the week. One of them requiring some special care and attention to avoid risks and another being a simple matter of getting to another play in which two of my nephews are performing. the film embodies much of what I value most in really good drama. It is a story of a man confronted with a terrible crisis on the day that was to be his wedding day and the day of his retirement from law enforcement. He finds little support in his complicated desire and determination to do his duty but where it comes it is precious to him and unexpected and  makes for an ending that is made to stand the test of time.  It is also a film about not being able to hope for the best and let things take care of themselves. It is a film about feeling very much obligated to do the right thing when there are many reasons to do otherwise.

So High Noon is a film I have seen many times. But this time I watched it again in a state of weariness on my parents couch on demand as a free movie with pauses in between various parts.  On March 14, 2017 I bought some newspapers and went to early voting. I find this  Tuesday a little trying as I am weary from having stayed up to finish defrosting a small refrigerator after having already had a pretty full day, the Day before. The villain of the piece is a gunslinger named Frank Miller and I am named Frank and have Miller ancestors — but I still greatly admire the film. It is a film which asks a lot of the viewer in terms of thinking about love, religion, public duty, courage, individualism and friendship. I put it often at the top of my list as the best film of all. But sometimes I might shift it around — however, it is always near the top. Gary Cooper’s character Will Kane has his own way to make in a very bleak time.

The truth is that not everyone goes through life in the same way. Not all of us  are using the same basic navigation system to get through life. But for me that is neither good nor bad in all cases. Right now I am close the point where all things fail at once in a life but one does not hit bottom. Hitting bottom is not an option for everyone. The people fighting over the reform of America’s healthcare system have many motivations. Some are motivated by political self interest, some by a desire for profit. But many who also have some of one or both of these two interests are also struggling for the good of the country and are convinced that there can be disastrous consequences if there plans fail and those of their political opponents prevail. We all are aware to some degree or another of the legacy we strive to leave behind of the young and vulnerable lives our decisions influence and of the values we want to pass on to posterity. Even when things are urgent for other reasons  we still have business to tend to that involves the future more than the unpleasant exigencies of our future.  President Ronald Reagan spoke of Morning in America and he used it as a phrase in his campaign advertising. but perhaps we are at the minutes before High Noon in America, I often feel that for me it is simply too late for anything really good to happen. But for America it is perhaps a time of consequence a time when one must act and act well. We do face impending showdowns with Iran, North Korea and others to varying degrees and we do face showdowns between political parties but perhaps there is more than that in this time.

Perhpas this is the time we will last be able to choose to stand up and make the future right for others or lose that chance  as a country. I am not sure but it is on my mind today.

1. My First Personal Grievance is that I feel compelled to have a list of grievance and to maintain a negative and polemic attitude on so many things for so long.That I have had to live with the injuries to myself and others that go with such negativity. 

I can walk, speak and am not incarcerated. In that regard I am more free than many other people. I have known some fine people and still stay in touch with many of them. Many of the people I care the most about are still in touch with me and are alive and healthy. In all these regards I am more blessed and fortunate than many people better than me are now or have been in the past. But I am not a fount of gratitude for my good fortune. In fact I often feel abused, mistreated, cheated and robbed when I reflect on my life. Much like the people who fill the streets and rallies after all recent presidential elections in America i am more than a little annoyed with my state in life. But complaining is not my full time occupation — neither is it the full-time occupation of most of the TEA Party people who protested early in the Obama Administration, nor of the many who flocked to Trump rallies and still do. Also it is not the full time occupation of most of the people who joined the many Women’s Marches in the Trump Administrations early days.   Nor is it the occupation of everyone who shouted FEEL THE BERN! or BLACK LIVES MATTER! in recent months and years.  There is not much I can say about all of those grievances that  will fit into the introductory paragraph of a blog post.

During the time since my last blog post I have done some lawn work, jury rigged a repair on a washing machine and let a friend read the first chapter of a novel manuscript. Those are not the only things I did since I last complained online. Nonetheless, I do complain online quite a bit. An alcoholic who is not effectively engaging in some kind of process for not drinking  may still often know that hew drinks too much and yet be unable to stop drinking for long or mitigate his drinking in any way that makes his life much better. Although we do not know what that thoughtful drunkard’s life might be like if he did not drink those around him or her will usually agree that taming the addiction should be a high priority in his life’s plan. But full-blown and well acknowledged alcoholism is an unusual case. One can survive for a good long while no matter how little one drinks of alcohol even though many lives may be saved by moderate consumption that are not reported by those with anti-drinking biases. However, beyond that kind of addiction it is not so easy a shot too call in most cases. As life gets worse and we age badly in many cases we may still have real insight when we see that very few people are even remotely interested in understanding a viewpoint very different from their own. In fact unbridled hostility to new insights cloaked behind smiling faces are probably more common than a real desire to understand. But the questions confront us in life whether we try to mind our business or not. Does Mr. X play too much golf? Does Miss Y show too much skin? Does Mrs. K spend too much time chatting about other people’s problems? Do the Z family spend too much money eating out? Does business L work its employees too hard? It is not necessarily our business but it is part of living in community or society to take an interest in what others are doing and part of the human condition to question and evaluate human behavior. Reader of this blog may well ask whether I am too critical of the society in which I live and whether I complain too much. Complaining and criticizing are useful activities. They are also not without a whole variety of risks.

This blog, in every post and page is personal. A great deal of it shows forth my view of the world in the ways that it is affected by experiences. Many of those experiences have shown grievances. But still I have never posted a post just like this. As I work on this blog post I have many other things to tend to which are important but for which I scarcely have enough resources and which are not particularly lucrative, glamorous or transformative of society as I complain about it here. In this post I am going to use my own life as a seriously intended example and measure of the reasons the world is a horrible place and this society is dysfunctional.

This blog post is about grievance, loss and injustice at a personal level. My effort here is to state what has been done to injure me and to briefly discuss why the results or damages of those injuries are abhorrent to me.

I will focus on a list of twelve numbered Grievances, However, I will not restrict myself from rambling before and after each listed grievance:

2. My Second Grievance is that the new Trump Administration and his style have adversely affected my limited readership on this blog and unrelated but in conjunction with that Word Press did not send me the Year in Review packet of analysis for the end of last year. I feel the struggle to have a voice and believe in my voice.

So this year I may have smaller readership and last year and I do not have the nice little documentation of my last year. But the Trump campaign helped my readership a bit. So thus far that is not a big deal in terms of readership or views but it did happen. I got a bump during his campaign. However lately I have sometimes gotten more views that come form fewer readers but no big bumps. My October 2015 post actually focused on some of the good achievements of the Obama Administration as examples of him not being as bad as I predicted he would be. But those positive comments in 2015 followed this statement about my blogging, especially in the early years:

For me the election of Barack Hussein Obama as President of these United States of America was a signal that the time had come for me to expend the very little energy and resourcefulness which I could devote to criticism in criticizing a man who would make already intolerable prospects of this country much worse and do so much more quickly. I still think that was an appropriate reaction to his election. But this note will not be in the same vein as most of the others I have written. This note will be largely about better aspects of the Obama Presidency.
So it is with Obama’s Presidency, it may turn out that serious wrongs come to be connected to him in time for which he shall be held responsible – yet he has not been as bad a President as could be. I want to discuss what has been better than the worst possible case…I have been among Barack Obama’s most committed and harshest critics since the day he was elected President. In general that will continue until he is out of office or I am unable to criticize him. However, I have on occasion praised this or that decision he has made and this or the other thing he has done. In addition I have written a great many times that he did not personally create any number of problems and bad behaviors for which I hold him responsible. I am going to dedicate this essay appearing as a post or note to putting forth some balance as regards Obama. Balance is not the same as truth. This does not change our fundamentally polemic pose towards one another’s positions and even persons.

I wonder if Trump’s critics are willing to find themselves where I was in that 2015 moment. It is hard to say because this cycle of recrimination is moving so fast. While this post is new some parts have been edited from an earlier not identical post both as it existed in its original condition and as it existed in its edited condition.The major edits and the first paragraph of the post I am using in places were entirely from October of 2015, while the original version of that post was from May of 2013.  This post is being written in February of 2017. So the use of this material provides a sort of alignment of three lenses over time to perceive the reality of things. I am also including a litany of personal grievances that have not appeared elsewhere. We will continue with that here:

3.My third grievance is that I feel that I uniquely but in solidarity with many others  feel that my own understanding of our society’s security and my personal safety are not represented in the views put forth by the Trump Apparatus or the media largely critical of Trump 

Threats like the Russian deployment of nuclear cruise missiles and North Korea using VX gas in a foreign international airport are serious risks. The destabilized Middle East and the confusion in East Asia are all serious threats and I have had a contact or so or an experience which I feel have prepared me to understand them a little and I resent being do far out of the analysis loop.  But one does not  have to look so far from home to find reasons for concern.

In recent years many things have happened in Europe and in the United States which while they are individually much less significant than the events of the eleventh of September 2001 are nonetheless cumulatively a set of events that show a Western World deeply impacted by organized mass violence. San Bernadino, The Boston Marathon Attacks,the attacks on the concert hall and later on both a soccer stadium and in a number of smaller venues in Paris, the truck attack in Nice, the shooting at Fort Hood,  the attacks on mass transit in London and Spain, and a hundred other events make up the face of what Trump clearly denounces as Radical Islamic Terrorism. Those things and the energies around them some how connect with police assassinations such as the sizable mass shootings in Dallas and Baton Rouge and the numerous small and usually individual wounding and killing of law enforcement by someone with an agenda. Then there are the riots facilitated by the most radical elements of the Black Lives Matter Movement, by Black Block Anarchists  which add a violent edge and sometimes core to demonstrations and protest that already feature civil disobedience and disturb the peace. Interspersed among this  violent symphony are notes struck by White Nationalist Dylan Roof at Mother Emanuel Church, far right lunatic Hauser in the theater in Lafayette and the really weird violence that claimed so many lives tragically in Sandy Hook Elementary School. Weirdness is not a crime murder is but weirdness is coming to be increasingly connected with America in many eyes. In the second Obama term which like the first saw wholesale public violence shaping our perceptions of the world it is also true that Amanda Knox has finally been acquitted of almost  all serious charges in a  truly final hearing by the Italian judiciary. This does not answer all issues related to her case. Did she murder the woman and were false approaches  a cause for a confusion that could never be overcome? Was there a ritual element that did or did not involve her or her boyfriend in any way? I assume and hope that she is as innocent as she now stands declared. I hope that she can go on with her life.  But at the time I wrote this I was upset at the way connections were made and the way that paths were pursued.  Italy is now retrying a woman executed for witchcraft 300 years ago. I do not believe there are no witches nor do I believe that none of them deserve to be prosecuted. I was very angry about the Amanda Knox prosecution because I did not believe a good case was made that she was a woman who was in fact a devotee of ritual murder.I am worried given all the violent images of American that American expats will be falsely accused of engaging in weird violence. The murder rate in Chicago is almost off the charts and Obama while he talked a lot about guns did not address a lot of the violent tensions in this country the way Trump has and is likely to again.  Spike Lee could make a film about the subject but Trump takes a more direct approach.

Obama was elected in a spirit of a national promise of hopeful and peaceful change. People came to this blog in part to see the threadbare qualities of that promise.Today it is easy to see that mass shootings across the United States, crises in Syria and related to Syria, bad relations with Russia and the rise of Donald Trump who from his gold tower in New York and his palace in Mar-a-Lago down in Florida  connected with the White Working Class Voters that nobady was sure existed and  the Bernie Sanders who connected in his quiet intellectual North East Jewish way with the mobs and people on the streets will be among the trends and events for which the second Obama term is  remembered. It will be remembered as the term when he failed to get Hillary elected and a lot of other people reelected.   Among the questions being asked are some discussed here but there are more exciting places to pose those questions that in this blog. Violence in this country is nothing that has suddenly appeared only under Obama and Trump. Not even significant and socially formative violence is new. In recent years and over the course of my lifetime the media has been on occasion filled with the violent deaths of people on such occasions as the President Kennedy Assassination, the Martin Luther King Assassination, the Bobby Kennedy Assassination, Jonestown massacre, the Oklahoma City Bombing, the Rodney King Riots, the Waco Branch Davidian conflagration and the  Ruby Ridge raid. This old pattern is at least connected prelude to the slightly different tenor of the events listed before or for the first time which include the Colombine High School Shootings, the 9/11 Attacks, the  Fort Hood Shooting, Colorado Dark Knight Shooting, The Newton Sandy Hook Shooting and the Boston Marathon Bombings. In addition to these violent episodes I think of all those I have known who have died suddenly and violently without so much media or public recognition. Many of these events which have touched me personally were pretty well covered in regional or local media but not at the center of the entire national discussion. It is in this context that the recent days of bomb threats on Jewish centers and destruction of tombs in Jewish cemeteries. Life is a complicated thing — but we must face the reality American violence as a whole. I think I do this more completely here than those discussing the new administration  or the apparatus of that beleaguered administration   often do but that is hard to prove. I don’t have the foreign affairs credentials some would have it’s true.

Why that foreign service credentialing is limited is not so easy to say.  But here is a relevant tidbit. I don’t think that Trump’s lack of military service or min is compelling evidence of  either one of us being shirkers. Nor was Obama’s lack of such service. I have often praised the armed services here and do not hesitate to say it provides a good credential to have military experience. I think that a certain amount of conflict is simply part of human nature. I do believe that my own nature is more imbued with a propensity to conflict than most human natures. But I have been in a number of situations that have heightened that aspect of my life… It was never really likely that I would wear a uniform of any military or police organization and I never have. But if I had done so then perhaps my life would make more sense from a variety of points of view. The closest I ever came to adding that kind of public and rational disclosure to my life’s history was a prolonged episode involving the Central Intelligence Agency known by its initials the C.I.A. or the CIA. This organization is the largest American civilian intelligence agency the position and structure of which have been reformed more often than other agencies. It lacks the kind of institutional support which the military can bring to its own agencies. Like a lot of people I grew up fascinated with spy movies and television shows. Twice before I was eighteen I met someone overseas whom I interacted with and who may well have been with the CIA. When I was sixteen years old I published a long letter to the editor in The Morning Star a Roman Catholic newspaper objecting to the draft and then going further. I had lots of reasons but as time went on felt that perhaps I had closed off a career that might be my best channel for my particular talents. In an onging process of figuring things out I applied to the Central Intelligence Agency while in college, seeking a career as an operative. I spoke with my wife, went through several phone interviews and was sent a first application. It was sort of approved and I was sent a second application and for it I got a recommendation from then US Senator John Breaux. This was sort of accepted and I was scheduled for initial testing and I sort of passed. Then I signed a confidentiality agreement of some kind for whatever happened thereafter. I cannot say more than that there were head games involved and I would describe my connections with the agency as just enough to endanger my friends and associates overseas by association and not nearly enough to get paid and supported.
I have spent a lot of time in places where there was conflict but I also have spent a lot of time alone in my room, at a picnic table in a park or elsewhere – reading, writing or using a computer’s keyboard or mouse. Solitude has defined my life as much as any conflict has and as much as the whole of conflict in my life has as well. These themes of conflict and solitude define my life in distinction and contrast to whatever themes of community and family there may be as well. Like a good number of people who write a lot I am fairly interested in myself. People tend to be interested in where there daily bread comes from and in the years when I taught, wrote, did outside sales or a number of other things for a living my daily bread seemed to come mostly from my own inner resources. So in writing and in other parts of my life, self absorption has been another theme which has been in contrast and distinction to themes of community and family in my life. Yet is all of this enough to describe whatever sense of alienation I have? Do the reasons for alienation matter much?

4. My Fourth Grievance is that I have not been able to profit sufficiently from the work that I have done in recent years. it has been impossible for me to capitalize fully  on any of the worthwhile things that I have been able to do.

The most potentially lucrative area of my work has been in dealing with space and related projects. The Martian was a film which got Matt Damon the Golden Globe for best actor in a comedy. That award is in itself disparaging enough of the idea of writing seriously about space colonization. I also mentioned the heavy rockets repeatedly in this blog and there have been times since the film just mentioned  and now again with some successes from Spacex when we have been  seeing a real interest in exploring Mars related and these interests  will be related to current missions reporting from there and related to the fame of The Martian.  That book is interesting in many ways and there are almost as many ways to understand its significance in the scheme of things as there are interviews about it. What is certainly true is that Weir wrote it and as he wrote it on an open format on the web he received a lot of input from people on the web and chemist and physicists. It is possible to read his take on this experience here.  I could and may do a whole take on this experience one day which constitutes its own post. But here, as is often the case I have a crowded agenda to cover. I also prepared a model for space colonization and I also developed it basically alone and then I also set up a method for intellectual transparency and the exchange of information it was called the Crater Cap Colony Concept Group.  There is more about my view here. Then I serialized a novel online and it has never been published. But there is a difference or two between our techniques. He really invited in a variety of sources with little commitment to improve his work by taking it from many sources and crediting none of them. In addition, the man who has claimed a fear of flying, reinforced the sense that we are trapped on this Earth I did a lot of work, have flown a great deal — entered into frank and open discussions in favor of my ideas I argues at great length. My novel makes a unique effort to directly credit the space community over time and it aggressively promotes space colonization. Did Weir steal and distort and twist ideas received initially form me — very likely so. Was it only from me, not likely. But was it malicious, no. Was it legally plagiarism, almost certainly not. A longer time has passed since I  daily and aggressively advocated planning to colonize the Moon and Mars.  But the reasons to consider such a course are not less compelling. I have just today begun editing my Culkathadreil novel manuscript in printed form with an ink pen. And will eventually have to digitize it. In addition I have not had even the little jobs in journalism and education which have helped me survive in the past. Further I have experienced quite a few setbacks. All of this combines with other factors to greatly limit my life and prospects these days. But I rush through without setting it all out clearly.

So we now begin the more lightly edited section of this version of this post. I abandon the readers and history to the point of view that I had at that time. For many people it appears that all times seem largely alike even though new situations are always arising. Many people constantly say almost the same exact things about larger events than those in their own lives and some constantly revisit the same rhetoric for describing their personal situations. In other words history may not repeat itself, but as a clever person once said — it does rhyme. I have a friend I correspond with and I frequently write to him  (and occasionally to other people) by incorporating lyrics from songs we both know into the  body of an email. It is a sort of humor on a number of levels at the same time. But I am a writer and I like novels  (although I have not published a novel) and poems which are quite distinct from other novels and verses out there in the world. I refer often enough to other sources in my blog and even in novels and try to create new ways to be transparent and responsible to the way I connect with the ideas of others. But I am also concerned about my own craftsmanship and originality whether it promises a benefit to me in any real way or not. In other words — I say my own thing my own way.

For me and for some others it is perhaps truer to say that each time is a bit different even though the situation in it are somewhat familiar and reminiscent or predictive of past and future situations. So this is a kind of transition paragraph between where I am now and where I was then in my thinking. From here down little has been changed but the formatting of a few lines.  I can find in the lines below a view of who I was and what I was thinking a bit over two years ago.

For example in summing up the first weekend in May of 2013 for me I could write: “ My nephew won his first boxing bout at a scored tournament while others of us in his family, including me, have been absorbed in other matters. My call of congratulations missed him while he was out serving at Mass. Old friends have arrived from the Philippines to celebrate a big occasion with our family and my parents met them at the airport. My brother Joseph is celebrating a birthday a couple of days early. The weather is spectacular here in south Louisiana.” This exact mix of circumstances seems pretty unique to me.
This piece will be a bit longer than my average piece. Those who read my stuff frequently will know that I am interested in the dates on the calendar and what holidays are being observed and what seasons are in play from nature and the various political and cultural institutions of our time. For example when I was working on the edited version of the 2013 post in this blog I noted that  the Greek Orthodox Christians celebrated the Feast of Christ’s Resurrection and that I had been blogging about the coming of The Great Gatsby and what had been going on as related to the making of that film. More personally, In those days my laptop that had my movie making software was still working and I noted that I had put up two videos in anticipation of the celebration of a family event. Lastly, I  mentioned the struggle I had experienced with allergy season that year.But I did not focus as much as some readers might think on my many forms of  and reason for discontent with the Obama Administration. Yet overall in the blog and elsewhere I did decry the vices and shortcomings of that regime. Right now the transition form the Age of Obama to Pax Trumpana is the big event coloring much of my own thought and much of the news around me — and I am a news watching and analyzing guy. I did not vote for either of the last two Presidents, in this recent election I voted for Chris Keniston of the Veterans Party for President of the United States. Today the White House kicked CNN and the New York Times out of a briefing. Obama had of course once kicked Fox News out and the New York Times led the effort to have them included once again. Trump has blamed these media for issuing stories angled against him and his administration based on unnamed sources. Of course the possibility that Trump is a neo-fascist who will harshly punish those who give their names to the press and criticize him seems a plausible possibility to many.  On the other hand the idea that a biased and even hate filled media is lying and cheating to do him dirt seems credible to many people as well. To many people both assertions given above seem overblown but also seem in different to resemble the truth. My own sympathies with both the White House communications apparatus and the big media are limited. I do have some empathy with each but since neither have helped me pay the bills (with the exception of big media Gannet more than a decade and a half ago) and I have been wandering out in the desert a long time I could find it in me to say “a pox on both your houses” pretty easily.

This is a time like any other time since this blog has been around or before when I am in synch with some things and out of synch with some other things. In my edit of the original 2013 post  I am referencing here  I wrote:

I have felt some sense of doing something important to myself at least as in recent weeks I have prepared and posted two of my intended trilogy of videos related to the fiftieth wedding anniversary of my parents. They represent and preserve in very brief form a kind of narrative and description of a story that I believe is important and certainly is important to me. As for the general tone and view point of the two video, I stand by them and they are in my opinion both true and authentic. Both emphasize the positive and good aspects of fifty years which have been just a bit longer than my own life and have been the single most significant influence on my own life. In this essay I am going to take a moment to reflect on both what my own life and point of view are and how I am seeing the life ahead of me – however short or long it may be.

4. My Fifth Grievance is that some of the most useful kinds of excellence which I possess in some degree have been liabilities and have even been punished.

I have spent a lot of time doing the deep reading, traveling, talking and thinking which are required to detect and to understand the problems and issues of importance to our world and our society. I believe I am a good social critic rather than a hot and trendy pundit. But I still need an income and an audience and I feel agrieved.  The word English word critic and related words such as critique, criticize and critical come from Greek κριτικός (kritikós), “able to discern”, which is a Greek derivation from the word κριτής (krités), which means roughly “a person who offers reasoned judgment or analysis”. It is unclear whether there is any connection to a man named Crito and the Dialogue in Plato’s Dialogues or (Dialogs) named for Crito – The Crito. This is the last of the dialogs or conversations about philosophy in the life of Socrates. He is executed at the end of it and the pending execution forms the basic framework of the conversation. Crito is certainly both critical of Socrates for his refusal to resist execution by fleeing from prison with his assistance and he is criticized by Socrates for what he says. Thus it could be the character is given the name Crito by Plato (or fabricated with the name Crito –not everyone accepts that the dialogs are based on fact) or it could be that they try to live up to his name in the tone of their conversation. Also, despite some texts seeming to indicate that the word existed before Socrates it may be that this is a gloss by some ancient clerks and that the word came into Greek in honor of the death of the great gadfly and the actions of his companion. One is reminded of the conversation between Peter and Jesus regarding Jesus going up to Jerusalem to face crucifixion which follows upon Jesus declaring Peter’s role as Rock and precedes the mystical peak of the Transfiguration. When Jesus foretells his condemnation by the leaders of his own people and crucifixion by the Romans Peter is eager to persuade him to change his plans to avoid these horrible events. Jesus tells Peter (as retold in Mark 9 and Matthew 16) that he is in this instance “Satan” – opposing God’s will. So Crito criticizes the legal system to which Socrates has been a devoted citizen subject. When one comes across Jesus and Socrates one is reminded that not only they but quite a few other people have been very serious about things. It is a fact we can sometimes forget. While people often use the term pundit for people who comment on politics and events I think that I am by many measures more of a critic than anything else as regards the sort of writing I do in Facebook Notes and Blog Posts. Perhaps like Crito and Peter that criticism is often born of a sense of resentment for the way things are turning out and the costs involved. However, in the case of both Jesus and Socrates both were men who spent years being largely critical of others, of institutions, of laws and of sacred customs. Each intended to bring about change and each on did contribute to vast webs and ripples of change across space and time. Both were executed. In each case this had at least something to do with their own criticisms of the status quo.
Crito (Ancient Greek: Κρίτων) is a short but important dialogue by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato. It is a conversation between Socrates and his wealthy associate Crito regarding justice (δικη). The men gathered in the cell or chamber where Socrates awaits his poisoned cup also converse in a disciplined manner in the same dialogue about injustice (αδικια), and the appropriate response to injustice. The truth is that it is more than just possible to empathize in both these cases of ancient teachers being killed with the opponent and critic beside them. Even such an unusual modern reader as myself readily wants to see a form of justice that does not require killing Socrates and a divine plan that does not require Jesus’s death. In the case of the Athenian philosopher Socrates thinks that justice cannot be repaid with injustice and two wrongs don’t make a right either. What that means is that when Crito offers to use money and influence to help Socrates escape execution the philosopher will not accept this and argues that he has been nurtured and lived under the Laws of Athens and should be willing to die by them as well. His duties to his family, friends, reputation and other matter Crito brings up to criticize his plan of accepting death are not relevant. He ends by having his disciples pay the sacrificial chicken he owes to a certain god. Part of human life is to face death and to try to find a way to face one’s own death well. Of course facing life is no easy task either.
I am not a hypochondriac but in addition to my health problems I have most of the problems which are experienced by those afflicted with a myriad of merely imagined diseases. I have been exposed to many horrible diseases and do not even have the resources to screen for which ones I might or might not have contracted. I am really stuck in a new way in my life despite the fact that it is a life in which being stuck has been a big motif all along. It may be that I was simply always going to be someone who negotiated a deal for something I did not much like rather than seeing life as a realization of hopes and dreams. It certainly appears that such an outcome is an ever more foregone conclusion. I am writing about this and wondering whether to try to continue on with anything else that I am doing online after my upcoming birthday. It seems to me that June 15, 2013 is a time to perhaps admit that I have done almost and at least nearly all I can do and it has brought me to a place that has nothing much to offer me anymore.
I am at a place in my life where it is possible and perhaps inevitable that I confront and analyze where life has brought me. It is a good time to take a moral inventory and also to try to define my own motivations. I also think that America is still at a place of crisis…
I am going to try to explain where I have come by some of the basic components and qualities of my point of view in this post. I think that there is not so much a need for this as there is a possibility that such an action could be useful.

I take a critical position and have a critical point of view partly because I often oppose the politics of those in leadership in my own country. Partly, oppose the politics of those in leadership in my own country because I have already undertaken critical commitments.
Many people are more “oppositional” in much of their behavior than I have ever been. Jails, mental hospitals and cemeteries around the world are filled in part by people who acted more rashly and directly in opposing the order of things around them than I ever have. Yet, I have long and often opposed many of the powers at work in this world. Certainly I consider myself a more pronounced political opposition than either major party in these United States faces in the other party. Opposition has a high cost and is tiring. When one has confronted many opposing forces on behalf and in defense of one’s church and then other opponents in one’s church there is a cost in that. When one has confronted many opposing forces on behalf and in defense of one’s country and then other opponents in one’s country there is a cost in that. When one has confronted many opposing forces on behalf and in defense of one’s ethnic affiliations and then other opponents in one’s ethnic affiliations there is a cost in that. When one has confronted many opposing forces on behalf and in defense of one’s former political party and then other political party in one’s church there is a cost in that. I am not alone in having paid all of those varied costs. However, not nearly everybody has paid such costs.  But despite that reality of continuous risk I know I have already paid a price and risk paying a greater price. Yet I do choose not only to discuss events and trends but to criticize and oppose. I choose to state my grievances on many matters. My own life would provide plenty to write about, however, I am still compelled to address national and global matters in these posts.

5. My Sixth Personal Grievance is that there is so much good that could be happening that is not. I feel I deserve a chance to be involved in much of it.

At the time that I am posting this blog post NASA has just  recently discovered a star with  a whole array of potentially  habitable planets. My only embedded link in this post is to that story here.  Whatever bad things may have been happening in the space program the discovery of exoplanets has certainly been a very important and worthwhile boom in recent years. In addition early on in this blog  I was very concerned about a lull in heavy lift rocketry development but at the moment and into the near future the heavy lift rocketry program is not as badly off as I then may have suggested it might be by now.  SpaceX and the Antares rocket system are both promising developments. And the Atlas program seems to be improved and ready to play a role. It may be that Elon Musk and others are going to bring America surely and not so slowly into a better position in terms of the space industry than we have been in and do so with sufficient speed to make a difference. I think there is a lot wrong with the space industry and with US space programs but I think things are better than they had appeared to me to be and better than I had indicated in some of my early writings in this blog. But I have already mentioned  that I worked on my novel (and other novels) and the Crater Cap Colony  Concept Group and I believe that in a universe full of potential Earth-like planets I deserve to be playing a better role than most are playing in structures that do not exist to meet challenges that are scarcely imaginable.

One of the many obstacles to that kind of progress in the Space future is social unrest and the kind of chaos and acrimony that has gotten a lot of airtime under the Trump administration. I do not deny that his administration has seen a great deal of unrest. However, it did not start with him. I have seen a change in America sense Barack Hussein Obama became President of the United States and it has empowered a flagrancy of violence and anti-social behavior as I predicted. It is also true that his rhetoric was often of the type which undermines the coherence of this society and puts a great deal at risk. I never said Obama would directly incite total social chaos and upheaval –  I never implied that either. However, Obama did in fact been sacrifice a lot of  the advantages of the presidency to be a mere demagogue. It was not a very big difference but he did better than the overall tone of my remarks and predictions would suggest at the start of this blog and of his Presidency. Likewise I do not predict that Trump will pursue a Fascist demagoguery to the full extent. But he does flirt around the edges.. those are not nice edges to visit in many cases.
I have proposed a new Model Constitution and yet consider myself a Constitutional Conservative in many ways. While Obama was not  a great model of either reverence for the constitution or effectiveness in dealing with the constitutional machinery and political realities of governance he did not completely given up the effort to govern legitimately. I never said Obama would do that but early on I sounded some alarms  I suggested that he was a truly hostile force as regards our constitutional national well-being. In time history may be written that shows most of my worst fears were true or such history may not be be written. But America under Trump is less bound by Constitutional niceties than it ever would have been but for Obama’s precedents. I think that had I not been robbed and cheated in many ways I would be playing a better role in the renewal of the American constitutional balance.

On Facebook this past week a certain post appeared which I pasted on to my timelin and now reproduce here:

R.I.P. Justin Allen 23, Brett Linley 29, Matthew Weikert 29, Justus Bartett 27, Dave Santos 21, Jesse Reed 26, Matthew Johnson 21, Zachary Fisher 24, Brandon King 23, Christopher Goeke 23, and Sheldon Tate 27…. All are Marines who gave their lives this week for us ….for our freedom! There’s no media for them at all… not even a mention of their names. Mainstream media not reporting why…too wrapped up in politics maybe???. Please honor them by copying and pasting this post.R.I.P.
It is the least we can do. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

That does lend some perspective to the feelings that Americans have. I have a lot to get done and won’t get it done but I am committed to trying. America has had easier moments and so have I. There are lots of places I go to check in on ideas other than my own. but current events can have a way of bringing minds together if we let them. Here is a blog post that touches on some events that I have been thinking about. But they are not at the center of my thinking.

So I am drawn to political thought, have been trying to help a friend settle back into life here and have not been finding a way forward in my own life in any real sense. Life is not much worth getting excited about compared to its many other phases and is mostly about the unpleasant dead ends and impossibilities and about many other things but not about hope, happiness or success. I have a sense that the readership of this blog,  which was never huge may be declining overall as the Trump administration proceeds. Meanwhile, I find that even undertaking the tiniest risks by past standards is increasingly challenging. I know how horribly things can go for how long and keep getting worse and so it makes it very difficult to plan to make an appointment on March 21 in Dallas and possibly get a decent pay check f0r a few days work, I know  now that for me there is no balance here between disappointment and anything else there is just disappointment.  If I was not busy before and had a sibling living in Dallas and could get a decent gig doing something good I would be making plans — but now I know that in this country everything almost always works out between badly and horribly for me for layer upon layer of reasons. So I will probably pass on the first decent break in years — it is small if it were bigger I would have to look for a way. But all of this makes it very hard for me to relate to Trump’s sense of opportunity. I have never found this land to be a good place to live and work and do business and so I know that we are very different people.

But as I look at the struggles going on around the White House I also see a recurring theme of Russian influences, Russian contacts and Russian concerns. Well, I do not see this as a simple thing. America and Russia are two great powers that live on the same small planet. There are not any great projects going on to really improve the standing of all players, no rising tide that raises all ships — not in reality. There is competition, chaos and conflict. Forces are deployed, countries are aligned  and lots of people are behaving badly in all sorts of places.  All those realities have to do with why those Marines died and why the Seal died in Yemen who did get more press as he fell in the raid on a cache of information sources linked to Al Qaeda and ISIS possibly — or possibly not.

There is a lot of tension. Israel is at risk in this tension and is seeking to cement its relationship with the Trump Administration.  I value the relationship with Israel and I applaud Trump’s efforts. But the world is a complex place.  For now there seems to be a small supply of optimism in much of the country and in my life as well.