03-07-2021, 04:04 PM
We are finding out much about ourselves and the validity of our assumptions during the Plague of Donald Trump (COVID-19). Some of us have learned how to live without going to casual-dining restaurants; some of us have learned to live without predictably-costly entertainment. My brother and I cut the cable even though we live 80 miles from the broadcast towers. I found that the only TV signals that I can get from broadcast are fundamentalist religious channels that make EWTN look brainy by contrast. So it is back to the Internet, which is better than broadcast TV, recorder video and music, and books. As for casual dining, it is possible to get pre-packaged entrees at the grocery store that one zaps in a microwave oven and gets something just as tasty.
I am beginning to realize that people like my late grandparents got more out of books, early recordings of music, and trips to the movie house than we supposedly-advanced people can get out of 200 channels of cable TV. When we do have reliable income again, maybe we will separate (he will be moving to where his girlfriend, who cannot get along with me, lives) and I will be stuck in the Great Lakes region in farm country. It's awful, and I have some question about the choices that I made to put me in this predicament -- and no satisfying answers within reach. At the very worst, death solves all my problems once and for all unless some Hell awaits me. At my age, Hell is all that scares me. I am satisfied that a God exists, but I cannot be sure that He is the benign Entity that I was told that he is. Were He so benign there would never have been an Atlantic slave trade or the Holocaust. Maybe I have the satisfaction that I will not go where the Nazis, Stalinists, and slave-traffickers are.
I'd like to have influence upon youth to direct them in inobtrusive, constructive ways. I've seen it all, and I have paid attention all my life to people (that goes back to the Lost) who have seen it all. I've known people who went as far west as they could in the Great Plains (western Nebraska) where they hoped to be settlers living a good life. They went out by train and came back by train, because droughts make western Nebraska unsuited to farming without irrigation. Irrigation was expensive in the late 19th century and still is if one is not near a river. There is no river, and the country population has gone from 1412 in 1920 to 444 in 2000, only to rebound to an estimated 465 in 2018. Those relatives, siblings of the father of my maternal grandmother, didn't stay for long. They returned by rail with the stuff that they moved out as comforts on the frontier and the livestock that they took out West for a new life that just did not pan out -- back to Indiana. My great-grandfather's brother, born in 1877, told me about this. I listened. I regret that I did not do a tape recording or take notes.
I am beginning to realize that people like my late grandparents got more out of books, early recordings of music, and trips to the movie house than we supposedly-advanced people can get out of 200 channels of cable TV. When we do have reliable income again, maybe we will separate (he will be moving to where his girlfriend, who cannot get along with me, lives) and I will be stuck in the Great Lakes region in farm country. It's awful, and I have some question about the choices that I made to put me in this predicament -- and no satisfying answers within reach. At the very worst, death solves all my problems once and for all unless some Hell awaits me. At my age, Hell is all that scares me. I am satisfied that a God exists, but I cannot be sure that He is the benign Entity that I was told that he is. Were He so benign there would never have been an Atlantic slave trade or the Holocaust. Maybe I have the satisfaction that I will not go where the Nazis, Stalinists, and slave-traffickers are.
I'd like to have influence upon youth to direct them in inobtrusive, constructive ways. I've seen it all, and I have paid attention all my life to people (that goes back to the Lost) who have seen it all. I've known people who went as far west as they could in the Great Plains (western Nebraska) where they hoped to be settlers living a good life. They went out by train and came back by train, because droughts make western Nebraska unsuited to farming without irrigation. Irrigation was expensive in the late 19th century and still is if one is not near a river. There is no river, and the country population has gone from 1412 in 1920 to 444 in 2000, only to rebound to an estimated 465 in 2018. Those relatives, siblings of the father of my maternal grandmother, didn't stay for long. They returned by rail with the stuff that they moved out as comforts on the frontier and the livestock that they took out West for a new life that just did not pan out -- back to Indiana. My great-grandfather's brother, born in 1877, told me about this. I listened. I regret that I did not do a tape recording or take notes.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.