I know you guys have been worried about how unorganized this blog (and frankly my writing for PJ and other things) have been this last month and a half or so. I know because some of you have pinged me by various means to make sure I was okay.

I am okay.  I’ve been caught up in a cycle of cleaning/repairing and doing home improvement projects.  It started with my “having had enough” of the cat pee problem in our basement and taking a black light to the walls of that bathroom.  I realized every one of them were marked, and honestly probably by the former owners’ cat whom they used to lock up in the master’s bath.  Because that wall had never been painted, since the original builder’s pain, I killzed the wall up to two feet (no, our cats aren’t that tall, but the wall wicks moisture) and then painted the whole bathroom.  That was a day, but then other things happened.  The pantry into which we’d just thrown stuff on moving got on my nerves enough that I just HAD to organize it.  That took an entire day. Then there was preparing the downstairs apartment to be a fully independent place (because having older son eat with us every day and simply have a tiny counter at which he can make coffee and a bar sink big enough to wash cups at is okay, but I refuse to have newlyweds actually LIVE with us and that’s on the plans soon enough — guys, I need dates, and what I’m supposed to do! — so, there must be a functional (enough) kitchen down there.  The entrance is already independent, though I wouldn’t advise the side-steps in winter.)

Then I cleaned and organized my closet, which was still cluttered with moving boxes.  Weirdly some of the clothes I was ready to donate as too small when we moved in fit me again (yay) so not all is lost.

Anyway, in the middle of that there was buying wood for two rooms on the bottom floor, which will need to be done, and yesterday “finding the pee spot that is stinking up the entire house” and neutralizing it as well as fall cleaning of the downstairs.

There are still all the floors to redo in wood (no asthmatic — even if it’s been in remission — should live in a house with carpet floors.) and the guest bathroom to get the same treatment as the master bathroom for the same reason (except there it’s been painted and the walls are purple.  BRIGHT purple.  It’s a tiny bathroom.  I’d ask what the former owners were thinking, but I don’t think they were.)

I know, half of you are rubbing your heads and wondering if this is writers’ block.  I’ll be honest, I wondered the same, but I don’t think so.  Or not anymore, anyway.

I think I know what this is.  For the last twenty years I’ve been hypothyroidal.  For the last five years before two years ago (so, seven years) the hypothyroidism has been critical. Which meant among other things that everything was let go.  Two years ago I started being treated, but the dose was nowhere near right till this February. (MIGHT still be on the low side.)

This feels like waking up.  When you’ve been severely depressed, the first emotion that comes back is anger (and that happened with thyroid treatment too, btw) and apparently for me recovery means cleaning and organizing.  Which makes perfect sense.

That this is on the borderline of a transition to “just us two” is also part of it. Because if things are organized, I can actually be MORE productive.  I.e. with “just us two” it doesn’t take much to keep an organized/finished house clean.

The thing is, though, that I didn’t realize that was what I was doing, or that the net result has been EXPONENTIALLY more clean and organized.  Why didn’t I notice it?

Well, because when you start projects like this, it gets way worse before it gets better.  Particularly when the project is “house improvement” it’s like your entire house becomes a construction zone.  (When we had a bathroom built adjacent the master bedroom at a former house, we slept with a bucket of cement and discards next to our bed for three months.  It seemed permanent.)

So to me this has been “riding the edge of crisis till they resolve.”  And things seemed to get exponentially worse until they got sort of okay.  By that time I didn’t remember the previous state of things, so I just felt they were “sort of okay” when done.

Then older son came back after two months away and kept commenting on how clean and organized everything was.  which was a bit of shock, because that’s not how I thought of  it.  I just thought of it as “For some reason I find myself creating these messes that take me forever to clear and leave me exhausted.”

But he’s right.  And when he said it, I blinked and suddenly saw how much more organized/cleaner/easier life was becoming.

The thing is that in most big projects, you make a bigger mess on the way to cleaning it up.

Please keep that in mind when it seems like the world is coming apart at the seams.

Actually what’s happening is that, the left’s lock on the news being broken, people who don’t agree with Marxism no longer feel alone and isolated.  I.e. we’ve woken up, and we’re aware of the need to clean society of this corroding philosophy.

They of course are reacting with madness to losing what they thought was a locked-in position of power.  And cleaning this up and bringing that portion of the country into marginal contact with reality is going to take forever.  And it will probably look worse before it looks marginally okay.  Also, because the left exerted a monopolistic control on media, entertainment and education for about 100 years, most of us don’t even remember what the previous state looked like, so we might not realize when its improving.

But the thing is even the mess is a sign we’re starting to clean up.

Be not afraid.  Go and clean.

Yesterday in the comments, there was a discussion about the bitter fruits of #metoo.

And it made me wonder exactly what else was supposed to happen.

Sure, in many industries women are treated shamefully.  This is usually the kind of industry — like writing used to be, like literature still is, like academia, I’m sure, also is — that is afflicted by oligopsony.  I.e. there is only one buyer (the gate keeper) but far more suppliers than could possibly be bought.  In such a market it quickly becomes known that the reason you’re being bought or rejected is not just the quality of your work. I mean, it was known in the nineties when countless “how to write” books told you to go to conferences and workshops to meet editors, because it’s easier to reject the work of an unknown.

In writing and publishing — and yeah, other industries — there is another level of crazy induced by not being able to “control” how well your book does.  I.e. so many people put their hand in, a critical failure by an office drone at a publishing house — say stealth releasing your book in eform and telling no one, not even the author — can make a book “fail” because by the time the paper book comes out your numbers aren’t great on Amazon, so the bookstores don’t order it, etc.

In that sort of system, where the fault is always the supplier and the supplier is always expendable, it helps to be in good with the gatekeepers.  Women are treated shamefully, yeah, but so are men.  In different ways, sure (not really always.  I’ve heard rumors.  Everyone has. Men too can be sexually harassed when they’re powerless.) but still treated shamefully.  I’ve heard of men whose publicity for a book was quietly dropped after they disagreed with their editor on a trivial non-book-related matter, for instance.

So, yeah, horrible things happen to women — and men — under systems where people have absolute power over the career of others and have never learned economics, and also, honestly, don’t care for the field or what happens to it.

It seems to me, particularly since in the twenty first century most of these systems are in rapid failure mode, that the way to deal with it is to get around and build around them.  It’s surely happening in publishing, and as for Hollywood, the tech isn’t so far off.  For education, the tech is here and what is holding us bad is accreditation and prestige, things that should arguably be easier to get around than tech.  Or at least which are possible to remedy by being loud about it.

It is patently obvious oligopsonies are poisonous to the soul and the mind.  The fact they also engender sexual abuse is almost irrelevant.  Oligopsonies by definition destroy the fields they “serve”.  (Particularly when the people who exert power have bee misstaught economics, but that’s something else.)

So sure, the #metoo movement had a point in Hollywood and such places.  Perhaps too narrowly focused on just women, and just sexual abuse, which in turn led to its being quickly spun into crazy.

I.e. it was rapidly presented as being a problem everywhere and of every woman.  Which in turn led to women complaining about men with a slightly off color sense of humor, men who might not have meant what women thought they meant, men who were so old their hands wandered aimlessly and might, maybe, have touched something, and men who were ugly and dared ask a woman out. Oh, yeah, men who knew more than women about any given subject, were also more than ever shamed for “mansplaning” (something that now involves any appeal to logic, so women using logic are also accused of it.)

Look, in the States, in our day and age, no woman my age or older has experienced “patriarchy” nor anything resembling patriarchy at large.

Sure there are toxic work places.  I worked in one (physical location employment) and I’m sure other women have also (and not just fields like Hollywood, but places where the boss is a handsy jerk.) but a) this is not the universal experience, far from it.  b) if these men are discovered and revealed, they are universally reviled by men and women.  It has been so since I came to this country in the early eighties.  There are legal and social means to deal with this kind of thing.  The cartoon of the boss pursuing the secretary around his desk was at least 50 years out of date.

But women are told that #yesallwomen and #metoo called for every woman to chime in with SOME incident.

It took exactly zero seconds for the movement to devolve to “he looked at me longer than I felt comfortable with.” as well as demands that all men denounce men who do this, and SOMEHOW mind control them into not doing it.  Sorry but “I should be able to walk in a dangerous neighborhood and no one will attack me” is fantasy land.  In the entire history of mankind, including periods where attacking someone meant death, there have been safer and unsafer times and places, but there has never been a time where somehow no man would ever attack any woman (or man.  Again, let me point out that while the “abuse” or “attack” is different, men aren’t safe in this type of neighborhood either.)

Since men STILL lack the ability to mind control everyone who shares the same genitalia with them — just as I can’t mind control the Shabies (sheep+babies) who fall for these “movements” and make these demands — that portion of #metoo was always going to fail.  How could it not?

So, what has #metoo and #believeallwomen and #yesallwomen wrought?

Well, what it seems to have wrought is young men (and generally men who might be in mixed industries) refusing to work with women, and certainly refusing to work with women alone.

Because any woman at any time can accuse you of anything, and the presumption of innocence doesn’t apply.

In companies that contract with government and where quotas (of course there are quotas) might be observed, I predict a vast preponderance of open floor plan offices, and maybe as time goes on some kind of morality officer, that keeps an eye on everything.

Also you thought you wanted unisex bathrooms? Ahahahahahahahahahahah.  I suspect that bathrooms for the sexes will be soon located at opposite ends of buildings, and if the idiocy doesn’t stop, there might actually be a panty-check which never existed before.  At any rate, anyone in possession of a penis, no matter how gay, or how much they identify as a woman would have to be insane to enter a bathroom where a woman could claim to have been raped.  Hell, I’m not sure of entering bathrooms with other women and no witnesses, and I don’t have a penis.

Unless of course, you take to filming all your calls of nature from the moment you go in, if not using the all-men bathroom.  (Sure, men can probably be raped in bathrooms, and are, but you know, no one ever said #believeallmen.)

Other things are already happening.  No man in his right mind will meet with a female colleague in an isolated spot.  One of the reasons I didn’t drop out of writing entirely in 2003 was a long talk with a male colleague in a park near the convention we were attending.  Sure my husband and his assistant were nearby, but they pretty much ignored us for the whole of it, because it was a long and involved talk about how publishing worked.  Would it happen now?  I don’t know, but I doubt it.

In my own field I’ve seen men accused of sexual harassment for criticizing a woman — in a non-sexual manner — in a series of emails, or offering to help the woman get over some craft issues.  And this was before #metoo.

I’ll point out the other reason I continued writing after 2003 was a bestseller who took it upon himself to call me several times a week to coach me out of the dismals, offered me his agent (didn’t work out) and in other ways tried to get me over the hump.  Would he do it today?  Who knows?

Now?  Any man who offers to help/apprentice any woman he doesn’t know extremely well/trust absolutely is a quixotic fool.  Particularly if that involves any kind of in-person mentoring.

In fields like STEM where women are fewer, this will result in beginning, “apprentice” trainees being ignored and isolated.  It will result in men being afraid to work for female supervisors when it involves any sort of even vaguely possible time alone.

The fruits of the #metoo tree are strictly segregated work places, in which men for their own protection can’t afford to help and mentor women.

Is this what was intended?  I don’t know.  The left always talks a good game, which results in a lot of shabies thinking they “care” and therefore giving them the moral high ground.  But the fruits are usually the same.

Help the poor? Generational welfare and broken families.  Universal education? mal-education and illiterate graduates.  Universal health? dead babies.

I think part of it is the insistence on treating men like widgets who should fit their place like cogs in a machine.  It never occurs to them that poor people are not exactly the same as rich people and the reasons might go beyond the “don’t have money” to cultural, nutrition and yes, even genetic reasons (though those don’t tell us anything about any particular individual, because human genetics don’t work as eugenicists think they do.)  It never occurs to them that the obvious physical differences between men and women lead to differences in perception, or vision, or, yes, culture.  No, it’s always “if we make people treat everyone the same, everyone will be alike.”  Which results in things like the French terror, or the Stalinist purges, and some pigs being more equal than others, but never mind that.

Men and women are different.  Sure, we can work together in the same work places, if you make allowances for the fact that you’re different. Men will, yes, be more interested in ah… carnal matters.  Seems to be a function of testosterone.  Women will often read meanings into gestures and events that are incidental.  If you convince women no sexual jests should be made in their presence (even if not aimed at them) because that victimizes them, or that calendars with pulchritudinous young women are an objectification of ALL WOMEN and also an insult on them, rather than something that makes men happy and hurts nobody, or that any man who asks them out and isn’t their type has oppressed them, then they can no longer work in a field dominated by men. And they will be pretty hard to work with in any field.

The calendar thing?  Hell, some of my best professors had them in their offices.  It amused me a little when I went into conference, but I never thought it was a sexist thing. Men like pretty women in scant attire.  And women like barechested firemen holding kittens (yes, the calendars exist.) Liking the visual means nothing in terms of treating the other sex with respect.  Again, why should it?

And yet they’ve convinced us that’s offensive to #yesallwomen and probably would cause all our hair to fall out or something.

Sure those calendars were more prevalent among men, because men are more visual, but women are more verbal.  Any number of romances and the equivalent of those calendars.  Should men run screaming when they see a woman with a romance novels?  And tell me anyone can read the Anita Blake series (even the first few books) and not find men objectified as sex objects.  And yet I read them and emerged without thinking of my husband and sons as such.

Again, all this seems to be predicated on people being exchangeable, and all the same.

Even if well intentioned, the fruits of that tree are always poisonous, because they don’t fit reality.

And the fruits of #metoo, like the fruits of feminism in general seem to be to make women isolated, powerless, and unable to work in fields and in ways men do.

Maybe it’s time to reexamine the tree?

*Sorry, but after two weeks of construction work, I find that TYPING is too tiring. I barely got through the post on Mad Genius and it probably makes no sense whatsoever. So I should probably take a day off, or at least a few hours, and do something non-demanding, like crochet.  That way I’ll be better and able to write tomorrow.  And FYI, I’m too old for construction work.  So I have to write a million or so books, so I can pay someone to do this stuff for me. – SAH)

Tough Love by Dr. Karma

So I watching this TV movie on TNT years ago, because my parents and aunt were, and it hooked me after only a couple minutes. I would’ve been inspired if I hadn’t kinda already made the decision to head down a similar road a couple years ago. This is what it’s all about. Not coddling and excusing the behaviors of kids but toughening them up, teaching them what they’re made of.

People often complain that libertarians and conservatives have no compassion. That we simply don’t care about the less fortunate. While I can’t speak for others, I do care. Thing is, in my admittedly short time on this earth, I’ve learned the difference between acting like you care and actually caring. The dichotomy is something I’ve seen in relatives, friends, teachers, mentors…basically anyone in a position to affect the long-term behavior of anyone else in a meaningful way.

In practice, it’s quite easy to tell the two apart. One type defines caring in terms of what they themselves do. “I did [blank] for them.” Or “I gave them [blank].” The other kind of person defines it in terms of what they get others to do. The most important people in my life have always been of the latter type. In one or two cases, it took me several years to realize just how important they were.

Which doesn’t change the fact that without them, I would not have taken the path I did. I would never have known what it was like to break your own trail, to clamber over the obstacles in my way, to find the meaning of what strength is. Without them, I would have trudged down an easier path, worn smooth by the countless number of feet that passed before mine, and I would be lesser for it.

As steel must be forged in the hottest of fires, so too must the human spirit. And while there is a danger that one can go too far, becoming as brittle as the hull of the Titanic, in my eyes the far greater menace comes from not being exposed to the inferno in the first place.

We accept that the immune system is strengthened by exposure to pathogens, that muscles only grow when stressed to their limit, that without gravity, bones do not grow strong. But far too many of us deny the importance of being pushed to one’s limits when it comes to personal growth.

The key to a child’s success is not their diversity training, their self esteem, or their ability to use large words. It isn’t in making them ‘feel loved’, or in the clothes they wear. It isn’t in being passed along to get a meaningless high school diploma. It won’t be found in a four year degree either. People will only realize their potential when their success is contingent upon their own efforts.

Perhaps my biggest problem with leftist thought when it comes to this issue is that it is a mindset that consists of nothing but excuses. Why one ethnic minority can’t match the success of others. Why one sex hasn’t achieved what the other has in various pursuits. Why children of the poor are unable to achieve what the offspring of wealthier people are able to. And, as in all things, some of these arguments have merit, whereas others hold so little water as to remind me of my youth in the Dust Bowl.

The best of these are nothing more than extenuating circumstances. They explain why some people haven’t accomplished what they are capable of yet. And while they’re somewhat valid in that context, they do nothing to contraindicate the future success of these people.

Yet what the Left tends to focus on isn’t the fact that these people have unrealized potential, but rather the aforementioned extenuating circumstances. Social welfare now encompasses 43.5% of our budget. The ghetto? As large as ever to these admittedly cynical eyes. Affirmative action has before my very eyes grown to encompass some recent immigrant groups while ignoring others. Exclusionary politics and who hurt who are the rule of the day in their minds. And while righting wrongs is a noble pursuit, it does little to change what Maslow called self-actualization. While it’s a useful term, Maslow’s framework itself is exceedingly flawed. Many of the greatest figures in history never had the trappings of comfort and wealth; instead they succeeded because they were willing to push themselves. On the other hand, every one of us can point to many, many acquaintances who rather than being enabled by their wealth and comfort were instead hobbled by it.

Rather than getting their hands dirty as Mr. Clark and I do in our respective professions, they treat these symptoms, willfully turning attention away from the disease growing within. They reward people for their poor choices, they remove the sting of failure from the inability to realize one’s potential. They act like they care, but they never make the steps to actually better the lot in life of these people. They never show people what they’re capable of. And they never demand they do it.

They seek to spare us from the flames, and in doing so leave us as useless as a lump of raw pig iron.

** Dr. Karma is an attending physician at (information redacted). His many professional accomplishments include contributions to evolutionary biology and saving an untold number of kids from stupid adults and an even more stupid entrenched bureaucracy. His primary accomplishment remains convincing his coworkers that he’s a pediatric specialist rather than a hitman in a mere six months. He specializes in whatever he feels like that day, and his coworkers are too scared to point out that he’s ‘just a psychiatrist’. The kids get better just to get him to stop yelling, singing, dancing, or dressing up like batman. It works, so he’s good with it.

The Quest For Truth — or Who Are You Gonna Believe? – A Blast From The Past From July 2014

*Sorry.  I was going to write a post and then I realized how dropping-dead tired I was.  As is trying to find a post exhausted me.  So bear with me.  I’m going to take a nap, so maybe I can work. Interestingly now the press lies on the other side, or keeps silent on the good economic news or even more farcically tries to find reasons why prosperity is bad.  Plus que ca change.- SAH*

“What is truth?” a man of the world asked, and washed his hands.

And now in what was once the land of the free, we’re reading newspapers that sound like echo chambers and we’re asking ourselves, “What is truth?”

I don’t now, and you don’t either.

In some cases, like when “the truth” refers to who created the world, or the date set for the heat death of the universe, this is not exactly a problem.  At any rate, I suspect the answer to the first doesn’t filter well through time/place bound minds, and so, the best we can do is an approximation.  And, as Heinlein put it, one of these days you will know.  Until then, you and everyone else just do the best you can.

In other cases, though, not knowing the truth is a real problem.

I am the sort of person who is always suspicious when too coherent an image is presented — or as my mom puts it, I can’t see a freshly painted wall without making a little scratch to see what’s beneath — which means I never precisely fell for the glossy images the Soviet Union presented in the seventies.  Does anyone but me remember it?  The glowing production numbers, the assurance that there were no poor and no unemployment?  Why in the eighties I read a poor idiotic journalist who’d visited the USSR enthuse in the Charlotte paper about how the very simple cartoon she’d seen on Russian TV represented their embrace of simple living and sophisticated aesthetics.  When in fact it represented their penury, their old equipment and, yes, the fact that their audience had no other choice.

In Europe this sort of self-delusion was almost universal particularly among the intellectuals.  You see, they had bet their future, after WWII on a Marxist-lite mess of pottage.  To suddenly find out that neither socialism nor its big, bad cousin communism worked, would have shattered their view of the world and revealed that they’d in fact been taken for patsies and wrenched the more or less functional core of their country’s economy, and engaged in massive redistribution… for nothing.

So they couldn’t believe that, and instead chose to believe USSR was a finely tuned, humming machine of success.

They managed to believe this despite the fact that visitors to the Soviet Union inevitably caught a feeling for just how deprived these people were.  But of course, they could tell themselves that they were just rich in non-material things.  (Someone tried to make a similar point when I echoed a post by Charlie, on Facebook, in which he pointed out how astonishingly well the Free Market has done in the last fifty years, in making us massively more wealthy.  All of us.)

They managed to believe this despite the fact that escapes occurred overwhelmingly in one direction: from the USSR to the free world.

Humans can believe just about anything if it’s printed in glossy magazines and nice (wholly made up) figures.  Particularly if it tells them what they very much want to believe.

So… You’ve probably by now got the glad tidings, that our unemployment is way down, and we’re roaring…

Do you believe it?  Or does it seem like a repeat of the “roaring recovery through the summer of 12 which continued through the elections, so that smart people said that “the economic policies of the Obama administration are working.  We must give them more time” even as they made fun of us skeptics who said “uh… isn’t this awfully convenient timing?  And lookit the innards of these figures?”

Amazingly when the real news trickled out they were not only bad, but appalling, kind of like the squalor beneath the facade of the USSR.

Steve Green goes into the figures behind our “good news” here.

Is he right?  Or are the people right who say “see, cutting off unemployment insurance works?”  (Of course it does.  Drops people off the books like a rock.)

Look, I know I have my haunch.  Yeah, yeah, the plural of anecdote isn’t data.  Bah.  Do you see the job market superheated, right now?  Are your friends spoiled for a choice of jobs after years of unemployment?  Do you see the restaurants with a wait after work, as they had even ten years ago?  Do you see new shops opening?  Do you feel the economy taking off?

Or are you sitting there figuring out how to make your car limp another year, and are your friends in pretty much the same situation?  Are you tempted to cry while grocery shopping, because everything costs three times more? Is your family all out of luxuries to cut, and is now cutting into what you used to consider necessities?

I’ll confess my situation and those of my friends resemble the second more than the first.  I confess after summer of recovery 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 5 and… I don’t believe the economy is roaring back.  I confess I think this is a case of lies, damn lies and government reports.

But the the truth is as unknowable as the truth about who created the universe.  While I doubt the fact sand figures of our sad situation are transcendant and unknowable by the human mind, when you are dependent on a government for all your information, and when that government visibly puts ideology over information, you end up not knowing.

Look, it’s entirely possible that people who were dead broke in their town in the USSR, and who knew all their neighbors were broke, yet thought that maybe, possibly, in other towns the economy was roaring.  They had no way of knowing.

By making itself an uncritical lapdog, our media has made itself even more partisan, more unreliable, than the old Pravda and the glossy Soviet Life.

Which means the books are cooked, but we don’t know how far.  We don’t know if some books aren’t cooked.  We don’t know which books are cooked.

The problem is not just that absent information on what’s really happening, we can slide slowly into the abyss, as others before us — Zimbabwe, Argentina, Greece — have.  The problem the information on what is going on with the economy is vital for a hundred different decisions: which job to take; what property to buy; whether to invest in this or that.

Of course, the administration that couldn’t run a lemonade stand doesn’t know that.  They’re academics and ideologues for whom the essential ingredient for success has been fanatical adherence to progressive ideology, not rational analysis of reality.

And so they spin their numbers and they think if they click their heels three times and wish really hard, this time when they stop telling us lies after securing the election, it will really be true.  The economy will be roaring, you see, roaring.

It might very well be true, too.  Being from Colorado I’m used to massive fires, and they do roar as they consume anything of value in their path and leave only ashes and destruction behind.

Which is what I expect to be plain once this last effort of obfuscation evaporates.

But until then even sensible people are believing those glossy pictures.  Because none of us wants to see the real squalor.  It must be that we love simplicity!  Yes, and we’re really aesthetically advanced.  And besides, this is a wonderful day until we get buried in the corn field.

And we don’t know the truth.  Knowing you’re being lied to is not the same as knowing the truth.

They say the truth will set you free.  Perhaps that’s why the administration is so carefully making sure no one (not even the various departments who make up one or the other set of numbers, but assume all others are right) has it.

And meanwhile we drown in a welter of made up figures and pretend facts.

“What is the truth?” a man of the world asked.

At least he had the decency to wash his hands.

Sorry to be so late today and not to have written a post yesterday.  Yes, I was still doing home improvement work, and we didn’t even get to the tiling, though we’re hoping to do it this evening.  By the time it was time to do it, we were so tired we were a danger to ourselves and others.

When I finish this post, I’ll go downstairs to finish the cabinet work, so only the tile remains tonight.

A bitter cold has set in, so cutting the tiles outside is going to be “fun.”

We’ll warm up a little in the next week, but right now it reminds me of the ionic autumn of my childhood, what I think of when people say “November” (which accounting for differences in altitude is about the same as October in CO.)

When you say “November” I think of tendrils of cold fog, of wood smoke, of grandma in her patio, breaking wood for winter.

I think I’d been very ill, when I saw her do that, because I was surprised at how cold and dark it was, and took great comfort in knowing grandma was preparing wood for the Franklin stove in winter.

I think she was sixty three, so seven years older than I’m now, which is weird, because in my mind I’m still that little three year old standing in the doorway, watching her break wood.  I’m still startled she’s gone, every time, and she’s been gone 26 years.

Our minds don’t age with your bodies, or not the same way.  I mean, I hope I know more and am more mature than I was at three…  At least on the good days.

But I keep forgetting I don’t have the energy and the strength of my twenties.  I’m so completely not in touch with my body, that I’ve been very worried all through September by my inability to write.  I thought there must be a psychological reason for it.

That is, until I got up early on Friday to do some work for PJ and found I couldn’t, and realized it’s not block, just bone-deep weariness.

I swear I’ve not been doing that much, just a little work around the house, stuff that would have taken me a few days 20 years ago.

TWENTY years ago seems a lifetime away.

And part of the problem is that I’m now feeling better, which feels like I woke up after a 20 year long slumber.  And I’m not as young as I used to be.

It’s nothing serious… yet.  It’s just getting tired a little earlier, running a little slower, not having as much upper body strength.

If I can figure it out, I’ll be fine.  Hopefully by May younger son will be off the payroll (he already lives elsewhere.)  And older son should be fully independent by the end of the year and married early next year.

That’s not so hard to get used to.  I’m ready to stop being mommy (though I’ll always want to see them) and pay more attention to my writing, my career, and, most of all, my husband.

I can see glimmers ahead of a new phase in life.  Grandma lived to 88 and was clear and able to the last week of life.  I’m hoping (at least) for the same.  And I’m looking forward to it, in a way: to a time when we’re just responsible for the two of us, and can come and go as we please, and be spontaneous if we wish.

The natural preserve behind the house is full of gold and red as the leaves turn.

Yes, Autumn was always my favorite season, and as my life is about to enter it, I’m trying to figure out how to make it very good indeed.

But now I have some cabinetry to finish.  Before the snow comes.

“I am in no mood to give consideration to drills that get their cords trapped under the fridge.”

“Shelves in a cabinet, who would have thought?”

“It’s okay to put the chipped board here.  The cabinet goes on top of it.  Lady Catherine will NEVER know.”

“I hate this varnish.  I send no compliments to its mother, it deserves no such respect.  I am most seriously displeased.”

Yeah, we’re still installing and refinishing cabinets. Should be done tomorrow.  Aka: the Tilening, this time it brings a wet saw.  Eh.

*And I blame RES.  I’m not gratuitously evil… much, but when he sent me a link to the book, saying he’d found it at Sam’s club, I was both bewildered and confused. What was this liberal wet dream of bullsh*t doing in a middle-America hub?  Then I started suspecting it was a really bad book, probably written by one of us under cover, to make money off the crazy – Amanda says nothing to dissuade me. The author might be under DEEP cover — his bio is a liberal wet dream — but I’d bet you under cover he is.  No one can be this bad by accident, particularly no one who has written more than one book. As for the people buying this, sucker, born every minute, etc. – SAH*

I Blame the Sarahs –  A Review of the Opening of Hope Never Dies, an Obama/Biden fanfiction by Amanda S. Green

Last week, I said I’d start a quick review series on The Coddling of the American Mind. That had been my plan until two days ago. By Wednesday, I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to do a post this week. Without going into too much detail, my 87-year-old mother underwent reverse shoulder replacement surgery. While she is doing remarkably well, it still means I am having to help her with every day activities right now like getting out of her chair, walking more than a few steps (the anesthesia did a real number on her), etc. Worse, I am now the one getting up at o’dark 30 because of the idiot dog. I was ready to beg off of a post this week when Sarah, the first Sarah, the evil but beautiful space princess Sarah, tagged me on Facebook all but daring me to snark Hope Never Dies: An Obama Biden Mystery. I didn’t even look the book up. My immediate response was not only “No” or even “Hell, no” but “There’s no way unless someone bought me the book and supplied much much booze.”

I should have kept my mouth shut. Or at least left it a “no”. I really should have turned off FB notifications. But I didn’t and Sarah the Second, Sarah C., started posting single quotes from the first chapter—I assume it was the first chapter. OMG, I didn’t know whether to run and hide, drink heavily or snark—or do all of the above.

In the end, instead of taking the week off, I needed something to point and laugh at and this book seems to be it. No, I haven’t bought it. No, I have no intention of buying it. I am completely opposed of putting any more money into anything associated with Obama than we as a Nation already have. So, with fair warning that there is no redeeming value to this book that I’ve found so far beyond being totally snark-worthy, here we go.

And we will start, not with the book but with the product page. The first thing you see after the title, versions, etc., isn’t the blurb for the book but this:

The New York Times Best Seller

“[Hope Never Dies is] an escapist fantasy that will likely appeal to liberals pining for the previous administration, longing for the Obama-Biden team to emerge from political retirement as action heroes.”—Alexandra Alter, New York Times

Now take a moment to wrap your mind around that. Mind you, I know comic books have been trying for “diversity” and would probably love to have a socialist superhero in the mold of BHO, but what would Joe Biden’s superpower be? Able to grope from far distances? Grope and flee in the blink of an eye? The mind truly does boggle, doesn’t it?

But let’s continue.

Vice President Joe Biden and President Barack Obama team up in this high-stakes thriller that combines a mystery worthy of Watson and Holmes with the laugh-out-loud bromantic chemistry of Lethal Weapon’s Murtaugh and Riggs.

Vice President Joe Biden is fresh out of the Obama White House and feeling adrift when his favorite railroad conductor dies in a suspicious accident, leaving behind an ailing wife and a trail of clues. To unravel the mystery, “Amtrak Joe” re-teams with the only man he’s ever fully trusted: the 44th president of the United States. Together they’ll plumb the darkest corners of Delaware, traveling from cheap motels to biker bars and beyond, as they uncover the sinister forces advancing America’s opioid epidemic.

Part noir thriller and part bromance, Hope Never Dies is essentially the first published work of Obama/Biden fiction—and a cathartic read for anyone distressed by the current state of affairs.

Oh, my.

Now remember, anything that happens after this is Sarah’s fault. She started this. She taunted me, challenged me to do this. Along with her cohort, Sarah C., they have forced me to read at least the free sample. I’ll warn you now, continue reading at your own peril.

From an editorial point of view, reading the first page (e-book edition) of a book subtitled “Obama/Biden fiction” and written in first-person, I should be able to figure out who the narrator is. All I know for certain is the author is trying really hard, too hard actually, to sound noir. We know the narrator is in a “black Irish mood”—and I won’t share my first thoughts on reading that. VBEG—and was apparently watching Youtube or its equivalent.

Then we get to this: “The camera panned down to the white-capped waves in the harbor. An impossibly long speedboat entered the frame, cutting through the surf like a buttered bullet.”

OMG. As someone on FB in the infamous thread that birthed this post commented, “Did Chuckie Wendig write this?” It reminds me of the opening scene of one of his Star Wars books where the ship (tie-fighter, X-wing?) weebled and wobbled. And now I’m going to have the theme song for “weebles wobble but they don’t fall down” in my head the rest of the day.

My second thought was that the narrator had to be Obama. He might have been Commander-in-Chief, but he never served in the military. I doubt he ever fired a gun. He might not see anything wrong with a “buttered bullet”. But, we’ll see.

Oh, wow, click for the next “page” and we finally find out, maybe, who the narrator is. At least we find out who it isn’t. You see, that boat isn’t alone in the shot. It is towing a parasailer behind it. “The camera zoomed in on the daredevil’s face, and I saw that my old friend Barack Obama was having the time of his life.”

Okay, so unless the author is really off on some sort of mind trip, we know the narrator isn’t Obama. Could Obama be the “friend” mentioned at the beginning of the chapter as having died? While my first reaction was to hope so, it would make for a short book since this is a bromance/mystery starring both Biden and Obama. Besides, remember, this is the fantasy Obama fans have been hoping for. So, unless they are going kill Obama off early and deify him and have him come back as a god to rule Earth, he doesn’t die off this early.

“Unencumbered by his dead-weight loser vice president, 44 was on the vacation to end all vacations.”

Well, I can agree with the author about the “dead-weight loser vice president”.

“Barack even had the gall to tell People magazine that we still went golfing together on occasion. To save face, I repeated the lie. The truth was, there hadn’t been any golf outings. No late-night texting. Not even a friendly poke on Facebook.”

Pardon me while I laugh. We know, probably, that the narrator is Biden but it still isn’t for sure. But, day-um, that last passage sounds like a pouting teen girl who wasn’t asked out on a second date. Still, that could be the former VP. He’s gotten the whine down pretty good over the years.

Without quoting, because I frankly don’t have the stomach for it, Biden’s sitting in his office and it’s getting dark. He glances outside and sees an orange pinprick of light. It doesn’t take him long to figure out it might just be a cigarette. So, talking to his dog, he goes to his safe where there are only two items: his Medal of Freedom and the Sig Saur he bought himself over his wife’s objections.

Now, here is where we go off into the land of make-believe again. He takes the gun out of the safe, tucks it under the waistband of his slacks and pulls his Polo shirt over it. Think about that for a moment. He doesn’t check to see if there’s a round chambered. He doesn’t even check to see if the magazine is in place or if there is ammo in it. Then there’s the whole putting it in his waistband and pulling his shirt over it. Not only is he risking the Sig falling down his pants unless that waist band is pretty damned tight but how in the hell is he supposed to get to the gun quickly if he’s pulled the shirt over it?

Well, no one has accused Biden in real life of being the sharpest tack.

Let me ask you this: if you are home at night with your wife and you suspect there might be a prowler—or worse—outside, do you go out without letting your wife know and suggesting she call 911? Well, our daunting narrator does just that. He calls out to “Jill”, who is in another room watching TV, that he’s going to walk the dog.

Oh, and where the HELL is the Secret Service detail? If he no longer has Secret Service protection, where’s his private security? Better yet, where is his common sense?

Of course, that assumes he ever had any.

It keeps getting better—or worse, depending on your point of view. The dog races outside but the motion detector light doesn’t come on. It’s burned out. The bulb is old and old bulbs are supposed to burn out. Yes, we actually get told that in the book.

Now, if this was a mystery and the narrator was female, I’d be saying she was too dumb to live. I’m screaming it right now at this noir wannabe. So far, the only thing separating this book from the slasher movies of the 1980’s is for our narrator to go running into the woods in high heels.

And we finally get the answer to where the Secret Service is. Our intrepid narrator comes upon a “vertically challenged man”. Then good ole Joe identifies him as Secret Service. Except then we’re told his detail had been dismissed several weeks before the opening of the book. So why is there a supposed Secret Service agent on-scene, much less flat out on the ground?

Instead of asking, instead of wanting to see ID, our narrator comments on how it’s a nice night for a walk and keeps walking. Worse, he walks in the direction the man he assumes is Secret Service indicates.

And there, deeper in the woods, he hears flint striking metal and instantly identifies it as a lighter. A moment later, he finds himself face-to-face with his good buddy (yes, I use that term loosely based on poor ole Joe’s whine earlier) BHO. An Obama who, even though they are in the trees/woods, is dressed in a “black hand-tailored suit” and his white shirt unbuttoned at the collar.

And, after telling us that Obama is never in a hurry, our author ends the first chapter and I no longer have to explain to my mother why I’m alternating between wanting to throw my laptop against the wall and laughing hysterically.

My eyes aren’t bleeding—yet. My blood pressure isn’t soaring. This is fiction, after all, and not the actual writings of either Obama or Biden. But damn, this book is bad. Worse, it is bad in that train wreck sort of way. You know you shouldn’t read more but you can’t help it. You have to see if it gets any worse.

All I know for certain is I want to know what the author was smoking, drinking, snorting, whatever, as he wrote it. I’m not sure if I want some of it or if I want to make sure to avoid it at all cost.

And, as much as I hate to admit it, this was exactly what I needed after this week. No, I’m still not going to buy it. So, if you guys want me to do more from the book, someone needs to loan it to me. Sorry, but that’s my price. VBG

Until later. Now to find the brain bleach so I can get back to my own writing and not have this novel infecting it.

(To cover Sarah and myself, all quotes not attributed to the product page on Amazon came from the first chapter of the book.)

(Help Amanda drink enough to keep snarking the left’s descent into madness.  We’ll collect for her liver transplant later. Hit her Pourboir jar now! – SAH)

Even though we’re routinely accused of being “angry” — I don’t see how anyone can look at the replacing of our constitution with the ideals of the French revolution, sometimes in its more Leninist or Maoist incarnations and not be outraged — I’ve very rarely seen real anger among conservatives and libertarians.  Outrage, sure, particularly when our civil liberties are invoked or when they try to bring here the policies that have failed everywhere they were tried, but not anger.  Not personal, seething anger that must find an outlet.

Honestly, the reason that hasn’t happened is for the same reason we’ve failed to do our own long march: libertarians and conservatives don’t tend to make politics their religion.  We already have a religion, thank you so much, and other, richer sources of satisfaction and fulfillment than politics.

We have family and work, hobbies, and a rich life beyond politics.

Or should I say we did?

In the relentless drive of the progressives for a totalitarian society, one that controls every aspect of your life (because they think that’s why their paradise has failed to materialize.  If only they can control everything we think, do, and every way we express ourselves, and all our sources of amusement or achievement, this time they’ll win for sure.), they have come for our families, our jobs, our hobbies.

I suspect I don’t need to expound on the hobbies, not with this crowd.  Sure, this is my job too, at least for now, but it is also my hobby.  I’m one of those weird people who don’t play games, don’t watch (much) TV, but read a lot, even while doing the other things I do, like furniture refinishing, art or sewing.  Often in audiobook to leave my hands free.

And we know what is happening to our hobby.  We’re not allowed to read (or write) unless we do it in a way that furthers the coming of paradise. And if we try to do anything about what is considered “good” or looked upon with respect in the field, all out war breaks out and we are vilified and our character destroyed in unimaginable ways via rumors and hate campaigns.

I understand it’s the same though, even in hobbies that though I engage in I don’t participate in fandom, like fiber arts.  And I know why I dropped out of my last art class five years ago.  It was an adult class, so a hobby.  We won’t go there.

Then jobs… I don’t need to expound on that, do I? the latest was the scientist who pointed out that talents and INTERESTS don’t have the same statistical distribution in males and females.

Any of us, particularly any of us who are statistical anomalies, know that.  I have always had mostly male friends because of my interests in space, politics (not of the females uber alas persuasion, but the individual freedom persuasion) and economics.  I don’t dislike females, nor do I avoid making female friends.  There are just a limited number of females who are interested in what I’m interested in.  I’ve always had women friends but usually one or two at a time.

Is it culture or genetics.  At this point, what difference does it make? The undeniable thing is that the distribution of interests and abilities is not equal across genders (or regions, or places of birth — science fiction readers were few and VERY odd in Portugal, even without adding in the female thing.)  It just isn’t.  To treat humans as though they were widgets and demand equal numbers (statistically) of everything is a form of insanity.

Sure, feminine interest in STEM — or lack thereof — could be a function of culture.  Though so far the scandinavian cultures who’ve bent more out of shape to be gender-impartial are also the ones in which more women are turning their backs on stem.  Because they can choose.

Is it a matter that can be debated.  Sure.  Is it a matter that should lead a scientist to be fired for expressing an unapproved opinion.  No.

We’ve in fact reached the levels that if you express an unapproved opinion, you might as well be a recusant in Tudor England.  They won’t tear you limb from limb and your entrails burned before your eyes while still living (yet) but they will make it impossible for you to earn a living (and have made it quite clear they’d do the other if they could.)

Families…  The new generations have been poised, men against women, and the women convinced that all their reverses are because of men.  The birth rate is plumeting, and gee, I wonder why. This is probably the most lasting wound from the philosophy that hates humans and wants us all gone.  They won’t get their way. Barbarism will come first.  But we don’t know how many people it takes to maintain civilization, and how many of those MUST be sane. They’re striking at both ends.

Then there’s the economy.  Yeah, we’re doing fine.  But how long can we continue improving and producing when companies all over have become convinced they have to hire statistically by exterior characteristics, because that’s the diversity that counts?  Never mind.  Every industry I know is teetering.

None of which means we’re going quietly into that good night.

Because we’ve awakened.  Not too early.  Probably not too late.

You see, there’s still more of us than of them.  And we look at the world and people as they really are, which, as they spin further and further from reality, is almost like a superpower.

We’ll find ways.  Like indie for publishing, other avenues will open.  Because we’re strong, we’re creative, and we’re not going to give up.

It would be stupid to give up in the face of people so blinkered that they believe humans are widgets or that silencing people changes their thoughts — instead of making them angrier and more determined than ever before — or that if only they can control every aspect of our lives everything will be paradise, when they’ve failed to bring about paradise in their lives, their jobs or their hobbies.  (On the contrary.  There’s ever more place settings at the cannibal feast.)

And yes, now I’m seeing anger on the right.  A lot of it.  It’s a quiet, determined anger of the “this is mine, and you can’t take it” variety.  It grows in the centers of our greatest loves in family and jobs and hobbies even.

The left is juggling lit torches near powder barrels and thinking they’ll somehow stay intact through the explosion.

And we’re trying to avoid the explosion, but also determined not to let them have their way.

This is ours. You can’t take it.  Besides, you’d just destroy it.

We’re bracing, digging down, getting ready for impact.  When it all falls down around our ears, we hope to have built enough around, over and under that things will go on with minor glitches.

This nation will survive.  Civilization will survive.

Because this is ours.  You didn’t build this.  And you can’t destroy it.

THE MENTAL STATE OF M. TODD HENDERSON- by Elaine Ashe

PART TWO

*Part one was published here.  I thought this installment was more appropriate to ATH than MGC. – SAH*

Todd Henderson is one of the only conservative law professors at the University of Chicago Law School. He’s the author of Mental State. This is an interview with freelance book editor, Elaine Ash.

Elaine Ash: What’s it like being a conservative at the University of Chicago?

Todd Henderson: There are just a handful of professors at the top twenty law schools who would identify as conservative. Almost all of those are libertarians—pro-choice, for open borders, and pro-gay marriage. Social or religious conservatives on law faculties are like unicorns. Americans are split down the middle. So too are America’s judges and elected representatives—the people who make the law—and yet nearly every faculty member teaching future lawyers what the law is are far-left Democrats.

EA: That’s kind of shocking to me.

MTH: I’m not the only conservative here, but I am the most outspoken. I like and admire my colleagues, and almost all our students are extremely bright, hardworking, and decent people—but my habit of saying what I think has gotten me into trouble on more occasions than I’d like to recount.

EA: What’s the difference between you and a left-leaning professor?

MTH: I approach law very differently than a liberal does. I believe in individual liberty and view government actions under a presumption of error. When a liberal looks out the world and sees something falling short of Nirvana, they want to remake the world to fix it. They imagine remedies for it in their own mind—as if a single human can design a system to solve our social problems. Amazingly, these solutions always involve more government power. People are hungry—the government should feed them. People are ignorant—the government should educate them. People are sad—the government should make them happy. I am skeptical of government power, because at its core it relies on violence.

EA: Violence? Please explain.

MTH: Every law and every government action works only when people are threatened with the loss of their liberty or their life. If you don’t pay your taxes, you go to jail. Something as trivial as parking tickets are ultimately backed up by the violence of the state—we could ask Eric Garner, but he was choked to death by officers who found him allegedly violating a law against selling cigarettes without tax coupons required by New York. Laws ultimately rely on coercion and violence.

By contrast, I have more faith in families, associations, and markets. These things are more likely to capture all the information we need to make the world as good as it can be. And, most importantly, they are not based on threats of violence. Liberal professors see the word as perfectible, while I think man’s ability to remake the world as largely a fool’s errand. I think these instincts seep into my book, just as the instincts of liberals do when they write fiction. But, at the end of the day, the book is entertainment. People want to enjoy themselves not be lectured at.

EA: Ah yes, your novel, a political thriller. Any pressure from UChicago regarding that?

MTH: Yes. Many people told me not to publish the book, claiming it would hurt me and hurt the University. These requests came after people apparently received an electronic copy of the manuscript from others. They wanted me to change aspects of the plot and the details of characters and scenes, all as the book was about to go to press. The bad guys in the book are not straight from central casting—a female Democrat president, an ethnic minority nominated to the Supreme Court, and so on.

EA: That must have raised some eyebrows.

MTH: University administrators are scared. They were worried about the backlash from the PC police. Barbarians are at our gates. I’m still getting worried glances and expressions of concern about how people might freak out at a work of fiction. Publishers told me the book was too risky. Agents told me the book wouldn’t sell—not because of its quality but because of what it says. These days the bad guys can only be on one side.

EA: What side is that?

MTH: The side that’s not the left. Based on my tribulations, anyone who tries to push back against the cultural hegemony of cultural and political leftism is going to have a tough row to hoe.  Don’t challenge liberal dogma if you want positive attention from the media. But, at the end of the day, the book is entertainment. People want to enjoy themselves not be lectured at.

EA: Tell me about the death threats.

MTH: On Twitter, I dared to compare Brett Kavanaugh, Supreme Court nominee, with Sonia Sotomayor, seated Supreme Court justice, in a discussion about how their personal lives and characteristics might be relevant. It didn’t go over well. I don’t get many voicemails at work anymore by virtue of email and mostly using my cell phone. And when the red light on my office phone is flashing, at most there are one or two messages—maybe from my mom or a reporter looking for a legal expert on a topic. So, when I went into my office a few weeks back and heard that I had nearly fifty messages, I knew something was afoot. I sat in my chair, pen in hand, and pressed play. They came like punches to the face. Message after message spitting hate, calling me vile names and wishing I were dead. Threats against me and my family—“You should die and your children too because you’ve probably polluted their minds with your racism.”

EA: Who were these people?

MTH: A Twitter-fueled mob so filled with hatred that they would try to rid the world of anyone who thinks differently than they do. Just imagine disagreeing with someone about something they said, then looking up that person’s phone number, calling them, and yelling obscenities at their answering machine. These are the minds of seriously disturbed people, and they are all ages, all walks of life, and all over the country, best I could tell from the messages.

EA: Are you going to shut up, then?

MTH: No.

Reviews:

“Exciting and compulsively readable, Mental State marks the entrance of a striking new talent on the thriller scene. Todd Henderson’s confident debut draws the reader into the unfamiliar worlds of academia, the law, and backroom politics, while providing a fresh take on more familiar thriller ground like the world of law enforcement. The Professor’s murder mystery delivers the rough and tumble goods, and it will leave readers wanting more.” —Kurt Schlichter, lawyer and bestselling author

“Mental State is fascinating, detailed, and a pure page-turner. It’s a must-read if you love the country, the Supreme Court, or just a book that will keep you up at night.” —Ben Shapiro, public intellectual, talk-show host, and bestselling author

“Todd Henderson has written a taut, suspenseful and powerfully entertaining legal thriller against the backdrop of a transformative Supreme Court nomination and baroque academic intrigue, which he describes with convincing details and an insider’s knowledge.  The novel moves at breakneck pace, as a rogue agent uses forensics, guile and not a little force to make sense of the mysterious murder of his brother.”

—Supreme Court Reporter, New York Times
“Try as I might, I could not put Mental State down. It’s terrific. At times hilarious, always interesting, and in parts truly disturbing. I loved it.” —Michael Seidman, Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center.

Elaine Ash edits the novels of career authors as well as emerging talent. A defender of the right to free expression, she serves writers of all political stripes. Her nonfiction book, Bestseller Metrics: How to Win the Novel Writing Game, is also a patent-pending software in development for the publishing industry.  http://www.bestsellermetrics.com

I’m one of those people who is shattered.  It took multiple impacts.  I can tell you when most of them happened, and how. Some are just a condition of when and where I grew up.  Some are personal and a consequence of who I am, which in turn made me who I am.

I don’t talk about them.  Honestly, I don’t think about them.  Unless you’re one of my closest friends and have the misfortune of catching me during one of my worst moments, you don’t know where the cracks are nor how carefully I paper them over.

I am aware of impact and damage ONLY insofar as I need to know how I work, and what is going to affect me in what way and also what biases are rooted into my perception, so I can think around them.

Because listen to me, since I’m about to say words you’ll rarely hear: you’re not defined by the damage you take.  Most of the damage you take is at any rate minuscule, compared to the damage people in the past took as a matter of course.  Sexual abuse?  Well sh*t son, the Romans thought that murals of monkeys having sex with human children were a great living room decoration.  You’re free to make inferences to what went on in people’s lives.  Women not giving consent to sexual contact? Good Lord, the idea you must give consent wasn’t really a thing, particularly if you were married.  And for much of history (though the Catholic Church fought against it for centuries) giving consent for your marriage wasn’t a thing either, so you’re free to infer what went on.

But more importantly, people were shattered in other ways.  I find it exceedingly bizarre that I’m 55 and I’ve never kept vigil at a death bed.  I’m not eager to do it, mind.  I am the world’s worst sick-room attendant being ADHD AND squeamish. But I remember when my mom was my age, she’d attended to half of our family’s elderly as they died.  And heck, it was old hat for her.

Death was so common for her generation, that as a child she and her friends made cloth dolls every year, and then had funerals for them at the end of the year and made new ones. This rang true to them, because so many babies in their neighborhood died in the first couple of years of age.  They also died later.  My mom remembered vividly the death of a friend when she was fourteen.  She said she realized he was dead because flies were landing on his eyes and he didn’t blink.

And heck, mom had it easy. In the norm of humans born centuries before her, her life was relatively protected.  No invasions, no blood on the streets.

Heck, if she’d been born say in London, she’d remember bombings during her early childhood, in WWII.

So why do we have any number of people running around “Shattered”by things that were relatively trivial?

I’m here to tell you that yes, being groped by strange males, particularly when you’re going about your normal business, is a horrible feeling.

First time it happened to me was fifth grace, when a totally unknown boy grabbed me in the playground as I was walking past, and felt me up very thoroughly before I could run away. I was eleven and completely innocent about sex, and had no idea why this felt “dirty” but it did.  The sense of wrong was so strong it still makes my skin crawl years later.

Do I count that in the number of blows that shattered me?  Oh, please. He was a cruddy little boy (probably 14) and I’m not about to give him that kind of power over me.

Would anyone have believed me if I complained?  Sure.  They’d have said “don’t go to that corner of the playground.”

Is that man a rapist now?  Possible.  The revolution happened shortly thereafter and in the confusion a lot of my generation went bad.

Is it likely?  No.  It’s likely that he’d just figured this out, and I crossed his field of notice shortly thereafter, so I was the lucky winner.  I doubt he could pick me — even a pick of me at that time — out of a lineup.  Hell, I doubt he remembers me.

Is that acceptable behavior?  No. If one of my sons had done that to any little girl and I caught him/was sure he’d done it, he’d not have been able to sit for a month, even if he were 14 when they were already taller and bigger than me.

But here’s the thing: all the women using #metoo to say that it should never happen to any woman and that every accusation has to believed, so this is stamped out… they’re crazy.  It will never be stamped out.  Humans aren’t widgets. No, men can’t cause all other men to be decent.  Anymore than I can cause every woman to not be a little idiot.  Because we don’t share a collective mind controlled by the sex organs.

Yes, in an ideal world no woman or girl would ever be afraid of walking anywhere alone or eve inebriated.  This is not an ideal world. Humans are not uniformly angels. In the world we live in, women have to be aware or their surroundings.  So do smaller men.  Hell, so do bigger men in some neighborhoods.  You’re never going to eliminate criminals, much less hooligans.

And in this non-ideal world, not only are teen boys not in full possession of their faculties because hormones do weird things to their mood.  They’re not being TAUGHT how to behave.  Telling them they’re toxic and have to stop being masculine doesn’t help them control themselves. If you tell someone they were born to be criminals they’re not going to fight very hard to be good.

And by the way requiring show trials in which there is no presumption of innocence and/or self accusation won’t make men behave better, or more boys control themselves.  If you don’t understand this you might want to study show trials in communist countries, as well as the long history of double-think.

You know what helped men control themselves?  The fact that good men could plant a facer on anyone acting like an ass where he could be seen.  But #grrrrrrlpower and “non violence” put an end to that. Considering humans are great apes and some responses are very old, perhaps that wasn’t the brightest of ideas?

Still and all, yes, there are shattering moments that have to do with sex.  They amount to a hell of a lot more than groping.  And even those…

Do you honestly think women in the past who went on to live functional, even good lives were never groped? That women even now in countries — like under Islam — where they have virtually no rights spend their time angsting because some other woman’s TOTALLY UNSUPPORTED accusation (which seems to have escalated from groping to attempted rape, maybe, but is not clear enough for anything) wasn’t immediately listened to? Do you think women brought up in harsher circumstances angst about every circumstance of groping? Are you really that protected?

Think of it this way: when you allow trauma to control your life — any trauma — you’re giving whoever (or whatever) traumatized you power over your life FOREVER.

Could I obsess about the guy who groped me in playground?  Sure. If I hadn’t had about a dozen more important things to worry about.

AND if I wanted a reason/cause to live for.

The problem is that #metoo and the idea that no woman ever should be touched with anything but extreme respect and possibly white gloves has become a cause.

Women whose lives are otherwise empty will gloam onto the one instance in which they were… who knows? felt up, maybe?as a reason to live.  They’re heroic, see, because they’re victims and victims are heroic.  And they’re living for the cause of “this won’t happen to any woman ever.”  It gives shape to their days.  It also traumatizes every child and a lot of the adults under their purview but never mind.

Yes, humans are different, and people are broken by different things.  My own shattering experiences are probably things many of you shrugged off.  And vice versa.

And I’ve known people, male and female, shattered by things that other people shrug off.  I know a man who became a communist leader, and hates freedom in society because his father abandoned his mother when he was five.  Which in the village environment was hard to take.

But you know, he had a home, a mother, and friends, and it shouldn’t have been that way.  For him it just was.  He wanted fathers to be irrelevant, which requires smashing family and replacing the state.

I know people traumatized forever because they were in a car accident and got scarred.

I’m not judging what traumatizes others.  As I said, some of my wounds would probably be laughed at by some of you guys.  They shattered me because I’m me, and yes, I was also incredibly protected by historical standards.

What I’m saying is, your wounds are not the most important thing about you.  And we’re never going to eliminate shattering events from EVERYONE’s life.  It would require everyone to be perfect, or everyone to be dead. (Or possibly both.)

Precisely because what shatters me won’t shatter you and vice versa, the perfect society where no trauma occurs is impossible.

And while devoting your life to being a victim of whatever shattering event is away of organizing your life and giving it meaning, it’s a stupid way.

Fools might think that you’re a hero for being a victim, but that’s not how the world works.  And devoting your life to anger and injury will make you a miserable human being and suck out the joy in life of everyone around you.  Not to mention twisting your children into pretzels.

It is better to take your cracks and mend them.  Become kintsugi if you can.  Patch over those shattered bits better.  Look at yourself as home improvement.  Don’t repair. Upgrade.  Now you know where your weak point is.  Make it strong.  And sure, help others along the way.  Help them the only way real people can be helped: one on one, volunteering, listening, sometimes with monetary help.  Do not “help” them by demanding the world be made perfectly safe.  It can’t be.  Even a total police state can’t keep boys from groping girls, or men from looking at a woman with lust in their eyes.  What it can do is f*ck up normal relationships between men and women.

Stop social signaling.  If you want to work for a better world, work for it in the only way it’s done: one on one, person by person.

And stop being a victim.  Sure, horrible things happen to everyone.  It is giving them power over you for the rest of your life that makes you a victim.

Don’t be a victim.  Be an adult.  Take the shattering events and integrate them.  Learn your weak points and patch them over.

And then go on. No one ever promised you a perfect world.  Of if they did, they’re liars or fools.  You’re not perfect.  Why would anyone else be.

Live well. It’s the best revenge.  It’s also the only way to make the world better.