This past week was scheduled for over six months for a visit by my assistant, who lives across the country. We were going to go over several ongoing editing projects, better handled in person, firm up a schedule for the rest of the year, as I’ve been merrily forgetting/running over deadlines at such a speed she can’t keep up with me, and arrange for her to coordinate a website design/shop design with my web person.
For this purpose, she was going to stay in our basement guest room for a week, and we’d have plenty of time to work, even taking in account that I was trying to do the last 10k words of the very long book.
About twelve hours after she arrived, I discovered there was a huge, confused, bureaucratic snarl involving documents needed for #2 son’s religious wedding to take place in Portugal in October: meaning they were demanding a document that I’m fairly sure they don’t need for reasons that are not applicable, but since the bureaucracy there moves at the speed of glaciation, I tried to get the document they might remotely need (they can’t have the one they asked for, since son is NOT a Portuguese citizen nor am I) and ran into the fact that the representation for Portugal in the US is widespread and beyond bizarre.
Since one of the main reasons I give thanks every morning when I wake up and I’m not a Portuguese citizen is the bizarrely convoluted bureaucracy that has been worsening since the Roman Empire, if not before, my blood pressure shot up to three million over five hundred thousand (these are approximations, it might be higher) multiplying as I met each obstacle to obtaining something very simple. Each step tried to convince me to get the document the Portuguese side think they need, which is actually impossible since neither of the parties to the wedding are Portuguese citizens.
On top of which I’m VERY BAD, bordering on mentally deficient when dealing with bureaucracy of ANY KIND and my response to frustration when dealing with bureaucrats is to roll twenty for angry snark. (Which does not go well in Latin cultures.)
If at this point you have an image of me sitting in front of the computer with a little cartoon chimney protruding from my head and steam whistling out, it would be accurate, yes.
Pray for me, as that situation is ongoing.
After about six hours of this, plus trying to explain to the Portuguese side — via my mother who is 90 and VERY stubborn — that we can’t actually register the legal marriage in Portugal since neither of these people are registered in Portugal and the process for them to marry legally there (legal and religious are completely separate) will take multiple years, and is pointless since they DON’T LIVE THERE. (The process will probably necessitate their living there for some time, at that.). Also reminding mom that neither my marriage, nor that of my older son were registered in Portugal, despite which we could have a religious ceremony there all the same — I decided we probably should eat.
And because I had completely forgotten to shop, I went to the basement, which had been fine in the morning, to get food from the freezers.
At which point, at the bottom of the stairs, my feet went splish-splosh. Note that I was so out of it I went five steps before going “that sound is WRONG” and looking down…. at two inches of water. At that point I was in the FINISHED part of the basement where the guest room, electronics and musical instruments are….
Run up the stairs screaming “We have a water leak.”
Well, I was wrong. The fact is we had a massive storm go through, and what we actually had was a raw sewage backup.
Thanks to husband’s precaution of putting everything in the basement on platforms, everything but possibly ONE eiderdown and cover and a Christmas tree are PROBABLY salvageable/okay.
Call the insurance company, who sent over a mitigation company who, for reasons inexplicable, decided WE must be the ones to carry everything stored down there up the stairs (while I’m fairly mobile and fine health wise, Dan’s knees are shot, which means bringing up EVERYTHING from food storage to appliances to empty computer boxes from the storage area would take me, even with my assistant’s help about two weeks. All the while walking on raw sewage, which, btw, for some reason started my asthma going. The company meanwhile, was enthusiastically removing flooring and padding, and wanted to proceed well beyond the area of flooding, and also wanted to CUT OUT DRY WALL, despite the wall not starting until well above the flood. Oh, and they wanted to empty the basement despite the fact that most storage is on elevated impermeable shelves.
Husband got very upset and called insurance again. As of right now, the basement is clean and disinfected and drying, pending environmental testing, and getting a company in to re-floor the damaged area. Also pending is getting in a plumber to make sure this backup doesn’t happen again. (Among other things we found we had some kind of a sewer access down there we didn’t know existed, until the cap popped off under pressure. This wasn’t mentioned in our inspection; it was under a set of shelves. We had no idea it even existed. The other access was thoroughly roto-rooted, but the source of the backup was outside our property. I don’t know what to even do with that. And please don’t tell me. Tell my husband. I’m already dealing with ONE insane bureaucracy.)
Meanwhile about a hundred minor things seem to also have decided to go critical all at once, to the point I’m answering the phone with “What fresh hell is this?”
At least we seem to have pulled Havelock cat from kidney failure brink. He’s been letting us hydrate him, and is doing well, if thoroughly put out with my locking him up in the office randomly (from his perspective. Actually so hoses/vents can be run up through open doors from the basement.)
Since the Portuguese bureaucracy will shut down in an hour and a half and my assistant HAS to leave in the next couple of hours, I will be trying to sit down and finish the book shortly. Even if I don’t have any hair left.
Pray for what remains of my sanity. Even if you’re an atheist. The novelty might be enough to get the Author’s attention, or at least cause Him to laugh.
I need three days or so to finish this book and maybe catch my breath, before returning to the struggle, which is very definitely real.
I was thinking of the place I grew up which doesn’t exist in any meaningful way, except as geographical location. Every field has been built over with stack a prole apartment buildings; every farm is now a park or a plaza. Highways have obliterated most of the streets and alleys; the people who live there are not the people I knew, and when I walk down the street I might as well be in a completely foreign land which I’ve never before seen.
The assumption from the much higher population density in the village now, than it was when I was growing up would be that there has been a population explosion.
But in fact, if you drive not a great distance from the city — or any of Portugal’s three major cities — and stray from the highways which host the usual cluster of vendors and restaurants and the towns and villages that support such, you find … miles and miles and miles of nothing: areas so empty you can hear a radio playing somewhere a mile or so off.
In that way Portugal is similar to a lot of American states where the areas that were farms and grazing land became increasingly more depopulated, which the cities either grew or maintained. This is because agriculture takes fewer people of course.
Which is good. Regardless of what their statistics say — and I have no idea and I don’t even begin to trust them, anyway — there as here, beyond the cooked numbers (I’m not going to exhaustively describe all the ways the census is gamed even here, except to say if you believe they’re counting everyone and that everyone responds honestly, and that the bureaucrats don’t add some arbitrary number so they get paid more/get more subsidies, you’re a beautiful soul and possibly too good for this world) you can see an accelerating population collapse.
My parents generation with five or six siblings gave way to my generation with one, or maybe two children per couple (yes, I know, the boomers was usually three or four. But I came immediately after in the years aggregated to the boom for no good reason sometime in the oughts.) And my generation, those who married, have at the very most two children, but more commonly one, and not uncommonly none.
There are many reasons for that. Part of it is socialism — it kills, fast or slow — which as it does embuggered economies, so it became harder for families to survive on one income, or one income supplemented by work done from home by the woman which was the traditional way. This in turn necessitated child care and made it harder to raise a family.
But more than that, the cultural shocks of the long war of the twentieth century and all sorts of nonsense devaluing the traditional business of women, run from home, and making a fetish of higher education and specialization for all, stigmatized craft work, or simply homemaking and house keeping as professions and declared that the be all and end all of human achievement was “a corporate career.” This of course ties in with socialism, because it’s very hard to tax and regulate work for which you’re not paid in a traditional, regular way. So that sort of work must be discouraged, in favor of work that can in fact be controlled by the government.
Over it all there is a cultural belief that we were reproducing too much — a conclusion arrived at out of thin air and cooked statistics, with a few polemicists declaring on nothing much that the Earth was at carrying capacity — and that the virtuous thing to do was to have no children or as few as possible. The profound disconnect between this idea and the fact that wealth comes from humans and that of course most of the planet was barely populated at all outside large cities never registered.
Instead, the whole planet bought into the polemic and fell headlong into the hysteria of “too many humans” aided by the fact that Marxism, which has penetrated the culture everywhere, believes at its core that wealth can’t be created, only endlessly redistributed. And if that were true, then fewer humans would mean more wealth for everyone. (This is the lesson drawn from the great dying of the black plague when everyone became suddenly much wealthier. BUT the truth is that this was because it gave people a brief boost by acquiring already produced goods. What made the prosperity stick, after that, was the fact that the population exploded after forcing the exploration of new lands and new means of cultivation, etc. and leading straight into the industrial revolution.)
Because this hysteria happened when mass communication and top down government were possible (due to the technological developments of the time) this meant that everyone pretty much fell for it, from governments penalizing having more than one or two children, to private citizens doing the “responsible” and “socially approved” thing.
Which leads to where we are, with a severely contracting population worldwide. I believe our ridiculous open borders and propagandizing of people to come here for free benefits seems (briefly) like a boon for some countries which are getting rid of trouble makers and charity cases.
But long term it won’t wash. Human families cycle through uselessness on the regular, usually caused by circumstances and life being too easy. Human evolution doesn’t happen in a generation or two. (Which is why the whole strong and weak men meme is such a useless piece of nonsense.) Welfare cases can, and often do have, quite rational and productive children. Provided they have children. I think the countries emptying themselves are going to find they have no future and are a howling wilderness left empty and roamed only by the beasts of the fields.
We’re not that far off, and yes, we are providing all the wrong incentives and might end up with a near permanent underclass because we’re cultivating it… Except we don’t have the money to cultivate it forever and the problem will fix itself.
But in general people is better than no people, because we’re clever apes and can figure out ways to turn things around. (This is not to say that I approve of the flood of illegal immigrants. If we decide to attract more population, instead of making it through the dearth with mechanization until people get their heads out of their tight, dark, smelly confines and start having more kids, then we should import population that is useful to us now where we are technologically, and also that wishes to embrace our credal nation and become Americans in every sense of the word.) It surely beats no people.
The world might be very pretty with no humans in it, and the left particularly seems to have a fetish for post-collapse porn, endlessly dissecting how long it would take for our cities to return to wilderness, for instance, or trying to figure out which species would follow ours up the evolutionary scale to intelligence (thereby betraying a curiously pre-scientific mind set, since nothing dictates that the dominant world species be intelligent or use technology.)
But a world empty of humans is irrelevant. If pretty, who is there to appreciate the aesthetics.
And to me, since I am human, such an empty landscape is sad and bereft of my kind, those who give meaning to the future.
I’m haunted by a feeling that the area I grew up in, the area where some branch of the family or other seems to always have lived in, with children of our extended relatives running and playing down the old cobbled streets, getting in fights in the alleys and exploring the fields and the woods, will, one day, in the not very distant future, be empty of children voices and laughter. I can picture in my mind the empty, crumbling stackaprol apartments swallowed up by the encroaching forest.
It happened once. Before the black plague, what became a “village” when I was little, was a very large market town, about the same sprawl it currently occupies (presumably without stackaprol apartments save for a few built on the insula model.) The depopulation of the black plague and lack of commerce means that the woods and fields in which I hiked as a child were, back then, manor houses, workshops, mills.
Centuries later, one of dad’s and my stops for lunch was sitting on the medieval millstone that rested at the edge of the woods.
It will not be so bad if in five or six centuries a little girl and her father sit to have a picnic lunch on some lump that used to be the entrance steps of a crumbled apartment building. And it’s the most likely thing, as it’s unlikely humans will manage to eradicate themselves completely.
But the the loss of wealth, of ability, of tech, of life that would result from the years of population collapse in between make my heart ache with sorrow.
I’d very much prefer fields and dales were filled with the laughter and sounds of children at play, and the children were taught and made competent so they can keep civilization going, so that my grandchildren or great grandchildren — should I have them — can walk in different worlds, under different suns, building families and growing, and creating vibrant, joyful human civilizations where non exists.
I realized with a shock a week ago that the anniversary of the October 7 attack on Israel is now less than 2 months away. This startled me and shocked me, because in my mental map, it happened yesterday.
It took looking back carefully to see the months and months of anti-semitic attacks all over the nation, the ridiculous pro-Palestine demonstrations trying to swell up to the level of Buy Large Mansions, the various losses of mind over technical Supreme Court decisions, then the growing incoherence of the Junta culminating in what amounts to an internal coup d’etat, oh and attempt on Trump’s life which like a lot of things — the Las Vegas shooters, that explosion on Christmas day four? years back — will never be adequately investigated or explained.
And I realized I thought it happened yesterday, because I’ve spent this entire year in a state of high alert, of stress, waiting for the next shoe to drop. Looking around, in astonishment at the things that are okay, normal, no one says much.
It’s been like that since 2020. Closing down the entire country; putting the entire population effectively under house arrest while scaring them about a virus that, yeah, was dangerous to people over 80, but turned out not to inflict any excess mortality beyond what a bad flu year would do — all of this would be considered so stupid, so highly implausible that I couldn’t get away with using it in a book. People would mock me if I tried and ask me what universe I lived in.
Yet, there we are and they did it. And since then the crazy outrages keep piling up, including the in-your-face-stolen election at the end of 2020 and the slightly less blatant one at the end of 22. Including the attack on Israel, which sure, was another country. But the atrocities, and the bragging about them, the targeting of civilians, women and children, and the fact perpetrators thought it was a great “victory” that would achieve, heaven only knows what, was like the stuff I read in history books when tribal societies clash, things that should be de-facto impossible in civilized societies. Certainly bragging them should be impossible without drawing condemnation from everyone. Except our officialdom and the left did not condemn the atrocities, and have instead been screaming at the top of their lungs because Israel is defending herself. This should not be possible, but of course it is, because people though angry are atomized, propagandized and incapable of fighting back with their elections corrupted.
Now the left thinks that this means this wonderful strategy of replacing shock with shock and outrage with outrage will give them a reign of a thousand years.
Leaving alone the fact that they live in a fantasy reality and couldn’t govern their way out of a wet paper bag with the directions written on the inside, there is the fact that eventually the traumatized population, after repeated retraumatizing goes into unreasoning and complete fury.
Judging by various things including our potemkin economy and increasingly obviously, transparently false news reporting, and the expressions of people at the grocery store, something is coming. And it will be neither good nor peaceful.
The biggest risk, honestly, is not letting the fury consume and destroy all, and to return to our civil society at the other end.
It’s almost impossible, but it’s not impossible. And America is a nation of miracles.
Heck, maybe the biggest miracle will occur, and we’ll be able to turn this around without it getting ugly and kinetic. Don’t bet on it. Prepare for the worse, but perhaps G-d still looks after fools, drunkards and the United States of America.
What is more important right now, while we wait for this very profligate centipede to drop yet another shoe, and wait/fear that the powder barrel we’ve been tap dancing on to blow, it’s very easy for stress to kill us, particularly those of us of a certain age.
You have to recognize that we’re living a very unnatural life, one beset by high stress that we keep trying to ignore so we can live life.
It’s easy to relax when the storm has passed, everyone is alive, and your main task is to recoup and regroup.
But the storm hasn’t passed, and power lines keep breaking and sparking all over, so we keep stumbling on them and getting shocked despite ourselves.
You can’t, on your own, do something about the terrible situation the world is in, as the beast of socialist governance keeps spasming to stay in control and causing more and more damage as it does. At some point either enough people will have enough and be in a position to fight back (If it’s on Christmas, you’ll be required to speak Romanian) or — it’s possible — the whole thing will fall apart at once, through extreme stupidity and malfeasance (it’s happened.)
But nothing will be won if by that time you have let stress and rage eat you, and make you ill. I don’t care how old you are, most of you who read here are rational human beings, and we’re going to need you to help rebuild on the other side, so maybe, just maybe we can get our representative Constitutional Republic back (while knowing that it hasn’t existed as such, not functionally, since before I was born and I’m somewhat past the mid century mark).
So, how do you manage the stress and the rage, not forgetting or avoiding seeing what they’re doing to us, but refusing to let it get inside our heads and destroy us?
Well…. Most of what you can do are small mitigation efforts.
Prepping for the worst helps. I know that, because my PTSD forces me to. If I don’t, I get to the stress level that doesn’t allow me to function.
What else? Well, carve out time and space every day to do things that de-stress you and make you feel better.
I can’t tell you precisely what that is, because I am not you.
If you’re a reader of this blog, reading is probably a great part of your relaxation and recovering strategy. So, find books that make you feel happy. Ignore if they are stupid or don’t teach you anything. Don’t hold yourself to impossible standards. Take time and make space to have things that make you feel happy. Books, or music, or something.
Sometimes when you’re very stressed, listening to a favorite tune with headphones might help. Reading a book or re-reading a book you enjoy might help. Taking a walk with your loved one might help.
On that, yesterday while dealing with bureaucracy for the kids’ wedding, the basement flooded with sewage because of a city line thing. Which is why this post is so late. And why my stress is somewhere at the point that you can expect a chimney to emerge from the top of my head and whistle.
But we’ll get through this. Personally and nationally. We will survive.
It’s all about maximizing our choices and not letting our stress kill us till it does.
Guns are fairly intricate mechanisms. While they can go long periods with minimal maintenance and no issues, it’s a good idea to know how to maintain them beyond a simple cleaning.
Since the AR family of rifles is probably the most popular semi-automatic rifle in the country right now, I’d like to discuss some of the malfunction causes and solutions that the average owner can take care of at home.
The heart of the AR is its gas system, commonly referred to as gas impingement. In this system, gas is diverted from the barrel and fed back into the gas key on the bolt carrier group. This channels the gas into a chamber behind the bolt, pushing the bolt forward and the carrier back. Since the bolt can’t move forward, being locked into the barrel extension, the carrier has to move back. This movement causes another component, called the cam pin, to rotate and unlock the bolt. The bolt and carrier then move back together during the action cycle.
All of this is very dependent on a few components being in good repair and properly set. Specifically the gas key bolts need to be properly tightened and staked and the gas rings need to be within spec and replaced when they wear enough to cause function issues.
Happily, most carriers come with the gas key bolted down and properly staked. Unfortunately, not all of them are. Knowing the signs of gas key leakage or worn gas rings and how to remedy the situation can prevent your rifle from being transformed into a really awkward straight pull bolt action.
Gas Key
If the gas key bolts are not properly tightened and staked, they can loosen during the firing cycle. This allows gas to leak out around the base of the gas key and rob the system of pressure, leading to short stroking of the action, feeding issues, and failure to lock open on an empty magazine.
A replacement gas key won’t be staked and will look similar to this one.
If the gas key is loose, don’t just tighten the screws and call it a day. The key needs to be removed and the mating surfaces thoroughly cleaned before reassembly. Once that’s done, the bolts need to be tightened and properly staked.
There’s no need to really crank down on them. Firmly hand tightened with a proper bit driver is all that’s needed. Once this is done, it’s time to stake the bolts. No special tools are needed for this job other than a center punch. I prefer an automatic center punch like this model from JelBo, though a manual center punch and ball peen hammer can work just as well.
Make sure the carrier is properly secured. I use a bench vice with padded soft jaws, but a couple of pieces of wood clamped to a table can suffice.
All that needs to be done is to displace a small amount of metal from the gas key into the head of the bolt to prevent it from turning under vibration. Don’t go crazy.
This is one in my collection. The first attempt at staking turned out to be insufficient, so it had to be done again. That’s why the staking looks more messy and aggressive.
In case anyone was wondering, I’m not a fan of thread locker on firearms. There may be some instances where it’s warranted, but much less than it’s used. If you must use some kind of thread locker on a firearm, blue shalt be the color thou shalt use, and the color of the thread locker shall be blue. Green shalt thou not use, nor either use thou red. Black is right out.
Gas Rings
The gas rings on an AR bolt, like the rings on a car engine cylinder, add a gas seal as well as some friction to the system. Every time the bolt cycles, they rub against the inside of the carrier and wear. Gas rings, like springs, are consumable parts and will need to be replaced eventually. The signs are similar to a loose gas key, but there’s a simple test to check the gas ring friction.
After removing the bolt/carrier group from the rifle, make sure the bolt is in the forward position and gently stand it up on the bolt face. If the carrier stays up, the rings are fine. If it slides down the bolt, it means the rings are sufficiently worn to require replacement.
The bolt requires three rings and they are usually sold in convenient three packs, like these from Brownells.
Remove the bolt from the carrier and wipe off any grease, oil, or loose carbon. Using a knife point or sharp pin (do not use the firing pin) find the gap in the rearmost ring and pull it towards the tail of the bolt, stripping the ring out of the retaining groove on the bolt. Repeat for the other two.
Clean the retaining groove and replace the rings. Don’t worry about the gaps in each ring lining up, the first time the bolt cycles they’ll shift around. Lubricate the bolt and reassemble. There should be a noticeable increase in friction.
Remember, take care of your tools and they’ll take care of you.
A journey of a thousand miles, yadda, yadda, yadda….
It’s trite, and you heard it a thousand time. But you know what? It’s true.
All of us — particularly those of us with ADD and of a depressive bend — become paralyzed by a task that’s too big and complex for our brains. You’re not alone.
But when you’re facing a vast quantity of yarn, all snarled together, if you keep trying to find the tip. So you cut it at a convenient place, start unraveling, and assume you’re going to mend it later.
When I was young, I often got tasked to clean the kitchen after my mom had cooked for a party of people. This might seem like nothing, except mom cooks by the fantastic mess method, as in when she’s in the middle of cooking she can’t be bothered to make sure the trash lands in the trash can, and used trays or oven pans just get balanced on the first convenient surface. There’s no rhyme or reason for it, and some of it seriously upsets me, like throwing organic refuse in a sink that lacks a disposal. I hate dealing with that, because particularly if it involves cooked anything — like bones from a cooked piece of meat — it’s sticky and slippery and gross.
After many times of doing that, not the sink, but cleaning the whole kitchen, I started to enjoy it, to the point I’d go directly to the kitchen instead of the party, and start cleaning. Okay, part of this was to avoid people, of course. I might be the very slightest bit introverted (she says, tongue in cheek at obvious understatement.) But that isn’t all. There was a method to it. First clear the sink, because I’ll need the sink to clear everything else. Start throwing obvious trash in the trash. Then take the cleared space by the sink and clean it, so you have a place to put clean dishes.
Then start taking one class of dishes. I usually started with glasses because that way the scrubby wouldn’t get greasy and scruffy from pans, and glasses would come out clean. Clean glasses first. Dry them. Put them away. Then wash and dry any breakables. Plates first, then bowls, then serving dishes. At this point you should be able to tackle the pots pans and oven trays, so put them in order, usually cleaner to dirtier and deal with it. People are going to be bringing stuff in while you’re doing this, so clean a portion of table or counter and tell them to stack stuff there. It will be easier, because you won’t be stepping over things by the time you get there.
You do it one category at a time, so you don’t get lost and discouraged. And often, while it seems like nothing is getting done, if you keep doing one little thing at a time, by the time the party is done, you have nothing but a handful of dishes to do, and the floor has been mopped and the entire place looks nice. (A warning for young women looking for marital prospects: this is not the way to get them. If you do this, the guys never meet you. Go to the party. Because otherwise their mothers and grandmothers will love you — such a nice girl, so organized — but the guys will never know you exist.)
That is what I revisit in my mind when I need to figure out what to do about anything. Even the biggest mess can be dealt with one step at a time.
And this applies to just about anything. For years I’ve been daunted from getting to this book I’m now finishing (somewhat hampered by a massive sinus infection recently) because it’s a whole world and it has so much stuff, and decades of accruing details, so how could I deal with it all? Well, one scene at a time. Sometimes a few lines at a time. And it’s getting done, though it’s taken me much too long.
Our national situation? Heaven knows I’d like to fix it all in one sell fweap so to put it. But it’s impossible to do that way without rivers of blood.
It might still come to that mind, but the thing is, it’s going our way, one step at a time.
Yeah, sure, we’re here washing the glasses, and people are dropping more glasses atop the trays, and it could all slide and break any second.
But–
But it’s getting done, one step at a time, restoring things to the way they should be, one step at a time.
I know it’s disheartening and it seems like they’re winning, but they’re not. We’ve already started turning this around.
It’s just going to take time. One step at a time.
I too wish it were faster. It’s going to consume a lot of treasure and time and, well, people’s lives, but it might be the only way to do that. We didn’t get in this situation in a single step. We won’t get out of it except: step by step by step.
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It turns out that the same skills that let Mark fix machines work on people, too. The mismanagement at the local Association has left quite a backlog of folks who need a little help. Mark’s dad thinks Mark is the man for the job. If that wasn’t enough to keep Mark on his toes, there’s always his love life to worry about.
Timber: U.S. Marshal and U.S. Marshal Ezra Flint are working together again in this exciting new adventure sequel from Robert Hanlon and Scott McCrea!
Mad-dog killer Harlon Roache is in custody and on his way to Huntsville Penitentiary when the stagecoach is hijacked by his gang and brought to the small town of Poison Creek.
Roache and his men terrorize the town, killing any who dare fight back, but everything stops when a monumental sandstorm hits the Poison Creek, cutting it off from the rest of the world.
What the badmen do not know is that Marshal Ezra Flint was working undercover on that stage, or that the legendary manhunter Jake Timber is now on their trail…
Every hero starts somewhere. She’s going to take the fast track from student to trained covert operative.
Six months ago, Olivia Markham testified in the grueling murder trial of her cousin Emily’s killer. When her boyfriend Jamie surprises Olivia with a trip to Ibiza, party island of the world, her family and friends urge her to go. After all, Emily had been her best friend, the one she’d planned to room with at Brown University her freshman year.
Olivia gets her chance to let loose—only not in the way anyone could foresee.
What was supposed to be a vacation dancing and drinking on the beach trying to move on from her cousin’s death turns into a nightmare terrorist attack instead. As men with automatic weapons and knives move through screaming, swimsuit-clad, and drunken tourists, Olivia can’t flee. She has to do something. Even if it kills her. So she stops and confronts a knife-wielding man who’d just slaughtered a young couple.
It was a foolhardy act.
But Olivia’s presence of mind and surprising fighting skills don’t go unnoticed—or in vain. A team from the Special Activities Division, the CIA’s ultra-clandestine paramilitary unit, miraculously intervenes. What happens next changes the course of Olivia’s life forever.
Set six years before THE HARLEQUIN & THE DRANGÙE, THE COVERT GUARDIAN narrates Olivia Markham’s genesis from idealistic college student to trained intelligence operative.
People love easily. Look at most of your relatives or coworkers. How lovable are they? Really? Yet most have mates and children. The vast majority are still invited to family gatherings and their relatives will speak to them.
Many have pets to which they are devoted. Some even call them their fur-babies. Is your dog or cat or parakeet property or family? Not in law but in your heart? Can a pet really love you back? Or is it a different affection? Are you not kind to those who feed and shelter you? But what if your dog could talk back? Would your cat speak to you kindly?
How much more complicated might it be if we meet really intelligent species not human? How would we treat these ‘people’ in feathers or fur? Perhaps a more difficult question is: How would they treat us? Are we that lovable?
When society and the law decide these sort of questions must be answered it is usually because someone disapproves of your choices. Today it may be a cat named in a will or a contest for custody of a dog. People are usually happy living the way they want until conflict is forced upon them.
What if the furry fellow in question has his own law? And is quite articulate in explaining his choices. Can a Human adopt such an alien? Can such an intelligent alien adopt a human? Should they?
Of course if the furry alien in question is smart enough to fly spaceships, and happens to be similar in size and disposition to a mature Grizzly bear, wisdom calls for a certain delicacy in telling him no…
The “April” series of books works from an earlier time toward merging with the “Family Law” series.
Your parents thought they were emigrating to a terraformed planet. That didn’t happen.
Now you’re second generation on a lost colony world.
You’re one of Martha’s Sons.
Will Peter Dawe’s perilous mission with a brother he despises end in death?
A lost starship’s settlers, isolated on an uncharted alien world, manage to terraform a mountain-ringed valley into a rich replica of Earth. Despite their success reproducing the environment they need to survive and thrive, only tenuous forces hold together the human colony on the world of Not What We Were Looking For. The governor’s appropriation of the western settlers’ weapons for the city strains those bonds to breaking point—and then beyond when Peter Dawe’s father sends him to get the weapons back.Twenty-year-old Peter Dawe’s restless nature easily endures the lost colony world’s rigors. His genetic modifications make it even easier. So when Peter retrieves the family weapon, he also brings back a motorbike, a piece of technology no longer available to everyone.
It would be a fine prize to keep to himself. He won it. He earned it. He quickly learns that his brother Simon lies in wait to take what isn’t his. Simon wants more than just the motorbike. He wants Peter’s glory.
But when Peter’s father forces him to take his hated older brother on Peter’s next mission, the pair must not only navigate the city’s perils and politics but learn to work together—when neither thinks the other should be in charge. Their success—and their very lives—depend on it. Or will Peter be proven right that he should have faced this task alone?
This box set contains the first three titles in the immersive Martha’s Sons science fiction adventure series: Simple Service, Long in the Land, and Relief Afar. If you like gripping action, insurmountable odds, and alien worlds, you’ll love Laura Montgomery’s tale of a man determined not to let family ties sabotage mission success.
Eight lives depend on Kyle’s desperate trek across the Moon to get help. But someone — or something — intends for him to fail. Can he defeat it in time?
Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.
So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.
We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.
One of the drivers of how scary everything feels is that we’re in an era of catastrophic innovation.
And I know as I type this that half of you are going to go “but from covered wagon to airplanes! Wasn’t that faster?”
Yes, in a way, but we’re talking about different areas of change. (As well as the fact that change builds on change.)
First let’s establish the rate of change humans are good for. It’s very slow, and measured in the pace of a human life. The new generation might expand the hunting grounds, or whatever, but by our middle years (which some scientists claim is around 25) we are set in our ways and pretty much just want our routine. We can shake it up in minor ways, but the major patterns are set.
Humans like their patterns “safe to eat” and “good grazing land” and “friendlies vs. enemies.” We want tomorrow to be more or less like today but a little better. And we want to raise fat babies who have fat babies. For that to happen, we have to know that tomorrow will be more or less like today but a little better.
This is our minds. Our bodies are even slower to adapt. See the rate at which lactose tolerance is disseminating in the population. Evolution is a slooooooow process. You see, it’s a hit or miss thing, and it’s based mostly on “Does it allow you to reproduce more, and produce more viable descendants.” Sure, being petite with violet eyes might make a gal super attractive, but unless it also allows her to have triplets for every birth and have 26 kids who each have 26 kids in her life time, the fact that gentlemen like anime girls is not going to give us all anime girls in two generations or fifty. Keep that in mind, because it’s important.
Second, sure, the late nineteenth to mid twentieth century saw an amazing rate of technological change. There was probably a non-insignificant percentage of people who made it out to the American West in covered wagons who were alive to see the moon landing. Looking back, this seems dizzying to us.
Was it?
Well, yes and no. Like a lot of the changes through the industrial revolution, it was astounding and mind-breaking and…. things that happen to other people either far away or in a much further up social strata.
Look, I was born in the early sixties in a small European country. When I was six we moved from one house to another using an… ox cart. I took my first flight at 17 when I came to the US as an exchange student. I was only the second person in my family to fly anywhere. This included immigrants to other continents who had taken the “vapor.” By which they meant boats. Not sure if they were steamboats, as the name implies.
The rhythm of life was still very much what it had been in the 19th century. Sure cloth manufacturing and clothes manufacturing was easier, cheaper and faster. But that meant some more mill jobs for local youth, and people dressed better.
Again, even when television became common in the seventies, the rhythm of life didn’t change much. The housewives now watched soap operas, as opposed to merely listening to them on the radio.
The difference in our current rate of change is that — mostly because government blocked the big changes that Heinlein expected — at the very personal, every-day life level.
When I moved to the states now almost forty years ago, contact with my family was cumbersome and expensive. It was a major line item on our budget to have calls to mom. Now it’s not only free, but I routinely get pics of grandnephew in my texts when I wake up. I can communicate to friends around the world. In fact, most of my friends, while in the US might as well live in Narnia. I never see them, we just talk every day.
But the … changes hit at every single level that involves information/learning/media. Which means they hit at every level for anyone who works or plays in those realms. Which in the US is almost every single person.
For me, at the professional level the change is particularly dizzying. I mentioned before that we’re just now about to run out of a set of stamps we bought in the early two thousands, expecting them to last a month. But submissions went online that month, and well, after that so went bill paying and most correspondence. We probably won’t use the six month supply of envelopes large and small for the rest of our natural lives. If you get a letter from me, it will have tape on the closures, because the glue is SO old.
Also, I went from trying to always have more than one publisher to publishing myself, and if you think that denotes a demotion, or that it must mean I’m making less, or– Well, oh, you sweet summer child.
And the whole thing is accelerating crazily. For people like me, the ability to produce entertainment that reaches the masses and/or to learn whatever I very well please, at this point is bounded only by my time and energy. (And the demands of this blog, which is– well. Its own time sink.)
Sure, but that’s entertainment. Even supposing that — bet you that — in two to five years I can produce animated movies of stories that rival what Hollywood can do, with minimal learning investment (I can do it now, if I am willing to spend three years to cludge together semi-functional tools, integrate them and LEARN them well enough to use off-label. My problem being I’m not willing to lose three years of not writing at all, and not blogging either.) what is that going to change?
Well, not much, but that’s the nature of my profession. I have friends in other professions, though, and … well…. it gets complicated.
If I’d stayed in my original path as a multilingual scientific translator, my lunch would be currently being eaten by automated translation tools, which, sure, still need human editors, but far less. (If I’d stayed on that path, I suspect right now the mathematician and I would be starting a retirement project of creating better automated translators.)
And I have friends doing work on better 3-d printing. And better machining, the kind you can do at home and used to require a factory. And I have friends working really hard to break all sorts of barriers in distance medicine, and diagnostic, and engineering, and–
As I said, it’s accelerating. Part of the reason it seems like governments have gone to war with their own people is that the “blue model” of centralized governance views the 1930s as its ideal time to be. Because mass everything was obvious and controllable, from communication to manufacturing.
Currently they’re running around screaming misinformation and trying to grow more fingers to plug the leaks in their information dam. And not succeeding. And that doesn’t count the myriad new manufacturing/robotics opportunities over the horizon just waiting for the boot to lift a little, not even be removed, to come into being.
To an extent, the “progressives” — never was a movement more strangely named — are suffering from shock and panic over fast change because of how wedded they are to “systems” that “explain everything.” People with that kind of mindset are not prepared to quickly change how they think, or to take new factors into account.
So even though all of us feel like everything is slip sliding away because of fast change to our everyday life, the left feels even more so.
To an extent their “invented” change, to the numbers of genders, or whatever, are ways to cope with their own cognitive dissonance, in the same way cutting yourself is a way to cope with change you can’t control. Also a way to accuse us of what they’re doing. “You only say that because you’re afraid of change!” etc. because they project like an Imax.
Also, tying in to that evolution thing, their attempts at keeping the new generations ignorant and incompetent, yeah, are going to hurt, but not in the long run. In the long run, humans are as creative and adaptive as they’ve always been, and the kids are finding ways to learn and innovate. The learned neuroticism only paralyzes them for a few years. That means they’re slower to get started, but not permanently crippled.
No matter what the left does, it only seems to feed the acceleration of change that escapes their control.
Which drives them crazier and leads them to do crazier things in an effort to control us.
Which in turn leads to us escaping them faster and in more creative ways.
Have I mentioned: Hold on to the sides of the boat. The seas will get choppier.
And also, remember RAH and keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.
*Sorry about the lateness. There were wedding dress fittings, and I was only person available to go with. Threw entire day off. Also Havelock cat is ill which ate the rest. – SAH*
The blue model is collapsing all over the world.
We’re calling it the blue model after the American colors. And no, you don’t need to tell me that the left manipulated those because post fall of the USSR they thought calling themselves reds was too on the nose.
Or perhaps because they tend to think in patterns, they thought the communists were defeated because they were red, and they could rub some of that on us. Who knows? The many many ways they avoid thinking are tiresome and hard to fathom.
But I’m using Blue model instead of Marxian because the blue model at its root is honestly more monarchist than anything else. It’s the idea that the government should take care of you. That you are dependent on it, and lesser-than.
Marxism simply highjacked the structures left over from monarchy. Which is why the blue model was much deeper all over Europe which still had leftover structures and mental categories from monarchy. The idea that someone in the power structure to a degree owns you and you owe them allegiance while they owe you protection/whatever else goes back as far as feudalism. The idea that individual rights trump that is alien in most of the world.
It isn’t alien in the US, and it is in fact, despite everything, the default. Which is why the blue model took a lot longer to penetrate fully here, and it’s still not really fully installed. Yes, I know what you hear on the TV and what recent college graduates spout, but really: In 16 we voted for the guy promising to bring back jobs, over the chick saying jobs were a thing of the past and she’d give everyone welfare. Americans still would rather take care of themselves, given half a choice, despite everything FDR and his ideological successors did to try to break that.
BTW and this is important later, the monarchical model in Europe had its roots in feudalism, which was a system that made sense for its time and place. Division of labor of a sort, under constant attack from outside (moors in Southern Europe, Huns in the East, Vikings in the North.) It is a system that works fabulously when one is under constant attack and short on resources.
It ran into problems as the pressure let up. Contrary to what you’ve been fed over and over in school, revolutions don’t happen when things are intolerable, but when things get better. Actually, revision on that: they can happen when things are intolerable, but then they are far far worse and can often flip totalitarian.
So, what is the blue model: A centralized, “strong” government, run by “experts” who possess some quality the “peasants” lack (this applies back to monarchy, where they were believed to have been installed by G-d. In our era it’s the “they’re so smart.” Kind of the same, said another way.) This allows them to allocate resources and make decisions for everyone. What decisions? Well, those you are too stupid to make, peasant!
No, on the serious side, the problem is that when the current form of the blue model was installed, it was believed that experts really had more knowledge and could see clearer than the average person, including into that person’s daily life.
No? Dudes: WHY THE HECK do we have a recommended daily nutrition? Particularly as we’re finding out how different people/metabolisms are, why do we have someone telling us what we should eat, every day? (And am I the only one who has found that a lot of our dietary diseases only showed up since we’ve had that?) Why is there someone telling you how much you, yes, you, should weigh, for that matter, when humans are completely different, and in the US we come from ethnic groups with widely varying body types? Why do we have regulations on what insulation your house must use, what type of stove you can use to cook your food, what your kids must learn, how your work must be performed, etc. etc. etc. etc. for everything you do every day, from the moment you get up to the moment you go to bed.
Well, “experts say” and “they know better” of course.
If we cut the federal government back to what the funding fathers thought were the functions of the federal government, we’d get rid of 99% of it. Guard the borders. Negotiate with foreign powers. Prevent war between states. I believe that’s it, unless I’m forgetting something.
Everything else is the blue model. Everything else is “Experts say you should wipe your butt three times, using paper of this thickness, folded twice.” EVERYTHING.
And it’s double that abroad. And they give a lot more credence to experts than even our dunderheads do. I remember watching in awe as my parents allowed their electrical panel to be changed with one that would crash at a lower usage to “save the environment” because…. experts said, so there were the government goons going door to door, doing this. And everyone thought this was okay. (Head>desk.)
So, why is the blue model crashing? Well, first because they are now openly against their own countries. Took a while for that to actually sink in, but slowly it’s penetrated. And people will actually defend themselves when they keep getting attacked.
Second, because it never worked and it can never work, beyond a very small population under high pressure.
After all, its idea of the obligation to and from government is based on Feudalism, which was exactly that. Feudalism broke under the twin impacts of the Black Death which — not because it was smaller population, which is what the left took from it the ijits — because it was a massive population CRASH created a surplus in a society that never had it before; and a population explosion following, which caused people to fan out and colonize beyond the immediate reach of the Lords/government.
This type of model, where the government imposes all sorts of dictates on things it has no business touching, only works as long as the government, whether your local lord or your local kommissar can dictate what you believe/talk about and what you do/how you react.
This means it doesn’t work very well in a distributed, spread out society. It does even worse with a from-a-distance, ignorant-of-local-conditions society. It does even worse when the people running it are infected with Marxism and think both that people are widgets and that people will respond to laws as though they were laws of nature. And it does even worse if the people running it are utterly in thrall of “experts” and “Studies” in an era when most of those are falsified. (Because financed by the government.)
But most of all it doesn’t work because it’s centralized, top down ordering of everything. It is particularly clunky in our continent-sized country, but frankly it doesn’t work very well even in the kit-kat sized countries like Portugal, where you need a passport to swing anything above a newborn kitten. The central planners not only can’t see into the needs and desires of people who live distantly/differently from them, but also the bureaucracy itself is optimized for ass covering, so all failures are excused and all data fudged.
The end result is failures no one will acknowledge, which snowball into really big failures.
The central administrative state never works very well, but it gets worse each year, because failures roll bigger and bigger every time, like the dung pushed ahead by a dung beetle.
To make things worse, of course, the stupid fools are INTERNATIONALISTS and aiming for the largest possible of all states. I honestly don’t know if this is because they’re Marxist or because they’ve tweaked accountability and good information are harder the bigger the nation is, which gives them cover, or if they truly believe that the long war of the 20th century was due to nationalism. (If anything it was due to aggregating all the tiny principalities and satrapies of Europe into large nation states who then collided over their macro policies.) However they all want these big aggregates and ultimately a world state. Which is stupidly insane. But anyway, their internationalism and conviction that people are widgets is causing them to a) import vast masses of third worlders into the west b)try to enforce some form of racial social justice that means the natives of the West have no rights.
And to compound their problems, they no longer control the communications, so their failures are becoming impossible to hide. The internet, even faltering and hampered as it is outside the US makes their bias and hooliganism obvious.
So, the blue model is falling in plain sight. The world is on fire, with the people of every western country at all but open war (from what I gather from reading the increasingly panicky “Stop doing that” communiques) with their governments.
How long? I don’t know. I know even here we’re tap dancing on a powder keg, and our idiot Junta keeps playing the music faster and faster.
I know anything could set it off. Britain had had horrific events before without fighting breaking out. And the poor bastages aren’t even armed.
At the rate things are breaking down it’s going to get sporty all over, and accelerate.
Make your final selections before flight, and strap in.
*I will continue the post on the bind we’re in, but tomorrow is a really busy day, and someone asked for this. So, here is my post from 2015 on acculturation. – SAH*
Prepare to be Assimilated a Blast From the past From November 22 2015
Yesterday I was surprised when Dave Freer sent me a post that echoed almost exactly what I’ve been thinking. In a late night (for me. He has temporal privilege, living in Australia) conversation last night, I found that we agree in more than one thing, including how nasty things are going to get if we don’t get at least a partial course correction soon. That is a post for another time — how the fact that the left’s escathology and the belief history comes with an arrow and that they are the inevitable “end of history” (a belief that’s religious in nature because no rational principles lead to it) has caused them to be blind to the fact that silencing opposition is NOT winning — but for now it remains scary that both of us are worried about the same things. Why scary? Because I’ve known Dave for… twelve? thirteen? years and the man has a gut feel for the future. Even when you really wish he weren’t right, he tends to be.
But today I want to talk about assimilation, or, in sociological terms, acculturation. I, and Kate Paulk, and Dave Freer, and a ton of the rest of us are immigrants who went to another country with the intention of living there the rest of our lives and who had incentives to fit in and be part of that country. (In the case of two of us, husbands. And in my case a philosophical belief in the principles the nation was founded on.)
But even then, with the best will to fit in, it’s a HARD thing. Really hard.
It’s not just in your head either, though it is there too.
Humans are tribal, and living in a multi-ethnic society doesn’t make you less tribal. This is why people keep looking for racists under their bed, because you know, it’s baked in, and they know they’ve “discriminated” at some point. Only this isn’t the racism of the progressives. Minorities can be (often are) as racist or more racist than the majority.
But more importantly, in a multi-ethnic society that tries as hard as it can to eliminate racism, you get a different kind of “racism” that has nothing to do with race. You get tribalism that fastens onto odd things. It’s best expressed in “Ya’ll are not for around here.”
What you might not realize if you have never immigrated and acculturated is that the way you move, the way you speak (absent accent), the way you eat and the way you walk (not to even mention handwriting) are ALL culturally linked. Most of it is not identifiable at a conscious level, either. Most of it is so deep that all it does is trigger the “ya’ll are not from around here.”
I know I’m fitting in better because it’s been years since people stared at me while I went about my daily business and before I opened my mouth came up to me and asked “Where are you from?”
(And btw, the reason I stopped resisting identifying as Latin is because other people are making that identification for me, usually people who have a grudge (and who, bizarrely, manage to think I’m Mexican.) My kids came to the same decision for the same reason. It’s one of those “you say that I am” and it actuates even when my hair is colored light brown — it has no color of its own anymore — and I’m pale from a combination of lack of sun and illness. SOMETHING is triggering this response in people. I don’t know what it is.)
Now, when you don’t fit in, for whatever reason, you’re going to find that some people — often not the sanest people in the world — are going to have issues with you and often be hostile.
Remember this as we go through the stages of assimilation.
It starts when you find yourself in a completely different land and you realize there’s no going back. I came over after Dan and I discussed our options and decided where we were going to live.
The choices were here or there or between and wherever, a sort of multinational, above nationality existence.
We chose the US for several reasons. To begin with there was that philosophical belief set I had which conformed best to the founding documents of the US. Then there was the fact that Dan could never be REALLY Portuguese, even if he moved there, learned the language and acculturated completely. He’d still be a foreigner living there. Being Portuguese means sharing ancestry. Our kids would be considered mestizos. Our grandkids would probably bear “the Americans” as a nickname. Our great grandkids might too, and by the sixth or seventh generation, THEN they would be Portuguese (and might not remember why they had that nickname, and might think it was just some ancestor who liked American movies.) Then there was HOW we wanted our kids to grow and the options we wanted them to have. We decided the US was our best bet. There were no doubts our kids would be Odd and the more free the society the more outliers thrive in it.
So I came over and set out to acculturate. Part of this involved watching a lot of old TV because it gives you the catch-phrases, the “feel” of things. I also read a lot and pretty much everything, which helps, though what helped most was reading auto-biographies and NOT by famous people, who are presenting an image, but the sort of “my grandma wrote an autobiography and we printed a hundred copies and donated one to the library” candid shots of normal people you can get in those.
Even with the best will of the world, even wanting more than anything to fit in, it’s very hard. Not just in America. America might be one of the easiest places in the world, because it is multi-ethnic and a country of immigrants.
But even so, people catch the subconcious signals of “something wrong about you.” They stare. They don’t trust you. Sometimes they think you’re stupid, because “smart” in a society is not an IQ test but a series of signals a lot of them subconscious.
I muddled through, but sometimes there there were days I felt so homesick that I’d give anything to never have set out on this course. And people treated me oddly, and it’s very easy to use that as an excuse for failure. I learned not to do it because, through friends who did it constantly, I identified it as a trap. I chose to ignore it. But I still knew it was happening, and it made me long to go back to my tribe, to the place I belonged.
Some number of immigrants do this. It gets to be too much for them. They run back “home” where “things make sense.” I might have done it but for that philosophical conviction. That’s how hard it is.
At this stage many people make plans to retire in the “homeland” or at least to go back after death. I guess it’s a comfort.
And I still had that option, six years in, because the hoped-for kids had failed to materialize, so if something happened to Dan, or simply if it got to be too much for me, we could always “go to Portugal.”
Only then I had Robert. And the most important reason to live here and stay here came into being. And if I was to raise this child American, I certainly wasn’t going back, even if a tragedy happened and something happened to Dan.
This is the point at which you’re most offensive to natives, btw. You know just enough of your new society to see all the warts, but not enough to see the good side or necessary side of the warts. And you’ve been far enough from your native society for a while so it creates this glow of nostalgia. You know you’re “trapped” in the new place, which creates resentment.
This is when the words “In my country” — meaning in the old country — come out of the mouths of immigrants. I was lucky to watch a Turkish immigrant in a group we belonged to alienate everyone with this behavior, so I didn’t do it. I thought it, sometimes, but I didn’t DO it.
So then came the serious-fitting-in part, helped, btw, by dad. We took Robert back to meet the family after he was born and dad who, btw, longs to see me every year, told me not to be running back for every important event in the kid’s life. “Don’t be like those immigrants from France who raise the kid to be Portuguese, while in France. You made your choice, now make sure your kid knows his place. Raise him American. We’d love to know him, of course, but he’s American and that’s where he has to fit, and live and thrive.” This was much like Dave Freer’s FIFO advice yesterday.
So… I made my choice. And I really started trying to fit in. This did not involve changing our diet so much, or my clothing choices (I’m odd, okay) but a closer observation of people. I’d have got rid of my accent, if I could. Though being a mother helps with this too, because unconsciously you start picking up speech patterns and gestures from your kids. I might still strike people as somewhat odd, but it wasn’t as in your face anymore.
I also stopped reading in Portuguese, because when I do that a lot, it affects my word choices and rhythm of language in English, and I was trying to get published.
And at some point, I stopped being stared at when I was at the grocery store, and I stopped feeling I stuck out as a sore thumb. I still couldn’t write people who grew up in America. (I still can’t write people who grew up NORMAL in America, but that’s something else.)
I don’t know when that happened because I was busy just living. Somewhere along the line I stopped thinking of Portugal as “home” and Portuguese as “we” and instead changed that to America.
Then came the shock of going to Portugal after a five year hiatus and being in a foreign land, rubbed wrong by the way these people moved, the way they talked, the way they prepared food, a myriad little things.
Now, be aware I’m not an “ugly American”. I’ve been to other countries (neither America nor Portugal) and reveled in the differences particularly in food and dress but also architecture and just ‘different’. That’s the point of traveling, I think. But it’s also easy to enjoy the difference when you know in two weeks or whatever you’ll be back home and have things your way.
It’s harder when the back of your brain remembers doing things that way and — this is hard to phrase, but it’s something like — is afraid of relapsing and of getting “trapped” in the old place. It’s a feeling of being in a foreign land that is nonetheless eerily familiar, and yet not familiar enough that you could survive in it on your own. Because of how familiar it is, you see the warts. Because you’re now acculturated elsewhere, it’s easy to see the solutions too and you find yourself saying “Back home we do it this way” then stop, aghast, realizing what happened. And it’s a relief to come back to your adopted homeland. And you feel guilty it’s a relief, because you love the people you left behind, and they would be hurt if they knew how much your prefer your new place.
This is where I’ve been for at least 15 years. It’s where I’ll be the rest of my life. There will always be little things that aren’t “right” about America, things I learned so far back that they’re not conscious. Nothing big or philosophical, but the little ways of doing things. Sometimes I can’t explain to my husband why I hate an area he loves, or vice versa (this is important while house hunting) all I can do is wave my hands and say “No, just no.” And I know I give the “indicators” of class and intelligence all wrong. (Not REAL class or intelligence but how those markers are perceived in the US.) I KNOW that was part of my trouble in the field. I also know that my “I’m getting really, really angry” is mistaken for shyness or fear here, which has led to some in retrospect funny situations.
I will never fully belong either place again. That’s okay. It’s a choice I made. And of the two, I belong here the most. Say I 90% belong here, opposed to 10% in Portugal.
But the process to get where I am was neither easy nor unintentional. And it involved consciously NOT romanticizing where I came from, which I find is a big temptation for immigrants of all types and colors.
So… So this brings us to taking in refugees from a culture so different from ours as to be mind-boggling, (and you wouldn’t get HOW different unless you’d lived in one half way there), from a religion that considers itself at war (physical, not just spiritual) with us and modernity, from a place where tribe is primary above all…
Do I understand why they want to come here? Sure. Even if half the reason is probably wrong of the “streets paved with gold” variety. They want a better life (or a life) for themselves and their children.
Will it be an easy road to acculturation? No. For one, our culture ACTIVELY DISCOURAGES acculturating. It’s considered a “betrayal” of your “native” culture. I was accidentally in the room yesterday (I am ill, okay) while someone watched an episode of Dr. Ken, in which his wife accuses him (a second generation Korean) of being a lapsed Korean and brags about how she has passed on “her culture” (she’s second generation Japanese) to her kids.
The entire episode could serve as a cultural dissection of “the crazy years.” These two people AND THEIR KIDS are AMERICAN. That’s the only thing they are. Yeah, okay, they come from elsewhere, as do most Americans.
BUT the message heard, loud and clear, is that you’re supposed to hold on to all this culture from an imaginary homeland, even when you marry someone from elsewhere, and pass this entire undigested baggage to your kids. The message is that not only is there no escaping your roots, but it’s somehow bad to want to.
This is the message these new refuggee-immigrants will get, though TV, through movies, through social workers. How important it is they hold on to their all vital tribalism. Not just in food and clothing, but in thought. How it’s somehow “racism” to demand they fit in into their new homeland.
Remember I’m saying this as someone who’s been there. Acculturation HURTS. Even when you want it, it’s a very painful process. Think of the worst days of your teenage years, and multiply them by five or ten years of consciously dragging yourself through this process.
It’s hard enough to do when you chose this, when you love it, and when your tradition doesn’t demand you hold yourself as an enemy of your new land’s ways. (And btw, I think that’s why it’s considered “racist”: acculturation and pushing for people to assimilate hurts people. Bleeding hearts don’t understand that sometimes hurt is part of the growth process.)
I can’t even imagine trying to do it when immigration was forced on me, when going back was never an option, when my habits, culture and religion both encouraged me to be suspicious of my new countrymen and caused them to suspect me.
Hard? Rather say impossible, or close to. And then add to that telling you that you’re not SUPPOSED to assimilate. And you’re supposed to raise your kids in the old culture.
People who have never acculturated, people who are frankly quite ignorant of what “foreign” or “abroad” means, beyond their easy, lazy, fluffy headed vacations talking to other people like them abroad, call those scared of such an influx of people in that bind “ignorant.” I guess because they lack a mirror.
Is it scary? It is very scary. Can it end well? Of course it can.
But the way it ends well is where our society cheerfully smiles and says “fit in, or f*ck off.” We’ll embrace little Achmed and little Fatima as our countrymen, but NOT if they go around demanding Sharia, telling us to stop eating pork, and that we can’t write/make stupid parodies of Allah, as we do of every other religion/belief in our culture. Sure, they can roll their eyes at the stupid parodies, or write outraged blog posts about our disrespect. But they don’t have the right to try to curtail us by law, or to bring their f*cked up culture, which caused their problems to begin with, here.
I don’t see it happening, at least not while our current multi-culti elites are in power. Which means what we’re doing is importing trouble for later.
Further more, what we’re doing is being horrible to these people and ensuring they’ll never fit in, either place. And not like me, not 90%/10%. No, we’re talking they will fit about 30% either place. And because not self-selected immigrants, they’re probably not odd, not used to NOT belonging.
Of such discontent is strife and war born.
UNDERSTAND this is not what i want, not an expression of my desires. It is what it is, and how the human animal works.
It is impossible to have this deranged belief that culture is genetic and that people can’t and shouldn’t change (a belief belied by history) and a multi-ethnic society. At the end of that road is a war none of us wants to imagine and a far more restrictive society than any of us would like.
The only ways out of it are to either take no immigrants, certainly no immigrants in a large group (which makes it harder to leave the old country and its hates and loves behind) OR to hand to every refugee a little handbook.
The cover would say “Fit in or f*ck off.” And the inside would explain “At home we did it–” is banned, that it’s gauche to try to pass the culture you left behind to your kids. Oh, food and attire are fine, no one complains of that, but do not try to pass on “we hate x because in the 11th century, they”. And the only way to stop passing that on is to be American as HARD as you can.
Which hurts. It hurts like hell. The generation that immigrated will never fully heal from it, and their kids will still bear scars.
But it’s the only way to make good on your choice of America. It’s that or go back. There is no other choice. Making your new country fit the old is the WRONG choice. Else, why did you leave.
Fit in or f*ck off. No, this doesn’t mean becoming the Borg. America is the society on Earth with the greatest tolerance for oddities and outliers. BUT you do need to fit in minimally to succeed. And you need to start thinking of America as “we” and not holding yourself up above the rest of your countrymen.
This goes double and with bells on if you were born and raised here. Stop imagining there is a perfect society elsewhere and that you somehow belong to it.
Life is in great part the art of adapting to the flaws in reality that don’t match your desired state.
According To Hoyt 