The Two That Got Away

The week after Thanksgiving. . .

"So, you hear the one about the hunters?"

"No, tell me."

Two hunters walked into a bar. . ."

Teddy Roosevelt and the 1907 New York Herald

The first president to understand the importance of working class Americans was TR. No wonder he was adored by so many.

Here are two original cartoons from the 1907 New York Herald Newspaper.

This is the lighter side of politics. Yes, that's what I said and isn't it about time we all lightened up?

Good, now read and enjoy.








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Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina Rationing Health Care

Two months ago, my wife and I began health care coverage with Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina. The monthly payment was $499.00 for $5000.00 deductible on a 60/40 plan, which means after the deductible amount is met, they pay 60 we pay 40%.

Today, I received the pictured letter in the mail, notifying me our monthly payment amount would increase to $528.00, or about a 6% increase.

We have not used our Blue Cross Blue Shield health care, period. Not once for any reason.

Along with the increased monthly payment amount, Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina will now be rationing MRI, MRA, CT, and PET procedures. Read the letter I've posted to learn more.

We need the public option to stop this. But do not count on South Carolina's U.S. Senators, or Republican Congressmen, they receive serious campaign contributions from the heath care industry.

Note this too:

Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina overcharged Medicare 6 million dollars to pay for executive pensions. This in one of the states with the highest number of uninsured, one of the worst overall health care systems in the country. However, BCBS CEO is one of the best-paid and financially compensated HMO executives in America.

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Fear is not Freedom

Fear is the mind killer, Frank Herbert wrote. However, fear is but half the equation of domination. The second half is hopelessness.

We saw, clearly demonstrated in the early years of this century, the ease with which fear and hopelessness saturates freedom.

The insane activities of a single man ignited another's drive for revenge, which bled into the thoughts of the people. Led by his fanatic need for retribution millions clamored around his cause, feeding on the fear he stoked to maintain the frenzy of the innocent.

The fervor rose in pitch until it permeated society through the multiple channels of media driven by online faces and spaces, bloggers, and cable network news. Discussions removed from civility, evolved into catastrophic verbal brawls and occasional physical confrontation.

The death of innocents, once a rare horror viewed with complete disbelief, became commonplace as parents killed not only each other, but also their entire families without cause it seemed, or any form of justification beyond that of fear and hopelessness.

As if this was not sufficient to satisfy, leaders twisted by the quest for apocalypse targeted the welfare of the less fortunate in contradiction to their religious teacher's words. Then, they flooded other lands with the quagmire of their venomous hatred of common decency.

Spiraling in the frenzy of fear's hatred, their followers attacked any person or idea they now believed with the conviction of the insane, affronted the concepts they allegedly upheld.

The welfare and health of all citizens no longer stood as a moral foundation of freedom, but instead, according to the few leaders now on platforms of greed and personal desire for fame, undermined the principles that so many combat heroes sacrificed lives and futures to create more than two centuries earlier and since.

Solutions no longer seem to exist, excluding the most radical, which dissect the diseased remains of a nation once held in the highest esteem by all others. When finished, discard, or allow secession to root out those leaders who will call their followers to lemming-like retreats on the rock-strewn shores of religious persecution.

Those leaders, thinking themselves elite aristocrats, noblemen, and princes, will gather armies to corral and control their followers once those drones declare their error and plead with outsiders for humane retreat.

Of course, there are alternatives, but none with fear and hopelessness interwoven through the fabric of order.

Acceptance and hope, like that which created democracy from the ashes of monarchy, and the voices of men and women who understand and uphold equality and morality are what is needed now.

Yet, I now wonder if this society can be rescued from the damage severing the arteries of peaceful dialogue. A few men with wealth and power created a tidal wave, and like any tsunami, the waters of misunderstanding mindlessly roil and churn, swallowing the good and evil together.

I am afraid that the future holds only division, since the two sides now represented in town hall meetings do not care to find common ground. Each seeks the higher level, the path most walked on rather than the trail trod by those who listen to the beat of a distant, and it seems forgotten drummer. As they do, the least among us die and starve, which is the ultimate demise of democracy and freedom.
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A Soldier's Bond

When I walked into his room, I knew he was dying. His face looked gaunt, as if the muscles that once pulled a frown, and parted a smile chased by laughter had dried up. Yet, he managed a weak smile when he saw me in uniform.

As I approached the side of his bed, I smelled his death as if it clung to the air around him like an apparition, patiently awaiting its final embrace. The scent of it was different from combat death. In war, death is liquid red, raw flesh, shattered bone. It smelled as if life lingered, the passing soul shocked by the awareness that twenty was the totality of its years.

He spoke softly, greeted me, and sounded as if he truly felt happy I survived something I was not sure I cared to have survived.

Survival is not living, I wanted to tell him, but he would not have understood. On the other hand, if he had, he might have misconstrued my intent.

I took his frail hand, grasped it expecting the strength it once revealed, and found him unable to grip my fingers. When I was a boy, he would act as if he planned to crush my hand, squeezing enough to water my eyes. As a master carpenter, he wielded a hammer, and I watched in awe as he drove sixteen-penny nails into two by fours with three blows.

We spoke, innocuous subjects avoiding the past. While we did, my mind wandered. Two weeks earlier, I slept in a combat zone, discussed killing the enemy with the appreciation only a soldier might comprehend. Them or us, we knew. They used the cover of night, falling rain, and boldness to assault our sandbag lined shelters.

Gunfire, artillery rounds roared at 3a.m. like locomotives racing fifty feet overhead. The heated rounds ignited air molecules as they forced their bulk along a path destined to terminate fifteen or more lives.

Since I ordered the attack, I listed with headphones to the sound of incoming, heard the heated rounds whistling to the earth as if it was a movie. They exploded over the electronic sensors planted on an enemy infiltration trail through the jungle blasting the voices I had heard minutes earlier while they talked and laughed, the voices that alerted me that the enemy moved in our direction.

I listened to them die, died with them, roughly removed the headphones and realized I could no longer see the world I knew that afternoon. Nature's darkness quivered around me, the room's light, too, seemed to fade. With a shock-steadied hand, I lit a cigarette, stared into the flame, wondered why it did not extinguish when I blew on it.

His weak fingers found strength enough to close on mine as if even though he was dying, he understood the place I had just visited. I looked into his northern German blue eyes; saw him studying me with a wisdom I once wished I might share with a man from his generation.

Now, his words did not form, but then I no longer needed them. What flowed silently between us felt stronger, like a bond given from an older man to a younger man as had been done for a thousand generations. Warriors walked the same path, through the same history, and when we glanced over our shoulders, saw those who strode before us. The trail was a long narrow corridor of time strewn with the fallen.

He did not know, that I at twenty-one knew I was older than he was, at seventy-five.

Facing death in combat left me indifferent to death outside of the battlefield. I struggled to move into a civilian life, and never again spent time with him that passed more than a casual greeting.

He died three weeks to the day after I returned home, six or more months beyond the time his doctor told him he had left to live.

And, I mourn him still.
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Spider and Snake

None shall know
of the zephyr’s passage
or the secret story
its passing foretells,
it drifts through ancient rafters
rustling webs among the eaves
awakening a lazy brown spider
at the center of her tattered web,
legs flexing
fluid spinning
she dances in preparation
for the coming generation.

This homespun globe spirals
into the sun
with a lamb upon a spit
once tender flesh crackles
above glowing embers,
while the hungry sit and watch
their tired tongues flickering
in the desert sun
their stretched bodies slither and writhe
sliding over crystalline sand
as they flee the unforgiving.

Yet that glowing global ember
grows even larger
until it slowly settles in the sea
orange light spilling
drifting through the rafters
through cracks in the walls,
and the brown spider
hunger now abated
curling her legs beneath her
patiently awaits the next zephyr.

If the Past Held the Future

If I strolled along the crest of hill overlooking the sand dunes hiding the beach from view, you would not see my passing. Yet, if I walked where you saw me as you had long in the past, you would not know me. Memories are cellophane wrappers carefully applied to preserve what we experienced.

They rattle when we touch them, as if in warning, telling us that if we peel away their protection, what we discover once exposed to the light of present day might not reveal the knowledge we anticipated so anxiously.

Alternatively, if knowledge was not our desire, but a comparison between then and now, we might learn that what we left behind was a tenuous crystal egg of time. Within it lies trapped the fragile innocence of youth we then believed filled with the wisdom reserved for those who lived long enough to understand the true definition of tolerance, upon, which wisdom roots itself most securely.

Moreover, if we sought fondness along with those echoing whispered promises of joy and forever, we might discover that promises were a moment's gift, and forever ended a moment later.

Haunted by the why of yesterday, we might learn that the why of today is but the precursor. Perhaps every why goes unanswered when definition is proven unnecessary. Asking may be a delay, but not a query.

The sand across the top of the dunes swirled under a stiff breeze's persuasion, rattling across my feet as I moved forward. I will not walk where you might see me. I do not want to see you. Let the rustling cellophane of memory fade as a hawk's feathers shivering the air do, when he drops to strike his prey.
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