I don’t have anything eloquent or insightful to say on the subject, but I feel that I should say this: to hell with the white-supremacist Nazi subculture that is thriving in my country today, and to hell with anyone who either supports them directly or offers them de facto shadow support by offering arguments like “Sad about what happened but Antifa is worse”, to hell with a major political party that decided that its ensconcement in power was a sufficiently worthy goal to ally with such people, and to hell with a moral midget of a President whose election is manna from heaven to these people and in whom they find a father figure.
A Guide to Making Good Life Choices
Two Hundred Forty One
I’m not going to lie, folks: it feels different this year. But this is still America and it’s still my home.
Happy Birthday, America. (Even if my current relationship status with you is set to "It's complicated.")
— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) July 4, 2017
It is complicated.
Obviously in a country this size we’re never all going to be on the same page. Heck, even if the country totaled 200 people, we wouldn’t all be on the same page. But the size of the disconnect right now is pretty staggering and more than a little daunting, in terms of the future.
But this is still America and it’s still my home.
I don’t know where we’re going, I don’t know where we want to go, and I fear that not enough people want America to go where it seems to me that it really needs to, and should, go.
But this is still America and it’s still my home.
I’m not fighting today. I’m celebrating and thinking and reading and listening to music. I’ll fight again tomorrow.
Because this is still American and it’s still my home.
Happy birthday to the red, white, and blue.
And now, the text of a post I occasionally run on this day:
—
Here’s a really weird story. It’s so weird, I’m not sure the historians didn’t make it up out of whole cloth. It seems that around 235 years ago or so, some folks living in a place under the rule of a King decided that they didn’t much like the way that King was ruling them. At all. They pretty much decided, en masse, that their King was behaving, to use a current term, like a douche.
Now, over the many centuries before these folks came along, lots of other folks in other lands have decided that their Kings and Queens were being douchey, so they came up with ways to replace them. They’d organize revolts, usually behind the banner of some obscure relative of the monarch’s so they could say that their person has a better claim to the throne, and off they’d go. So you’d expect that the folks we’re talking about here would have just said, “You know what? Our King is a douche. Let’s replace him with a new King.”
But these folks didn’t say that. What they said was, “Not only does our King suck, but he sucks so much that we’re now thinking maybe we won’t even have any more Kings. We’ll do it all ourselves.”
Over a year or so, there were some battles and skirmishes between these folks and the troops sent by the King to put down the pesky rebels, but it didn’t work, and that notion — “No more Kings and Queens!” — took hold. It became a really popular idea, so finally, these folks appointed some representatives to gather in one of their cities and talk these issues over. The conversation went like this:
GUY #1: So, we’re all agreed then? Kings suck?
GUY #2: Yes, Verily, they suck.
GUY #1: OK, so what do we do?
GUY #3: Well, we’re already fighting, so we just keep fighting. But we should probably tell the King that we’re being serious and we’re not just a bunch of rabble-rousers here.
GUY #1: Right! How do we do that?
GUY #4: How ’bout a letter? I’ve got some nice parchment, quills, and a new bottle of ink.
GUY #2: Good idea! But you’re about as eloquent as my cow. You’ll just write “Hey King, sod off” and be done with it. We should be a bit more poetic about it.
GUY #4: How about Tom? He’s pretty poetic.
GUY #1: Good idea! Let Tom do it. Now where’s that Adams guy with the beer?
So a guy named Tom wrote the King a sternly-worded letter. It was pretty wordy, given the standards of the time, so here’s a paraphrase:
Dear King,
We the undersigned, being representatives of the people of your colonies, have collectively decided that you are a douche and we don’t want to live under your rule anymore. Furthermore, we’re going to come up with a government of our own that won’t even have a King. Now, we’ve just called you a douche, so you’re probably thinking that we should be kind enough to at least tell you all the reasons we have for thinking you’re a douche, so there’s a list of those reasons later on. For now, suffice it to say that we believe in Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. And you don’t. And since we like the whole Life and Liberty thing a lot more than we like you, we’re gonna take those and let you do whatever it is you do with your time in that Palace of yours.
So, here’s the list of ways you’ve pissed us off. Note how long it is. You don’t have to be a douche, you know.
…
See? Really, dude. There’s no reason for some of that stuff, right? So anyway, have a good life and all. You’ve still got your island, and Canada seems pretty happy with you for some reason (but really, they’re weird folks to begin with, what with that odd game they like to play on ice). But we’re out of here.
Signed,
All the guys presentPS: Could you make sure your soldiers always wear those bright red coats? It makes it really easy to see ’em in the forests. KTHXBAI.
And so it came to pass that after some years of war, and some further years of cruddy government, they all got together again and figured out how they wanted to set up their new, “No Kings!” government. Their notion was to spread power out amongst a bunch of folks who were accountable to the people, and to further make sure that their government was required to respect certain rights that couldn’t be taken away. It was a really weird idea…and yet, these folks worked hard to make it work, and their children kept working hard to make it work, and their children kept at it, and so on and so on and son on, until today.
Does it still work? Sometimes yes, sometimes not so much. But we’re still here, and we’re still working at it.
Share This Post
Larry Havers, 1946-1967
Fourteen years ago I wrote the following on Memorial Day, and I wanted to revisit it. It’s about the Vietnam Veteran whose name I remember, despite the fact that I had no relation to him and clearly never knew him, because he was killed four years before I was born.
Memorial Day, for all its solemnity, has for me always been something of a distant holiday, because no one close to me has ever fallen in war, and in fact I have to look pretty far for relatives who have even served in wartime. Both of my grandfathers fought in World War I, but both had been dead for years when I was born. I know that an uncle of mine served during World War II, but I also know that he saw no action (not to belittle his service, but Memorial Day is generally set aside to remember those who paid the “last full price of devotion”). My father-in-law served in Viet Nam, but my own father did not (he had college deferments for the first half of the war, and was above draft age during the second). So there is little in my family history to personalize Memorial Day; for me, it really is a day to remember “all the men and women who have died in service to the United States”.
One personal remembrance, though, does creep up for me each Memorial Day. It has nothing at all to do with my family; in fact, I have no connection with the young man in question.
When I was in grade school, during the fall and spring, when the weather was nice, we would have gym class outdoors, at the athletic field. On good days we’d play softball or flag football or soccer; on not-so-good days we’d run around the quarter-mile track. But the walk to the athletic field involved crossing the street in front of the school and walking a tenth of a mile or so down the street, past the town cemetery. I remember that at the corner of the cemetery we passed, behind the wrought-iron fence, the grave of a man named Larry Havers was visible. His stone was decorated with a photograph of him, in military uniform. I don’t recall what branch in which he served, nor do I recall his date-of-birth as given on the stone, but I do recall the year of his death: 1967. I even think the stone specified the specific battle in which he was killed in action, but I’m not sure about that, either.
That’s what I remember each Memorial Day: the grave of a man I never knew, who died four years before I was born in a place across the world to which I doubt I’ll ever go. And in the absence of anyone from my own family, Mr. Havers’s name will probably be the one I look for if I ever visit that memorial in Washington. I hope his family wouldn’t mind.
I looked online and found these images, first of Mr. Havers’s obituary and then of Mr. Havers himself. The things you remember. I wonder what kind of man he was. This year he has been gone for half a century. His name is not forgotten.
Mr. Havers’s service information can be found on the Virtual Vietnam Wall here. He was born 14 October 1946 and died 29 October 1967, in Thua Thien.
Share This Post
In memory of those who paid
Know, all who see these lines,
That this man, by his appetite for honor,
By his steadfastness,
By his love for his country,
By his courage,
Was one of the miracles of the God.— Guy Gavriel Kay
Well, how do you do, young Willie McBride,
Do you mind if I sit down here by your graveside?
And rest for awhile ‘neath the warm summer sun,
I’ve been walking all day, and I’m nearly done.
I see by your gravestone you were only 19
When you joined the great fallen in 1916,
I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean
Or, Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?
Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?
Did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind
In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined?
And, though you died back in 1916,
To that faithful heart are you forever 19?
Or are you a stranger without even a name,
Enshrined then, forever, behind a glass pane,
In an old photograph, torn and tattered and stained,
And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame?
Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?
The sun’s shining down on these green fields of France;
The warm wind blows gently, and the red poppies dance.
The trenches have vanished long under the plow;
No gas and no barbed wire, no guns firing now.
But here in this graveyard that’s still No Man’s Land
The countless white crosses in stand mute in the sand
To man’s blind indifference to his fellow man,
And a whole generation who were butchered and damned.
Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?
And I can’t help but wonder, no Willie McBride,
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did they really believe when they answered the call,
Did they really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the sorrow, the suffering, the glory, the pain
The killing and dying, was all done in vain,
For young Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.
Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?
Share This Post
Come on, ONE of you has gotta go!
This United Airlines fiasco is quite the thing, from the bizarre legality of a business being allowed to sell more of a product than it can actually provide (most other businesses would be accused of fraud if they tried that), to the police being deployed to enforce the whims of a corporation. For me, the most depressing aspect is all the people online excusing United’s behavior, on the basis that “Them’s the rules” and “It’s in the fine print.” Blind acquiescence to corporate authority cannot be that good a thing. (And I’ll leave unmentioned the awfulness of some news media outlets deciding to dig into the passenger’s past, as if that in any way excuses what’s happened to him now. The whole “He’s no angel, though” thing has got to stop.)
This fiasco has, though, prompted a lot of hilarious reaction from the Internet, and really, this post is just an excuse for me to post one of these. And here you go:
Well, look — it’s pretty obvious which of these guys is going to get “re-accommodated”. Looking at the line of redshirts, do you notice anything distinctive about the third guy from the left?
Share This Post
More snow….
This really hasn’t been a very hard winter, in terms of snow. In fact, there’s only been one or two really “big” snow events, and one of those was really only notorious by virtue of when and how the snow hit: intense snowbands that stalled in place right during late afternoon and evening rush hour, back in November. That made a huge mess, and there were even kids stranded on school buses or who didn’t even make it out of school.
So now the “big storm” is hitting the Northeast, and it’s not sparing Buffalo. We’re not really on the docket to bear any of the brunt of this one, but we will get a good amount of snow. Luckily it will fall over three days instead of three hours, which makes it much more manageable. There’s some kvetching going on because Governor Cuomo declared a state of emergency not just for Eastern NY and the NYC metro area, which are the regions that are in the crosshairs for a big hit, but for all of New York State, which has a lot of people in Buffalo going, “Huh? We’ve functioned normally in worse than this.” I dunno…I can see that point, but we have seen storms turn worse than expected in recent memory (see above), and just last week there was a nasty wind storm that still has several thousand homes in WNY without electricity. I don’t think erring on the side of caution is always a bad thing.
Anyway, stay warm, people!
Share This Post
Happy Pi Day!!!
UPDATE 3/14/2019
I see this post is getting a lot of traffic all of a sudden, so if you like this sort of goofiness, check out my similar post from last year, which features a newer video in which I may or may not get pied. (Spoiler: I get pied.) Happy Pi Day, everyone!
UPDATED below!
Yes, it’s Pi Day, 3-14, the funnest of all the various goofy geeky holidays! (Well, May 4 — Star Wars Day — is right up there.)
UPDATE!!!
I posted the earlier material to hold this space until I had my own material ready to go. I didn’t properly observe Pi Day last year, so I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice!
(These photos have been modified with an app called Prisma that makes nifty “artistic” images out of source photos.)
Happy Pi Day, everyone!!!!!
Share This Post
Dear 45 (an Open Letter to the President of the United States)
Dear Mr. President,
Yes, you are my President.
But I do not support you, and I do not expect good things from you. I do not expect good policy choices, nor do I expect good outcomes. My expectations for you are astoundingly, confounding low, because that’s where you put them. You did it by appealing, day in and day out, to the very worst instincts in the American psyche, right from your campaign’s opening address when you warned us all about the steady stream and rapists and murderers surging into our country from across the Rio Grande.
You did it by lying day in and day out, so much that reporters had trouble figuring out how to report that you were lying. You lied so much that you were eventually lying about having lied in the first place. You ran the most dishonest presidential campaign I have ever seen, and yet somehow you managed to reap the benefit of an opponent whom most people seem to think is also a huge liar, even though she isn’t.
You did it by cheering on the expulsion of people from your events of people who don’t like you or who say things about you that you don’t like.
You did it by several years ago making your first big claim to political fame by pursuing the stupid fiction that Barack Obama was not a natural-born American citizen.
You did it by showing on FOX News repeatedly to scoff at the very idea of global warming and climate change.
You did it with idiotic policy proposals like building a wall between the United States and Mexico, and then compounding this stupidity with the idea that Mexico will somehow be forced to pay for it.
You did it by filling your administration with people who are clearly on the take, people who are clearly going to make out like bandits, people who are obviously going to set to the tasks of destroying the missions of the agencies they are heading, and people who are simply downright ignorant (an Energy Secretary who didn’t know what the department even does, or a HUD secretary who believes that the Egyptian pyramids are grain silos).
You lowered my expectations by attacking people left and right on Twitter, by egging on your bizarrely rabid followers, by threatening your opponent with investigations and prosecutions, and by scoffing at one’s obligations as a citizen by saying “It makes you smart” that you managed to avoid paying income taxes at one point.
There is literally nothing you have said or done over the last eighteen months that gives me the smallest reason to think that you might be a good President. You have shown no curiosity about issues or insight into them. You have shown zero respect for the work of the job or the norms that surround it. You have demonstrated no foreign policy acumen aside from chest-thumping and Russo-philia. I can think of no issue that stands to improve for your having addressed it, and I can think of no aspect of American life that will be better for your having been President.
And the thing is? You’re going to fail. No matter what. You’re going to be able to do a lot of damage, and you’ll ruin a lot of lives. Hell, if you and your cohorts in Congress repeal the ACA without a “replacement” (and let’s be honest, none of you has the slightest idea what kind of “replacement” you’ll offer), you might just kill people. But it won’t matter. Not in the long-run, it won’t. You’re not going to reignite American manufacturing so that towns once more have big factories employing ten thousand people. You’re not going to be able to push all of the queer people back into their respective closets. You’re not going to make the young people like you.
Ultimately, though, I don’t even think you care that much, and that may bother me most of all. You seem to expect the Presidency to be this easy thing that you can almost do on a part-time basis, and that your business experience is one hundred percent applicable to the challenges you will confront as President. As to the latter, your business experience isn’t the unbroken run of amazing success stories that you often say it is, and that experience is not always applicable. What might be OK in a board room is not OK in a cabinet meeting.
In short, I expect your Presidency to be a time of awful policy making combined with amazing levels of corruption. The last administration that paired deep disengagement in policy and facts with willingness to profit from events did not result in good results. Your judicial appointees will be terrible people, and our Congress will rubber-stamp your stuff and you’ll rubber-stamp their stuff. The idea of national government in the hands of you, Paul Ryan, and Mitch McConnell fills me with many emotions, none of them happy and most of them angry.
So thus will I join the millions of Americans who are going to oppose you and resist you and work hard to thwart you and your agenda. And when we finally get rid of you and your Congress?
Well, that’s when we’ll start making America great again.
Share This Post
Dear 44 (an Open Letter to the President of the United States)
Dear Mr. President,
I honestly never thought writing something on the occasion of your impending departure from office would feel so bittersweet, but my God — I didn’t expect a lot of things.
On the night you won the Presidency, there was a surging feeling that America had done one of the truly spectacular things that it has done occasionally in its history. It felt, in some way, like putting a human being on the Moon, or maybe like sending wave upon wave of thousands of soldiers onto those beaches in France to finally start putting an end to World War II. I was born in 1971, so I’ve known all too few of those amazing moments when the promise of America seems to rise up and make itself known in one single event. That’s what your election felt like.
Maybe that was too much to put on you, in addition to, you know, actually being President.
On that night in 2008, I wrote about how much you inspired me and how you represented not just a huge step forward in being this country’s first black President, but that you also appealed by virtue of being a curious and studious man who didn’t seem to approach each issue with your mind already made up. I think that you did end up being that kind of President, and the country benefited for having a calm and steady hand at the wheel, a hand that was not prone to emotional decision-making or spontaneous policies shaped by a misplaced faith in your own ability to size people up on sight.
I also noted that you were still an imperfect human being, and that you were still going to have to work within the confines of our existing political system, which meant in turn that you would be disappointing to me on occasion. I won’t lie: yes, there were times when I wished you would push the gas a little harder, show a little more of your anger, shoot from the hip a little more. I wish you would have recognized earlier the degree to which the Republican Party was unwilling to engage your ideas in any way other than predetermined opposition. I also wish that the drone warfare had ended, and I’m sure that you’re frustrated that Guantanamo Bay is still a going concern and that you got absolutely nowhere in addressing America’s ongoing love affair with firearms.
But that’s the point, isn’t it? I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure that no President has ever left office having achieved every policy goal they set forth from the time they took office. I’m sure every President who left office under their own power felt the keen pain of missed opportunities and unmet goals, some more than others. But you got a surprising amount of things done: the stimulus package that kept an economic disaster from metastasizing into an economic calamity for the ages. Real policy changes addressing climate change. An end to discrimination against gays in our nation’s military. The Affordable Care Act.
I don’t know how many of those things will stay in effect. Like many Americans — if not most Americans — I look to the future, and to what may be coming from the incoming President and Congress, with a high degree of trepidation and grim resolve to fight against it. I’ve no doubt whatsoever that you will not be shrinking from the coming battles, as justified as you might be in stepping back and saying “Come on, folks, I did the job for eight years and I’ve earned a break.” The truth is, there is still a lot of ugliness in the heart of this country, which eight years of your Presidency were not enough to end. We are still a country with a great deal of latent and institutionalized racism, sexism, and other bigotries in play. We are still a country that seeks to punish the poor, that undervalues education and those that provide it. We are still a country that praises freedom but erects barriers to voting. We are still a country that resists application of policy ideas that have proven far superior in other countries to our own approaches to issues like health care, energy, and transportation.
It saddens me deeply that a lot of these ugly factors in the American psyche are coming to the fore as you leave office, Mr. President. You worked hard to engage these things and there are times when it’s hard to look around and see any progress at all.
But we did elect you, Mr. President. We elected you by huge numbers, and we did it twice. Further, the incoming President, for all his loud bluster, is only the incoming President by virtue of a very odd quirk in our electoral system. And there are millions upon millions of people who are unwilling to see your work and your legacy undone. Jon Stewart said a few months ago that we are still the country that elected Barack Obama. We’re going to have to live up to that, but we’re still a country where millions elected you and where millions supported you and where millions are ready to stand up and fight for the things that you just finished eight years fighting for. We’re not throwing away our shot.
So anyway, I just wanted to say thank you, Mr. President. You did a lot of good for the United States, and I truly believe that we are better for your service. I truly believe that you are the best President of my lifetime (and my sample size starts with Nixon). I hope that you will continue to see, in decades to come, an America that resumes and continues striving for the America that you said we could have. And we still can.
Yes, we can.
Sincerely,
Kelly C Sedinger
PS: I’ve got a bit of a crush on your wife. I hope you don’t mind.
