I am frequently puzzled by pious sayings. I know they are meant to be comforting, but why? Things like “God opens a window when he closes a door.” “God will take care of it.” ” Have faith, God will save you” all imply that you … we … are helpless. That we can do nothing in the face of problems other than pray to a higher power for help.
Why is that? Why should helplessness be a comfort to anyone?
What makes you think God closed that door? Maybe the wind blew it shut. God may take care of you in a spiritual sense, but practically speaking, for every person I know who feels God saved them, there are many more who didn’t survive the disease, lost their home, wound up on the street, lost a child, lost a mate, didn’t succeed, failed to meet the challenge. I’m much more inclined to “God helps them who helps themselves.” Because it suggests that we have strength, that we are not simply at the mercy of forces we cannot control.
Does that mean I’m an atheist? Not at all. What I have is an unyielding belief that with free will, we also have responsibility.
God gave us gifts when we were created as images of Himself. We got intelligence, cleverness, reason, creativity. We were granted the ability to judge right from wrong, knowledge of good and evil. When a window closes, there is no reason to assume God closed it. It’s entirely likely, if you look around, pay attention and don’t collapse in a sodden heap of helpless tears, you may see a window is already there, was always there, but you weren’t looking for it. Walk over, brace yourself, and open the window. Voila!
You don’t need to ask God to do those things you can and should do for yourself.
I don’t believe clouds have silver linings, but I believe storms are no less necessary than sunshine. We need rain, wind and storms. It’s part of life, the normal ups and downs. Rain is not worse or less valuable than sunshine, only different. It keeps the aquifers alive and the crops growing. You may not like rain, but the earth loves and needs it. Creation was not made just for you and me and our personal comfort and convenience.
There are many things over which we have no control. We cannot fix all the broken things in the world or in our lives. Death is part of life and though we fear it, it’s the only certainty.
Until then, we have choices to make and responsibilities to meet. If we can’t make everything go as we want, we can do the best we can to take care of ourselves and each other, make the best of our choices. Pick good occupations, mates. When needed, find the right surgeon, hospital and treatment. Find good people to be our friends, who will support us through good times and bad. We can choose to be decent, kind, caring and treat others as we want to be treated.
We can choose paths of honor and love. We can be the good guys. We can decide to care for other people even when it costs us dearly.
We can make those choices because we were born to an understanding of right and wrong, with the ability to make the best of bad situations, to cope with pain and bear up under ill-fortune. That’s not punishment. It’s life. No one said it was going to be easy.
We don’t have to wait for a higher power to take care of us. We are grown ups. Expecting God to take care of every boo-boo is infantile. If we aren’t supposed to take care of ourselves, why did God give us the ability to do so? If He was intending to personally care for all the needs of every single person on the planet, why give us the wondrous gifts to which we are heir?
Do I pray? Yes. Do I think prayers get answered? Absolutely.
But remember this when you pray. Sometimes the answer is “No.”
We are free to ask, but free will cuts both ways. God has free will too, so there’s no guarantee we’ll get what we ask for. God never promised to fix every hurt or eliminate evil. No matter what religion you follow — or even if you follow no particular faith — nothing and no one promises to make all the bad stuff go away. So I will continue do my best to take care of me and mine, using the gifts God gave me as best I can.
If you are somewhere around my age, you remember the Jonestown Massacre. Even if you were a lot younger, if you were old enough to read a newspaper or watch TV, you could hardly forget it. With fundamentalism enjoying a rebirth, with well-known people urging others to murder or mayhem, it is a good time to remember where this kind of thing leads. These days, disagreements that ought to result in nothing more serious than an argument result in the ugliest kind of hate-spewing rhetoric.
Lest we forget, there was nothing even remotely amusing about this story. There isn’t a word that begins to sum up the sickening reality.
It isn’t rare for fanaticism and hatred to end in death. It frequently leads to a lot of death and almost always, it is the most innocent who pay the butcher’s bill.
The Road to Jonestown
The phrase “drink the Kool-Aid” has become common parlance in American business and politics. Roughly translated, it means “to blindly follow.” It usually carries a negative connotation. The “Kool Aid” references go all the back to the 1950s when it was the typical drink for children on suburban summer afternoons. But the origin of the saying is something else, darker, and different. It has become the kind of bland rhetoric about which we don’t give a thought, but its roots lie in horror.
Before we talk about Kool-Aid, let’s take a brief trip down memory lane to a particularly horrible episode of American history.
Jim Jones, cult leader and mass murderer, was a complex madman. A communist, occasional Methodist minister, he founded his own pseudo-church in the late 1950s. He called it the “Peoples Temple Full Gospel Church,” known in short as the “Peoples Temple.”
The lack of a possessive apostrophe was intentional. The name was supposed to be a reference to “the people of the world.” While Jones called it a church, it was closer to a warped version of a Marxist commune. Initially, it was combined with a hodgepodge of Christian references that he used in his diatribes … supposedly sermons.
Regardless, it was never any kind of church. The Peoples Temple was a straight-up cult. It made serious demands in the way of personal committment and financial support from its members and a level of obedience that is the defining quality of a cult.
Jones was the cult’s leader — and a homicidal maniac — but he had positive attributes. Jones and his wife Marceline were strongly in favor of racial integration. They adopted a bunch of kids from varying racial backgrounds. They were the first white family in Indiana to adopt an African-American boy. Other adopted children included 3 Korean Americans, a Native American, and a handful of white kids. They also had one child of their own.
Jones called his adopted kids the “Rainbow Family,” and he made a name for himself desegregating various institutions in Indiana. Before you get all dewy-eyed about this, note this ultimately climaxed in the murder of these children by their adoptive parents.
The Peoples Temple continued to expand through the 1960s. Jones gradually abandoned his Marxism. His preaching began to increasingly focus on impending nuclear apocalypse. He even specified a date — July 15, 1967 — and suggested after the apocalypse, a socialist paradise would exist on Earth. Where would the new Eden be?
Jones decided on the town of Redwood Valley, California and before the expected Big Bang, he moved the Temple and its peoples there.
When the end-of-the-world deadline came and went without nuclear holocaust, Jones abandoned even the pretenses of Christianity. The cloak came off and he revealed himself as an atheist using religion to give legitimacy to his views. Jones announced that “Those who remained drugged with the opiate of religion must be brought to enlightenment — socialism.” Prophetic words in view of the fact that Jones himself was a drug addict who preferred literal to metaphorical opiates.
As media attention increased, Jones started to worry the Peoples Temple’s tax-exempt religious status was in danger of revocation. He was paranoid about the U.S. intelligence community — probably with justification.
Jim Jones, cult leader
In 1977, Jones moved the Temple and its people again. This was a major relocation, leaving the United States completely and settling on a site that Jones had been working on since 1974. Located in Guyana, a poor South American nation, he modestly named it “Jonestown.”
It was a bleak, inhospitable place on 4000 acres of poor soil with limited access to fresh water. It was much to small encampment, dramatically overcrowded Temple members were forced to work long hours merely to survive.
Jones figured his people could farm the land in this new utopia. He had put together several million dollars before getting to Jonestown, but his wealth was not shared amongst his followers. He barely used any of the money for himself and lived in a small, bare-bones shared house.
All Hell Breaks Loose
U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan visited Jonestown in November of 1978. Rumors of peculiar goings-on were leaking out of Jonestown. Ryan decided to investigate the allegations of human rights abuses in Jonestown.
Ryan didn’t go alone. He took a contingent of media representatives including NBC News correspondent Don Harris and other reporters, plus relatives of Jonestown resident. During his visit to Jonestown, Congressman Ryan talked to more than a dozen Temple members, all of whom said they wanted to leave. Several of them passed a note saying: “Please help us get out of Jonestown” to news anchor Harris.
If the number of defectors seems low proportionate to the more than 900 residents of Jonestown, keep in mind the congressional party had not been able to talk to most of the “fellowship.” The number of those who might have wanted to leave could conceivably been much more but we will never know.
Ryan began processing the paperwork to repatriate Temple members who wanted to go back to the States. In the middle of this, Ryan was attacked by Don Sly, a knife-wielding Temple member. This would-be assassin was stopped before injuring Ryan.
Eventually the entire Ryan party plus the group of Jonestown defectors drove to a nearby airstrip and boarded planes, intending to leave. Jim Jones had other plans. He sent armed Temple members — his “Red Brigade” after the Congressional party These creepy ‘soldiers of the Temple” opened fire on them, killing Ryan, one Temple defector, three members of the media, and wounding eleven others. The survivors fled into the jungle.
When the murderers returned to Jonestown and reported their actions, Jones promptly started what he called a “White Night” meeting. He invited all Temple members. This wasn’t the first White Night. Jones had hosted previous White Night meetings in which he suggested U.S. intelligence agencies would soon attack Jonestown.
He had even staged fake attacks to add a realism, though it’s hard to believe that anyone was fooled by the play-acting. Faced with this hypothetical invasion scenario, Jones offered Temple members a set of choices. They could stay and fight imaginary invaders. They could take off for the USSR. Another tempting alternative would be to run off into the jungles of Guyana. Or they could commit mass suicide as an act of political protest.
On previous occasions Temple members had opted for suicide. Not satisfied, Jones had tested their committment and gave them cups of liquid that they were told contained poison. They were asked to drink it. Which they did. After a while, Jones told them the liquid wasn’t poisonous — but one day it would be.
Indeed Jim Jones had been stockpiling cyanide and other drugs for years. On this final White Night, Jones was no longer testing his followers. It was time to kill them all.
Don’t Drink the Poisonous Fruit-Flavored Beverage
After the airstrip murders outside Jonestown, Jim Jones ordered Temple members to create a fruity mix containing a cocktail of chemicals that included cyanide, diazepam (Valium), promethazine (Phenergan — a sedative), chloral hydrate (a sedative/hypnotic sometimes called “knockout drops”), and Flavor Aid — a grape-flavored beverage similar to Kool-Aid.
Jones urged his followers to commit suicide to make a political point. What that point was supposed to be is still a matter of considerable conjecture. After some discussion, Temple member Christine Miller suggested flying Temple members to the USSR.
Jones was never interested in escape. There was only one answer that he would accept. Death and lots of it. He repeatedly pointed out to his followers that Congressman Ryan was dead (and whose fault was that?) which would surely bring down the weight of American retribution in short order. An audiotape of this meeting exists. It is just as creepy as you’d expect.
Then it was time for the detailed instructions which — still baffling to me at least — the followers did as they were told. I will never understand why. Probably that’s a positive sign indicating I’m not insane.
Jones insisted mothers must squirt poison into the mouths of their children using syringes. As their children died, the mothers were dosed as well, though they were allowed to drink from cups. Temple members wandered out onto the ground, where eventually just over 900 lay dead, including more than 300 children. Only a handful of survivors escaped Jonestown — primarily residents who happened to be away on errands or playing basketball when the mass suicide/massacre took place.
Jones, his wife, and various other members of the Temple left wills stating that their assets should go to the Communist Party of the USSR.
Jones did not drink poison. He died from a gunshot to the head, though it’s not clear if it was self-inflicted. Jones likely died last or nearly so and may have preferred the gun to cyanide, having just seen the horrendous effects of death by cyanide.
What’s With the Kool-Aid?
In the wake of the tragedy at Jonestown, the phrase “drink the Kool-Aid” became a popular term for blind obedience, as the Temple members had apparently accepted their cups of poison without objection. According to various accounts, the primary beverage used at Jonestown was actually Flavor Aid (sometimes “Flav-R-Aid”) — although there is evidence both Kool-Aid and Flavor Aid were used.
Kool-Aid was better known than Flavor Aid . Kool-Aid was introduced in 1927 in powdered form. When Americans thought about a powdered fruity drink mix (other than “Tang”), “Kool-Aid” came immediately to mind.
So, although Kool-Aid and Flavor Aid were both present at Jonestown, the phrase “(don’t) drink the Kool-Aid” has become entrenched in popular lingo.
Last year at this time a facebook status, some stories in the news and a number of You Tube videos on "coming out" compelled me to write on a topic I might have otherwise avoided. As you will see below, I could not find a dramatic You Tube video at the time on the harrowing coming out story to which I referred.
I started reading Ender’s World: Fresh Perspectives on the SF Classic Ender’s Game with high hopes. I love the Ender’s Game series. I thought it was one of the more original science fiction series of the last couple of decades. I like the characters. I especially like that Orson Scott Card didn’t baby his readers. When times got hard, his characters suffered. They grew, they learned to deal with the fallout from their wrong decisions, society’s wrong-headedness and other peoples’ bad choices. They dealt with unfairness, misjudgment by themselves and others.
They felt the pain of love that is not returned, of exile that is undeserved. Bad people transformed into much better people over time. Good people lost their edge. I read every book in the series including books that were not directly in the same timeline but concerned characters who formed the original groups at Battle School.
Ender’s Game and the books that follow are thought-provoking and on many levels disturbing. It questions our fundamental views on children, right and wrong. Our beliefs that “our species first” and by inference, “our country first” is the moral choice.
I consider myself an intelligent reader and I have a strong interest in philosophy and ethics. What’s more, I believe that the science fiction reading audience is probably as a group, the smartest, best educated, eclectic group of readers you will ever find. So when offered the opportunity to read Ender’s World, a book that isn’t part of the actual Ender’s Game series but is an analysis of the series and the issues it raises, I jumped at the chance. Oops.
Cover of Ender’s Game (Ender Quartet)
By the time I was half way through the book, I wished I’d never started. I felt like I was back in high school or college lit class, over analyzingMoby Dick until I didn’t know a whale from a guppy … or care. Nothing spoils a good story for me faster than picking at its carcass.
This is a book that takes a great science fiction series and with the best of intentions, squeezes the fun out of it. It removes any sense of wonder you might have remaining, eliminates any potential surprises. It makes you feel your own thoughts are uneducated and insufficiently intellectual.
To say I didn’t enjoy the book doesn’t go quite far enough. I am certain somewhere out there in the big world of books there are those who enjoy this sort of thing. I am not one of them. Minute analyses of fictional material is a kind of dying of the light for me.
Read Ender’s Game. Read the sequels. When you are finished, if you really and truly have nothing else on your plate and want to hear what a bunch of dry academics can do to a great story and characters, read this. Otherwise, skip it.
The ultimate question about this series and every other book or series I read is twofold: did it entertain me? Did it leaving me thinking about it and wanting more? If so, the book has done it’s job and fulfilled its purpose. It’s one thing to talk about a book you love with people who love it too. It’s another thing to pick it apart until you no longer recognize it.
I first read Earth Abides by George R. Stewart more than 30 years ago. It wasn’t newly published even then, but it was new to me.
Unlike many other books I have read and forgotten, Earth Abides has stayed in my mind. I have returned to it again and again. I can recall it with remarkable clarity especially considering the hundreds of books I read every year, probably thousands since I first encountered Earth Abides.
Earth Abides is considered by many writers and readers of science fiction as a “foundation book” and is often cited as “the original disaster” story. A foundation book it is, but “original disaster story” entirely misses the point.
Earth Abides isn’t a disaster story, original or otherwise. It is a book of rebuilding, renewal and hope. The event that initiates the story is a disaster, a plague accidentally released from a laboratory that runs amok and kills off most of Earth’s human population. Some small percentage of earth’s population is naturally immune to the bug (as is true for all plagues) plus anyone who survived a rattlesnake bite has immunity.
The plague is the back story. The front story and theme of Earth Abides is the ways that humankind copes with the tragedy as scattered remnants of people gradually find each other. Individuals find others to form groups. Through marriage and the pressures of survival, groups become tribes. Most ailments of the old earth were eliminated by the plague. The vanished ailments are physical — the new generations are wonderfully healthy — and sociological. Archaic religious and social structures are shed by survivors who don’t remember what purpose they served or have any interest in preserving them. The new world has no room for bigotry, hatred or mental disease. It’s a small world, a new world with much to do. The strong and useful will survive, but the unfit cannot be allowed to reproduce. The world is too small to support those who cannot contribute.
Thus new civilizations thrive and increase. Ultimately, they repopulate the earth. The reborn world contains bits and pieces of what went before, but is redesigned in a new and presumably healthier way. The world is free of race hatred and religious prejudice, as well as most diseases.
The book was re-released in a 60th anniversary edition a few years ago, including an audio version with an introduction by Connie Willis.
Cover of the 1949 Random House hardcover edition of Earth Abides. Cover illustration by H. Lawrence Hoffman. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I have owned dozens of copies of this book. I usually keep an extra copy to give it to people who haven’t read it.
The complaint that the book is a bit preachy is fair enough, but so are many science fiction and fantasy books, including everything Robert Heinlein wrote and everything written by Anne Rice. Anne Rice is so preachy that some of her books are the straight stuff: no plot, no story, just preaching. George R. Stewart had, in my opinion, better points to make and gets a free preaching pass from me. Most writers, especially in science fiction, have points to make and it won’t kill anyone to ponder them.
It’s also important to remember that the book was published in another time and place. Many things that are largely accepted without a second thought today were revolutionary 64 years ago. In some parts of the world and in this country too, they are still revolutionary. We have moved on … to a point.
When the book was first published interracial relationships and rejection of formal religion were not accepted or tolerated most places. Attitudes have changed though there’s still more than enough racism, religious fanaticism and hatred to go around.
I’ve seen criticisms pointing out how out of date the book’s technology is. It wouldn’t matter if the technology of the world gone missing had been spot on accurate. Gone is gone.
Regardless of how advanced it used to be, whatever it was became insupportable on a depopulated earth. You can’t drive cars without gasoline and you can’t keep the pumps working without electricity. You can’t use telephones or computers when there’s no service. Satellites would circle the earth, but their signals would be received by no living person, so how would it matter? No batteries and no power, and it’s all over when the power is gone. As the book makes clear, the amount of time before the automated system stop functioning when there’s no one to take care of them is a few years — maybe — for even the most basic infrastructure.
After that, the world goes back to a pre-technological world, though not a pre-industrial one. Industry existed before electricity. There has always been wind, water and sun. And books remain, knowledge exists waiting to be re-deployed. Earth abides.
The world ends, the world begins. Earth Abides. Ish and Emma are the “mother” and “father” of the new tribe. Ish, in Hebrew, means “man” and “Eema” means “mother” which I am sure is not coincidental. It’s a wonderful story that suggests the human race has the capacity to not only survive, but reinvent civilization and make a better world. If you haven’t read this book, read it. It’s available in print and on Audible with a fine narrator. I cannot recommend it too highly. Earth Abides is timeless. As is the Earth itself. I discovered today there is an entire site dedicated to George R. Stewart –The EARTH ABIDES Project . The site contains pictures and other memorabilia. Definitely check it out!
We were up in Worcester, the capital of our middle-of-nowhere part of the world. Taking pictures, happily unaware that something awful was happening 60 miles away in Boston. When we got home and the phone and email lit up, we knew something was up,
Garry and I lived in Boston for a long time. Garry was a reporter. If he were still working, as many of his friends are, he would have been exactly where the bombs went off. I would have been one of the terrified wives waiting to hear if my husband was alive and/or in multiple pieces. Maybe I would have been one of the unlucky ones. I’m glad to have missed the experience.
A lot of people needed reassurance, wanted to be sure Garry wasn’t working (retired since 2001, but not everyone believes it) and we hadn’t gone to see the Marathon. We had merely taken a drive up to Worcester, looping back via the grocery store and the pond where the swans live. A normal pleasant spring day. For us, anyhow.
I had been laughing earlier in the day about how seriously New Englanders take their holidays. I had tried to get in touch with my doctor only to discover the office was closed for Patriot’s Day. If you live in Boston, there’s also Evacuation Day, another Revolutionary War remembrance, but affecting only the city. I can’t imagine New York closing down to celebrate a battle that took place more than 200 years ago. New York’s all about getting on with business, but Boston is into remembering and celebrating traditions.
Boston State House – Night
Patriot’s Day and the Boston Marathon are part of what makes the Commonwealth and the city special. Unique. Boston is a big city, but it’s accessible. Even with awful parking, potholes and traffic, you can drive in Boston. You may not enjoy the experience but the city is not in constant gridlock. It’s a great walking city too. There are lots of street festivals, free concerts, and events that are open to everyone and their families. Is that going to change?
Are people going to be too afraid to enjoy the city? Lock themselves up behind steel doors? If terrorists can’t kill us all, they sure can take the joy out of life … if we let them.
I can’t in good conscience tell anyone not to be afraid. But I lived in Jerusalem. I did lose friends to terrorists. It was black humor indeed to call Thursday at the marketplace “Bomb day.” Yet we went on living because the alternative is too horrible to contemplate and because if you close down your world, the bastards have won.
Yesterday, as we watched and listened to the news, we worried about people we knew until we finally heard they were safe.
I don’t “get” the terrorist gestalt, murdering civilians to make a political statement. What statement can you make based on murder? That you are willing to slaughter people because your cause is more important than life itself? Nothing is more important than life.
I have a feeling we aren’t dealing with an international conspiracy. No one has claimed responsibility for this atrocity. The bombs were built to inflict maximum harm, ugly bombs intended to tear flesh, rip and rend. Any bomb can kill you, but these were explicitly created to maim as well as murder.
If it’s discovered this is the work of a homegrown psychopath, will this make us feel better? I don’t find the idea comforting. Quite the opposite. The perpetrator could be a neighbor … or anyone. That’s creepy, not comforting.
Garry always laughs at the expression “senseless violence.” As if there’s some other kind. The sensible kind.
There may be times when killing is unavoidable to prevent a greater evil but it’s never a good thing, only sometimes justifiable to protect yourself or others. Killing is never good. Sane people know this. Civilian, military and law enforcement personnel don’t casually take lives. That so many people seem comfortable with murder is deeply disturbing. What is wrong with them … and with us that we glorify killers and turn them into heroes?
Yesterday in Boston, someone showed his/her/their inhumanity and cowardice. Religious fanatics? Non-denominational crazies? Foreign sociopaths? Homegrown psychopaths? Some other previously unknown lunatic fringe group … or a deranged individual?
Does it matter?
Whoever or whatever … I hope we catch them and make sure they never do it again to anyone anywhere.
From Garry:
I covered the Boston Marathon and other Patriot’s Day events for 31 years until my retirement. They are some of the most wonderful memories in my entire TV/radio news career covering more than 40 years. Patriot’s Day is special in New England, in Massachusetts, in greater Boston. The Revolutionary War re-enactments at dawn in Lexington and Concord were among my favorite assignments.
You could see children getting their first real look at history. Normally stoic or cynical adults looked on with pride and awe. I still see their faces in my sense memory. The Marathon weekend was always a period when the bad things going on in the world were put on hold for a brief time.
You met people from all around the world. Instant friendships were formed. Politics were set aside. Laughter and smiles were the common language. It is hard not to see this attack — even in this post 9/11 world — as anything but a horrible loss of innocence. It is so very sad.
The first movie I remember seeing with my mom was “Gunfight at OK Corral.” It was a busy day at the Utopia on Union Turnpike in Queens. It wasn’t a big theater, especially not in the days when movie theaters were palaces. There were hardly any seats left by the time we got there, having walked the mile and some from home. I had a non-driving mom who was also a subscriber to healthy outdoor exercise. We did a lot of walking, she with enthusiasm and verve and I because I didn’t have a choice.
Wyatt Earp at 33. (Photo: Wikipedia)
We found a seat in the second row, from which vantage point Burt and Kirk had heads 20 feet high. It left an indelible mark on my mind. I became an O.K. Corral aficionado, catching each new version of the story as it was cranked out of Hollywood. When video taped movies became available, I caught up with all earlier versions, too.
I stayed with “Gunfight” as my favorite for a long time. Maybe I’m just fond of Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas. Garry generally favored “My Darling Clementine” but he is a John Ford fan, so it figures. We have our preferences and they aren’t based on logic.
In 1993, along came “Tombstone.” One viewing and it was my favorite version of the gunfight story. A few more viewings and it morphed into my favorite western, though there are a goodly number of contenders for second place.
I don’t love it for its historical accuracy, though It is nominally more accurate than any other extant version of the story. As do all the Wyatt Earp – Doc Holliday stories, it omits as much, maybe more, than it includes. The Earps were wild and crazy guys.
John Henry “Doc” Holliday (Photo: Wikipedia)
Doc Holliday was an even wilder, crazier guy. They were all lethal as Hell and no more honest then they needed to be … or less.
There were other Earp brothers who are consistently left out of the story, maybe because they didn’t go into the peacekeeping business. Dad, on the other hand, was a real piece of work and deserves a movie of his own. Although I tend to be prickly about historical details, even I do not watch westerns for historical accuracy.
First, I watch them because … I’m embarrassed to admit it … I love horses. I will watch anything with or about horses. You could probably just put on films of horses running around a field and I’d watch that too.
Next, I love westerns because they make it easy to distinguish good from bad. When I was growing up seeing Johnny Mack Brown B movies on old channel 13 in New York, I always knew the guys in black hats were villains and the ones in white hats were heroes. It appealed to my 8-year old need for moral simplicity. Many people never move beyond that … a discussion for a different day.
Most of all, westerns present my fantasies in Technicolor and surround sound. In the western movie world, revenge and righteous violence are terrific. Not merely acceptable, but desirable. In the Old West, when you find a bad guy, get out the six-shooter, shotgun, or both and mow’em down. Justice is meted out quickly and permanently with no guilt attached. You can be a wimp preaching peace and love in real life, but sit down in front of another viewing of “Tombstone,” watch Kurt, Val and the rest of the gang cut a swathe of blood and death across the southwest while you cheer them on.
“Tombstone” is deliciously violent. The gunfight at O.K. corral is merely the beginning. There’s a deeply satisfying amount of killing to follow. I revel in it. When Kurt Russell declares that he’s coming for them and Hell will follow … I am there. Yes, kill the bastards. It’s so cathartic! The only piece of armament I’ve ever owned is my Daisy Red RyderBB gun and a 22 caliber target rifle, but I can pretend. And I’m a dead shot with the rifle and have slaughtered paper plates and other inanimate targets from New York to northern Maine. I have a rich and rewarding fantasy life.
Garry and I made a personal pilgrimage to Tombstone.
Sign on a door in Tombstone, AZ
I have argued with people who keep saying the movie was filmed on a sound stage. Unless the entire town of Tombstone was victim of a mass hallucination — mass hallucinations are not nearly as common in real life as in Hollywood — and merely thought a movie company came, rebuilt the town to look like historical Tombstone, then filmed a movie … unless you subscribe to this fairly bizarre theory, “Tombstone” was filmed in Tombstone.
I have pictures of Tombstone. We bought tee shirts. It was the best part or at least, our favorite part, of a one long summer’s sojourn through Arizona. So, although there may have been some re-shooting on a set, the bulk of the film was shot in Tombstone. It was and remains the only thing of note to happen there in the past 100 years. Everyone talks about it. It was a big deal.
August was not the best time to visit, but our host still works a real job and it’s hard to find a good time to visit when he isn’t working. Regardless, the mercury climbed to 128 Fahrenheit and never dropped below 120 while the sun shined. Which, that time of year, it does relentlessly. I think that’s why they invented awnings over the wooden sidewalks.
It was painfully hot. Maybe that’s what the fighting was about. Who wouldn’t want to shoot people living in that heat with no air conditioning? It makes one very cranky. I’ll bet the heat got to them, so they tried to kill each other. It makes almost as much sense as any other explanation.
We don’t watch movies for a dose of reality, or at least I don’t. I have plenty of reality. More than enough. I go to escape, to move from a reality I don’t care for to another world I like better. Westerns let me immerse myself in raw emotions that are unacceptable otherwise.
These days every time I read an article in ZDNet or any of the techno-blogs, they are casually talking about getting rid of the Windows desktop and making basic softwaresubscription-based, something that will benefit the corporate bottom lines of suppliers of software, but which will hurt millions upon millions of users. They talk as if subscriptions are no big deal. It may not be a big deal for them, but it’s a big deal to me and possibly, a lot of you too.
Subscriptions are much more expensive than buying software, installing it and updating only when you really need a new version. Let’s look at a non-MS example. I have a license for Photoshop. This is expensive software that I need to be a serious amateur photographer. I do NOT make money at photography, but I love it, am pretty good at it and there isn’t any product on the market that comes near Photoshop in terms of what it can do and how well it does it. So, I decided to upgrade from CS5 to CS6. Previously, this has involved calling Adobe, giving my serial number and member ID, then paying them $200 plus shipping. They send me a DVD and we are done for the next few years.
This time, I spent over an hour on the phone explaining, over and over, that $49 per month to subscribe to Photoshop when I live on a fixed retirement income is impossible. That’s just about $600 a year for Photoshop. I don’t have that kind money to spend. Nor will I ever have it because that’s the meaning of “fixed income.” It means that the amount never goes up. Ever. You are lucky if it doesn’t go away, but you can be absolutely certain it will never be more.
Millions of people live on fixed incomes and many more survive on minimal incomes, yet they need computers and software. Students, retirees, disabled people and unemployed people trying to find work are among those millions. People whose incomes are not in the 6 digit realm, like teachers, policeman, firefighters. The clerks in your bank and the guy who fixes your car aren’t nailing down big figure salaries.
Computers are basic tools these days. You can’t apply for a job without a computer. You can’t submit a manuscript for publication or even try to find a publisher without a computer. Computers and electronic information and money transfer is basic to modern life everywhere on earth. An internet connection is essential. It is not less important to the elderly, retired, or to those with disabilities. To a disabled person, that high-speed connection is the difference between a life worth living and a living death.
In the real world, many people … probably MOST people …. don’t have much (or any) slack in their budgets. They aren’t going to be able to pay for monthly subscriptions for software. I don’t want anyone to tell me about “free” apps. Unless someone makes a lot more apps that do a lot more a lot better than the ones I’ve seen so far, there is no way they will replace the applications we use. The developers and marketing wonks who tell us we can get an app for that don’t use those apps to do their own work. I guarantee they are using sturdy installed applications. I’ll bet they aren’t storing it all in a cloud either, that they have back up drives and servers to protect data and keep it under their own control. What a bunch of hypocrites these people are. How I resent how they toy with my life.
In one way or another over the past few years, I have been informed that being old and living on short money means I don’t need Photoshop. I don’t need Outlook. I don’t need cable television. I don’t need books. I don’t need email. I don’t need anything but generic medications and minimal health care. I should be grateful that I have food and a roof over my head. I don’t need a Kindle, a computer or a camera. I can buy my clothing second-hand, scrounge for medication. Whatever people with somewhat high incomes deem necessary for themselves is not necessary for me. Apparently when I retired — or in my case became disabled, life being neither fair nor predictable — I cashed in my rights to everything other than life itself and I’m not sure I’m entitled to that, either.
I have long known that corporation were heartless, but these computer guys have no moral compass either. Zilch. They have no idea why they do what they do, that software has a purpose. It isn’t an end in itself. It is intended to solve real problems for living human beings. It’s not just cool toys to play with or a way for them to make a good living.
These products and tools are important to users. Critical. The market for technology is not those who invent it. The market is everyone: people supporting families, struggling to feed a family on an income too small for the purpose. All the folks trying to survive hard times, to improve their living conditions, to get by with very little are the real end-users for all of this stuff. To make it inaccessible to any but the well-to-do is the equivalent of turning off our electricity and water and has much the same effect. Computers and software are not luxuries and haven’t been for years.
Having tools to make pictures, keep complicated medical and study schedules and many more life functions are not optional extras. Corporations, big software companies like Microsoft and Adobe, our so-called Congress, insurance companies are all playing with our lives. We don’t matter at all except as a source of income for them.
As for ZDNet’s contention that the corporate world will have to accept Windows 8 (the implication being that they have no choice in the matter), I have a news flash. I’ve recently been visiting companies with whom I’ve worked in the past. They are switching to Macs. Entire companies are dropping Windows. Small companies right now because they aren’t as heavily invested in an operating system, but small organizations are the bellwethers for the big trends that follow. These groups are doing their development on Unix or Linux boxes — which is not new because they have been using them for development for years — and everything else on Macs.
Why I asked? Because they won’t touch Windows 8. They don’t like it. They won’t buy it. Just a little reality check for anyone listening. You cannot force people to adopt things they do not like, no matter how big and powerful you think you are. When you stop listening to your customers, your users, the people who made you big in the first place, you are likely to discover as so many others have before you that the world needs you a lot less than you thought. Where’s DEC? Where’s Wang? Where’s RCA? Westinghouse? They’ve either disappeared or been absorbed to become nothing more than a logo and a memory.
The business world is ripe for the plucking. They want an operating system that will run familiar applications as Windows did. Nature and business abhor a vacuum. I bet they are already circling. Not just Mac, but many others.
Earth to ZDNet: there is life on the planet! You might want to get back in touch with it.
With camera in hand, exploring European lands, cultures, food, and drink...mostly with a plan, but sometimes enjoying the adventure of just getting lost.
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