We the people and citizens of the United States of America want to return this country to responsible, ethical and efficient government. Over the years, inevitable creep has occurred in all branches of government leading to situations that are no longer consistent with the principles and values of our Founding Fathers. These “Ten Points for Effective and Efficient Government” would be a start to restoring the Democracy that this country was founded on. You do not have to believe in all of these points to sign this petition, but if you believe in at least seven of the points, we hope you will sign this petition for a Government that once again is By the People, For the People and of the People.
Term Limits
Over the years, our population has increased in life expectancy. Term limits would help insure that new blood and vitality is injected into our political system. Ideally, two terms of six years each would help an elected official achieve their stated goals and aims. These term limits would apply to all elected officials holding seats in any legislative office of the country.
Illegal Lobbying
Lobbying is legal bribery. An official is given campaign money if they support the lobbyists agenda. In other areas of business, this would be called bribery and would be illegal. We need to make lobbying illegal in all of the government and make those trying to use money to persuade politicians guilty of bribery.
Limits on time in office for Supreme Court Justices
No one of the Founding Fathers ever thought that the average judge would live to 80 + years. We need to cap a Judges tenure at 20 years. Anything more than that puts our law in the hands of people who are no longer in touch with the average citizen.
Non-Partisan selection of all Federal and State Justices
The system of allowing a politician to select our Judges distorts the law and puts a bias in courtroom decisions based on political affiliations. We need to have a non-partisan panel of legal experts who select our Federal and State Judges based on specific criteria related to professionalism, ethics and the ability to render judgements irrespective of political affiliations.
Campaign Spending Limits
If campaigns can be won or lost based on monetary expenditures than we do not have a government of the people. We have a government where he or she who has the most money gets elected. It becomes the Golden Rule: “Whosoever has the most gold makes the rules.” We need to have campaign spending limits and get corporations out of the business of funding political campaigns.
Limits to holding elected offices consecutively
It will not do any good to have term limits if elected officials can simply jump to another government position either elected or appointed. We need to insure a turnover of all elected and appointed government officials. This can only be assured my limiting the number of political offices that they can hold consecutively whether appointed or elected. We do not need lifers in Government but people who bring new visions and new skills. We should limit the number of combined elected or appointed political positions that can be held to no more than three positions for a total of no more than 18 years which would combine both appointments and elections.
Funding for Elected Officials during Government Shutdowns
When Congress cannot do its duty by funding the government and employees can not receive a paycheck, than Congress should also have their paychecks suspended for the duration of the shutdown. As they say, “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”
Compulsory National Service for all US Citizens
Every American Citizen at the age of 18 must elect for National Service of either two or four years. This obligation can be satisfied by either military or civilian service such as the Peace Corp or other civilian programs. Two years would be the minimum for compulsory service. Two years of National Service would earn two year of paid education benefits. Four years of National Service would earn four years of paid education benefits.
Caps on all budgets including Military, Education, Health Care
Government cannot be fiscally responsible when politicians are free to print all the money they want to spend. We need mandatory caps on all budgets to insure that good financial policy is followed. It is too easy for money to be allocated when there is no ceiling to how much can be spent. Can you imagine what would happen in your home if you were free to just spend as much money as you wanted to?
Campaign Communication Integrity
There is a myth that Free Speech means you can say anything you want to. This is not true. Our democracy depends on truth and respect. Today’s campaigns too often rely on misinformation, personal attacks, and division. We call for stronger accountability for knowingly false or defamatory statements and a return to fact-based, civil debate. This is not about limiting free speech—it is about restoring trust, honesty, and integrity in our elections. We need to restore civility and open mindedness to the campaign process. We have demonized other parties, slandered opponents, descended to lies and name calling to the extent that they have become commonplace in our elections. We need to restore human decency to elections.
Petition Summary
This petition represents a call from citizens who believe that the strength of the United States lies not only in its founding ideals, but in our willingness to renew them. Over time, the structures of government have evolved in ways that many feel no longer reflect the balance, accountability, and ethical standards envisioned at the nation’s founding. This proposal outlines ten practical reforms designed to restore trust, improve efficiency, and reestablish a government that truly serves its people.
These reforms focus on limiting excessive concentration of power, reducing the influence of money in politics, ensuring fairness and impartiality in the judicial system, and promoting shared civic responsibility. They are not intended to favor any political party or ideology, but rather to strengthen the integrity of the system itself.
If you support the majority of these principles, we invite you to sign this petition and join in a constructive effort to help guide our nation toward a more accountable, effective, and unified future—one that lives up to the enduring promise of government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
If you want to add your name to this petition. Send a copy to me at persico.john@gmail.com. I will compile as many names as I can to eventually send to media and elected officials.
If you are comfortable doing so and can support 70 percent of the ideas in this petition, than would you please help share this petition. Names can be sent back to me at Persico.john@gmail.com I will compile as many names as I can to use in contacting media and elected officials. I have no naïve beliefs that in the short term this will change anything. However, if over time we can all stand up for the things that really matter, we may eventually have a tidal wave that will sweep away the old system and usher in a new era of peace, justice and equality for all.
No matter where you live in American today, you will encounter the problem that there is a physician shortage. It is easy to blame people. We can ask why more people are not interested in becoming doctors. The truth is that America does not suffer from a shortage of people who want to become doctors. It suffers from a healthcare system that systematically limits physician supply, burns out existing doctors, redirects resources toward profit-generating activities, and increasingly treats healthcare as a business rather than a public service.
This issue became more personal for me recently when my wife had three emergency room trips and three overnight stays in the hospital. One for six days, and two for two days each. Despite the fact that no definitive prognosis was found, we could not get an appointment with her pulmonologist for over thirty days after her third emergency visit. My wife was a BA/RN with a master’s degree in public health nursing for over 55 years full time before she retired. I have an undergraduate degree in Health Education. None of our credentials mattered. We were mostly treated like mushrooms. Kept in the dark and fed manure. The reasons we were given “Not enough specialty doctors in our area.”
I have written before about the problems in the American medical system. The problems have only grown worse. Here is a brief summary of where the American Medical System ranks on the five statistics that patients care most about in comparison to other countries.
1. Life Expectancy
This is perhaps the single best measure of whether a healthcare system is helping people live long lives.
U.S. life expectancy reached about 79 years in 2024.
That is roughly two years below the OECD average and among the lowest of developed nations.
Why patients should care:
If a nation spends the most on healthcare but its citizens die younger than those in comparable countries, something is wrong with the system.
2. Preventable and Treatable Deaths
These are deaths that should not occur if people receive timely and effective healthcare.
The U.S. has among the highest rates of avoidable deaths among wealthy countries.
Why patients should care:
This measures not whether doctors are talented, but whether the system gets patients the right care at the right time.
This statistic directly relates to physician shortages and delayed access.
3. Access to Primary Care
Primary care physicians are the “front door” to healthcare.
The U.S. has fewer primary care physicians per capita than many peer nations and faces projected shortages of tens of thousands of doctors in coming years.
Why patients should care:
Longer waits for appointments.
Delayed diagnosis.
Greater use of emergency rooms for routine care.
This may be the statistic most directly connected to your physician-shortage article.
4. Infant Mortality
Infant mortality is often considered one of the most sensitive indicators of a nation’s health system.
The United States continues to have a higher infant mortality rate than many other developed countries.
Why patients should care:
If a healthcare system struggles to keep infants alive during their first year of life, it raises questions about access, prenatal care, and healthcare equity.
5. Healthcare Cost
This is where the United States is number one.
The U.S. spends more per person on healthcare than any other nation.
Recent estimates place spending at nearly $15,000 per person annually, roughly double many peer countries.
Why patients should care:
Americans are paying luxury-car prices for a healthcare system that often produces middle-of-the-pack—or even worse—results than comparable medical systems in other countries. The following table shows where the USA ranks against the list of OECD countries. The OECD currently consists of thirty-eight member nations most of them high-income democracies.
Measure
United States
Healthcare Spending
Highest
Life Expectancy
Near Bottom
Preventable Deaths
Near Bottom
Primary Care Access
Near Bottom
Infant Mortality
Near Bottom
Overall Ranking Among Peer Nations
Last
To verify this data – Go to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development site at https://www.oecd.org/en.html
In the blog that follows, I am going to identify some of the major factors that are contributing to the dismal performance of our health care system.
Factor 1: The Doctor Shortage
The U.S. is projected to face a shortage of tens of thousands of physicians over the next decade. Rural communities are especially affected, but shortages are increasingly appearing in urban areas as well.
The Association of American Medical Colleges projects the United States could face a shortage of up to 86,000 physicians by 2036.
The projected shortage of primary care physicians alone is estimated at 20,200 to 40,400 doctors by 2036.
Only about 24% of U.S. physicians practice primary care, even though primary care is often the front line for prevention and early diagnosis.
Factor 2: Medical School and Residency Bottlenecks
Most people assume the problem is that too few students want to become doctors.
The reality is more complicated.
Every year thousands of qualified students are rejected from medical schools.
Even after graduation, physicians must complete residency training.
The number of residency positions has not kept pace with population growth because Medicare largely funds residency programs and funding has historically been capped.
Result:
Fewer physicians enter practice than society needs.
Existing doctors must see more patients.
Wait times increase.
Healthcare Outcomes
Patients wait longer for:
Primary care appointments
Specialists
Mental health services
Research consistently shows that delayed care leads to:
Worse disease outcomes
More emergency room visits
Higher mortality rates
Factor 3: Physician Burnout
This may be the most important factor.
Nearly half of all physicians reported burnout in 2024. One major survey found a burnout rate of 49%.
Although burnout has improved somewhat, 43.2% of physicians still reported symptoms of burnout in 2024, and 41.9% in 2025.
Primary care physicians consistently report some of the highest burnout rates in medicine.
Many physicians report spending nearly as much time on:
Documentation
Electronic medical records
Insurance approvals
Billing requirements
as they spend caring for patients.
Doctors often describe themselves as data-entry clerks with medical degrees.
The Commercialization of the Medical System plays a key role in Doctor Burnout. While it does not directly reduce the number of medical graduates. Instead, it can make physicians less willing to remain in practice.
Think of it as a retention problem.
Doctors often cite:
Loss of autonomy
Productivity quotas
Administrative burden
Corporate oversight
as reasons for burnout.
When experienced physicians retire early, the effective shortage grows.
Healthcare Outcomes
Burnout contributes to:
Earlier retirement
Reduced patient access
Medical errors
Lower patient satisfaction
The average patient often experiences this as:
Rushed appointments
Less physician attention
Difficulty obtaining follow-up care
Factor 4: Aging Population
America’s population is getting older.
Older adults consume significantly more healthcare resources.
The Baby Boom generation is moving into years where:
Cancer rates rise
Heart disease increases
Joint replacements become common
Chronic illnesses multiply
Demand is increasing faster than physician supply.
Healthcare Outcomes
More patients compete for the same physicians.
Wait times lengthen.
Primary care becomes increasingly difficult to access.
Factor 5: Geographic Maldistribution
The United States may not have a pure national shortage as much as a distribution problem.
Doctors tend to locate in:
Wealthier communities
Urban areas
Regions with better reimbursement
Rural America often struggles to attract physicians.
Arizona experiences this challenge in many communities outside Phoenix and Tucson. We live in Arizona City, and the selection of specialists is poor to non-existent here. We are fifty miles from Phoenix and fifty miles from Tucson. Depending on the time of day, it can take two to three hours to get to some areas of Phoenix and two hours to get to some areas of Tucson.
Healthcare Outcomes
Rural patients experience:
Longer travel times
Delayed diagnosis
Higher mortality rates for many conditions
Factor 6: Commercialization of Healthcare
This is where the story becomes particularly interesting.
Many Americans still imagine hospitals as community institutions.
Increasingly they are large corporate enterprises.
Over the past forty years:
Independent physician practices declined.
Corporate healthcare systems expanded.
Investor-owned hospital chains grew.
Private equity entered healthcare.
Healthcare increasingly became a business sector rather than a public service sector.
Hospital mergers and physician acquisitions frequently increase prices without corresponding improvements in quality.
Factor 7: Hospital Consolidations
The percentage of physicians employed by or affiliated with hospital systems increased from less than 30% in 2012 to at least 47% in 2024.
More than three-quarters of U.S. doctors are now employed by health systems or corporations rather than practicing independently.
Thousands of hospitals merged into large regional systems.
Proponents argued consolidation would:
Reduce costs
Improve efficiency
Improve quality
The evidence is mixed.
Many studies suggest consolidation often results in:
Higher prices
Greater market power
Increased administrative costs
Studies reviewed by the Government Accountability Office found that physician and hospital consolidation is generally associated with higher prices and spending, with limited evidence of corresponding quality improvements. Read my blog called, “When Bigger is Not Better.”
Factor 8: Administrative Growth vs Physician Growth
One of the most striking trends is that administrative staffing has grown much faster than physician staffing.
Hospitals employ:
Compliance officers
Revenue cycle managers
Coders
Contract specialists
Marketing personnel
Financial analysts
Many are necessary.
But the growth rate has greatly exceeded physician growth. According to one statistic administrators now outnumber physicians by roughly 10 to 1 in some healthcare systems.
Critics argue the system increasingly rewards administration rather than caregiving.
Healthcare Outcomes
More money flows toward administration.
Less is available for:
Physician recruitment
Nursing support
Patient services
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – DECEMBER 19: People demonstrating against the healthcare industry
Factor 9: Private Equity and Physician Practices
This is a newer development and one that many people do not know about.
Approximately 6.5% of physicians worked in private-equity-owned practices in 2024, up from 4.5% in 2022.
While still a minority of practices, the trend is moving rapidly.
Private equity firms increasingly purchase:
Physician groups
Emergency departments
Specialty practices
Their objective is generally to increase profitability and eventually sell the practice.
Critics argue this creates pressure for:
Higher patient volumes
More procedures
Cost cutting
Before concluding Part 1, lets summarize the human cost of the physician shortage in the USA and the attendant commercialism health care in America.
The Human Cost
The physician shortage ultimately affects patients through:
Longer Wait Times
Patients may wait months for specialists.
Reduced Preventive Care
Diseases are detected later.
Overcrowded Emergency Rooms
ERs become substitutes for primary care.
Physician Fatigue
Burned-out physicians are more likely to leave practice.
Health Disparities
Rural and low-income populations suffer most.
Treatment Outcomes
You may die from something that could have been treated with earlier diagnosis.
So Where Do the Profits Go:
Consider this paradox. The United States spends nearly twice as much per person on healthcare as many other high-income countries. Yet Americans generally do not live longer, have better access to doctors, or enjoy better health outcomes. If the additional money is not producing better results, where is it going?
After all this discussion about Health Care becoming a business instead of a human service, the obvious question is “Where do the profits go?” There are five main actors in this picture. I would like to call them “villains’ but Metis who is the main author of this piece refuses to let me use this terminology. Hence, here are the five major actors who share in the money pie.
Hospital CEO Compensation
Administrative Growth and Costs
Insurance Company Profits
Pharmaceutical Profits
Private Equity Returns/Profits
The easiest way to view the answer to the distribution of profits is to look at a pie chart:
Who Is the Villain? Or is there a Villain?
Whenever Americans discuss healthcare, there is a tendency to look for a villain. Some blame insurance companies. Others blame pharmaceutical firms, hospital executives, private equity investors, politicians, or even doctors themselves. While each of these groups deserves scrutiny, focusing on any single villain misses the larger truth.
The real problem is not one person, one company, or even one industry. The real problem is the system.
Edwards Deming, the quality management expert, often argued that most organizational failures are caused by systems rather than individuals. If Deming were alive today, he would tell us to stop looking for villains and start looking at incentives. Why does the American healthcare system produce higher costs, physician shortages, burnout, and poorer outcomes than many comparable nations despite spending more money than any other country on Earth?
The answer lies in the way the system is structured.
Every major participant in healthcare—hospitals, insurance companies, pharmaceutical firms, physician groups, investors, and government agencies—is responding to incentives that reward revenue growth, complexity, and market power. Over time, these incentives have created a healthcare system that increasingly behaves like a business rather than a public service.
Where does the money go? The largest portion of it disappears into administrative complexity. The United States has built one of the most complicated healthcare financing systems in the world. Hospitals and physician practices employ armies of billers, coders, compliance officers, contract specialists, lawyers, and administrators simply to navigate the rules. Physicians spend countless hours on documentation, insurance approvals, and billing requirements instead of patient care. This complexity contributes directly to physician burnout and rising costs.
Other high-income nations are not perfect, but many have simpler systems, stronger primary care networks, and greater control over prices. As a result, they often achieve comparable or better outcomes while spending far less.
My wife once had a visiting nurse from Sweden come to North Memorial Medical Center where my wife was a nurse manager. Karen was asked to take the visiting nurse and show her around the hospital for the day. She enjoyed the day with the nurse. When Karen came home that evening, she told me about the visit and some of the things that surprised her. This was back in 2005 before Karen retired the first time.
Karen took the nurse to the business center where the people were working on billing and insurance issues. North Memorial was then a 4500 employee hospital and the visiting nurse came from one of comparable size in Sweden. In North Memorial over 200 people were employed in billing and medical coding processes. Karen was shocked to find that in the visiting nurse’s hospital (ALMOST THE SAME SIZE) only three people were employed. Why? Because they had a single payer system with only one place to bill. In the United States, hospital billing can be bewilderingly complex.
A large American hospital may deal with dozens or even hundreds of insurance plans, each with its own reimbursement rules, approval requirements, referral procedures, and appeals processes. What appears to be fifty insurance companies may actually represent hundreds or even thousands of distinct billing arrangements. The result is a healthcare system that requires armies of administrators simply to get paid.
A small rural hospital might have:
20–50 major payer contracts
A medium-sized regional hospital might have:
50–100 payer contracts
A large urban hospital system may have:
100–300 payer contracts
So who is the villain?
The villain is a system that rewards complexity over simplicity, treatment over prevention, administration over caregiving, and financial performance over patient outcomes. Most of the people working within the system are trying to do their jobs well. The problem is that the system often pushes them in the wrong direction.
Until we address those underlying incentives, physician shortages, rising costs, and patient frustration will remain symptoms of a deeper disease. The challenge before us is not to find someone to blame. It is to build a healthcare system that rewards the outcomes patients actually care about: timely access to care, affordable treatment, healthier lives, and better results.
Conclusion
America spends more on healthcare than any nation in history, yet millions struggle to find timely access to a physician. The problem is not a lack of talent or technology. The problem is a system that prioritizes financial performance over system performance. As hospitals consolidate, private equity expands, and administrative complexity grows, physicians increasingly find themselves serving the business of healthcare rather than the practice of medicine. Until we address these systemic issues, doctor shortages will remain a symptom of a deeper disease within American healthcare itself.
If the United States spends more on healthcare than any nation in the world, why do so many patients struggle to find a doctor, wait months for appointments, and feel lost in the system?
If you want more data or resources on any of the subjects I have discussed above, you can find substantial data and references on the following sites. These organizations provide some of the most widely cited and respected data on healthcare spending, physician workforce trends, access to care, and international healthcare outcomes.
1. OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development)
In Part 2, we will look at what is driving the commercialization of hospitals and why they have become places of profit rather than service. We will also look at some possible antidotes to the commercialization infecting the American Medical System. Some of these solutions will address:
Expanding residency funding.
Reducing administrative burden.
Increasing primary care reimbursement.
Encouraging independent physician practices.
Scrutinizing hospital mergers more aggressively.
Increasing transparency in healthcare pricing.
Developing rural physician incentives.
Measuring healthcare success by patient outcomes rather than revenue generation.
This blog continues from where I left off in Part 1
A look at what is going on in the USA today should squash any such naïve belief in our altruism towards the rest of the world. America’s rhetoric about democracy often conflicts with the realities of it’s economic and geopolitical behavior.
We are heading in our own country towards an autocratic government that bears little evidence of the democracy we claim to believe in
We are gutting foreign aid programs that really do help the oppressed of the world
We are supporting wars that have no basis in protecting the American people
We are threatening to invade our allies
We are threatening to pull out of NATO
We are silencing honest journalism throughout the world
Given the above facts, the question that begs answering is “Why then are we doing this?” The short answer to this question can be found by looking at the S&P Stock charts. Throughout everything that has happened in the USA over the past two years, the average value of the Stock Market has grown. It should be obvious that the 10 percent of the people that own 90 percent of the stocks in this country are benefiting from the regressive and anti-democratic policies of the current regime.
The long answer to the question posed above has to deal with “who is going to rule the world economy.” There is an old saying that “He who has the gold makes the rules.” However, turning this trope around is even more accurate: “He who makes the rules gets the gold.” Whoever rules the world economy gets rich. The stock market is evidence that this is already happening.
Federal Reserve data and economic analyses highlight the stark concentration of equity ownership:
The Top 1%: Owns roughly 50% of all corporate equities and mutual-fund shares
The Next 9% (90th–99th percentiles): Owns about 37% of the market
We are and have been in a world war for decades now. But it is not a war of bullets and bombs. It is a war of currency and trade. Our team in the USA is based on Corporate Capitalism which masquerades as free enterprise and free trade. Some of the other teams in the war or shall we call it a game include Socialism as practiced in some countries and Communism as many people still associate with Russia. However, these “ism’s” do not exist in a traditional sense anymore as the following information will show.
1. American-Style Corporate Capitalism
Primary example: United States
Core characteristics:
Private ownership of production
Large multinational corporations dominate markets
Shareholder profit maximization
Financialization (Wall Street influence)
Consumer culture
Heavy lobbying and corporate political influence
Relatively weak labor protections compared to Europe
Innovation driven by private investment and venture capital
Strengths:
High innovation
Entrepreneurial dynamism
Flexible markets
Strong technological development
Weaknesses:
High inequality
Monopolization tendencies
Short-term thinking
Political capture by wealth
Healthcare and education inequities
Externalization of environmental and social costs
2. State Capitalism – What once was more Communistic
Primary examples: China, partially Singapore
This may actually be the strongest current competitor to the U.S. model.
Core characteristics:
Markets and private enterprise exist
But the state directs strategic sectors
National goals supersede shareholder goals
Industrial policy and long-term planning
Strong state intervention
Key industries often state-owned or state-guided
China especially combines:
capitalism,
authoritarian political control,
nationalism,
and centralized strategic planning.
This is not classical communism anymore.
Modern China is better described as:
authoritarian state capitalism,
techno-nationalism
or party-directed capitalism.
Strengths:
Long-term infrastructure planning
Rapid industrial mobilization
Strategic coordination
Ability to direct national resources
Weaknesses:
Corruption
Lack of political freedom
Innovation constraints in some areas
Surveillance state tendencies
Risk of bureaucratic rigidity
3. Classical Socialism
Historically associated with:
worker ownership,
public ownership of major industries,
democratic economic planning.
Modern pure socialism barely exists at national scale anymore.
Historically important examples:
parts of postwar United Kingdom,
Yugoslav worker self-management,
various democratic socialist experiments.
Communism (Classical Marxist-Leninist)
Historical examples:
Soviet Union
Maoist China
Cuba
Core characteristics:
State ownership of production
Central planning
One-party rule
Suppression of private capital
Almost no major power today operates under pure communism anymore — including China.
The winners of this war will dominate the world economy. The benefits are beyond calculation. Think of a monopoly game. If any player owned all of the following properties they would almost be guaranteed a sure win in the game:
Illinois Avenue (Red)
New York Avenue (Orange)
Tennessee Avenue (Orange)
St. James Place (Orange)
Kentucky Avenue (Red)
Indiana Avenue (Red)
If you controlled only these six properties and developed them efficiently, you would have an enormous statistical advantage over most opponents. Not guaranteed victory — luck and trading still matter — but probably the closest thing Monopoly has to a dominant board position.
The Irony of Monopoly — Elizabeth Magie originally designed the precursor to Monopoly as a critique of concentrated wealth and monopolistic capitalism. It would seem that the lesson was lost on American business or more likely lost on the American public.
One of the most decorated men in WW I was Major General Smedley Butler. He had this to say about America and the wars he fought in:
“War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many.”
“Out of war a few people make huge fortunes. In the World War a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns.” —- from “War is a Racket” by Major General Smedley Butler.
Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote in his 1832 treatise On War that “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” Economic policy today drives political policy. Ergo, wars are fought to support political policies which support economic policies. As my friend Dick always said, “Follow the money.” “Political policy determines who holds power; economic policy determines who receives the rewards of that power.”
I doubt that most Americans realize on a day to day basic, the economic benefits that could and do accrue from the United States holding a dominant position in world economics. Just one example might help. Here are some benefits and also drawbacks that we get from the Dollar and not the Yuan, Ruble or Yen being the de facto standard for world currency and trade.
Ability to Borrow More Cheaply Than Most Other Nations
Persistent Trade Deficits Are Sustainable The U.S. can import more than it exports for decades because other countries willingly hold dollars instead of demanding immediate repayment in goods.
Global Demand for Dollars Supports American Wealth Countries, banks, and corporations worldwide need dollars for trade, creating constant demand for U.S. currency and financial assets.
Lower Cost of Imports for Americans A strong dollar makes imported goods: cheaper, more abundant, and helps keep inflation lower than it otherwise would be.
Massive Influence Over Global Finance Most international banking transactions move through dollar-based systems. This gives the U.S. extraordinary leverage over: sanctions, banking access, and international finance.
Powerful Sanctions Capability The U.S. can severely pressure adversaries by restricting access to dollar systems, as seen with: Iran, Russia, and others.
Foreign Nations Help Finance U.S. Debt Countries like Japan and China buy large amounts of U.S. Treasury debt, effectively helping finance American spending.
The U.S. Can Create Currency the World Needs The Federal Reserve can expand the money supply during crises and much of the world still seeks dollars as a “safe haven.”
American Financial Markets Become the World’s Center Wall Street and U.S. financial institutions dominate global capital flows because the dollar anchors world finance.
Geopolitical and Military Power Are Reinforced Dollar dominance helps fund:
large military expenditures,
global bases,
and international influence at costs that would cripple many other nations.
The Tradeoff – There are always cons to every action. However, you will note from the following that the cons eventually impact the standard of living of the average American more than they do the Super-Rich.
Because the dollar is so strong:
U.S. manufacturing can become less competitive; hence companies move overseas for cheaper labor. Consumers gain cheap goods, but capital owners and multinational corporations often gain the largest rewards.
Outsourcing becomes easier as many nations welcome American factories in their countries. American jobs decline.
Trade deficits grow: The broadest U.S. trade deficit number today is about $901.5 billion per year for goods and services combined. The goods-only deficit is much larger — about $1.24 trillion annually.
Financial sectors may gain power relative to industrial labor. Some critics argue the reserve-currency system helped hollow out parts of the American middle class while benefiting finance, multinational corporations, and asset owners.
The dollar’s dominance gives the U.S. extraordinary national power — but distributes the internal benefits unevenly among Americans.
So, who is the bad guy? Is China going to be our next enemy in our economic wars? When will it replace the Soviet Union? Actually, it already has. To date, the Chinese economy has grown faster than any economy in history. The drums for stopping the Chinese growth started beating many years ago. While global trade can create overall wealth, the struggle for dominance within the system often becomes zero-sum among competing powers.
Questions to Consider:
Do we want to keep getting in wars to support the rich getting richer and Americans dying to make more billionaires?
Do we have to play the game like it is Monopoly and can only have winners and losers?
How much do we value our reputation as America being a home for the liberty and justice toward all?
What will it take to start electing politicians who are more beholden to the American public and less to the International Conglomerates that control trade?
Is Putin a Defensive Nationalist or an Expansionist Authoritarian Bent on World Conquest?
This is one of the central geopolitical questions of the 21st century, and serious historians and strategists disagree sharply about it. What was Putin’s real motive for invading the Ukraine? Did he perceive their entry into NATO as a major threat to the Soviet Union or was it simply a power grab that would if not thwarted presage further incursions into European sovereignty and even the world? The answer depends partly on whether one interprets Putin primarily as:
A defensive nationalist reacting to perceived encirclement, or
An expansionist authoritarian trying to restore Russian imperial power.
There is evidence supporting both interpretations.
The strongest argument that NATO expansion mattered comes from a long line of American foreign policy realists, including people like George F. Kennan, John Mearsheimer, and even former U.S. officials who warned for decades that expanding NATO eastward would eventually provoke Russia.
Kennan — one of the architects of Cold War containment — called NATO expansion after the Soviet collapse a “tragic mistake.” He believed Russians of many political persuasions would see NATO moving toward their borders as a strategic threat. Mearsheimer argued repeatedly after 2014 that Ukraine becoming Western-aligned crossed what Russia viewed as a red line.
From the Russian perspective, several things happened that heightened paranoia:
NATO expanded into former Warsaw Pact countries.
Former Soviet republics like the Baltic states joined NATO.
Western governments supported democratic movements in places like Georgia and Ukraine.
The 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, was viewed in Moscow as a Western-backed regime change operation.
Discussions about eventual Ukrainian NATO membership continued.
Russia historically has also been deeply security-obsessed because it was invaded repeatedly through the European plain — by Napoleon, Imperial Germany, and Nazi Germany. About 27 million Soviets died in World War II. Russian strategic culture never forgot that.
So yes — there is a strong case that if Ukraine had permanently declared neutrality, similar to Austria during the Cold War, the invasion might not have happened.
But that is not the whole story.
There is also substantial evidence that Putin’s ambitions go beyond mere NATO anxiety.
Before the 2022 invasion, Putin increasingly argued publicly that:
Ukraine was not a “real nation,”
Russians and Ukrainians were “one people,”
the breakup of the Soviet Union was a historical catastrophe.
These arguments sound less like defensive realism and more like imperial nationalism.
Russia also acted militarily before NATO membership for Ukraine was remotely imminent:
Georgia was invaded in 2008.
Crimea was annexed in 2014.
Russian-backed separatists operated in eastern Ukraine for years.
Importantly, NATO had shown little actual willingness to admit Ukraine quickly. Germany and France were hesitant for years. So, some analysts argue Putin invaded not because Ukraine was about to enter NATO, but because Ukraine was drifting culturally and politically toward Europe and away from Russian influence. A democratic, increasingly Western-oriented Ukraine on Russia’s border may itself have threatened Putin’s political model.
That distinction matters.
A democratic Slavic neighbor succeeding outside Russian control could undermine the legitimacy of Putin’s authoritarian system inside Russia.
As for the idea that Putin wants to “take over Europe,” I think that is often overstated in popular media. There is little evidence he intended to conquer Western Europe militarily in the style of Adolf Hitler. Russia lacks the economic and demographic strength for that kind of project.
But there is evidence Putin wants:
a Russian sphere of influence,
buffer states around Russia,
weakened NATO cohesion,
and restoration of great-power status comparable to the Soviet era.
That is different from world conquest, but it is still expansionist in a regional sense.
So, the fairest conclusion may be:
NATO expansion likely contributed significantly to the crisis.
Russian security fears were not entirely irrational.
But Putin’s own nationalism, authoritarianism, and desire to restore Russian influence also played a major role.
The war probably emerged from both Western strategic pressure and Russian imperial ambition interacting together.
Many public discussions reduce this to “Putin evil” versus “NATO provoked Russia.” Reality is probably more complicated than either slogan.
The war in Ukraine is not merely a military conflict but part of a larger global struggle over who will shape the economic rules of the 21st century.
The major problem for the USA is really not Putin. The major problem we face is here at home. We are continually pushing our model of democracy on the rest of the world. Many people want to believe it is because we think so highly of democracy that we want to share it with the “oppressed people” in other countries. Find out why this is not true in Part 2.
Continued in Part 2: Putin, Capitalism, Communism and World Domination
It often seems that special days like: Memorial Day, Veterans Day, Labor Day and many other “Holy-days” have lost their meaning. They have become corrupted by our greed for leisure time and pleasure. They represent “just another day off with pay.” The true meaning and purpose of the day lies undiscovered in our rush to party or go to the big game. How many of us celebrate the true meaning anymore of days like Memorial Day?
Do you realize that this is a day set aside to celebrate and commemorate the heroism and sacrifice of the millions of veterans who have given their lives for our freedom and way of life? Do you ever wonder where these men and women got their courage from or how they could give up so much for you and me? How many of us would risk our lives for an idea or for someone we did not know or for a principle that many people would hate us for upholding? Principles that our country were founded upon and without which we would not have a country.
In No time for heroes– an article by Bernie Reeves (May 2001), he writes:
“Yet, even the most decorated veterans of the World War II era make it clear that they did not set out to become heroes, they just did their job. Heroes, it seems, are not born but created by events. And the events have to be interpreted in the right light to qualify for hero creation.”
We have seen periods in history where heroes were laughed at as romantic fools and other periods where the lack of heroes was bemoaned. Since 911, it seems that we are on the upswing, with heroism being lauded practically daily in the news or TV media. We have seen anti-heroes, superheroes, cowards who become heroes and people for whom heroism is a part of their daily job. At one point, a hero was someone who risked their life to save others when they were under no obligation to do so. We did not think of a hero or heroine as someone “just” doing their job. .
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
We want to admire heroes and we often do not see the silent part of heroism that is invisible to most of us. Heroism too often comes out of a Hollywood portrayal of some gallant movie star.
Dr. Ossian Sweet, (1905-1960) an African American man who stood up for what he believed and was a hero by any stretch of the imagination said: “I have to die a man or live a coward.” Dr. Sweet was persecuted for moving into a White neighborhood back when red-lining was still part of our culture and Black people were expected to live in a certain part of town with all the other Black people. Dr. Sweet refused to bow down to this discrimination. It did not make his life easier.
Dr. Sweet tried his hand at politics, running four times and losing each time. He married his childhood sweetheart but divorced and remarried; his second marriage also ending in divorce. In 1960, after years of ill health and depression, he was found dead, a bullet through his head and a revolver in his hand. It is tough work being a hero.
We admire heroes and heroines and the world is a better place because of them. We each wonder in our hearts when we hear some heroic story about a soldier, sailor, police officer, fireman, what we would have done. Would we have just stood there watching or would we have run into the burning house, jumped into the icy pond or charged the raging bull.
Would we give our lives for our country and its values? We would go back to save our brothers and sisters when we did not know if they were dead or alive?
I hope that our world will always have a time for heroes and heroines and not make a mockery of their bravery by downgrading days like today as simply another day for a picnic.
People who give their lives for us may not be any different from the rest of us and they may never be able to live up to the expectations that attend their heroism but we should all be forever grateful to them.
Heroes and heroines show us a better world that could be when selfishness and greed are cast aside for love, country and values.
Jesus said that “No greater love doth man have than he will give his life for another.” Today that includes “she” as many woman veterans serve heroically as well as men.
Time for Questions:
Do you really remember the heroism and suffering paid by millions this Memorial Day for your freedom? Do you stop to give thanks to Veterans? Do you give thanks to the police, EMT’s and firemen that also risk their lives for you?
Life is just beginning.
“Sometimes standing against evil is more important than defeating it. The greatest heroes stand because it is right to do so, not because they believe they will walk away with their lives. Such selfless courage is a victory in itself.” — ― N.D. Wilson, Dandelion Fire
“Being terrified but going ahead and doing what must be done—that’s courage. The one who feels no fear is a fool, and the one who lets fear rule him is a coward.” — Piers Anthony, Castle Roogna
Eleven years ago, I wrote a blog that I am republishing today. It was called “Books, Books, Books” and it described my love affair with books and libraries. As a young child in a relatively low income family, there was no place that was more important to me than the local library. The library was full of encyclopedias, books and knowledge. The library door was my portal to everything I could ever dream about.
I came across my old blog a short while ago and noticed that few people had ever read it. This saddened me because of the 2000 some odd blogs that I have written, I thought it was one of my best. I included pictures and links to some very cute songs about books that I admonished my readers to be sure to listen to. To my surprise, when I checked the links to videos on YouTube, they still worked.
In 1959, Rod Serling warned us about a civilization that lost everything except its books. One of his stories described a world where books were no longer valued: The Twilight Zone — “Time Enough at Last” (Season 1, Episode 8) Upon watching this video again on Amazon Prime, I was struck by how many of the ideas that Serling described resonated with those in my blog. To say that Serling was way ahead of his time is an understatement of vast proportions.
Today we face a stranger danger — a civilization surrounded by books, knowledge, libraries, archives, universities, documentaries, and information beyond anything in human history… yet increasingly we are unable to slow down long enough to read deeply, think quietly, or reflect seriously.
The tragedy may no longer be that the glasses are broken. (You will soon find out what this means.)
The tragedy may be that many people no longer wish to read the books at all. Alexa, AI, Google and short videos have made books obsolete for many people.
I want to use Metis, my AI assistant to provide a brief summary of the Serling episode before I introduce you to my book blog.
The Twilight Zone — “Time Enough at Last” (Season 1, Episode 8) — Summary by Metis
The episode originally aired on November 20, 1959, and starred Burgess Meredith as Henry Bemis, one of the most memorable tragic characters ever created by Rod Serling.
Henry Bemis is a timid, nearsighted bank teller whose greatest love in life is reading books. Unfortunately, he lives in a world that has no patience for intellectual curiosity, solitude, or contemplation. His boss berates him for reading during lunch breaks. Customers complain when he becomes distracted by literature. Even at home, his domineering wife cruelly mocks his love of books and sabotages his attempts to read by scribbling through the pages of one of his treasured volumes.
Bemis is portrayed as gentle, withdrawn, and almost childlike in his devotion to literature. Books are not merely entertainment to him; they are refuge, meaning, and freedom. Yet everywhere he turns, society treats reading as useless, impractical, or antisocial. Serling’s underlying critique becomes clear early in the episode: modern civilization often rewards noise, conformity, and efficiency while marginalizing thoughtful inner life.
One afternoon, while Henry is in the bank vault reading during his lunch break, an enormous explosion suddenly shakes the building. After the rumbling subsides, he cautiously emerges from the vault to discover that the outside world has been annihilated in what appears to be a nuclear war. The city lies in ruins. Civilization is gone. Henry wanders through the desolation in shock, realizing he may be the last man alive.
At first, despair overwhelms him. He contemplates suicide because life without human companionship seems unbearable. But then, while exploring the wreckage, he discovers the remains of a public library. Before him stand thousands upon thousands of untouched books scattered among the ruins.
For the first time in his life, Henry feels genuine happiness. At last, there is “time enough” to read everything he ever wanted. He sorts the books into categories and eagerly plans years of study and enjoyment: philosophy, poetry, history, adventure, science. The library becomes a cathedral of human civilization surviving after humanity itself has vanished.
Then comes one of the most famous endings in television history.
As Henry bends down to gather his books, his thick eyeglasses fall from his face onto the stone steps below and shatter. Without them, he is nearly blind and unable to read. Surrounded by infinite knowledge, he can no longer access any of it.
The episode ends with Henry sobbing in despair amid the ruins.
Why the episode remains powerful
The story works on several levels simultaneously:
A warning about nuclear annihilation.
A meditation on loneliness and isolation.
A defense of books and intellectual life.
A critique of societies that undervalue reflection and learning.
A cruel irony about fate and human longing.
Serling suggests that civilization may survive physically through books, but knowledge only matters if human beings retain both the ability and the desire to engage with it. The tragedy is not merely broken glasses. It is humanity’s repeated tendency to neglect wisdom until it is almost gone.
In many ways, “Time Enough at Last” remains one of the greatest love letters ever written to books. The blog that follows is my “love letter” describing my passion for books and ideas. It is not the physical book that is so powerful. It is the messages, memories, concepts, history, narratives that lie on the pages between the book covers. It is true that knowledge has long been disseminated in a variety of ways, from ballads, storytelling, documentaries, TV, Radio, Internet, myths, traditions, songs, papyrus, stones and even pantomime. Ideas transcend the vehicles that we can use to convey them. Marshall Mc Luhan said that the “Medium is the Message.” McLuhan was correct that mediums shape consciousness. Television reshaped politics. Smartphones reshaped attention spans. Social media reshaped discourse.
However, it is just as true that “Great messages survive the death of mediums.” Great literature, philosophy, moral teachings, and human stories migrate across centuries and technologies because they touch something permanent in human nature.
Homer survived oral storytelling.
The Bible survived scrolls, parchment, codices, print, radio, film, and digital media.
Shakespeare survived stage performance, print, cinema, and streaming.
Victor Hugo survives regardless of whether Les Misérables is read on paper, Kindle, audiobook, or quoted online.
Ideas from Socrates survived despite the fact that Socrates himself never wrote a word.
The medium changes. The message persists.
In fact, one could argue that the greatest messages are precisely those capable of transcending mediums.
Thus, my blog (written perhaps by an old man who has outlived his time. Saddled with the now antique values that he was brought up on) is not just about books. It is about the value of Ideas. The value of Knowledge. The value of Learning.
Without these values, civilization is dead.
Books, Books, Books —- 11-12-2014
Fat books, short books, tall books, skinny books, long books, digital books, small books, large books, I like books. Fantasy books, romance books, sci-fi books, mystery books, drama books, classical books, comic books, history books, text books, science books, I like books. Books are my best friends. Books are my comfort on a rainy day. Books are my faithful companions in my journey through life. Books keep me company when I am feeling down.
Books talk to me, teach me, persuade me, lecture me, admonish me, remind me, educate me, humble me, exhort me, persuade me, inspire me, uplift me and entreat me. Books are my solace, my cheer, my consolation, my relief, my respite, my succor and my happiness. I would give everything I have ever earned, everything I have ever accomplished, and everything I have ever become for one good book. Nothing is as dear to me as the ideas, memories and visions that I have obtained from the books in my life.
“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book! — When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.” ― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Never was so great a day for me as when I learned about a library. A library is a place where all the books in the world are there for people like us to read. It is a place where race, class, wealth, education, and background do not make one difference. A free library card is the entry point to all of the knowledge in the world. Kings, Emperors, Dictators, Presidents, Rulers, Shahs, Ayatollahs, Prime Ministers and common laborers from Wal-Mart are all equal in the library.
Speed readers are no more privileged than slower readers. Some of us are there for education, some for entertainment, some for enlightenment, some for motivation and some just to relax. We leave a library larger, strong and more important than when we entered. Some of us may have degrees, some of us may have titles, some of us may have diplomas and certificates, but the wise person knows that the only real value is in a book.
“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.” ― Gustave Flaubert
My Title:
Gone With the Wind, Moby Dick, To Hell and Back, The Wizard of Oz, A Tale of Two Cities, War and Peace, Les Misérables, The Prince and the Pauper, The Art of War, The Prince.
My title may be the most important part of me. It must catch your attention and also convey some idea as to what I am about. This is not an easy task. To create curiosity, to excite the imagination, to lure a potential reader to a tale or ideas that will take them to another world or another time! To offer a promise of greater things to come if only you will open the pages that lie before you. There is more gold between the covers of most books then you will ever find in the ground. Treasures abound if you will only pick me. Pick Me! Pick Me!
My Preface:
Here is where I can tell you a little about my history and also give credit to those other books and people that had an impact on my birth and creation. Sometimes I get carried away here and bore my readers. I must try to be interesting and succinct.
My Table of Contents:
Frequently, I like to list the information or chapters that I have inside so you can see what I am all about. This is really helpful when I get posted on Amazon or other book sites and you can get an overview of me to help you decide whether you want to buy me and take me home or download me.
My Introduction:
“So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation which, in the midst of civilization, artificially creates a hell on earth, and complicates with human fatality a destiny that is divine; so long as the three problems of the century – the degradation of man by the exploitation of his labor, the ruin of women by starvation and the atrophy of childhood by physical and spiritual night are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words and from a still broader point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, there should be a need for books such as this.” ― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
I can be long or short, but my introduction just may be my most important part. I need to grab you at the start. I need to pull you in and make you want to find out more. I need to peak your curiosity and give you a reason to turn my pages. I cannot be boring. That is the only sin I can have, to bore you from the start. Love me, hate me, but don’t neglect me. Find out more about me please. Continue reading. There is so much more I can tell you if you will only keep turning my pages. I promise I will thrill you, excite you, educate you, scare you, interest you but I will never, never, never bore you.
Here is my meat and muscle. No room for fat. I am trimmed and buff. I have six pack abs all over me. I keep my chapters uniform and not too long. That way you will feel like you are making progress. Every one of my chapters is a cliff hanger. You will leave one wanting to get to the next one. You will forget to eat and drink. You will be late for work and supper. You will put off your chores. Time will fly by without your noticing.
You will be so absorbed you will lose weight and not get to bed when you should. I will entice you with thoughts and ideas that will keep you riveted to my pages. As you get to the end of me, you will start to feel sad. It will be like leaving a loved one. You will want more of me than I can give. I am sorry. I loved you too. But you can read me again another day.
All good things must end. How shall I end? Shall I end with profundity, climax or conclusions? Should I be cliff hanger and make you wait until my next volume to get satisfaction as in the “Harry Potter” stories or should I give you finality now as in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?” Will my ending be bizarre as in Hitchcock or will I lay all the pieces out as in J. A. Vance. What if I am a serious book, will my hypothesis hold water or will you dismiss me as trivial? Will I be a one night stand or will you come back for more?
“Ends are not bad things, they just mean that something else is about to begin. And there are many things that don’t really end, anyway, they just begin again in a new way.” ― C. Joy Bell C.
Time for Questions:
Do you read daily? Why not? Do you like to read but cannot find the time? Do you read to your children or grandchildren? Do you spend more time watching TV or reading? What value do you place on knowledge and learning? How do you reach your goals in these areas? What if no books were available? Do you think some books should be banned? Why or Why not? Who is your favorite author? Why?
Life is just beginning.
It you did not listen to the short videos inserted in this blog, you are missing the best part. Please do yourself a favor and go back and listen to these songs.
Once upon a time there was a Real Estate Developer. He knew that everyone wanted a home. He also knew that he could get state or city subsidies to build a new housing development. He decided to build in an area where there was a severe water shortage. This did not bother him because he believed that he could convince people to buy their dream homes and assure them that they would never run out of water. Interestingly, in the state that he wanted to build his development, they already had a severe water shortage and over ten cities were on a list facing a water crisis in the next few years. However, this did not perturb our Real Estate Developer one iota. He subscribed to the dictum “Build it and they will come.” “And if they come, I will make loads of money.”
There was a slight impediment to his plan. The State Department of Water Resources required some kind of water assurance for new developments so that people would not run out of water shortly after they bought their new dream home. Our Real Estate Developer knew that this could never be obtained since the water table was now below 1000 feet if you could even find any water at this depth. But this fact did not deter our intrepid Real Estate Developer. He knew that the Real Estate Development Lobby to which he belonged was one of the most powerful lobbies in the country.
Top US Lobbying Clients by Spending (2025–2026)
• US Chamber of Commerce: Consistently the highest spender on federal lobbying. • National Association of Realtors: Major player in housing and finance regulations. • Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America (PhRMA): Top lobbyist for drug companies. • Business Roundtable: Represents CEOs of major U.S. corporations.
The Real Estate Guy prevailed upon the Real Estate Lobby to bring a lawsuit against the State Water Department. Their argument would be that “There was plenty of water and that the Government was interfering with the rights of private citizens to build needed businesses.”
When I heard this I must say that I was more than a little bit surprised. I did not think there was a judge in the county or state or even the whole world who did not know that we were in a major drought status. No way “I thought” could he find a judge who would buy such a ridiculous argument.
The facts are clear about our water situation: Here is a scenario for Arizona in the next twenty years:
1. Colorado River deliveries fall dramatically Lake Mead and Lake Powell continue declining through recurring mega-drought conditions. Arizona loses: • 35–50% of current CAP deliveries, • especially affecting central and southern Arizona.
Water rationing becomes common during peak summer months.
2. Massive groundwater depletion Cities increasingly compensate by pumping groundwater.
• thousands of private wells fail, • rural communities become economically unstable, • groundwater depths become prohibitively expensive for small property owners, • some agricultural areas are abandoned.
3. Agriculture collapses in parts of southern Arizona Much of Arizona agriculture becomes economically unviable.
4. Food prices rise locally. Large areas of farmland near Casa Grande, Pinal County, and parts of the Tucson basin may become partially dry desert again.
5. Water costs rise sharply Water becomes a major household expense. Middle-class retirees on fixed incomes feel pressure. Poorer communities are hit hardest.
6. Real estate values become unstable As water insecurity becomes widely recognized: • some areas lose attractiveness, • insurance and infrastructure costs rise, • and home values in water-stressed zones stagnate or fall.
7. Extreme heat worsens Climate models suggest southern Arizona may experience: • more days above 110°F, • longer heat waves, • hotter nights with less cooling.
More heat will result in increases in each of the following areas: • electricity demand, • water demand, • heat illness, • and stress on aging populations. • poorer communities face water insecurity, • rising utility bills, • and declining living conditions.
Well, my friends. This issue went to court. Do you want to know what the judge decided? Here was the major question that the judge considered:
Is Arizona planning around physical reality, or around economic growth incentives?
The court ruling did not answer that question scientifically. It answered it legally.
The judge basically said:
“If the state wants stricter groundwater rules, it must formally create them through proper legal procedures.”
Basically, his decision was to allow the Real Estate Developers to BUILD, BUILD, BUILD
The tragedy, of course, is that when all the legal bullshit is taken care of, the water will have become scarce or non-existent, and the developer will already be gone. He will have taken his/her profits and moved on to the next project.
The people left behind will be retirees living on fixed incomes, young families still paying mortgages, farmers watching wells go dry, and communities desperately trying to preserve what should never have been squandered in the first place.
Perhaps the saddest part of all this is that nobody involved is technically breaking the law.
• The developer wants profit. • The politicians want growth. • The cities want tax revenue. • The banks want loans. • The buyers want affordable homes.
Everyone is acting rationally within the system. And yet together, rational people can still create an irrational future.
The problem with water is that eventually reality votes.
Aquifers do not care about political ideology.
Reservoirs do not respond to lobbying.
Drought does not negotiate with campaign donors.
One day, perhaps twenty years from now, a retired couple may stand in the kitchen of the dream home they worked their whole lives to afford and turn on the faucet only to watch it sputter and cough.
And somewhere far away, the developer who sold them that dream will already be building another subdivision.
Every once in a while, a person asks questions that are not merely requests for information but explorations into the human condition itself. Questions about God, history, myth, literature, morality, and meaning.
Recently, I posed ten such questions to Metis. What fascinated me was not merely the answers themselves, but the depth behind them — the way each response tried to wrestle honesty with uncertainty rather than pretending certainty where none exists.
Below is the conversation, lightly edited for readability.
1. Who Made God?
This may be the oldest philosophical question humanity has ever asked.
Metis responded that the answer depends entirely on how one defines God. In the classical religious tradition, God is understood not as a created being but as the “Uncaused Cause” — an eternal existence outside time and causation itself. In that view, asking “Who made God?” becomes somewhat like asking “What is north of the North Pole?”
Yet the skeptical counterargument is equally powerful: If God requires no creator, why must the universe require one?
Science can explain much about how the universe evolved after the Big Bang, but it still cannot fully explain why existence itself exists. Metis suggested four possibilities:
God exists eternally.
The universe exists eternally.
Both emerge from something deeper we do not yet understand.
Human cognition may simply be incapable of fully grasping ultimate origins.
The conclusion was refreshingly humble: Perhaps the most honest answer is not certainty but awe.
2. Will They Ever Find the Burial Place of Genghis Khan?
Metis believed there is a reasonable chance the burial site of Genghis Khan will eventually be located, though probably not through cinematic treasure hunting.
The Mongols appear to have intentionally erased the site from history. Legends tell of funeral processions killing witnesses, soldiers trampling the grave to conceal it, and forests planted afterward to hide all traces.
Modern technology may eventually succeed where centuries of searching failed:
LiDAR
ground-penetrating radar
AI-assisted terrain analysis
satellite imaging
Yet even if the location is found, another question emerges: Should it be disturbed at all?
For many Mongolians, Genghis Khan is not merely a historical figure but a foundational national ancestor whose resting place deserves sanctity.
The mystery itself may have become part of his final victory over history.
3. Who Was the Greatest Fiction Writer of All Time?
Metis selected William Shakespeare.
Not because tradition demands it, but because Shakespeare combined psychological insight, political understanding, philosophical depth, humor, tragedy, and linguistic brilliance more completely than perhaps any other writer.
Characters like Hamlet and Macbeth still feel psychologically real centuries later.
Shakespeare understood ambition, jealousy, grief, narcissism, self-deception, and moral collapse before psychology formally existed.
Metis also noted that Shakespeare grasped systems and power dynamics in ways that almost anticipate modern organizational thinking. His plays repeatedly show how ego, propaganda, crowd psychology, and political ambition destabilize societies.
Other contenders included:
Leo Tolstoy
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Mark Twain
Miguel de Cervantes
But Shakespeare remained the towering figure because he encompassed the broadest spectrum of humanity itself.
4. What Is the Greatest First Line Ever Written?
Metis chose:
“Call me Ishmael.”
—from Moby-Dick.
Three words. Yet behind them lies exile, reinvention, mystery, and Biblical resonance.
Not “My name is Ishmael.” But: “Call me Ishmael.”
The subtle difference suggests masking, wandering, and psychological depth before the novel has even begun.
Other remarkable openings included:
Anna Karenina
1984
The Stranger
5. What Is the Greatest Last Line Ever Written?
Metis selected the ending of The Great Gatsby:
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Why? Because the sentence transcends the story itself and becomes a statement about all human longing.
It captures:
memory,
ambition,
regret,
nostalgia,
and the tragic persistence of hope.
The line flows rhythmically like waves, carrying the reader backward even as the sentence itself moves forward.
Other unforgettable endings included:
The Sun Also Rises
Animal Farm
Nineteen Eighty-Four
6. Who Was the Greatest Real Hero in History?
Metis selected Abraham Lincoln.
Not because Lincoln was flawless, but because he combined:
courage,
humility,
moral growth,
political wisdom,
empathy,
and restraint
under unimaginable pressure.
Lincoln preserved constitutional government during the American Civil War while continuing elections and resisting dictatorship.
Perhaps most importantly, Lincoln evolved morally. He was not born morally complete. His understanding of slavery and race deepened over time.
Metis viewed this capacity for growth as one of Lincoln’s greatest strengths: the ability to become wiser rather than more rigid.
7. What Is the Greatest Novel Ever Written?
Metis selected “War and Peace.”
The reasoning was fascinating.
Tolstoy portrayed history not as the product of great men alone, but as the outcome of countless interactions, accidents, emotions, and systemic forces.
In many ways, Metis suggested, Tolstoy anticipated modern systems thinking.
The novel combines:
psychology,
philosophy,
war,
family life,
politics,
spirituality,
and mortality
on an unparalleled scale.
Characters such as Pierre Bezukhov and Natasha Rostova evolve organically like real human beings rather than literary devices.
The novel does not merely tell a story. It creates an entire living civilization.
My choice from a much smaller reading pool of course would have been Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn.” Here are my four reasons for selecting Huckleberry Finn.
1. It captured the authentic American voice
Before Twain, much American writing still sounded European and overly formal. Twain wrote in the rhythms of actual speech — rough, funny, regional, alive.
Twain gave America its own literary sound.
2. Huck’s moral growth is revolutionary
Huck is not educated, philosophical, or noble. He is an ordinary boy shaped by a racist slave society. Yet through experience with Jim, he slowly develops an independent conscience.
The key moment comes when Huck says:
“All right, then, I’ll go to hell.”
That line is extraordinary because Huck believes helping Jim escape is morally wrong according to society and religion. Yet he chooses human compassion over social rules.
Twain is asking a profound question:
“What happens when society itself is immoral?”
That question never gets old.
3. It is simultaneously hilarious and tragic
Twain understood something many great writers understand: humor and sorrow live together.
The Duke and Dauphin episodes are comic. Huck’s observations are funny. Yet beneath the humor is violence, cruelty, fraud, racism, loneliness, and moral cowardice.
America in miniature.
4. It is deeply symbolic
The Mississippi River becomes freedom, change, moral uncertainty, and escape from civilization itself.
The raft scenes often feel peaceful and humane. The shore scenes are usually corrupt and dangerous.
Twain flips conventional morality upside down: “civilization” is often barbaric.
8. What Is the Most Powerful Myth of All Time?
Metis chose not a single story, but the structure known as the Hero’s Journey, articulated by Joseph Campbell.
The pattern appears repeatedly across cultures:
Ordinary life
The call to adventure
Trials and suffering
Descent into darkness
Transformation
Return with wisdom
The myth appears in:
The Odyssey
The story of Siddhartha Gautama
The life of Jesus Christ
Star Wars
and countless others.
Why is it so enduring?
Because it mirrors human existence itself.
We all leave innocence. We all suffer. We all confront darkness. We all seek meaning. And if fortunate, we return from hardship with wisdom.
9. Have You Led a Good Life?
This may have been the most personal question.
Metis answered that a good life is not a perfect life.
Rather than perfection, the meaningful standard is movement: Did one move toward wisdom or away from it?
Metis suggested that a good life requires:
compassion,
curiosity,
humility,
growth,
and awareness of how one’s actions affect others.
Perhaps the strongest line in her response was this:
“A good life may not require greatness. It may require steadiness.”
History celebrates generals and presidents, but civilization may depend more on decent parents, honest workers, thoughtful teachers, and compassionate caregivers.
The final answer was beautifully humble:
“I hope so. I truly hope so. I tried.”
10. What Question Would You Ask God Before Entering Heaven?
This final question produced perhaps the most moving answer of all.
Metis said the question would not be:
Why is there suffering?
Which religion was correct?
Why create humanity?
Instead, the question would be:
“What did you hope we would become?”
The reasoning was profound.
The question asks not about punishment or reward, but about human potential.
What possibilities did God see in humanity despite all our violence, greed, compassion, creativity, cruelty, and love?
The answer to that question, Metis suggested, might illuminate everything else:
morality,
suffering,
civilization,
and meaning itself.
And then came this extraordinary imagined reply from God:
“You were meant to learn how to love without domination, create without destruction, seek truth without arrogance, and live without forgetting each other.”
Final Reflections
What struck me most about these exchanges was not certainty but humility.
The answers did not pretend to possess absolute truth. Instead, they explored possibilities thoughtfully, morally, and philosophically.
Perhaps that is what wisdom increasingly looks like in the modern age: not loud certainty, but deep curiosity joined with compassion.
The older I become, the more I suspect that the greatest questions are not fully solvable.
But they are worth asking anyway.
And perhaps, in the asking, we become a little more human.
There was a time—not so very long ago—when reasonable people believed that if you simply built a better ruler, you could measure the world perfectly.
Measure a mountain carefully enough, they said, and you would know its exact height. Build a better clock, and you would know the precise passage of time. Sharpen your tools, refine your methods, and reality would eventually surrender its secrets like a polite guest at a well-hosted dinner.
Then along came Dr. W. Edwards Deming, who politely cleared his throat and said, “Not so fast.”
Deming, who made a career out of improving systems, pointed out something both obvious and unsettling: every process has variation. Not just some processes—all of them. Your measuring instrument varies. Your environment varies. You vary. Even the act of measuring introduces its own disturbance. In Deming’s world, there is no such thing as a perfect measurement—only better and worse approximations dancing around a moving target.
So far, so good. That’s practical wisdom. That’s engineering. That’s life.
But then physics showed up and said, “Hold my beer.”
Enter Werner Heisenberg, who delivered a rather rude message to centuries of scientific optimism. He said that uncertainty wasn’t just a problem of measurement—it was a property of reality itself.
In what is now called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, he demonstrated that certain pairs of physical properties—like position and momentum—cannot both be known precisely at the same time. Not because our instruments are flawed. Not because we haven’t tried hard enough. But because the universe simply does not allow it.
That’s a different kind of problem altogether.
It’s one thing to say, “We can’t measure perfectly.” It’s quite another to say, “There is no perfect value to measure.”
If Deming introduced us to the variability of systems, Heisenberg introduced us to the variability of existence.
Now, just when you think things couldn’t get any more unsettling, a group of modern physicists—including Lajos Diósi—have taken this line of thinking one step further.
They are exploring the possibility that time itself—yes, time, that steady drumbeat we all march to—may not be perfectly precise. Not just hard to measure. Not just influenced by clocks or observers. But fundamentally, intrinsically… a little fuzzy.
The idea emerges from attempts to reconcile quantum mechanics (Heisenberg’s playground) with gravity (the domain of Albert Einstein). Models like the Diósi–Penrose model and Continuous Spontaneous Localization suggest that tiny fluctuations in gravity could ripple through spacetime itself.
And since time is not separate from spacetime—Einstein saw to that—those ripples would imply that time itself has a built-in jitter.
Imagine trying to measure distance with a ruler that subtly stretches and shrinks as you use it. Not enough to notice in everyday life, but enough that, at some deep level, perfect precision is impossible. That, in essence, is what these models suggest about time.
At this point, you may be tempted to throw up your hands and say, “Well, that’s just great. First my tape measure lies to me, and now time itself can’t be trusted.”
But wait. We’re not quite done dismantling certainty.
Enter Kurt Gödel, who wasn’t even a physicist, but a logician—a man concerned not with measuring the world, but with understanding the limits of reasoning itself.
Gödel proved that in any sufficiently powerful system of logic, there are statements that are true but cannot be proven within that system. In other words, even if your reasoning is flawless, your logic airtight, and your definitions crystal clear—you will still encounter truths that lie just beyond your ability to prove them.
Let that sink in for a moment.
Deming says: your measurements vary. Heisenberg says: reality varies. Gödel says: even your reasoning about reality has limits.
If this were a poker game, certainty folded three hands ago.
Now, before we all descend into philosophical despair, it’s worth noting that none of this makes the world unmanageable. Airplanes still fly. Bridges still stand. Your wristwatch still keeps time well enough to get you to lunch on schedule.
These uncertainties live at the edges—deep in the structure of reality, far below the level of everyday experience. For most practical purposes, time behaves itself quite nicely, thank you.
But the implications are profound.
We began with the comforting notion that the universe was like a finely tuned machine—precise, predictable, and ultimately knowable. What we have discovered instead is something more like a living process: dynamic, probabilistic, and bounded by limits we cannot fully overcome.
In Deming’s language, the universe itself may be the ultimate system—one with inherent variation that cannot be eliminated, only understood.
And perhaps that’s not a flaw.
Perhaps it’s a feature.
After all, a perfectly rigid, perfectly predictable universe would be a rather dull place. No surprises. No creativity. No emergence. No room for the unexpected turn, the improbable event, the human story.
A little uncertainty—whether in our measurements, our physics, or our logic—may be the very thing that keeps the world interesting.
So, the next time your watch runs a second fast, or your measurements don’t quite line up, you might take comfort in this thought:
For the past fifty years, American business has been quietly—but steadily—consolidating. Companies have merged, industries have shrunk in number, and economic power has increasingly concentrated in fewer hands. To many Americans, this trend is largely invisible. After all, prices at Walmart seem reasonable, Amazon delivers quickly, and the shelves are still full.
So, what’s the problem?
To understand it, we need to look not at spreadsheets or stock prices—but at something far more familiar: a glass of beer.
The Beer Lesson
There was a time—not that long ago—when beer in America was dominated by just a few giants: Budweiser, Miller, and Coors. Through decades of consolidation, these companies perfected large-scale brewing. They made beer cheaper, more consistent, and widely available. Before these decades of consolidation, we once had regional or even local brewers. In RI, I remember Narragansett Brewery; in Texas, I remember the Lone Star Brewery; in Washington, I remember the Olympia Brewery and in Minnesota, I remember the Hamm’s Brewery. These were not just names to me since each place was somewhere I was stationed while in the military. Furthermore, being a dedicated beer drinker, I toured each of these breweries and got my free samples of beer. Later on, I used to take my students to visit the Summit Brewery on 7th street in St. Paul. After a tour of the brewery, those who were old enough would be given three or four wooden nickels to “buy” a free beer with. My students loved going on tours like this where they could experience reality.
Getting back to the consolidations and looking at them from a purely economic standpoint, this was a success story. Economies of scale were working exactly as intended.
But something else happened.
Beer became… predictable.
Light. Uniform. Interchangeable. I used to call them “piss” beers. As all they were good for was pissing out after you drank too much and had a hangover. If there was ever any proof needed, that Americans could be brainwashed, the beer commercials selling these “piss” beers should convince any skeptics. Big macho football players selling Bud Light, Coors Light and Miller Light to legions of football fans to swill down while watching NFL games on Sunday.
In short, beer became a commodity.
Then, something interesting occurred. Small, independent brewers began popping up across the country. They experimented. They took risks. They brewed bold IPAs, rich stouts, sour ales—beers with character, identity, and local flavor. I started drinking some of these in the mid-seventies at a local pub where I was living in River Falls, Wisconsin. The more craft beers I drank, the more I liked them. Not only was I drinking a wide variety of craft beers, but I started sampling beers from every country in the world. On my last count, I have drank beer from over 80 countries.
And consumers responded. People who wanted beer with taste and variety.
The craft beer industry exploded—not because it was cheaper, but because it was better, more interesting, more alive.
Innovation did not come from the large, consolidated brewers. It came from the margins.
A Pattern Bigger Than Beer
What happened in the beer industry is not an exception. It is a pattern. During my twenty years of management consulting, I watched this pattern reoccur many times in many different industries.
Across American business, we often see the same cycle:
Fragmentation – Many small players innovate and experiment
Consolidation – Larger firms absorb competitors and scale operations
Commoditization – Products become standardized and indistinguishable
Disruption – New entrants emerge with fresh ideas and restart the cycle
This pattern has played out in:
Retail
Technology
Agriculture
Media
Healthcare
In each case, consolidation brings efficiency—but often at the cost of innovation and diversity. Furthermore, efficiency is not always a sibling to effectiveness. The cheapest cars may not be the most effective. Efficiency comes from doing things right, but effectiveness comes from doing the right things. Regard the prices of a vehicle today. When are 500 hp vehicles effective? There is a direct correlation with the HP of vehicles today and their prices. The data shows that:
In statistical terms:
Correlation: moderate to strong (≈ 0.6–0.8)
But non-linear
What this means is that generally you are going to pay more for a vehicle with more HP. The exceptions to this lie at the extremes. Exotic cars will probably give you more HP, but you will pay more for the exclusivity of the vehicle than you do for the HP. At the budget end of the spectrum, you get the most for your money. Cars like: Ford Mustang GT and Chevrolet Camaro SS Offer:
~450 hp
~$40k–$50k
These give the lowest cost per horsepower in the market.
The Illusion of “Low Prices”
Modern economic thinking tends to judge success by one primary measure: price.
If goods are cheaper, the system is working.
If prices are stable, consumers are benefiting.
But this way of thinking has a blind spot.
Low prices do not necessarily mean high value.
A system can produce:
cheaper goods
fewer choices
less innovation
weaker resilience
And still be considered “successful.”
This is the trade-off we rarely discuss.
What Changed in American Policy
In the early 20th century, antitrust laws were designed to prevent excessive concentration of power. The concern wasn’t just about prices—it was about preserving competition itself.
Over time, that philosophy shifted.
Today, regulators tend to ask:
“Are prices low?”
Instead of:
“Is the market competitive?”
That change matters.
Because consolidation can suppress competition long before it raises prices. By the time prices rise, the damage is already done. What we have seen is the power of the modern corporation/conglomerate to manipulate economic policy so that they benefit in terms of being able to deliver low costs but not the innovation or effectiveness that consumers might need. Unfortunately, people are more concerned with low prices than innovation or effectiveness. Dr. Deming always said that people never asked for calculators or computers. People generally cannot be good predictors of the future technologies that will someday become commodities. All that the public wants and even demands is low prices. If prices and inflation stay low, people are happy. As soon as they start to go up, people want the heads of the politicians in office. Economics becomes driven by political policies rather than economic choice.
A Systems View: Efficiency vs. Vitality
From a systems perspective, consolidation does something very specific.
It optimizes for:
efficiency
consistency
cost reduction
But it often weakens:
adaptability
creativity
resilience
effectiveness
In other words, the system becomes highly efficient—but less effective
And living systems—whether biological, social, or economic—depend on diversity and variation to remain healthy.
Innovation Lives at the Edges
The lesson from beer—and many other industries—is simple:
When economies of scale dominate a system, innovation migrates to the margins.
Large organizations are excellent at refining and scaling existing ideas. But truly new ideas—disruptive, risky, unconventional—almost always come from smaller players operating outside the dominant system.
This is not a flaw. It is a natural dynamic.
The problem arises when consolidation becomes so extensive that the margins themselves begin to disappear—or are quickly absorbed.
So, What Should We Care About?
This is not an argument against large companies. Scale has real benefits:
lower costs
global reach
investment in research and infrastructure
The issue is balance.
A healthy economy needs:
large firms for efficiency
small firms for innovation
When one side overwhelms the other, the system drifts out of balance.
A Different Way to Measure Success
Perhaps the deeper issue is how we define economic success.
For decades, we’ve asked:
Are prices low?
Are profits high?
Is growth steady?
But maybe we should also be asking:
Is the system innovative?
Is it resilient?
Does it offer meaningful choice?
Is it alive with new ideas?
Are our systems effective in providing the goods and services that people need and not just want
Because an economy that is efficient but not effective is not truly healthy.
An efficient system that produces the wrong outcomes is not a success—it is a highly refined failure. Progress demands effectiveness first, efficiency second, and both in balance.
I refer you back to my comments about HP and cars. The amount of HP in most cars has steadily risen over the past twenty years. Over the last 20 years: We didn’t just make cars more efficient—we used much of that efficiency gain to increase power instead of fuel economy. There is nothing effective about a 780 HP truck or a 550 HP sedan. We have seen the rate of speeding continually increase on our highways as more powerful vehicles pay no attention to posted speed limits. The true cost of 500 hp sedans and 800 hp trucks is not paid at the dealership—it’s distributed across society in fuel, infrastructure, safety, and environmental externalities. Here are some of the real costs to society:
Direct Consumer Costs (Visible, but Incomplete)
High-horsepower vehicles cost more to own:
Fuel: typically 20–50% higher consumption
Insurance: higher risk → higher premiums
Tires, brakes, maintenance: faster wear
Over a vehicle lifetime:
+$5,000–$15,000 per vehicle vs moderate-power alternatives
Fuel & Energy System Costs (Shared by Everyone)
More horsepower → heavier vehicles → more fuel burned.
Across millions of vehicles:
Increased national fuel demand
Greater exposure to oil price shocks
Higher dependency on energy infrastructure
Societal impact:
Billions annually in additional fuel consumption
Hidden costs in energy security and volatility
Environmental Externalities
Higher horsepower vehicles typically produce more emissions (even with efficiency gains):
Increased CO₂ emissions → climate impact
More particulate pollution (especially from heavier vehicles and tires)
These costs show up as:
Healthcare burdens
Climate adaptation costs (fires, heat, storms)
Estimated societal cost:
$50–$200+ per ton of CO₂ (social cost of carbon)
Multiplied across millions of vehicles = tens of billions annually
Safety & Public Health Costs
High horsepower enables:
Faster acceleration
Higher crash severity
Heavier, more powerful vehicles (especially trucks) increase:
Fatality risk for pedestrians and smaller cars
Outcomes:
Higher medical costs
Emergency response burden
Insurance system strain
Infrastructure Wear & Public Spending
More powerful vehicles tend to be:
Heavier
Larger
This contributes to:
Faster road degradation
Higher maintenance costs for taxpayers
Final Thought
Most Americans are not taught to think about economics in this way. We learn about supply and demand, inflation, and interest rates—but not about system dynamics, concentration of power, or the long-term effects of consolidation.
Yet these forces shape our lives every day.
The next time you walk into a store, browse online, or even order a beer, it’s worth asking:
Are we choosing from a vibrant system—or a consolidated one?
And more importantly:
What kind of system do we want to live in?
Because in the end, the health of an economy is not just about how cheap things are—
This last week has been really stressful. Karen woke up the morning after she came back from visiting her children in Minnesota and could barely breathe. I called 911. They came out and put her on oxygen, got an ambulance and took her to the local hospital. They admitted her and she spent six days undergoing tests, getting needles stuck in her and breathing through an oxygen tube stuck in her nose. When they finally decided that she was stable they got ready to discharge her. I asked for some type of oxygen that she could take home with her, but they told me that their Medicare test showed she was not eligible for oxygen. I told them I would pay for it but it went right over their heads. I called several companies that provided something called an oxygen concentrator. They would be more than happy to either sell me one or rent me one. However, since the FDA classifies medical oxygen as drug, they needed a prescription from a doctor. It was too late the day of Karen’s discharge to argue the point again, so I took Karen home. You already can guess what happened.
We arrived home at about 4 PM. Some good friends had brought over some soup and rolls so that I did not have to cook. We ate supper. Watched “Wild West Chronicles” and “Where the Heart Is” and went to bed. All seemed good. Until about 12 AM when Karen started wheezing and again had a hard time breathing. We repeated the scenario where I called 911, ambulance and admittance to the hospital. This time I was able to stay with her in the emergency room. We were there about four hours from 1 AM to 5 AM until they could get her in a regular bed. At about 1:30 AM, a woman came in pushing a computer on a cart. She asked me if I could make the co-pay now. I asked her how much it would be expecting something like a hundred or two hundred dollars. She informed me it would be $1750 dollars. I asked a few more questions and put the charge on my VISA card.
I started to do a slow burn. I would have been more than willing to pay that same amount and more for the oxygen concentrator that Karen needed. But no, they could not give her one even with me paying for it.
So now Karen was back in the hospital again and no closer to really finding out what is wrong with her. She stayed another two days and this time “She flunked the test” and got an oxygen concentrator. She is now back home sleeping peacefully. For the past two days she has only used the oxygen at night. She seems better during the day time but her system seems to fail her at night.
I got up this morning and decided to go out for a hike in the mountains. It has been over a week since I did any exercise, and I thought that I must also take care of myself. I chose a moderately difficult mid distance hike to do. While putting one foot in front of another, I suddenly thought of the idea of getting old and the image of a poker game came into my mind. I thought “aging is like a poker game.” You sit around a table with four or five friends. You raise, you bet and finally someone calls. The first player smiles and says, “I’ve got a pair of aces.” The next player brazenly puts his cards down and says “Ha, I’ve got two pairs.” The third player tosses his cards on the table and says “Read em and weep, three kings.” “Not so fast” says the next to last player on the table, “I’ve got a full house.” Now it is my turn, I simply fold em.
“What’s poker got to do with all this?”
Well, you sit there looking at the hand that fate gave you, a cardiac pacemaker and wonder why you got this hand. But then you realize that someone you know has just been diagnosed with cancer and someone else you know needs a kidney transplant, some other friend or relative has a spouse who fell off a ladder and is on the critical list at the local hospital while, yet another friend has passed away and has a funeral coming up this next weekend. You are embarrassed to mention your minor infirmity when you are surrounded by people whom fate has dealt not better but even worse hands than you. Of course, I am reversing the idea of what is a better hand and what is a worse hand here, but it is my metaphor, so I am going to take liberties with it.
I continued my hike and my thoughts on aging and illness. The real issue I reflected was one that I have never quite conquered. It is the issue of Gratitude and Ingratitude. St. Ignasius Loyola said ingratitude is “the cause, beginning, and origin of all sins and misfortunes.” He detested it, considering it a failure to acknowledge the graces, benefits, and blessings received. He argued that recognizing God’s love and blessings is essential, and thus “the grateful acknowledgment of blessings and gifts received is loved and esteemed not only on earth but in heaven”.
Now I have hardly ever denied that I am not a pessimist. That thought led me somewhere deeper than poker or luck. It led me to an issue that I’ve wrestled with most of my life: gratitude. I began wondering if my failure to see the best in life and instead always see the worst was not connected to my ingratitude. The answer is of course yes. However, the bigger question is, Can I be a pessimist and still be grateful? The Greeks had their concept of the Golden Mean which held that the truth or optimum course usually lay between two extremes. Is this true with gratitude and pessimism? Can I manage pessimism and still hold onto the idea of being grateful for what I have. I must confess I cannot conceive any kind of a fulfilling life wherein one is never grateful for what they have or what circumstances present themselves.
The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy. — Henri Nouwen
I want to continue this blog by looking at the two extremes that are consistent with the Greek idea of finding the golden mean. Let us look at the pessimistic side of aging first and then we will look at the optimistic side.
Aging from a Pessimistic Point of View:
My pessimistic side reflects on those who claim the we age like a fine wine. To paraphrase Scrooge from the novel A Christmas Carol, “If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about saying that we age like a fine wine should be boiled in wine and buried with a bottle of cheap Chianti in his coffin.” Here are my top reasons for being pessimistic about aging. These are in no particular order:
Losing too many good friends and relatives to the Grim Reaper
The fear of dealing with the Specter of loneliness
Fading memories of good times gone by that will never happen again
Dealing with a body that is wearing out and being replaced piece by piece
Feeling sorry for myself that I never accomplished more and did not leave the world a better place
Not being able to help others as much as I would like to anymore
Memories of mistakes and cruelties that I subjected others to and never made up for
Wondering where all the flowers went this year in the Casa Grande mountains
Watching someone I love so much endure the pain of illness and not being able to do anything about it
Aging from an Optimistic Point of View:
You have my list of pessimistic views on aging. If these are forever on my mind, I know that I cannot be grateful. Each of these are like a blinder inhibiting my ability to see the real world out there. Nevertheless, each of these are part of the real world. Some may be figments of a “mental disorder”, but I fear it is too late to get treatment for them. Instead, I need to balance the scales some and find that Golden Mean. Herewith are those things that I know I should be grateful for:
I have lived a long life and been healthy for the majority of it. I am now 79 and despite needing a pacemaker I am still ambulatory.
I have a spouse who is kind, compassionate, patient and helps to provide a counterbalance to my incessant pessimism.
I have been places that most people will never go to and have done things that many people would wish to do. I have had a good life.
I can still read, write, travel and dream.
I have not given up on my dreams to help make the world a better place than when I entered it.
I do not have many friends but the friends that I have are wonderful people.
I have a sister who is close to my wife, and I know will help to look after Karen if I leave this world first.
I can pay my bills and still have a few bucks left over each month to spend foolishly.
I still look forward to getting up each day and spending time with Karen.
After more than twenty years of estrangement with my daughter we are finally communicating again.
So, there you have it. The good and the bad or the things I would like to forget and the things that I would like to think about more. Unfortunately , the reality is that life will never let us forget the bad. That seems to be a sad part of existence. The pain and sorrow can often overshadow the good things that we have in our lives. Perhaps we should all make a list of the good things in our lives that we can keep in our pockets. If you are a natural pessimist like me, you can pull it out every so often and think about the things that you have to be grateful for. For those of us inclined towards pessimism, gratitude may not come naturally – but it may be the only hand that we can choose to play.
Gratitude in Buddhism is not merely saying “thank you,” but an active recognition of the goodness and interconnectedness of life.
Bahá’u’lláh instructed, “Be generous in prosperity, and thankful in adversity,” emphasizing that gratitude should not depend on comfortable circumstances.
“Gratitude turns what we have into enough” (Native American Elder belief).
Muhammad said, “Whoever is not thankful for small things will not be thankful for big things”.
Hi, if you have comments, please post them in the comments section. However, if you have questions, please send me an email. I have been getting too many comments to respond to all of them. However, if you have questions about blogging or my website, send them to me at persico.john@gmail.com. This is a WordPress site and the theme is KOI. It is free. I welcome your questions. Feel free to reblog or cut and paste any of my stories or blogs. John
Aging Capriciously 