Aging Capriciously

There is a song called the “Long Black Veil.”  One of the refrains in the song goes:

She walks these hills in a long black veil
She visits my grave when the night winds wail
Nobody knows, nobody sees
Nobody knows but me

Something about the last lines resonates with me.  “Nobody knows, nobody sees, but me.”  I often feel like that about the life I live and the people around me.  Sometimes, I describe it as feeling like Alice in Wonderland.  Crazy times, crazy people and we go on our daily lives just like nothing was happening.  There are a great many people who mistrust and even hate “Big Government” today.  I have argued that government is needed to counterbalance a naturally greedy and predatory economic system.  Nevertheless, I have worked as a consultant with many different levels of government and many different government agencies.  The stupidity and corruption that I have seen in government is mind boggling.  It would make Alice think that Wonderland was a normal rational functioning place.

I wander these hills, and nobody sees, nobody knows but me. 

I suppose the general populace should be forgiven for not rebelling.  But when they give their political leaders a vote of no confidence and still vote them back into office, you have to scratch your head and wonder if you are crazy or not.  Am I the only one that sees the links between the corruption and stupidity and the fact that our political system is no longer functioning as it should?  Why rail against your political leaders and vote them back into office?  I would like to see a political system as follows:

• One term of six years for all political offices. No repeats!
• Representatives selected at random from a pool of qualified candidates for all offices
• Consolidation of government to represent districts and not towns, counties and states
• More emphasis on national referendums
• Supreme Court judges only selected by two thirds vote of the Senate

I can be arguing with Democrats or Republicans in the USA and almost everyone agrees that we could eliminate a great deal of greed and undue influence in our political system by term limits.  Yet, we now have over twenty Democratic candidates running for the Presidency and not one of them has mentioned term limits.  Nor will they!

Does anyone notice?  Does anyone care?  Nobody knows, nobody sees but me.

The problems underlying our political system of greed and influence seem to be beyond touch.  We go through the motions every four years of another political circus to elect someone that many of us hope will defeat Trump.  That person will get into office, no matter who they are, no matter what they say they will do, and in a short period of time they will be corrupted by a sick crazy system.  As we always said in Organization Development “You put a good person in a bad system and the system will win every time.”  It will not matter who we elect.  They will back the military; they will represent big business and they will find some country or war to get us involved in.

I wander this country.  I walk these lands.  Nobody knows, nobody sees but me.

I find myself time and time again, wondering and wondering and wondering.  Maybe everyone else knows and everyone else sees and I am the only blind person in Wonderland.

Last blog I said I needed to focus on characters more.  My favorite character in my life is my wife Karen.  She has a big heart and really cares about people.  She is my lodestone for happiness.  I have a deal with her.  She keeps me happy and I keep her healthy.  I am much better at being healthy than I am at being happy.  My mother always said that “ignorance is bliss” and I sometime wonder if I have the opposite problem.  But Karen loves me despite my many caustic and pessimistic moments.  She cooks, sews, cleans and works as a Nurse Consultant continuing to bring in extra income even though she will be seventy-five years old in July of this year.  She is smart and thrifty.  I don’t know how I got so lucky.

Karen has a BS in Nursing and an Masters Degree.  We met in 1983 when we were both going through a divorce.  Coincidentally we had each been married for sixteen years.  We married in 1989 after a pre-marriage honeymoon in China.  We will be coming up on 30 years of married life in September.  We are planning to go to Paris and Moscow in the spring of 2020.  My favorites times are when I am with Karen.

Karen enjoys traveling, reading, music and we share the same attitudes towards politics.  Karen is quite an accomplished musician and is multi-talented in this area.  When we are down in Arizona, she is part of a group called “The Tucson Dulcimer Ensemble.”  A coterie of mostly women and a few men who play a variety of acoustic instruments with a strong focus on the mountain and hammered dulcimers.  Karen’s discipline in practicing and learning to play several different instruments always amazes me.  I think if I had her discipline I could have been ruler of the known world. 😊

Karen is the first and most important among many in my cast of characters that continues to influence my life.  I could talk about the ones that are living but I should eventually note some of the “dead” characters who influence my thinking and decisions.  Foremost among these would be Socrates, but I will save that thought for another time.

“Our uniqueness makes us special, makes perception valuable – but it can also make us lonely. This loneliness is different from being ‘alone’: You can be lonely even surrounded by people. The feeling I’m talking about stems from the sense that we can never fully share the truth of who we are. I experienced this acutely at an early age.” — Amy Tan