Who Watches Big Brother?

Having an older brother is a wonderful thing. Such a wonderful thing, in fact, that there is a national organization that attempts to generate this relationship for those less fortunate in the sibling department. I feel grateful on just about any day because I had someone out there in front of me, breaking the waves and stomping down a path. Precious little of my development as a youth was not at some level pioneered by my big brother. I went to the same preschool, elementary, junior and high school he did. When it came time to troop off to college, I thought I might try Santa Fe, or maybe Colorado Springs, but I ended up at the University of Colorado. I graduated. Just like my brother before me.
It could be argued that I strayed from the path laid out for me when I didn't end up in law enforcement, but by picking a career in public education I figure I made a pretty strong course correction toward serving my community. My sense of duty and dependability may have come from my parents, but it has been reinforced on a regular basis throughout the years by the dedication I witnessed in my big brother's commitment to his friends, family and jurisdiction.
And I never would have known what was really cool without my older brother around. Like the Beatles. He gave me my first Beatles records. And Pink Floyd. He gave me "Wish You Were Here" when I was thirteen. I was encouraged to listen to it through headphones. He's the one who drove me to my first concerts at Red Rocks Amphitheater. He's the guy who taught me to "chug nachos" and then ride in the front car of Mister Twister. He's the guy who gave me my first car, his beloved red Toyota pickup. He's also the guy who didn't disown me when I dropped that red Toyota pickup off the side of a winding mountain road. He's the guy who had me stand with him on his wedding day and hold his daughter just hours after she was born.
He's the guy.
Today is his day. A moment to reflect, as he likes to remind us, of "another trip around the sun." Thanks for showing me the way. Thanks for making the path a little more clear. Having an older brother is a wonderful thing.

Us Instead Of Them

The headline read: Why the U.S. is No. 1 - In Mass Shootings. At last, I thought. An answer. Then I was struck by a Marilyn Manson lyric: "The death of one is a tragedy, but the death of a million is just a statistic." Not the most original concept, but certainly in the aftermath of his somewhat contrived connection with the Columbine High School massacre that serves as something of a jumping off point for this discussion, it rang through to me. I was moved at this point to try and discern what, for the purposes of any further discussion, what a "mass shooting" is. More than one victim? The always despicable murder/suicide would therefore be classified in this category, and catastrophes like the one sixteen years ago in Littleton, Colorado are the kind that get their own spot on the History Channel web site. The next link in that chain might possibly be the movie theater shooting in 2012 in Aurora, Colorado. Or any of the other shootings that have taken place since 1966, the time frame that exceeded four deaths, the FBI's measure for what it considers "mass." The article discussed the findings of University of Alabama criminologist Adam Lankford's assertion that America's "exceptionalism" is what keeps us constantly in the lead in this particular category.
That and the guns. Of one hundred seventy-eight countries surveyed, the per capita number of guns in the United states was 88.8 firearms per one hundred people. Two hundred seventy million guns. Second place went to Yemen, with 54.8 per one hundred people. That means that in Yemen, if you wanted to shoot someone, you might have to wait a day until it was your turn to have a gun, then take your best shot. In the United States, you probably won't have to wait that long. Or at all.
America is generally proud of its first class status, but this is not a list at the top of which we should stand tall. I know: Blah blah blah Second Amendment blah blah blah cold dead hands. The problem continues to be those cold dead hands. To that end, Wal Mart is discontinuing the sale of semi-automatic weapons like the AR-15. Like the one purchased by James Holmes that jammed during his rampage through a midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises. Dark night indeed. Maybe if all the AR-15s purchased from Wal Mart or any other retailer would come pre-jammed, maybe a few more innocent lives could be spared. Maybe gun ownership is enough. Using them for mass killing isn't what the framers of the Constitution had in mind.

Live On The Air

Earlier this month, as Bay Area camera crews were deploying at Pier 14 to report on the tragic events of a month before that, when Kate Steinle was shot and killed while walking that peaceful bit of scenic San Francisco, a masked gunman rolled up and robbed the reporters and their camera operators. One of them was pistol whipped, and it all happened on live TV. This was not the first time that a news crew was attacked. While reporting on a Powerball winner whose ticket came from a local doughnut shop a different reporter and his cameraman were robbed of their equipment by two men in masks. Television news may not be the glamorous career it had first appeared to be.
Especially now. Across the country in Virginia, a pair of television journalists were shot and killed during a live broadcast. In this case, the shooter turned out to be a disgruntled former co-worker who then crashed his car and shot himself. But not before posting first person video of the event on his Facebook page. I suppose we should be happy to know that keeping the public informed was one of the last things that went through his head. Along with the bullet.
So it turns out that TV News isn't all the hype and glory that we might once have thought, after watching Network and Broadcast News. Somewhere along the line, things became a little more dangerous than Ted Baxter reading the headlines. It's now more on a par with Les Nessman covering the Turkey Drop for WKRP in Cincinnati. But that was radio. One might think that having live video on you at all times might keep you safe.
Unless you're a reporter covering Donald Trump. Donald's shots are currently of the "zinger" variety, but he isn't showing the fourth estate much respect at all. Seldom is the phrase "biting the hand that feeds you" seemed more apt. The Donald had Univision anchor Jorge Ramos removed from a campaign event in Iowa. This came after he told Mister Ramos repeatedly to sit down and "go back to Univision." Somehow, this makes slightly more sense than his attacks on Megyn Kelly, but at this point, maybe it would be good if we just turned off the cameras for a while and gave ourselves some rest.

In The Bottle

I am nothing if not a singular apologist for social media. Wait. Strike that. Reverse it. I am not an apologist for social media. While I fully appreciate the way that technology has allowed humans to connect in ways that would have seemed ridiculous and obscure thirty years ago. Being able to share ideas and pen pal letters with classrooms across the globe with counterparts they have only encountered online is a genius thing. On the other hand, I do have to spend a certain amount of time, mandated time, each year explaining to children why we have to be extremely careful about with whom and where we share information. The cell phones in ten-year-olds' pockets that cost more than the computers in the lab are highly sophisticated machines that are designed with the idea of keeping the bearer of that technology in touch with the world. No worries there. Wait. Strike that. Reverse it.
We should expect that with kids. We wouldn't send them out with a lighter and tell them to start up the gas grill without some very specific training and admonitions. Come to think of it, we probably wouldn't even give them the lighter. Matches, maybe.
What about adults?
"Life is short. Have an affair." That's the slogan of the networking site, Ashley Madison. This is a web site that actively promotes infidelity. As a proponent of technology (see above) this is just about the lowest form of in-your-face-what's-wrong-with-this-world-sign-of-the-coming-apocalypse moral decrepitude that makes people old and young wish that there was something wholesome left in this world. The Ashley Madison folks even had a "money back guarantee: "Your money back if your infidelity is not completely satisfying." What could go wrong?
July of this year, a group calling themselves "The Impact Group" hacked into the membership files of Ashley Madison. Whoops. No more discretion. Now that data was free to roam about Al Gore's Internet in ways that even Al might not have imagined. What were the human costs? So far, two people have committed suicide as a result of having their private lives being made very public. The door is currently kicked wide open for more extortion, scams and bad behavior brought on by what was probably a lark that turned into a twisted trail of broken hearts and dented dreams. Karma? Perhaps, but it brings to mind the image that a fellow teacher once suggested to me about ketchup in a bottle. If you don't want ketchup all over everything, don't take it out of the bottle. There is no clever way to get the ketchup back inside once it's out. In this case, your personal business is the ketchup, and the Internet is the paper plate that will now become covered in that ill-advised attempt at using far too much of a condiment. Messy. Ugly. Marriages and relationships ended because of poorly managed ketchup.
Keep it in the bottle.

Forward Into The Past

If you had a time machine, would you go back to Germany in the early 1930's and kill Hitler? Maybe you would go even further and put a great big hole in the Mayflower, ensuring at least another decade or two of peace and quiet for the Native Americans who were doing just fine without a Thanksgiving Feast, thank you very much. Or maybe your sights are just a little shorter, and you happen to be very interested in movies and entertainment. You might figure out a way to halt production on any of the "worst upcoming movies in the next five years." Sure, you could prevent genocide, but if in your mind any movie made starring Adam Sandler is on a par with the attempted extinction of a race of people, then you understand what we're up against.
Please understand that I once enjoyed a bit of Sandler with some seventies soundtrack embellishment. I enjoyed "Big Daddy." I liked "The Wedding Singer." I laughed at "Happy Gilmore." And I truly enjoyed and respected "Punch Drunk Love." I truly believed, in 2002, that Adam Sandler had hit upon something that might take his acting skills and his whole act to a new level. I was wrong. Now he has become a punch line in the story of his own career. I was even tempted to see "Pixels," because it sounded like a very amusing premise: a group of aging video game players have to save the earth from aliens who descend upon the Earth in the shape of all those arcade hits from long ago. Except it starred Adam Sandler, and so I stayed away.
If only I had access to that time machine. I could go back to 2002 and sit Adam down. I could show him clips of the bile he has been serving up for the past decade or so and tell him that there is no reason he couldn't follow his comedic muse and still maintain a certain level of quality. He could even keep finding ways to keep his buddies gainfully employed. Hire a writer. Or two. Get somebody to direct you who isn't afraid of you.
And don't give up and stick your movie on Netflix because your new movie has been deemed offensive by those Native Americans whom we spoke about earlier. Come to think of it, if there was a way to keep any of Sandler's relatives off the Mayflower, maybe we could change history for the better. For good.

Founded On Dumb

Lawyers for accused terrorist Ayoub El Khazzani reported that their client was "dumbfounded" by allegations that he was on a train last weekend to commit an act of terror. The fact that he was armed with a Kalashnikov assault rifle, Luger automatic pistol, nine cartridge clips and a box-cutter wasn't fully addressed by the defense team, but I'm guessing that showing up on any sort of public transportation with a box cutter is sending a pretty clear message. That message, according to Mister El Khazzani, would seem to be, "Hey, there are a lot of boxes that need opening on French trains, and if my box cutter gets lost, I can always use my semi-automatic pistol or my machine gun to get them open." That is, unless he had been more successful in his alleged terrorist attack, in which case some rowdy group of militant-types would have claimed responsibility for the acts of this lone gunman. Instead, he turns out to be just that: A lone gunman. Unfortunately for Ayoub, the three American tourists who chose to act together put a pretty solid hurting on him after he got off just a few shots, wounding just one. Not very terror-filled, sorry. At least we now have an answer to the old riddle: When is a terrorist not a terrorist? Of course, I'm willing to bet that when those three college boys were beating him unconscious with his own rifle, there may have been some terror on board that train, but I expect it was pretty centralized. It could also be that the beating he sustained may have been the cause of any "dumbfoundedness."

Meanwhile back here in the states, down Alabama way, Donald Trump was busy stumping for whatever office it is that he seems to be running for currently: CEO, Fuhrer, terrormeister. While wearing his "Make America Great Again" cap and spouting his newly enhanced vitriol, voices in the crowd were crying out: "White Power!" One of these voices later added to the throng of media which now flocks to each and every Trump utterance, “Hopefully, he’s going to sit there and say, ‘When I become elected president, what we’re going to do is we’re going to make the border a vacation spot, it’s going to cost you twenty-five dollars for a permit, and then you get fifty dollars for every confirmed kill. That’d be one nice thing.” That was Trump fan Jim Sherota, a local on hand to cheer the man and his vision. Cheryl Burns, visiting from California with time on her hands to take in the spectacle had this to add: “There is no more California,” she said. “It’s now international, lawless territory. Everything is up for grabs. Illegal aliens are murdering people there. People are being raped. Trump isn’t lying about anything — the rest of the country just hasn’t found out yet.” I live in California, and I didn't know that. You know how I feel?

Dumbfounded. Terrified.

Less Filling

“Never send care packages to the so-called starving families in Europe because they’re not starving at all. Can you afford to live in Europe? No. You can’t even afford to visit Europe. And you know what they do with the care packages you send? They whack them with their polo mallets and kick them in their swimming pools and have a good laugh at your expense.” These are the words that I put away in my memory, along with a great many others, after listening to that National Lampoon record over and over in those formative years. The ones we call "teenage." Those were heady times, back when my world view was still forming, but comedy albums were essential for the generation of that view. Those of you who have kept track of that vision over the years shouldn't be surprised that mine comes with a laugh track.
But now back to that whole starving children concern. I was never truly badgered by my parents to clean my plate, at least in as much as it could have saved lives in some foreign country. In Europe, Asia, or even down the street from where I lived. This lack of hectoring may have been due, in part, to the way my brothers and I devoured the meals set in front of us. We were good little eaters. And my mom was pretty good about putting permutations of meat and cheese in front of us so that we only had ourselves to blame if we went to bed hungry. There wasn't a lot of food being pushed around the plate, unless it was on it's way to one of our gaping maws. Starving children, indeed.
But if there was a place that I had been led to believe was full of children in need of a square meal, it was India. Imagine my surprise when, this past weekend, I opened up this story about "the obesity epidemic" in India. Soda, candy, Flamin' Hot Cheetos and all that good junk is finding its way into the formerly malnourished bellies of the teenagers in Delhi. Okay, so maybe malnourished is still pretty much the case if you take that as "bad nourishment." Man cannot live on Flamin' Hot Cheetos alone. More good news: The United States is no longer number one on the list of childhood obesity. That distinction now belongs to Greece. Italy is number two, followed by New Zealand and Slovenia. Estados Unidos shows up as number five. Sure, we're still in the top ten, but it looks like all those carrot sticks and Wii Fit seems to be paying off.