Month: April 2026

Peter

Heroism

I have posted this poem twice before. Once in November of 2019, during the Impeachment trial of Donald J Trump because I thought it took heroism to initiate and prosecute the impeachment process . The time before that had been 10 years prior, and I thought it was a good time for a reminder.

I reprint it again today for the same reason. We need courage, heroism. And we need it now, everyday, all the time.

HEROISM

It takes great strength to train
To modern service your ancestral brain;
To lift the weight of the unnumbered years
Of dead men’s habits, methods and ideas;
To hold that back with one hand, and support
With the other the weak steps of new resolve!

It takes great strength to bring your life up square
With your accepted thought, and hold it there,
Resisting the inertia that drags back
From new attempts to the old habit’s track.
It is so easy to drift back–to sink–
So hard to live abreast of what you think!

It takes great strength to live where you belong,
When other people think that you are wrong;
People you love, and who love you, and whose
Approval is a pleasure you would choose.
To bear this pressure, and succeed at length
In living your belief–well, it takes strength–

Courage, too. But what does courage mean
Save strength to help you face a pain foreseen;
Courage to undertake this life-long strain
Of setting yourself against your grandsire’s brain:
Dangerous risk of walking alone and free,
Out of the easy paths that used to be;
And the fierce pain of hurting those we love,
When love meets truth, and truth must ride above!

But the best courage man has ever shown,
Is daring to cut loose, and think alone.
Dark are the unlit chambers of clear space,
Where light shines back from no reflecting face.
Our sun’s wide glare, our heaven’s shining blue,
We owe to fog and dust they fumble through;
And our rich wisdom that we treasure so,
Shines from a thousand things that we don’t know.

But to think new–it takes a courage grim
As led Columbus over the world’s rim.
To think–it costs some courage–and to go–
Try it–it taxes every power you know.
It takes great love to stir a human heart
To live beyond the others, and apart;
A love that is not shallow, is not small;
Is not for one or two, but for them all.

Love that can wound love for its higher need;
Love that can leave love, though the heart may bleed;
Love that can lose love, family and friend,
Yet steadfastly live, loving to the end.
A love that asks no answer, that can live,
Moved by one burning, deathless force–to give!
Love, strength and courage; courage, strength and love–
The heroes of all time are built thereof.

Charlotte Anna Perkins Stetson Gilman (1860–1935) 

…launched her career as a lecturer, author, and reformer with the story for which she is best-known today, “The Yellow Wallpaper.”  

She was hailed as the “brains” of the US women’s movement, whose focus she sought to broaden from suffrage to economics. Her most influential sociological work criticized the competitive individualism of capitalists and Social Darwinists, and touted altruistic service as the prerequisite to both social progress and human evolution.

By 1900, Gilman had become an international celebrity, but had already faced a scandal over her divorce and “abandonment” of her child. As the years passed, her audience shrunk and grew more hostile, and she increasingly positioned herself in opposition to the society that in an earlier, more idealistic period she had seen as the better part of the self. 

In her final years, she unflinchingly faced breast cancer, her second husband’s sudden death, and finally, her own carefully planned suicide— she “preferred chloroform to cancer” and cared little for a single life when its usefulness was over. A remarkable woman whose public solutions often belied her private anxieties.

Well, that’s a mouthful. I’ll be back tomorrow to chat again. :-) Take care and hug your loved ones.

Peter

The Things We Love

“The things that we love tell us what we are.”

Thomas Acquinas (1225-1274)

Like most of us, I suspect, I have a love/hate relationship with social media. At present it comprises more of my interactions with other people than I am happy about — but I’m too much of a hermit and recluse to search for people who share my interests. A lifetime taught me there aren’t many. Actually, I SAY that I’m a hermit and a recluse but in reality it comes down to the fact that I’ve never been able to find many people who have similar interests in close proximity. Most of my life I have had active correspondences with people all over the world. (Well, mostly the U.S., Australia and Europe.) — I’m OK with that. I like people. I like conversation if it’s something I’m even remotely interested in, but I hate small talk, and sports, and politics. And, more than that, people are exhausting. I’m one of those INTP personalities and people can all be just too much.

I get confused by the social media topic of searching for self. Speaking only for myself, I have always had things I cared about and I thought that the things I cared about defined who I was. I probably saw the Thomas Aquinas quote above when I was young but I doubt that it ever really sank in as something I “remembered” — in my head I was simply satisfied that my faith, my ideals, my interests pretty well defined who I was and that was that.

Having interests didn’t make self-definition easy, mind you. Over time things change. My understanding grew. Other people too grew and changed. Sometimes we would come to a fork in the road that took us in different directions. Yeah — that made sense. You go your way, I’ll go mine, and we are both seeking what we want in or out of life.

I don’t know about you, but I do fear for the young. Especially with the rising prevalence of AI – Artificial Intelligence. Just this morning I saw a blog post from someone bemoaning the fact that “their time with AI” wasn’t as fulfilling as they hoped it would be. Yeah…. That struck me like a brick. AI isn’t a person. You don’t really “spend time with AI.” But there you have it, The machines are not serving as it they were human companions for at least SOME part of the population.

I don’t know. In my mind the ability to think, and process ideas, is a major part of life. I grew up in the era of the Civil Rights movement, and the beginnings of the Ecology push, and a bunch of other ideas, maybe ideals, that shaped my generation. I still struggle with those challenges; I still think about them.

I know that idealism isn’t dead. My granddaughter and her husband are avid outdoors people. They annually trek or canoe through Boundary Waters — now under attack — and they are upset, and motivated. They both have jobs that keep them attuned to public opinion and public causes. They do all that they can to minimize their impact on the earth. I give them mucho credit for resisting the inertia that draws back from new challenged.

Unfortunately I don’t see as much of that kind of activism that affects daily life in people living near me. Maybe I’m blind. Maybe their activism is hidden. I’m delighted when I see the folk who come out for No Kings Day protests, but I’m saddened that we can only screw up our courage to the protest point so seldom while evil men and women are out every single day harming and plotting to harm others. Is that because we have too many distractions? Do we, as a nation, not care enough about anything? I have no idea.

Thomas Acquinas lived 800 years ago. But some things don’t change. And I have always loved the reality that truth never changes. Most ideas have lived before our time, we are almost all the time simply repeating history in a slightly different “flavor.” English instead of Latin or Greek, or Indian, or, or, or, or.. One didn’t need social media to suffer loss of identity. Peasants in medieval times surely had to wonder whether there wasn’t something more to life than their experience — assuming they had a free moment when they weren’t required by the Lord of the Manor or the conquering army to do something. We can spend time pondering what we should be doing. Or we can go about doing what we love or care about so long as we are able — and filling in with required tasks when we must. We don’t have to give up our hopes and dreams. But we do have to own them. If we refuse to say, “I love choral music and I want to sing” we’ll never go out and find a chorus or choir to join. And that is how we find out who we are, isn’t it? Or, as I heard from an acquaintance recently: they had trained as a nurse, graduated the course, took a job, and spend several months doing the work — and then decided that they didn’t want to spend their life doing THAT!!!!!. So, they listened to their interests — or what they thought they were interested in and made a decision. They are now doing what I think they see as a temporary job until they connect with another interest that is more important to them. But they now have a direction. They KNOW what they want — and it came from within — not from someone else’s advice or meddling or idle curiosity.

Life can be difficult. But it can also be simple — if we let it be. We can make our own problems too. Sometimes the difficult thing isn’t difficult at all, we just don’t want to do it and find a million reasons not to do it. Who am I may be a philosophical question but it can also be a practical one — a question that we answer day by day, minute by minute, ever refining the fine points of our definition.

But in it all, I really think it’s about “The things we love.” What do we care about? Do we care? Should we care? Why don’t we care? Decide what it is that you love, care about, are willing to live and die for — and everything else falls into place. Perhaps not easily…. but at least you’ll know where you’re going.

That’s it for today. Take care of yourself and I’ll be back to chat again soon.

Peter

My Kingdom is not of this World

If you read the story of Jesus you will know that he plainly stated that his kingdom was not of this world. I have always thought it curious that so many of his followers have gone to great lengths to form, create, achieve kingdoms in his name; often at extreme cost for those who resisted such kingdom making. And not many nations around the world haven’t done their bit to establish their little bit of heaven at the cost of their neighbor’s blood being shed.

In my teens and 20’s when I faced the draft I was actively part of a religious faith that sought a different kingdom — one beyond this world and apart from it. We were — and are still — inhabitants of another kingdom. We may live under the rules of the United States of America, and it makes allowances for such as myself. I’m not alone but I have not changed even if I’m old and no longer nearly as active as in those days.

The idea that this is not my kingdom sort of revived itself years ago when I saw the saying to the side. “Not my circus, not my monkeys”

I wonder whether the fact that I have long thought of myself as apart from the country even though I’m here in it, and have to do certain things because of that. I can’t say it gives me any special insight. I’m not all that different from others. But with less of a vested interest in the outcome — after all, the kingdom I wait for will be far more just and fair than the one we live in now — I don’t have to defend anything. The lack of a defense mechanism lets me see that justice is lacking, that compassion is absent, that wrong-doers are congratulated and greedy people are rewarded while generous souls are getting harder to find.

I don’t know how others who say they call upon the name of Jesus for salvation can justify ignoring the things he said. And I know that you can moan and complain about how good or bad Bible translations might be, but the fact remains that if you compare half a dozen or more other that the concepts ring true regardless the individual words some translator used to convey 2000 year old ideas.

I don’t really “fault” clergy for sometimes teaching the wrong thing. One has to be dispassionate about their studies to let the truth sink in through their biased skull and to allow new ideas to flourish in the sometimes barren soil of our brain. And to be fair, most of the people of cloth — pastors, priests, deacons, etc., — learned the ideas they hold true from other men and women. Once you have been taught, it’s difficult indeed to let words speak to you without bias.

There’s an old saying, I heard it first from Roman Catholic friends but I have heard it since from others so it’s not like “Catholics” have any claim to the expression. But it says,

Give me a child until the age of 5, and he (she) will never depart from the church.

A simple, but powerful reality. SO MUCH of what we become is solidified in our early years. Personality — the thing that makes me ME, forms in the minds of children and it’s not all that hard to see which young ones will become leaders, which ones are happy following, which ones have a penchant for deception, which ones are loners, or extra-social. The church has prospered by encouraging parents to bring children to church, to have them go through their catechism or bar mitzvah or whatever the process and celebration of coming into the faith.

Having been taught from early on that certain things ARE and certain things ARE NOT — later in life it’s hard to distinguish when a leader of the church says something that SHOULD cause alarm but because the words were spoken by holy lips no one ever sounded the alarm. And so small offenses build up into massive divergences from the faith that Jesus taught.

It’s not easy to live a life where you are a pilgrim and a stranger in a foreign land. But, in fact, that is part of the calling of Jesus. His followers are encouraged to hope for and work for his kingdom. The one that is not of this world.

That’s if for today. Take care of yourself and I’ll be back soon to chat. :-)

Peter

At Best

We go in the direction we are looking.

Often our suppositions and beliefs push us beyond reason or experience. If we believe one nationality or group to be inferior or superior then all of our thoughts will try to enforce that opinion.

It’s hard to find people who truly want truth for authority rather than authorities to decide what is true. And what I mean by “truth” is those things that can be substantively verified or proven.

I came across this quotation from B.F. Skinner (for more about him see the Wiki article about him)

Considering free will to be an illusion, Skinner saw human action as dependent on consequences of previous actions, a theory he would articulate as the principle of reinforcement: If the consequences to an action are bad, there is a high chance the action will not be repeated; if the consequences are good, the probability of the action being repeated becomes stronger.

Skinner developed behavior analysis, especially the philosophy of radical behaviorism, and founded the experimental analysis of behavior, a school of experimental research psychology. He also used operant conditioning to strengthen behavior, considering the rate of response to be the most effective measure of response strength. To study operant conditioning, he invented the operant conditioning chamber (aka the Skinner box), and to measure rate he invented the cumulative recorder. Using these tools, he and Charles Ferster produced Skinner’s most influential experimental work, outlined in their 1957 book Schedules of Reinforcement.

Wikipedia “B F Skinner”

I really struggle with this idea. Historically there have been times when punishment has improved the lives of many, and other times when punishment has done nothing more than foment dissatisfaction and rebellion. I suppose on some levels, it’s the degree of punishment that is the difference. “Punishing” a child’s misbehavior or disrespect can produce an adult who understands the basics of human interaction and refrains from needlessly offending others. Conversely, if someone steals food to fill an empty belly or a child’s belly, and then confining them among thieves and murderers who will take advantage of a relatively pure heart — well, the results of that are probably more likely to corrupt one than to improve one. And, society has struggled for centuries to know what to do with people who flaunt the laws. Whether “serious” or trivial — there seem to be a limited number of solutions available and too often those who make the rules don’t want to be bothered dealing with those who don’t and would just as soon bundle them off to a place where they aren’t any trouble. NO wonder Britain populated Australia with convicts and prisons dot the rural maps of the U.S.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is all about whether individuals are able to see a shadow projected onto a wall, without seeing the source of the projection, and deduce that there is something going on that is more real than the shadow on the wall. It seems a simple concept, but in reality, and in application it speaks to a group of people who are unable to make such connections.

The U.S. election of November 2025 demonstrates the reality perfectly. Given all that was known about candidates before the election, the outcome demonstrates the some are capable of making the connection between idea and reality.

Yes, there are some people for whom punishment is nothing more than a lesson in how to avoid punishment — but in the election situation the “punishment” the population was enduring because of a President from a certain party has been proven to be far less of a pain than the release from that president’s punishing power than being released into the hands of the Orange Buffoon.

There was a time when public discussion could entertain multiple ideas, sort them out, and arrive at solutions that suited multiple interest group. In that sense “punishment” or enduring various social settings, situations, biases, behaviors have been able to teach lessons far more important than just how to avoid the situation — they have enabled society to move beyond social problems so that everyone received some benefit and no one was an outcast.

I sometimes wonder about things like “national pride” or “regimental pride”. One would think that being proud of something is a good thing. But the question needs answering, “is it?”

If you have ever watched or been part of a regional or national heritage celebration it’s clear that to some degree there is always a feeling that we are somehow just a little bit better than them. If we were all the same, and our accomplishments were no better than anyone else’s accomplishment what reason would there be to have a special event marking our “accomplishments”? In daily life we have Polish events (yeah, I’m mostly Polish) and Irish celebrations (my wife is mostly Irish) and gay celebrations and sport team celebrations to herald the winning of who knows what, and so on and so forth. They all celebrate something the celebrants think makes them particularly worthy of recognition. Certainly military celebrations are the most scary because they are celebrating their victory in battle, their ability to subjugate or destroy others, and while they hide the ugly by talking about honor and the flag and this and that it really comes down to the fact that they are proud to have whupped the ass of whomever they went against. Basically, it’s good to be a bully.

I know that’s not a popular opinion. But the problem is that when we begin seeing ourselves as more noteworthy of celebration than others that pride rises up and men and women do terrible things to save their pride and prevent embarrassment. Or, to be punished. How many common crimes are committed so as to avoid reprisals for other crimes. How many social offenses are committed so as to avoid the disapproval of others… It’s a great big Round Robin of a mess. And we get into it because we feel the need to be better than someone else.

I don’t know how to change anything. I do know that we have seen better climates for the exchange of ideas. But in a time when national treasures are being plundered by the few while the populace stands silently beside it’s clear that Plato was right about some people not being able to draw conclusions based upon concepts and that we aren’t in for a smooth ride anytime in the near future.

I guess I better stop here, for now. I’ll be back soon to chat again. In the meantime take care of yourself and your loved ones. :-)

Peter

Drowning in Entertainment

Choices. The world is full of them. Our choices become us, don’t they. It’s easy to say when life goes wrong that “it’s not fair” — life that is — but then we rarely want to look at at how many of our own choices are the reason that life has gone wrong. Not all, for sure. Sometimes bad stuff just happens. Other times bad stuff happens because other people have done things TO or ABOUT us. But the majority of what happens in most of our lives in a First World country are about our own choices. Why else do you think that alcohol and drugs are so prevalent — because we need an escape from the reality we are living.

There is an Old Testament idea of a “still, small, voice” that is God’s way of speaking to us. I don’t know about you but it’s not easy to hear a small sound, a still sound, a quiet sound. And I can’t tell you how many times I have hit the “Quiet” button on my remote control to cut the music or television speakers just so I could hear whether I thought I heard rain on the windows, or a distant alarm/siren, or water gurgling in the pipes. I sometimes think about dogs that are able to prick their ears and how their face changes when they hear something and are trying to make out just what it is.

People aren’t great with silence. And even sound is often not enough. Why is it that young folks, especially, love their music loud, why music concerts are often at ear splitting intensity and lights are flashing and everything is a-jitter? WE are afraid to be caught in the silence.

I think it’s clear that much of the world doesn’t want to hear from God. No one tells us to turn up the volume. Oh, I suppose we could say that “nurture” has taught us that listening to loud music is the way to listen to music, but really I don’t think it’s about having been taught how to listen. I think it’s about us feeling better when the volume is up and we aren’t distracted by anything.

I’ve sat in living rooms while people watched sporting events and conversation was discouraged because the fans wanted to see and hear every little thing on the screen — don’t bother me with life, this is entertainment!

It’s hard to hear a still, small, voice. But if it’s there then we are only doing ourselves a disservice by pretending it’s not there. For 35 years we owned a family residential property with multiple tenants. When I ignored the little sounds it cost me money. Water burbling was a bad sign, a door clattering was a warning, the sounds of flapping or squeaking were similarly signed of something being wrong. Sometimes I’d hear noises in our apartment — and the quiet sounds were at the other end of the property. When I ignored them I ended up with a repairman and a repair bill which — had I paid attention at the time — I could have avoided by fixing a small problem before it became a big one.

In my humble opinion God’s been talking to us all along, but we’ve had the volume turned up so high that we aren’t paying attention. The Orange Buffoon in the big white house is a result, not a cause. Drug use is a result, not a cause. Sexual predators are a result, not a cause. Most of what’s wrong with society is the result of what has gone before — that we as a society had opportunity to fix — but chose, instead, distraction and entertainment.

I guess that’s it for today. I hope you’re doing well, or as well as the crazy world around us will allow. I’ll be back again soon to chat again.

Image Peter

Solutions

I’ve been thinking about something other than problems — solutions! We always focus on the problems and it’s a rare individual who actually says, “sod the problems, we want something better than fighting what’s wrong, how do we make something that’s right?”

I’ve been lucky to have lived in a time when the world was about ideas and ideals. Oh, maybe not the WHOLE world, but ideas were at least out in the public view and spoken about openly. I mourn for a world that has been gobbled up by expediency and greed.

One voice doesn’t change the world — at least not very often. So, I guess we are each forced to do our own little bit in the part of the universe where we have any influence at all.

Talk again soon. :-)

Image Peter

Only old people and young people

Faith is elusive. The busier we are, the harder to attain. The more complicated and sophisticated we are the less inclined we are. Faith, real faith, is rare. The world thinks that people of faith are foolish. But faith doesn’t care.

Peter

19 years with WordPress

Today in my WordPress mail I got notification that I’ve been with WordPress (where this blog lives) for 19 years!

I haven’t always been writing THIS particular blog at the WordPress hosting, for 6 or 7 years (before hacking got to be a big deal). For a good while I self-hosted a couple other blogs which no longer exist. But I was hacked enough times that I decided to give up on self-hosting and let WordPress take care of the hackers and keep the site up and running — which job they have done wonderfully.

Over the time I’ve used dozens of their site templates, moving from photo heavy blogs to primarily text related blogs and I have loved the ease and flexibility that they have enabled when it comes to changes to your look. Anyway, thanks for WordPress for a lot of fun, meeting a lot of new people and a pleasant enough pastime that has also kept me sane and sober.

So, congratulations to me! :-)