Author: ron

the public trough

I recently attended a rally protesting cuts to health care for the mentally ill here in Sacramento. The Sacramento Bee covered the rally, and one of the first user comments on the web page accused the protesters of “feeding at the public trough.” At first I was indignant but, you know, I can understand the reader’s anger and frustration. Looking through the short article, several interesting facts emerge. Please try to bear with me as I attempt some arithmetic:

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The Screen Time Conspiracy and other “clinical guidelines” woes

I recently received a communiqué from a physician asserting that the “AAP [American Academy of Pediatrics] recommends no more than one hour each day of screen time.” This immediately raised my hackles on several levels, beginning with the implied criticism that I was not being a responsible parent. (Parents out there, raise your hands: how many of you limit your children’s total time watching television and using video games, computers, handheld games, or cell phones to less than one hour per day? Every day? Be honest! Include time the child spends in others’ care, including school. Are you sure? Do you know how to program your television’s V-Chip? I don’t see many hands out there. The rest of you must be BAD PARENTS.)

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An Open Letter to 21st Century Insurance

Note: this page was attacked and defaced by a “reputation service.” This is restored from a version saved by The Internet Archive, so not all of the links work correctly.

Sigh. I’d been a happy customer of 21st Century Insurance (now apparently known as AIG Direct) for close to two decades, since back when they were “20th Century Insurance.” Lately, though, they’ve gone down the tubes. I’ve referred friends to Twenty-First Century who have recently reported that their customer service has become simply awful. Why do companies that spend time and money building up a reputation for good customer relations to suddenly decide to go bad? To make a quick buck, I guess.

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Desert Heart

HIKING GOLDEN BROWN HILLS, sun dazzling, dry breeze hot
I kneel before a great flat stone and, struck from behind
I am surprised to find my heart on that stone, rhythmically
Pulsing, wet, alive, dislocated, ugly

It should be sterile, that heart, but it gathers chaff
And grains of sand, wind blown, and tiny pebbles from
The rock on which it beats. Its sticky wetness defies
The dehydrating air, the desiccating sun, the drying dirt

I pick it up, hurl it toward a sea that lies beyond
The horizon. Borne aloft, it is a miracle that it plashes
Out beyond the turbid, crashing waves and half sinks
Half floats in the moist milieu, shedding sand and sticks

Beating still, wet still, living still

— Ron – 16 Aug 2008

Second Night Spaces

Our second night together
In not too many years
Our love, so long enduring,
So chaste and pure unless you count
The thousand or so lascivious thoughts
Coursing through my mind:
O! to wake up more entangled 
Than entranced!  But a treasure
Such as ours is not so lightly
Changed, and what pure bliss
To wake to coffee, to walk, to dream,
To reminisce of all those times
When we stumbled, fell,
Gave our hearts for breaking,
Tortured our minds with questing,
Laughed with sorrow, cried with joy,
And we were here, each other,
For each other, loving each other, 
Offering our arms in hugs
That say it’s okay that we
Don’t always understand.
You, so tolerant of my mistakes,
Must see in me something like
The wisdom, beauty, courage that I see
In you for each of one thousand five hundred
Days and two nights.
Can I -- dare I try? -- to fill a part of
The “If I’m so wonderful...” empty
Spaces over which you give lament?
Dare I say what you might not believe,
That you are still -- have always been -- 
My picture of not quite perfection?
There still aren’t words, even in
This “Precise, Extra-Fine” pen to
Say what I have tried to know
For fourteen hundred ninety eight
Of fifteen hundred nights.
In my dreams, I finally work it out
On a porch, in an old rocker,
By your side in the twilight --
But by then I have no empty space,
And it need not be said.

— Ron – 08 Jul 1993

Every gun that is made…

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children… This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”

— Dwight D. Eisenhower, From a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953