Gems II

Tonight I finished the crown of my first gemstone. All facets are polished. Honestly, it's coming out better than I expected for the first effort. Either I did my homework better than I thought, the faceting machine is more simple to use than I expected, the moon was in the right phase, or something...

It's a seductive effort, cutting gems. Everything's on such a tiny scale. One degree of difference in a facet angle makes a world of difference. Time cannot be rushed, and here in the early going it's taking more time than I would ever be able to recoup in sales of stones. Yet I can see how it can get better with practice, and eventually I'll be turning out really nice stones with much less effort.

I didn't have an engineer's brain to start this whole thing, but it looks like an artist's temperament may compensate. Once I realize what I'm looking for with each facet, the cutting is like playing a Chopin nocturne, the same notes played every time but each performance subtly different from the last depending on my mood, my fingers' willingness and fitness to translate the piece, the setting in which the piece is being played, the depth of soul that can be had at the moment... There are so many jukes and jives you can use to tweak a facet, and each gem will be a unique performance. Unlike music, the gem will remain in silent beauty forever, always there to appreciate, never decaying with time.

I like this stuff.

Slavery

In a report this morning on the radio the estate of James Madison, President of the United States, was considered. The focus was on the fact that Madison, principal author of the Constitution, owned about one hundred slaves. There is a modern sense of disbelief that such a contradiction could occur, but this ignores the historical context. It was the spirit of the times and an integral part of the economy. At the time very few in positions of authority questioned it.

The reporter said that many of the slaves had no earthly possessions to pass on. Set that next to Janis Joplin singing, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”, and it turns our understanding a mite. It got me to thinking about what the slave owners were beholden to, and a whole landscape opened up. In a short space, during which I was driving and soon had to pull over to write it all down, I came up with a list of things that people can be enslaved to.

But first, I wanted to consider the definition of slavery. Turning to Webster’s, the first definition is what we normally think of as being owned by and in servitude to another human being. But skipping down to the third definition we find that slavery is a condition of submission to or domination by some influence, habit, etc. By this definition James Madison was enslaved to his business ventures and land holdings. My own idea is that slavery is whatever is necessary to support your drives, and this could be positive or negative. Let’s go back to my list. We can be enslaved by:

· Possessions, or standard of living
· Self image and identity, including the pursuit of success
· Opinions, either our own or others’
· Doctrines
· Causes
· Relationships of many types
· Hope without certainty, especially with religion and politics
· Desire for potency, power
· Passions
· Situations we’ve gotten into and are hard to get out of

This is just a short list of all the kinds, and each could take an essay itself. Jumping back to the global level, it seems that we’re all enslaved to something or someone. And so much time, effort, money, and hopefulness goes into efforts to feel free, which paradoxically enslaves us to the pursuit of freedom. Bikers find it in the wind on the road. Adrenaline junkies find it in fast vehicles and extreme sports. Workers of all types find it in a lazy Saturday morning with (relatively) nothing to do. Yet the feeling of freedom is momentary and fleeting; we return to other enslavements in all too short a time.

Is there a more enduring type of freedom? Stay tuned.

If there is such a thing as a free man or woman, it must be exceedingly rare.

*Sigh*

On the news today somebody from the White House leaked that Iran will be attacked next month. I'll trust that this wasn't unsubstantiated rumor, that NPR checked out its sources.

What can you do with people who only see the world in terms of Good Guys and Bad Guys, who have the world's largest military at their disposal, and whose apparently only solution is to attack? They don't hear reason. They don't admit fault. They don't think through to outcomes. Through their decisions and actions over the last six years more than six hundred thousand people have died, more than seventy percent innocent. A newly elected Congress hasn't been able to curb their aggression.

I'm holding my head in my hands. My eyes can't focus. They want to start another war. I want to scream "STOP IT!!!!!!!" But it would be shouting into deep space, where the sound doesn't even leave my mouth.

In a different report this morning a man was talking about 'peace through strength'. It's an admirable moniker. It sounds full-bodied and patriotic. It expresses a desire for peace.

But it's only peace on the surface. Strength is a friendlier word than dominance, which is what is really going on. Peace at this superficial level only means nobody dares confront. Underneath we have fear and resentment in those under domination. The image of peace is only as valuable as an imitation Rolex.

Real peace, as I often preach, cannot be had by competition and domination: it can only be had by cooperation and equality. It must be cultivated over a long period of time. It involves the risk that when you hold out your hand in offered brotherhood it may be grabbed and you're pulled off balance, and once off balance you can be thrown and hurt. Those who can only imagine aggression as a solution in this situation aren't wise or visionary enough to be leaders.

I'm tired of being ruled by those who believe that an image of strength is the height of respectability when they know little strength of spirit and loving. I'm tired of having to submit to the dictates of playground bullies. And it makes me sick to think that in a month, should the leak from the White House prove to be true, thousands more innocent people in another land will die because America's leaders only know how to attack. God help us all.

Punishment, Death, and Wisdom

I think I've broached the topic of punishment before. It's still on my mind, the attitude of criminalizing everything officially unwholesome (while looking the other way for corporate greed and crime). The culture of punishment is bothersome for two reasons: first, what happens when parents focus more on catching and punishing their children than loving and encouraging them? The kids may turn rebellious, they may become crafty and scared, they may be resentful or hateful in return; in short, they become anything but loved and encouraged. Our Federal government can be looked at as a parent figure to the nation. Get the drift? Second, a focus on crime and punishment is one of fourteen typical traits of a fascist state. Bush & Co can deny it all they want, but if they walk like a duck, quack like a duck...

* * *

A long-time friend of the family, retired a few years, drowned last week. He was revived and kept alive on life support for nearly a week, but after thirty minutes under water there was massive brain damage from lack of oxygen, and within hours of removing life support he died. Another friend from a different family, this one my age, has been struggling with an extremely rare form of cancer. Last week they were going to try the last resort, what they called a 'fatal dose' of chemo. Either it would kill the cancer or it would kill him. I haven't heard the results yet.

Things like this get you thinking about your own mortality. If I'm found not breathing with no heartbeat, DON'T REVIVE ME. If I have late stage cancer with little hope for cure, give me palliative care and let me say my goodbyes. Since a strange clinical death experience at age 14 I have no fear of death. There's a fear of dying painfully, but that's a different story. Death itself is not frightening. It's the next adventure, the next stage in the journey, and -- if my experience and the experience of many others who have died and been brought back to conscious life is believed -- a thousand million times preferrable to a human, mortal life. If I live to be 150 I still won't have done everything I want to; at some point this mortal experience will end. That's the way it is. It's not morbid to think about your own death. For it is in the consideration of death that we discover some of the meaning of life. And find the motivation to start doing things now.

* * *

Dont' you wish sometimes that there were more homo sapients around?

Bumper Stickers

I don't see it very often anymore, but one occasionally rolls past me affixed to the rear of a car, the bumper sticker that says, "Faith, Hope, Victory". It's a condensation of the elements held by those favoring the war. But though they do not realize it, it exposes the religion of Nationalism, which borrows from religion until something inconvenient is encountered, then a patriotic ideal is inserted. In this instance the biblical element of Love is dropped and replaced by Victory. If God is Love, then when you drop Love you drop God.

Another bumper sticker I still see regularly is "Freedom Is Not Free". There are usually other bumper stickers around it that suggest support for the President, right or wrong. It's a sound-bitish kind of saying, easy to remember, and packed with emotion for those who revere the flag. Its meaning is that many have sacrificed money, time, effort, and even their own lives to perpetuate the guarantee of freedom in our land. Yet thought about for a moment, the saying melts into an oxymoron kind of situation. Something is not what it is. Either that, or something is what it is not. It's too close to "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength'. You have to use the same kind of twisted rationalizing to believe it without question, to accept it without bother. This type of motto, underneath it all, serves those who benefit from the twisted logic and relies on the unquestioned ignorance of the people enslaved. It is one footfall on the path to fascism.

It is a strange vision, to imagine a land without politicians, for the people only send representatives to gather who believe that the people rule themselves.

Risky Thoughts

Getting out of bed every morning there is a chance that I could stub my toe before fully awake. Brushing my teeth I could jam the brush too far back and tear the inside of my cheek. Getting in the car and on the road is risky: more people die in car wrecks every year than have died in commercial plane crashes in the U.S. throughout aviation history. Hiking in the woods presents a cornucopia of dangers: ticks can bring Lyme disease, I could snap an ankle on uneven rock, copperheads cross the path, tree branches come crashing down unexpectedly, falling off a bluff would hurt, and I could unintentionally come between the local mountain lion and its food stash. Going to work, I could be assaulted by a client blowing up. I could be-- and have been -- fired for specious reasons with little legal recourse.

I could reduce the amount of risk I face in life by just staying at home all the time. But then a tree could fall into the house, the house could catch fire from a bare wire in the wall, I could be asphyxiated by undetected carbon monoxide, I could cut myself on a can lid or with a kitchen knife, I could slip in the bathtub and crack my head open on the stool, I could get shocked by trying to do laundry when the wiring in the machine has rubbed bare on internal metal parts, I could get a paper cut just sitting on the couch with a book...

Risk is a fact of life.

Yet when a bridge collapses unexpectedly, when miners are trapped or buried when the earth shifts and ruins their tunnels, when a tornado levels a town, when a young person dies during football practice or on an operating table, when our hearts are broken by someone we thought loved us...on and on, we have somehow come to think that these things shouldn't happen. How did we get to that point?

For example: when a death occurs we have to list a reason (it's illegal to die of old age in the U.S.; did you know that?) and we think a good percentage of deaths are wrongful. News flash: to date the rate of death among humans is one hundred percent. Every aspect of life contains risk and the law of averages takes many before they expect to go. If you somehow survive all the external risks long enough, your body at some point begins failing. How we got to the point of being offended by death is, as mentioned, legislated, and too many attorneys on the landscape prompt us to claim being wronged. We expect doctors to never err, medications to never react wrongly, and products that we buy to never present any potential harm. Never, never, never.

The word never is an absolute. It leaves no wiggle room. It's a form of perfection. Yet we live as imperfect beings in an imperfect world. To expect perfection in this life is to live outside a demonstrated reality. Not living in reality, we live in fantasy.

Good luck.

Okay, but product liability has prompted a lot of R&D in product safety to the point that our cars and children's toys and power tools are less risky than ever. Should we stop the forward progress? Some of the advances in safety were undreamt of a generation ago. Heck, when I was a kid car dashboards were solid metal. Guaranteed to knock your teeth out.

What's the acceptable level of damage from inevitable risk? "No miner deaths are acceptable," one industry spokesperson said on the radio today. It shows that the company is concerned, but it promotes an unrealistic expectation for a very risky job. It would be nice to be able to not have any tragedy, but how much stress do we hand ourselves by setting unrealistic expectations? We get accused of not caring if we say that it's likely that X number of miners will probably die this year, but we fail as administrators if our expectation of perfection is not met.

I could probably go on and on, but would only wind down to this one point: risk happens. We can get better at being more aware so that we can avoid a good amount of risk. And we could get a lot better at accepting reality even if it's tragic. It's a part of the flowing dance of life, knowing when to leap, when to dance joyfully, and when to bow gracefully.

Flotsam and Jetsam II

A coworker today said that he's never looked at a porn site on the Internet. Part of me is happy for him, that he has disciplined himself so that he carries a point of pride. Another part of me thinks that it's a stupid practice to deny part of our essential nature. Like our head and heart it just needs to be used wisely and responsibly, even made into an art form. And have fun.

I'll admit I've looked, and come to find that there are a lot of women who pose nude who...uhm...shouldn't. But for every yin there's a yang, and there are some very pretty women. Yet I find that the eyes are more important than anything else: if they are self-involved, hateful, or clueless it doesn't matter how good her bod looks. I'm turned off. If they are intelligent, kind, and playful it makes a woman so attractive.

A woman at our day center today said that I'm handsome. Haven't heard that for years. The self-deprecating part of me concludes that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and one comment in several years is an aberration. A question also arises: this woman is diagnosed with a mental illness; does her comment mean that only a crazy woman can find me attractive, or does it mean that a person with a diagnosis is only in that one way affected and in most other ways is like any other normal human, and from years of therapy she has learned to merely say what she honestly sees?

The woman next to her asked if I was a psychiatrist. Clearly off her rocker.

I wrote in a recent blog that I struggle in relationships because I don't like to be emotionally dishonest. Last weekend on Car Talk Tom and Ray were in rare form and laughing more than usual. One of the topics throughout the show was about relationships, and one female caller said that it was not that she lets her husband be right about things, as Tom and Ray had posited, but that she led her husband to think he was right. Lots of laughs. And a very common comment. It was another example for me that we somehow think that one person in a relationship is to be in control, and manipulation is necessary to retain one's sense of control. How sad, that we don't trust our partners to have knowledge, wisdom, decision-making skills, and our best interests at heart as well as their own; if we aren't willing to share as equals aren't we being pretty immature or insecure? When we say we love someone but then don't show trust in them there's something wrong. That machinery is going to throw a scrap iron fit one day, or will spend its life laboring on only half its cylinders.

With thoughts like that I'm gonna be single for a looooong time, huh?

Gems

They say that my grandfather was a genius. In 1925, at the age of nineteen, he figured out aerodynamics well enough to design and build an airplane – a low-wing monoplane in an era of biplanes – that actually flew. He was a gifted artist: a plate of his incredibly detailed color drawings of butterflies still adorns my mother’s living room wall. Armed with only a high school education my grandfather spent his working life as an engineer, first with aircraft, naturally, then many years designing combines. He designed the first Gleaner self-propelled combine, bringing the company from the age of horse- and mule-drawn implements into the modern age. A six-inch replica of that combine, built by Grandpa from tin cans, sits in my uncle’s living room.

After retiring my grandfather took up a new hobby: faceting gems. He studied how light acts and reacts, how it reflects and refracts, and the entirely complex world of gem minerals and what types of cuts and facet angles each required. He bought faceting equipment and made a small business out of a very exacting hobby. All family members have jewelry given as gifts.

Following Grandpa’s death, my father took the faceting equipment into his own home, taught himself to facet, and carried on the hobby. Understand, Dad was also an aircraft engineer, a quiet, intelligent, and exceptionally kind man, and the exacting nature of faceting was an easy extension of his life’s work. Alas, his eyesight declined in later years and he became increasingly unable to do faceting as finely as he expected. Dad died a year and a half ago.

Last weekend I, the oldest son in the family, picked up the faceting equipment that Grandpa and Dad had accumulated and brought it to my home. To buy equipment for the hobby outright would cost more than I can afford, and I have the double sense of gratitude for inheriting it and the sober responsibility to facet gems as well as the excellent men preceding me. Although artistic, I’m not an engineer. It will take effort to equal their quality.

On the faceting machine there remains a gem started by Dad. I don’t know what type of stone it is; its very pale green may be corundum, which would make it a sapphire, yet it is exceptionally clear and large. The finished stone would be more than a carat. I don’t know of any synthetic stone that would imitate such a pale sapphire – its shade makes it worth less than darker and bluer stones – and I am left wondering. Dad only got the crown faceted, the top portion of the stone, and hadn’t even shaped the pavilion underneath. He may not have been able to see well enough to know that the crown wasn’t polished well enough, and there are still lap streaks on it.

It would be nearly impossible to finish the stone as it was started. I don’t know the facet angles that were used and can’t accurately polish them as they need to be. I’m not sure how to align the girdle facets – the thin strip of surfaces around the girth of the stone that separates the crown from the pavilion – to match the crown. Probably I’ll have to regrind the stone and start over. It will lose carat weight if I do that. But it’s not a complete stone otherwise, and to save it as is serves no purpose other than to occupy one of the dop sticks I’d need to facet other gems.

So I’ve inherited some equipment and several hundred rough stones. There was something else also given me: the attitude to use it well. There is no doubt in my mind that I can figure it out and make some very nice stones. There is an artistic determination and appreciation in me, and the desire to do things well. There is also a desire to make fine things as gifts for others (every family member already has one of my hand-crafted, built from scratch, antique reproduction clocks). There’s little use in arguing whether such things were with me from birth or taught during my upbringing; it’s likely both. But it’s the way things have always been done in my family and I am the next generation to use it in the world, with the responsibility to pass it on.

Every facet on a gem is important. Leave one unpolished and there is diminishment. Facets at sloppy angles leave a gem less brilliant than it could be. I was raised with good morals, good language, the pursuit of knowledge, the expectation to treat others well, the discipline to do things well, the ability to think critically, and on and on. There are many facets to a human life.

My life is a gem, carefully shaped and polished by artistic souls and hands. It is my fortune that they did a fine job.

Fear and a Slippery Slope

Yesterday the Senate passed a bill authorizing warrantless wiretapping on domestic/foreign communications. It's one of those things that makes you cock your head and say, "Huh?"

Hasn't it been one of the bones of contention that the Bush administration unconstitutionally did warrantless wiretapping, ignoring FISA? Wasn't this one of the grounds for impeachment that almost nobody had the guts to support? And now the Senate hands Bush permission to do what he was doing illegally before. It will be impossible to hold him to account for this wrongdoing now that the Senate has okayed it.

It is also one step -- a substantial step -- off the path and onto the slippery slope. For now it's limited to foreign communications. How much longer before it's domestic? A silly question, really: it's already been practiced domestically, and now with permission to tap foreign communications it will be so easy for them to invoke the same logic when it's revealed again that domestic wiretapping is still going on.

Didn't I wonder aloud in a recent blog which civil liberties the Bush administration was after next?

A second part of this is that lots of Democratic lawmakers went along with this bill, saying that they didn't want to look soft on terror. An immediate problem comes up: the American people sent them to Washington, DC to tell Bush and Buddies that we're tired of this game. And now the newbies are already wrapped up in it. What kind of backroom pressures are being put on them so that they violate the trust of the citizens who sent them there?

When lawmakers say that they don't want to appear this way or that, what they're saying is that they're afraid for their images. They're not voting on principle; they're voting on how it looks so that they can get reelected. This has been one of the biggest problems with the whole war on terror: Bush and Co defined the terms of this landscape, and anybody who responds to it is playing the game by the rules the Administration laid down. Once you step foot into the game the Administration is already in control. You're playing their game.

We know from oodles of research on children that bullies are operating out of a fear of personal powerlessness. They are preemptively aggressive so that nobody questions their fears. And the fears never get addressed. Why don't we apply this to adults? To politicians who display preemptive aggression? Does human nature change from childhood to adulthood? Nope. Not like that.

When we say that national security is the preeminent issue, then insecurity is the problem. Are we going to solve it by focusing on terrorists we can't see Somewhere Out There? Nope. And when the majority of Americans are trying to tell the top elected officials that we don't like their insecurity anymore, of course they respond in the way they know how: to be aggressive.

How do we deal with childhood bullies? We know a lot from the research. It's time to use it on the adults who are behaving just the same. Before more people die in a war based on insecurity. Before we lose more civil liberties because our 'leaders' harbor unacknowledged fears.

America is better than that.