Personal Narrative

99 Years

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My grandmother died last night. She was 99. She was very active right up until her death. She had a very good life.

Aside from the obvious sorrows that I have, the historian in me thinks about the past. Not just my memories with her, but all the things she has seen in the last 99 years. I simply can’t imagine her life.

She was born in Munich and raised with I believe six siblings. She was the last to pass.

She lived though both world wars. The Great War she was in Germany and her whole family almost starved, but they managed. Her dad was a cobbler – a great one. Legend has it that he fixed shoes for some of the Habsburgs although I have no proof of that. She fled Hitler in the thirties and watched WW2 from Chicago where she met my Grandfather, who emigrated from Latvia.

I simply can’t imagine what she thought about even the things that I take for granted today, like my Blackberry, coming from a rural community without electricity. They raised rabbits for food.

What about antibiotics? Cars? Indoor plumbing?

What a century this has been.

“Blogging Through Georgia”

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Communism, it seemed to me then and still seems to me now, is not the opposite of fascism: it is fascism’s blood-brother, its complementary twin. The two live together in a vicious symbiotic relationship; scratch a Red and you’ll find a Brown. Better yet, scratch either one deeply enough and you will find a Black: someone so caught up in the will to power that crimes and atrocities don’t even count anymore.

– Walter Russell Mead (via Instapundit)

The Insurgency

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Once many years ago my father was sailing in a 30 foot sailboat on Nantucket Sound. The water was clear, and deep down in the water he saw a shape, that was unclear at first, but it got bigger and bigger, and soon its top fin broke the water. It was the largest shark he had ever seen. It was longer than the boat. It swam alongside for a few seconds, and probably not smelling anything good to eat, dipped back down and disappeared into the depths. If he had not been looking, he would not have seen it. He knows what he saw. Take it or leave it.

Something very big may come out of the dark, deep water, and if you are looking in the right place, you will see it coming.

I recently had a two part post on Right Network about the mass political movement which is developing in the USA, which I have called The Insurgency. Maybe I am all wrong about the size and importance of this movement. Maybe the shadows will not form and harden and rise into clarity and solid form. Maybe the mass movement will fizzle. Maybe politics will remain muddle and kludges. Or maybe I am looking in the right place at the right time. Take it or leave it.

The first post is here. Excerpt:

The Insurgency is a movement of citizens directed against unsustainable government taxation and regulation, and spending, both of which benefit insiders rather than ordinary people. The target of the Insurgency is a leviathan in Washington, D.C. that will ruin us all if it is not dismantled.
 
The Insurgency is part of a long tradition of mass political movements in our history. It has the potential to make a fundamental change in American life—for the better.

The second post is here. Excerpt:

When the American political and economic system suffers a serious failure, we can no longer avoid taking a hard look at ourselves. We have to make fundamental decisions about what kind of country we want America to be. At such moments, people perceive that their basic values are being contested, and those who have a stake in the current system are, reasonably enough, afraid of change. People who see the urgent need for change resent the obstruction. Political rhetoric becomes heated, because a lot is at stake. This is also normal, as history shows.

Stand by for an interesting historical period.

[I am more than usually interested in our readers’ thoughts on this.]

Is Pride the Worst Thing You Can Have?

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Of all the faults I see in people, I think that pride is the most damaging.

I am a small business owner and am pretty close with all of my employees. I have had many employees for decades, and a few for just a short while. It seems that whenever there is a major problem with an employee it all boils down to pride. They can call it other things and make excuses, but the main issue tends to be an utter lack of humility.

Just this morning a new employee who had only been on the job for a few months raised his voice at me. I told him that I don’t yell and scream but would be glad to have an adult like discussion. He continued with the loud voice and I was forced to fire him. He had been looking for a job for close to a year when I hired him and just like that he is gone. I am sure it will take a long time for him to find another job. What in blazes was he thinking?

Only a few hours after his departure word spread and I have been deluged with phone calls and emails of people looking for work. I have never seen anything like it. Nuclear engineers to kids right out of high school. But I digress.

This particular individual showed traits that, it seems, more people are showing. Instead of shutting up this morning and saying “yes, sir” or simply being quiet as I asked, my ex-employee had to keep mouthing off. Of course, my evidence of an increase of pride and lack of humility is completely anecdotal to my little world.

I have seen this in many business acquaintances as well as vendors and customers. I have learned that in my world, to shut up and take it is the best prescription, unless you really want to burn your bridge.

To our commenters – do people of this generation or people in general seem to show more pride in today’s era than in past eras? Or do you think I am noticing something that isn’t there?

Childhood Flashback

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I had a terrific set of army guys.

I would move the coffee table over, and cover the whole living room floor with three defensive belts, a defense in depth, manned by grey German army guys. They had defenses made of lincoln logs, wooden blocks and those brown sandbag machine gun nests. The Americans had to get ashore. Where the wood floor in the kitchen met the rug was the surf line. The Americans started out with 12 M-60 tanks. I knew they weren’t WWII tanks, but I used what I had. I used log palisade sections from the Ft. Apache set as rafts to get the tanks ashore. American casualties were heavy, with most of the tanks knocked out, especially getting through the second defensive line which had bunkers and an 88 mm antitank gun concealed behind green plastic trees. I had stretcher teams to take out the wounded. I’d get on the floor, with my head on the rug, so I could see the same line of sight the plastic guys could see. I only had two pale grey panzers, which I kept back to counterattack when the green guys finally started to break the second fortress belt. But I knew to send a swarm of bazooka guys in once the line was breached and we made short work of the panzers. The surviving Germans made a fighting retreat to a plastic, three story, Navarone style bunker on the stone floor in front of the fireplace. I had a reserve of goose stepping Germans back there. Before the made the final assault, I would go get dead kneeling and standing shooting rifle guys, and replace them where they fell with goose stepping guys. I would commit these last reserves to the defense. The Americans took out the guns on the fort with counterbattery fire, but then they had to clear out the dead enders with a final tank-infantry assault. Sometimes one tank, sometimes two, would have made it all the way across the grey living room rug. The Germans would not give up. It was room to room in that fort thing at the end, like Stalingrad.

The set up and battle took several hours.

I think I was nine, maybe ten.