NOT!  We are probably as far from calm as you can get. I started enumerating all the events of 2020 and found myself looking for the scotch bottle at 7:00 AM.

Start with a dose of COVD, sprinkle in the ensuing calamity for our economy, and the just when you think things are getting better here comes Derek Chauvin and his callous disregard for a human life in George Foreman. Breanna Taylor, Kenosha and the lawless rioting in Chicago, Seattle and elsewhere and things are really starting to boil. 

Had enough? Sorry, but the Gulf coast is belted by hurricanes three times in a row. Almost like a prize fighter getting up off the deck after each knockout punch only to get hit with another. The fires in California and my beloved Colorado almost give you the feeling of doomsday or at least a glimpse of it from the edge. 

The response to the virus is chaotic. New York screams for help but a hospital ship with hundreds of beds goes unused. We can’t find masks, PPE, or ventilators. We dart to and fro trying this or that to stem the flow but it is a dam breach that takes down everything in its path. 

Just when democracy should be at its best we keep shooting blanks. Congress stutters in fits and starts. It is locked in a battle of egos and one upsmanship with our Tweeting president. The elections are contested no matter the assurances and we the poor people are clamoring for a leader. Anyone, anywhere among this ship of fools. It is almost as if everyone in Washington has fiddles while the rest of our beautiful country burns. 

This is not the year in review of a man who is depressed but rather one who looks at all we have in consternation. We were favored by 171/2 points and here we are in the fourth quarter and down by ten. We are so incredibly creative and resourceful when we want to be but we have chosen to bitch and moan about our lot, even though there is none better. 

The irony and maybe the beauty of all this is the ability of the locals to get back to basics. When in doubt do it for ourselves. Here in La La Land we don masks out of respect for our neighbors not feeling in any sense docile nor subservient. We play by the rules not because it is the law but because it is right. 

There is a school in Indiantown run by two nuns. It is called Hope Rural. The locale is home to the people that pick the fruit and labor in the hotels and condos. It has existed for over 25 years to educate a hundred or so kids in the basics of education and life. They do this without a penny of public or even diocesan funding. 

I mention them because as a community we give Christmas to the over 100 families every year. Our garage was the depot for our members to bring bags of presents for each. A vey cool thing but more importantly going on in nooks and crannies throughout our generous nation. Food banks, shelters and neighbors looking in on each other are a part of our landscape as a country and a people. 

I am so torn about how good and how bad we are. Sure it is life but does it really have to be that way? I am always amazed by the balance of nature. Food chains and adaptations over millennia have enabled all forms of life to survive. There is flock of sand hill cranes flying above me. I wonder if they fight and bicker about who is boss or does one have more than the other?

There was guy who was born over 2000 years ago. Let’s for the moment not even call him God. He preached about loving one another. He healed the sick. Maybe it wasn’t a miracle but maybe the human spirit just reviving because someone took the the time to care. We are so quick to rule it out as a possibility because science says it can’t happen. We can’t seem to get the message that is so obvious. 

I worry about us because we want to keep slicing off pieces of the pie for own. We want to be recognized and rewarded for what our color, nationality or sexual preference is. We want to stand out for what we have materially and not for what goes on inside of us. We are losing our sense of community in our burgs, our nation and our world. That can’t be good. 

I am going to go out and say hello to total strangers today. I am going to write or call friend and say thank you for being so. I am gong to have a talk with my God and tell him my shortcomings but also how lucky I am. I hopefully have put into words what I think we all feel. We can get there but it is going to take a lot of work. But as I think about it maybe “All is bright” after all. 

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all of you.

As always

Ted The Great

Factoids:

With three devastating hurricanes, extreme wildfires, hail, flooding, tornadoes and drought, the United States tallied a record high bill last year for weather-related disasters: $306 billion. 

In a letter Thursday, Capitol physician Brian Monahan informed members of Congress and their staffs that the National Security Council had designated vaccine doses to Congress to meet “long-standing requirements for continuity of government operations.” Members would be vaccinated first, followed by “continuity-essential” staff, and then other staff members until the supply is exhausted.The Devil made them do it.  As of press time many emergency room doctors and nurses throughout the country have not been able to be vaccinated because of short supply. 

From the beginning of March through the end of October, food banks nationwide distributed an estimated 4.2 billion meals to our neighbors facing hunger in the United States. 

Since 1947 the Marines Toys for Tots program has given out over 584 million toys to 265 milli9n kids. That is just one program!

92% of Americans celebrate Christmas. 79% put up a tree. About 35 million trees are sold each years.

Overall, American consumers will spend more than $1 trillion for Christmas this year, with almost $150 billion going to online retailers

There has been a lot going on in this little brain over the last week. My social interaction has been severely curtailed so I have to find my own way to entertain TTG. 

I went to the boob tube and found little that was of comfort. I have given up on PBS after every newscast was full of bias and subdued hate during the unending presidential campaign. McNeil, Lehrer would be disappointed. As for regular news, I completely understand and respect COVID. I just don’t need it every night. Lines for testing everywhere in America and the 49th closeup of people dying in ICU’s have numbed me rather than intrigued me. 

How about Frontline? The latest on the Uyghurs being deemed subhuman in China? Perhaps The Social Dilemma which will cause you to toss everything technological that you own. I am not dismissing any of this. It is just difficult to find anything uplifting.  

A friend very nicely dropped off a book to me called,The Kill Chain by Christian Bose. I read it in two days. It discusses war from a new technological perspective. I will admit it was an incredible page turner but at the end I wanted to have a stiff scotch. That was at 8:00AM!

I picked up my Wall Street Journal from the driveway this AM hoping for solace. It’s Tuesday, so the crosswords don’t offer respite. Let me see,COVID again, Trump still denying, student debt, congressional inaction on monetary aid, Pearl Harbor, the Pope’s inaction in China. What’s a nice guy like me doing in a place like this? 

But wait, there is a full page ad taken out by the HANS Foundation. Probably looking for money but let me peruse. It seems it is run by this guy from India, Manoj Bhargava. A former monk who turned entrepreneur and had this “5 Hour Energy” drink. Made him a billionaire. My type of guy. 

His latest venture is called the Hans Premium Water Invention,HPW. It can turn brackish, chemical water into crystal clear pure water much like that Guy turned water into wine at Cana. This thing is the size of a dishwasher and doesn’t use chemicals. I have to read on. There has to be a catch somewhere?

If he is right then we don’t have to buy water in plastic bottles. We can go to God forsaken places like Calcutta and provide people with aqua pura. There are one billion people in the world today without access to clean water. 80% of the water in China is contaminated. Forget about that. What about Flint, Michigan?

Sucked in, I kept reading. He never asked me to buy one of these things. He never asked for money. This dude actually gives away billions to the poor people of India. He wants to provide at no cost, this device to regions and countries in the world with no access to fresh water. Is he for real?

I immediately sprinted to my laptop to find some sort of critique. He had to be a whack job at best or charlatan at worst. The fact is I could not find anything derogatory. There was an article in Forbes five years ago and just recently in Crane’s Detroit. But no malice or forethought. Hmm. 

The best imprimatur I could find was a deal he just cut with Culligan Water Treatment to distribute his products in the US. I don’t think an operation of that size would risk their rep on a fly by night. Wow. A positive story, that he had to pay the WSJ for. 

Point being is there are some good things happening out there that get little or no ink. If I had breezed by page 10 to find the editorials, I would not have had my sprint uplifted. If I had not researched I would not have discovered a billionaire doing good things whom I had never heard of, much less know how to spell his name. Imagine that. 

There is whole lot of good stuff out there that costs very little or nothing. Go to a body of water. It can be the ocean or a pond or perhaps a puddle. Look at and into it and just think about nothing but simple things. 

Take a walk down a path where there is nothing around you but beauty in its most primordial form. No, I am not going Thoreau or Chopra on you but trying see life for what it is. Sure we have been thrown a few curve balls lately but that is the hand we are dealt. 

Can I find bad in today’s world? You bet. There is a bunch of it. Is there a whole lot of good. Yup! You just have to look a little harder or even better as that full page ad demonstrated, not overlook it. A little bit of sanity is starting to creep in. Don’t worry, not too much in my case. I don’t want to lose my reputation. 

As always 

Ted The Great 

Factoids:

68.7 % of the fresh water on earth is trapped in glaciers. 30% of the fresh water is in the ground in aquifers. Water is 71% of the world’s surface. 80% of all illness in the industrial world is water related Yikes!

Approximately 400 billion gallons of water are used in the United States every day. About 6,800 gallons of water is required to grow a day’s food for a family of four. Unsafe water kills 200 children in the world every hour. 

The number of negative news stories far outweigh the good. Humans may be neurologically or physiologically predisposed towards focusing on negative information because the potential costs of negative information far outweigh the potential benefits of positive information.

Uyghurs are a Muslim population in the Xinjiang province of China. They number about 2.5 million and have lived in the area for over thousand years. The Communist Party in China has been trying to root them out since 1931. Most have been imprisoned in what are called “reeducation facilities”.