WANT TO BE SOMETHING SPECIAL? BE A SCRIBE

My mother had beautiful cursive handwriting, and she didn't have to practice much at it.  She was taught to write that way while in school, something schools spent a lot of time on back in her day.  I came along in the school system half a century later and learned to write fairly well . . . but nothing like her style.  My kids came along and can't write well at all, but they ended up with fairly good educations.  My grandkids are handicapped when it comes to handwriting, can hardly do it at all . . . but they graduated from high school and went to college.

One of the most respected jobs in ancient societies was that of being a scribe.  Not many people were selected to learn to write, but it's a good thing some people learned to write well or we wouldn't have much in the way of recorded history.  We still have a few people in our modern society who can actually write beautifully . . . but they are rare.  School districts all over America are abolishing cursive handwriting from curriculums, saying it is no longer needed.  Needed?  Replaced by what?  Oh, I forgot, it's being replaced by keyboards and hand held gizmos.  What to know what else is being replaced?  People who can actually spell and read, and if you want to blame that on anything, you can drop that pile of poop at the feet of our modern educators.

Here are a few analogies for you: 1) We no longer have real photographers because the modern generation of snapshot takers don't know diddly-squat about a camera.  They've gone digital, and that has robbed the world of photography of some great photographic art.  These days, there is very little art to taking pictures . . . and 2) Modern high tech digital equipment has done damage to what real music is supposed to sound like.  It's good, for sure, but it's missing all the things that brought warmth and realism to music recorded the old analogue way.  Translate that to writing, and you get the picture.  If you can't write without pecking out words on a keyboard, you can't really master the language.  Education has taken big strides backward in the last half century, almost to the point where we're now managed throughout by a bunch of linguistic cripples.  Good reading goes along with good writing, and if you can't read, you're doomed to ignorance.

I'm pissed off about all this because I've been victimized along with millions of others.  The only time I actually write these days is when I have to sign my name to something, and I'm not very good at that anymore.  I wouldn't even start to present an argument that we'd be better off if everything was written by hand.  We moved past that centuries ago, to the printed word, what generation upon generation of people saw on paper.  Those words have now moved mostly to monitors, screens, tablets, laptops, etc.  But I remember well the learning experience, of how I used to pour over notes taken in class by hand before taking exams.  I remember having to write down the things I needed to remember because seeing the words take shape by my own hand caused them to stick in my memory. I've still got most of those old notes stored away.  I've got most of my old papers from graduate school, and I can still remember writing them.

And now, I've written dozens of books, all of them on either typewriters or computers using some fancy digital word program . . . and I can't even remember my own books.  You'd think they'd be stuck in my brain forever, but they aren't because in a twisted sort of way they're artificial.  I could argue that those books would've never been written if I'd been forced to write them by hand, and that's probably true.  I did considerable research on some of those books, now lost to me . . . unless I go back and read the notes I made by hand.

Want to be something special?  Be a scribe, and you'll be like few others.

FLAWED RESEARCH

Beware, all ye brethren who love to cite statistics.  The research you depend upon for your facts and figures is tainted, often wrong . . . and more often than that, misrepresented.  How many times do you pick up a magazine, newspaper, or read on the internet (for all you gizmophobes) some article starting with "A recent study has revealed that . . . .?"  Yeah, I know, and you read it and went, "Wow!  I didn't know that."  Consider this:  What you just read is more than likely just bullshit.  I use the term bullshit metaphorically, for it all the stuff you read based on research these days was actually bullshit, we'd have no further use for commercial fertilizer.  

I'm a retired political scientist, lots of graduate work and teaching behind me, and I've had a lifetime of dealing with research.  Don't get me wrong 'cause I'm by no means against conducting study to find the truth about one thing or another . . . but I've run into more false information from these research and study groups than I have real factual information.  Here's a good one for you, one you've probably seen before.  "A recent study revealed that one in three marriages will end in divorce."  That's false, just flat out not true.  I've seen studies that put the number at forty percent of marriages ending in divorce.  They reached that erroneous percentage by taking the number of marriages in a particular year and measure them agains the number of divorces.  Let's say there were 5 million marriages and 2 million divorces, and that means forty percent.  The only way you find out what the real extent of divorce is would be to track specific marriages over a period of time.  So, in the year 1990, five million marriages took place.  If you could follow each of those marriages, you'd find that after 10 years an overwhelming percent of them would still be intact . . . and after 20 years, you'd still have a high percentage intact.  We know this from taking smaller samples, like following 1,000 marriages over that period of time.  The results of all good studies like that show that the alarming results most often found in published reports is wrong . . . way off the real mark.  

I'm a cat lover, take care of quite a few of them, and I've come to recognize several entities out there who are anti-cat organizations.  Bird people, for instance, are out to get the cats under control, and I see all sorts of reports about how cats, and we're talking here about domestic cats, are destroying the bird populations of America.  And they cite all sorts of statistics that won't hold water under close scrutiny.  I won't deny that cats are natural hunters, and even your sweetest house cat is going to kill and eat a bird if it gets a chance.  I've got 16 cats here at my home (it's a large house with a big yard), and I've still got lots of birds around.  Besides, a bird has wings, a cat doesn't, and that's pretty much a mismatch . . . other than the cat is a lot more intelligent.  My next door neighbor has a parrot, a very friendly bird at that, and they used to turn it loose "to get some exercise."  And it would come to my house and follow me around while I worked in the yard.  It just jabbered away at me, would sit on the

fence within feet of me.  But the cats took note of this, and on two occasion I had to rescue the parrot from a cat attack.  Maybe you've noticed - cats are quick.  I didn't want the parrot hurt or killed, and so I told the neighbor that my cats had a contract out on her parrot.  Now, the parrot has a big cage on the front porch . . . where he sits some days and calls the cats.  Maybe birds aren't that dumb after all.

Sometimes I think they're smarter than the ornithologists who study them. 

A recent report on cats says that they are responsible for disease in deer populations.  Comes from feral cats that prey on the poor deer by giving them diseases.  I've never heard of a deer eating a cat or cat poop, don't think I ever will.  That particular study is highly flawed, as has been pointed out by a number of detractors.  Most of it was done based on statistics that showed where the deer had this particular disease, lots of cats were around.  The study badly overestimated the number of feral cats, even said that their populations were increasing.  Real research shows just the opposite.  

Even wrong research sometimes has a good effect in the end.  There's no doubt that we need to continue working toward decreasing feral cat populations.  We need more spay/neuter clinics, more pet owners who show some responsibility, and more people who understand the problem of dealing with neglected animals.  Unfortunately, we live in a nation that does very little about neglected people, much less neglected animals.  Information about any problem doesn't have to be right on when it comes to actual facts . . . as long as it points us in the right direction.  How long did it take us to understand that smoking cigarettes causes cancer, heart disease, other problems?  Or . . . have we even learned that yet?

THE GHOSTS OF CHRISTMAS PAST

My biggest problem with Christmas is dealing with the blues that come from too many bad memories.  At the age of 73, I should remember a lot of Christmases . . . but I don't.  If pressed into making a decision, I couldn't say which Christmas was my best, or worst.  The bad ones stick out like sore thumbs, though, and I remember them distinctly.  I spent one Christmas, my 21st, pretty much flat on my back recovering from an early November car accident that nearly killed me.  1999 was a bad one because we'd just buried my father-in-law, and other family problems added to that being perhaps the worst Christmas ever.  My first marriage ended on Christmas.  I lost several close friends within a few days of Christmas.  There's no need to go on and on about the bad ones, but the point is that they've never completely stopped haunting me.  And that usually ruins the best holiday of the year for me.

But . . . I'm married to a Christmas gal, a woman who despite all the bad Christmas seasons she's had, still throws herself into trying to make it a good time.  I'm the problem, and I'm fully aware of that.  It's hard for me to hide depression (wish I could), but this year I'm going to make myself toughen up and deal with Christmas.  Yesterday, I tried to finish up shopping for presents, and that always makes me angry.  I'm lousy at it.  I've tried giving cash money enclosed in cheery cards, have spent upwards of five thousand dollars on a single Christmas, and none of that has worked.  And, it's not them . . . it's me.

I got a badly needed lecture yesterday from my wife telling me to forget the money, forget about fretting over what I give people, forget about the past and all the bad memories . . . and just enjoy the time you have with people.  Give something small and inexpensive, she said, but give it with a glad heart . . . and nobody will care much about the present itself.  I went over to my shop after that, took care of some chores there, and then flopped down on a daybed and slept awhile.  The dream I had was about as strange as they get, visitations from people I haven't seen in many years, some of them no longer around.  But it wasn't a gloomy dream, wasn't like Scrooge's ghosts of Christmas past.  They were all happy to see me, and although the dream was bizarre, it was a wake-up call for me.  I woke up in tears, not so much from having seen people I've missed a lot, but from shame.  Yeah, just like Scrooge.

I've got two days to turn things around, see if I can make something out of what could be my last Christmas.  You never know at my age what tomorrow brings, and I don't want my family to remember my last Christmas as something that will spoil their future Christmases.  And if I have a few more Christmas seasons to live through, they will be different.  I'm not a poor man.  I've got enough money to buy people nice things, but I've never given them the thing they want most . . . me in a good mood.  It's gonna happen this year.  I promise.