Here is Bob Homans. Thank you for the feedback about 16 point type. As I wrote, since the days of the first PalmPilot I have never owned a handheld device. My only regret is that I did not invest in companies that made them. I still have my eyesight.
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I am at an age where I read obituaries, being reminded that “there but for fortune go I.” Reading those published in my Reed College magazine gets me thinking.
There are many people from around my own class of ‘64. Tom Forstenzer was one. He was a more serious student than I was. As one reads, he knew from an early age what he wanted to do. He was successful in his pursuit of the law.
I knew ten other people in the list of recent obituaries. There must be 40 or 50 in the full list, though the query function is not structured in such a way that I can pull them out.
The college does not of course know what happened to the most colorful members of my class. Nancy Jo Taylor, Lenny Ryall, Bill “Animal” Crabtree, Gerry Fisher, Phyllis Frankel and others dropped out of college and so far as I know went on to lead rather dissolute lives. Thus the obituaries are a biased sample. The accomplishments of people sufficiently connected to the college to merit mention are certainly more significant than the average of the people I knew.
What did they accomplish? Activists that they were, they set out to change the world. The obituaries show a strong social justice bent. They went to Mississippi to seek justice for the black people. They joined the Peace Corps. They became lawyers, fighting for the rights of the underdog. They joined environmental movements, fighting big oil tooth and nail. They believed that carbon dioxide is leading to the imminent demise of planet Earth, and that radical measures were needed to control it. They believed that women could only lead satisfying lives if they were allowed to have abortions. They believed in bodily autonomy – a person should be allowed to ingest whatever substance they wanted. I assume, conversely, that some were adamantly convinced that a citizen had a duty to allow the government to inject substances into his arm whether or not they wanted it.
June will mark 60 years since their graduation. Is the world a better place for their efforts? Is the United States a better place? Should I have participated with them, seeking to earn my star in the liberal Pantheon?
I have to confess I was skeptical all the way. I was skeptical whether the races were the same or would ever be the same. I could not accept that teenage Jewish kids from New York knew more about how the races should get along than people who had grown up in the South. I could not believe that forcibly integrating white neighborhoods in Boston would make anybody better off.
I was skeptical that drugs were any sort of shortcut to Nirvana. That was an informed conclusion – I tried many of them. I found it hard to believe that gay sex would transform a life any more than heterosexual sex had transformed mine. Sex is no more than a small part of life. Though cleaning up our pollution, leaving a neater planet, made eminently good sense, I could not accept that we were putting our race in danger of extinction. I could not believe that natural phenomena such as radioactivity and carbon dioxide that had been around as long as the earth itself could all of a sudden pose a mortal danger to humanity.
In other words, I was a born conservative. My mottos would have been those that I tell my children. Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke. Don’t mess with things you don’t understand. Try to see the other guy’s point of view. Don’t presume to fix the other guy’s problem. He may not see it as a problem, and your solution not help even if it is. Trust people to look out for themselves. Accept the evidence of your eyes. If people appear to be different, they probably are.
A philosophy like mine will never attract disciples. There is no glory in it, only accusations of indifference and selfishness. On the other hand, as I compare the world of today with that of 60 years ago, I readily conclude that 60 years of activist meddling has almost uniformly made things worse. When I was young the races got along better. Specifically, just by being polite and interested, back in the day I got along with black people everywhere I encountered them. The sexes got along a whole lot better back then. We pretty much liked each other.
The notion that the new world in the morning, utopia has not arrived because of right-wing resistance is ridiculous. Conservatives, or rather, plain old traditional people, have constantly given ground. The progressives have won every battle.
How well one propagates his genome and his culture is a fundamental, biological measure of success. The obituaries, skewed though they may be towards the successful, show woefully few children and grandchildren. Even those reported may exaggerate our fecundity, in that the numbers include step- and adoptive children and grandchildren.
I’m convinced that I’ll have made a pretty good accounting if our three kids grow up comfortable with themselves and raising children to be like themselves. And have not been shut up however unfashionable my opinions.
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People often approach me on the bus wanting English lessons. My answer heretofore has been that I’m retired.
But wait! This may be an opportunity to get more involved in the community. Here is what I have resolved to do.
First, inform any prospective student that studying a language involves homework. You can’t expect to learn any language by spending a couple of hours a week with the teacher, no matter how gifted. Take it from a guy who has mastered several but is still grappling with Ukrainian.
Second, tell them that language has four modes: reading and writing, speaking and listening. Having a native speaker as an instructor is useful mainly for listening. Vocabulary you build on your own through reading and memorization. A Ukrainian can certainly teach grammar and vocabulary as well as I. And writing? It is rare to meet a student who even wants to try.
Third, tell them that I am not going to do anything unless I get something out of it. I want to learn from conversation with Ukrainians. I want to talk about topics of common interest.
Therefore, this is what I propose. Before we meet, the students should watch one of my videos on YouTube or Rumble, or maybe one of my video reviews on Amazon. I have produced close to 200 of them over the last six or seven years. Some were made for English instruction: Sarah Tall and Plain, The Old Man and the Sea, and some Rudyard Kipling stories. Some are Toastmasters speeches about dating in the United States, my travels in the Amazon and so on. Some of them are on topics you might call popular science: evolution, global warming, human intelligence and so on. Assuming there are at most two or three people at a time who want to participate, it should be easy to decide in advance on a topic for them to prepare.
Listening to the videos will give them a chance to get accustomed to my voice, acquaint themselves with my thinking, learn vocabulary and formulate questions.
We can meet at my house for a couple of hours’ conversation in the evening. Eddie may want to participate. Zoriana will be welcome to listen in provided that she doesn’t make a pest of herself.
I think I can create A5-sized flyers (that’s roughly ¼ of letter-size paper) to keep in my backpack and hand out as people ask. Let’s see what comes of it.
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That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man is pleased to have given himself some work - ironing. Eddie is wearing dress shirts and khakis to school these days. It was Hawaiian shirts every day when he started in September. I thought he looked pretty spiffy, but the school administration told him he didn’t look serious. They also objected to his torn jeans. The other kids, I gather, wear jeans and knit tops for the most part. It takes me half an hour a week to keep Eddie looking good, but it’s worth the effort. I don’t want him to be confused with a Reed College student or anything.
You're so hard on the well-intentioned types who went to college with you. You have your values and your measure of personal success. I measure my success by my own standards, not by your standards. The thing is as I think back in history which generation left the next generation better off? Can you determine that one particular generation was more successful than another? The measure of progress is quite subjective. Until a hundred years ago, we were all riding around on horses. The modern world which purports to be a better world is certainly materially better, especially over our lifetimes, but I don't think England for example was a better place after the Romans left until the 20th Century. That's about 1900 years of not much progress.
I read obituaries, but I don't care if people had children or grandchildren. I look to see how they took care of themselves, what they died from. I assess them on the basis of health outcomes. You can read between the lines and get a good sense of how they lived. Having children is about the easiest thing a human can do, because all it takes is a squirt at the wrong time. Now raising smart capable kids who make good decisions, now that's hard. That's a challenge. Anybody can breed. Not everybody can raise kids without trauma.
By the way, only 55% of the people born in 1946 were still alive two years ago. The US population was 140,000,000, so the US has more than doubled its population since I was born, and there were less than 2.5 billion people on the planet. I'm not so worried about a shrinking world population because since WWII 5.5 billion people have been added. I don't think it would be a big problem if the world population shrank to 2 billion people again. Of course, I won't be here then, so it's academic, isn't it?