If you have no stake in the future, please shut up. Introducing Vittorio.

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They say a progressive is somebody who loves humanity but hates people. Progressives instinctively despise me as an exemplar of the normalcy they have been trained to reject. But they even reject having their own children and grandchildren! Carrying on the tradition of their own ancestors is another normalcy that they eschew.

Yet these lovers of humanity, with no stake in the future of the planet, feel an obligation to tell me how to live. They want to panic me about global warming, species extinctions, pollution, race and gender issues as threats to a cosmic future in which they will not be represented.  Their pleasure seems to be in convincing us normies that we are abnormal and need to mend our ways.

I suppose I can take comfort in the fact that progressives will leave behind few progeny to bother mine in the future, but it would be considerate of them to stop pestering us now.  Fat chance.  Pestering is what they live for.

As I wrote, my speech about speed dating Saturday came off very well.  It was a joint meeting with another club, Dnipro Hills, and there were five native speakers - Michael Murphy, Sandeep, John, Jeremy, and of course me.  The most interesting guy was a guest.   All through the meeting I kept hearing the name Victoria, which is not a guy's name.  Turns out to be Vittorio, an Italian.

He is in his early 30s.  He has traveled the world for the past ten years, never as much as a year in one place.  He reads incessantly.  His favorite genre is biography, and we discovered enjoyed several of the same ones, starting with "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman."  Though by different authors, we had read biographies of many of the same prominent people.

Vittorio said that he had realized in March 2020 that Covid 19 was a scam.  There were supposedly 900 Covid deaths in Italy but doctors he knew told him that only 17 of the deaths were attributable to Covid.  The others were old people with comorbidities and preexisting conditions whose deaths were categorized as Covid just to boost the narrative.  He knew the hydroxychloroquine ban was a scam.

He has seen all three Plandеmic movies.  I was content to stop at one, in May of 2020.  I got the message.  It was well more than a year before vаccines became available in Ukraine, by which time the fraud had become pretty obvious to anybody paying attention.

Vittorio is resolved not to marry. His well-reasoned position is from the perspective of an individual. Marriage does not benefit a person who lives only for himself. The responsibility and expense are very limiting.

On the other hand, I counter, man is a social creature just as much as the primates from which we evolved. We cannot exist apart from the society of our fellow humans. Our life has no meaning without them. Family is of course the cornerstone of society. When we reject the obligation to have family, we give ourselves unlimited freedom at the sacrifice of a purpose in life.

There is a lot more to be said, which I will leave for future blogs. Here I will only mention the vignette that set the direction of our conversation.

Remaining in Kyiv during the war was Oksana and my biggest decision since deciding to have a third child. In February and March 2022 everybody around us was panicking and heading for the border. They generously shared their panic with Oksana, who asked me every day why we were not packing and leaving. Oksana got as far as collecting all of our essential documents into a package we could grab quickly if we had to flee – a step that turned out to create complications whenever we needed to go to a bank, an embassy, or any government organization.

I had of course given the matter a great deal of thought. Even though she didn't seem convinced, asking me at least daily, Oksana was polite enough to listen to my reasoning, I patiently explained that:

·       I lived in Danang and Saigon during the Vietnam War. I know the vast difference between perceived and real danger.
·       Our neighborhood has no military, industrial, or even multistory business or commercial buildings. There would be no reason for the Russians to come here.
·       Our neighborhood is cut off from the city by a high railroad embankment on the north and east and a river on the west. It is hard to get to and not on the way to anyplace.
·       Should the Russians capture Kyiv with their 100,000 troops, they would certainly have their hands full suppressing 4 million Kyivlyans. 
·       The Russians would not regard three small children and three septuagenarians as a threat. If they come, they will have other things to do.
·       We would be exposed to delays, theft, extortion and such on the road.
·       Our house would be exposed to burglars and even squatters such as Russian soldiers when we were gone.
·       We have no friends or family overseas to whom we could go.
·       Any place we would wind up would already be flooded with refugees. Wherever we found to stay would be cramped and expensive.
·       There are seven of us, including her wheelchair-bound amputee father, and we don't have a car or a driver.
·       It would be a total disruption of Eddie's schooling, and it is unlikely we would find adequate childcare for the two girls.

None of the people leaving could offer any such detailed explanation for their choice. It was simply a panic. Oksana could articulate no justification. I am gratified that she allowed my masculine logic to prevail. Though they do not talk about it, the disruption that returning families experienced seems pretty obvious.

Vittorio made the observation that had I been married to a Spanish woman, I would be divorced by now. However ill-formed her own opinions might have been, an empowered woman would simply not have let me make the decision.  It would have to be joint, hammered out by argument.  Experience shows that a woman never gives up.  It would ultimately have been done her way.

In other news, Toastmasters International forced the question of dues renewal two months early.  They are raising dues from $45 to $60 per six months, but we could renew for the October–March period at the $45 rate through the end of July. Everybody who was planning to renew has done so. More good news – Tania Knyazeva, whose 2008-9 presidency immediately preceded mine, is rejoining the club. We owe a lot of our success to her warm and magnetic personality.

Those are today's musings from Lake WeBeGone, where the good-looking woman is making an impressively dedicated effort to improve her English. Though I don't like being interrupted as I write, I have to concede that she does so to ask really good questions. The same for Eddie, who has finished 90 of the 100 math questions for his new school.

Graham