Friday, November 1, 2024

 Friday, November 1, 2024  

  My mom would have been 121 today.  I'm so glad my parents and Mike are dead and don't have to deal with the current political situation. My parents were both refugees from Nazi Germany. They watched a dictatorship rise.  My dad talked about preventing it from happening again.  Good luck!  The voices of objection are loud and clear here.  How do you stop a tsunami?

 I just finished listening to Tied Up in Knots, a biography of Don Knots written by his daughter Karen.  The last chapters are somewhat interesting as she talks about performers and shows I knew. The book's first part reads like a third-grader's report on their parent's childhood.  It's a list.  It goes something like this. Dad was president of his graduating class. His dad's dad became mentally ill and threatened his dad's mom with a knife. Dad went to the lake with his friends and got dirty. His brother Shadow died of asthma.  Each item was given equal weight. 

 The book has a point of interest that has a bearing on the current political situation.  People voting for Trump want life to go 'back to normal."  Karen writes about Mayberry festivals all over the country. Everyone thinks life was really that peaceful once, that free from strife. It certainly was more predictable. But it's not always better, aside from that. Unpredictability is a huge stressor for all of us, but worse for some than others.

 When I moved to Ohio in 2003, I got a job in a rural town just outside of Columbus. I taught English to children from Somalia or born in the US to Somali parents.  Somali was their first language. The woman who hired me told me the school was all white and Protestant five years earlier. There weren't even any Catholics in the school.  The rural population suffered a significant shock. Many small rural towns have contact with people of different cultures right on Main Street, USA.  

 Ten thousand years ago, we traveled in small bands. Everyone knew everyone else. The rules of conduct evolved and changed in the interaction between the group members, the same way language developed or changed over time. Everyone was under the watchful eye of everyone else. They all conformed to the agreed-upon set of rules or else.  

 Once groups got large enough that everyone didn't have regular contact with everyone else, some form of government developed.  The rules were codified and enforced by an overseer, a chief and his council, a king and his. 

 When the population of the groups or tribes got big enough that the different tribes had frequent contact with each other, conflict arose. The rules were different for each tribe, and each tribe was out for itself. There was anarchy at the tribal level instead of the individual.  Someone came along and organized all the tribes under a single head. What the majority of the tribes accepted or were forced to accept became the rule of law. Many groups were organized under religious banners. 

 We're too diverse now for most people to cope.  I don't recommend the Chinese method; destroy any group that doesn't conform and send them to reeducation camps. Or the one the US government used when forcing the American Indians to stop being so Indian. Why couldn't they go on being what they were?  I'm unsure why their ways of being were considered such a threat.  The pursuit of 'purity' motivated the Germans in the 1930s.  

 We see whites as being the major enforcers. The Chinese in China aren't white; they've done a bang-up job eliminating challenges to the Chinese culture as dictated by the Communist government. I have no solution. I'm not very optimistic. Prayer is the only thing I have to offer, and money for the least bad option. 

   I met with fourth-grade LG this afternoon. The other day, I spoke to his father, and he supported my theory that LG panics when he doesn't understand something perfectly and blocks all input.  His brain freezes, and he is in a state of painful confusion.   I introduced an aspect of the BrainManagementskills in this session.  I drew a picture of a head from a side view and two blobs, one representing the conscious mind and one the unconscious.  Whew! That threw him for a loop.  His panic is definitely a problem, but I don't know if he has learned to panic because of an actual learning problem or if all his learning problems can be attributed to his panic.