“The newer generation will never know the feeling of slamming a phone down when someone annoyed you on a call, then slamming it two or three more times for good measure.”
1. “Never knowing who was calling until you picked up the phone. Back in the ’60s and ’70s, there weren’t even answering machines, so if you didn’t pick up, you’d have no idea who called. On the other side of that coin, if you called somebody and they didn’t answer, you’d know it wasn’t because they didn’t want to talk to you, it was because they weren’t available.”
2. “Going to a cellphone-free concert.”
3. “I miss taking most of Sunday to read the paper. I miss doing the big crossword puzzle, having to look up clues in the encyclopedia or dictionary, and reading all the sale inserts. Now I get the paper on an iPad, where there are no puzzles and no Sunday inserts.”
4. “This is a weird one, but I miss being able to hear a song and not know what it is. Any song you want now is a click away, but it used to sometimes take decades to find a track. Better yet, sometimes it took decades to even know where to start looking.”
5. “Analog controls in cars and appliances, which were superior. Touchscreen and digital displays are far less functional than knobs and springs and stuff.”
6. “Phone booths. The feeling of privacy while making a call was unique to the time — being able to step out of the noisy world for a moment and still see it in motion, living and pulsating. The quiet desperation of taking notes on scraps of paper or, worse, on a page of a phone book, then ripping that page out for safekeeping, was so extraordinary. People in a phone booth were still part of the world, but they were seeking to connect to an active site that was far away. Then the call was over, and you moved on with your life.”
7. “I miss the simple, cheap cars that any ham-handed shade-tree mechanic could fix.”
8. “Stereos weighed a lot back in the day, for sure. But they sounded fantastic. People today think earbuds are high-fidelity sound.”
9. “I miss the friendly arguments we used to have about who was the better ballplayer. Nowadays, you can look up statistics immediately, but in the ’70s and ’80s, it was your word against your buddies’ as to who was better.” (Continued)
Karen McM brought this to our attention and recommends Maui Strong as good place to consider making a donation to help. There are many other good organizations listed below.
Hawaii Community Foundation Maui Strong fund: Focusing on rapid response and working with local nonprofits to understand community needs. More details.
Maui Food Bank: Collecting and distributing food to help the hungry in Maui County. More details.
Ed note: It’s hard to disagree with Brooks, but he really doesn’t address our age group in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. It isn’t uncommon that unconscious ageism leaves us out of the equation considering what may make us happy. It’s different for us. Many have lovely memories of marriage but are now single. Some have a new relationship without marriage. Many simply have a huge circle of friends, family and activities. Our careers are behind us yet we are active volunteers. It seems to me that it’s the community and relationships that keep us moving in a positive way.
When I’m around young adults I like to ask them how they are thinking about the big commitments in their lives: what career to go into, where to live, whom to marry. Most of them have thought a lot about their career plans. But my impression is that many have not thought a lot about how marriage will fit into their lives.
The common operating assumption seems to be that professional life is at the core of life and that marriage would be something nice to add on top sometime down the road. According to an analysis of recent survey data by the University of Virginia professor Brad Wilcox, 75 percent of adults ages 18 to 40 said that making a good living was crucial to fulfillment in life while only 32 percent thought that marriage was crucial to fulfillment. In a Pew Research Center survey, 88 percent of parents said it was “extremely or very” important for their kids to be financially independent, while only 21 percent said it was “extremely or very” important for their kids to marry.
It’s not that I meet many people who are against marriage. Today, as in the past, a vast majority of Americans would like to tie the knot someday. It’s just that it’s not exactly top of mind.
Fewer people believe that marriage is vitally important. In 2006, 50 percent of young adults said it was very important for a couple to marry if they intended to spend the rest of their lives together. But by 2020 only 29 percent of young adults said that.
Many people have shifted the way they conceive of marriage. To use sociologist Andrew Cherlin’s language, they no longer view it as the “cornerstone” of their life; they view it as the “capstone” — something to enter into after they’ve successfully established themselves as adults.
Partly as a result of these attitudes, there is less marriage in America today. The marriage rate is close to the lowest level in American history. For example, in 1980, only 6 percent of 40-year-olds had never been married. As of 2021, 25 percent of 40-year-olds have never been married.
As I confront young adults who think this way, I am seized by an unfortunate urge to sermonize. I want to put a hand on their shoulder and say: Look, there are many reasons you may not find marital happiness in your life. Maybe you won’t be able to find a financially stable partner, or one who wants to commit. Maybe you’ll marry a great person but find yourselves drifting apart. But don’t let it be because you didn’t prioritize marriage. Don’t let it be because you didn’t think hard about marriage when you were young.
My strong advice is to obsess less about your career and to think a lot more about marriage. Please respect the truism that if you have a great career and a crappy marriage you will be unhappy, but if you have a great marriage and a crappy career you will be happy. Please use your youthful years as a chance to have romantic relationships, so you’ll have some practice when it comes time to wed. Even if you’re years away, please read books on how to decide whom to marry. Read George Eliot and Jane Austen. Start with the masters.
This is not just softhearted sentimentality I’m offering. There are mountains of evidence to show that intimate relationships, not career, are at the core of life, and those intimate relationships will have a downstream effect on everything else you do.
Last month, for example, the University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman published a study in which he found that marriage was “the most important differentiator” between happy and unhappy people. Married people are 30 points happier than the unmarried. Income contributes to happiness, too, but not as much.
As Wilcox writes in his vitally important forthcoming book, “Get Married”: “Marital quality is, far and away, the top predictor I have run across of life satisfaction in America. Specifically, the odds that men and women say they are ‘very happy’ with their lives are a staggering 545 percent higher for those who are very happily married, compared to peers who are not married or who are less than very happy in their marriages.”
“When it comes to predicting overall happiness, a good marriage is far more important than how much education you get, how much money you make, how often you have sex, and, yes, even how satisfied you are with your work.”
Economists Shawn Grover and John F. Helliwell studied two groups of adults over time, some who married and some who didn’t. They found that marriage caused higher levels of life satisfaction, especially in middle age, when adults’average level of satisfaction tends to be at its lowest. It wasn’t only the traits people brought into the marriage; marriage itself had positive effects.
We could do a lot to raise the marriage rate by increasing wages — financial precarity inhibits marriage. But as a culture, we could improve our national happiness levels by making sure people focus most on what is primary — marriage and intimate relationships — and not on what is important but secondary — their career.
Posted inEssays|Comments Off on To Be Happy, Marriage Matters More Than Career
Age bias doesn’t show up only as discrimination or snarky birthday cards. One potent source of ageism comes from older people themselves.
By Emily Laber-Warren in the Washington Post (Thanks to T&T)
Louise Pendry was teaching a psychology course in a cramped classroom at the University of Exeter when she found herself awkwardly climbing over her desk to allow students to come to the front and present. Her legs got caught in some equipment cables, and she lost her balance.
Pendry, a senior lecturer, quipped to her students, “I’m not the woman I used to be, clearly.”
Ironically, the course was about stereotyping. After class, a student suggested that Pendry had engaged in age bias — against herself.
“And I thought, ‘absolutely true,’” Pendry, 57, said. “You know what? Anybody would have struggled to clamber over those desks. It wasn’t just because I was older.”
Age bias doesn’t show up only as blatant discrimination (“We want someone younger for that job.”) or snarky birthday cards. One of the most potent sources of ageism comes from older people themselves, and like other forms of ageism, the self-inflicted kind is associated with lower levels of emotional and physical health and can slash years off people’s lives.
People, however, can shift these negative feelings to improve their well-being. When older people are reminded of the many positive things about aging, they can experience immediate benefits such as becoming stronger and having more will to live, said Becca Levy, a professor of epidemiology and psychology at the Yale School of Public Health who is a leading expert on the health effects of ageism.
I hope you didn’t miss the update meeting today. I hope you were there to hear about CAPE employee awards, new management staff introductions, flu shots, the COVID booster, RSV shots, Heidi’s vacation or Roger’s standup!
Please pass the word please. Let’s fill up the September meeting in the Performance Hall and continue to help build a vibrant community!
Posted inAdvocacy, CCRC Info|Comments Off on Monthly Update Meetings
Photographs by September Dawn Bottoms. Article from the NYT
Mr. Kristof is an Opinion columnist reporting from Greenwood, Miss. Ms. Bottoms is a photographer from Oklahoma whose work focuses on mental illness, family and poverty.
This is the third in the series “How America Heals” in which Nicholas Kristof is examining the interwoven crises devastating parts of America and exploring paths to recovery.
It’s not just that life expectancy in Mississippi (71.9) now appears to be a hair shorter than in Bangladesh (72.4). Nor that an infant is some 70 percent more likely to die in the United States than in other wealthy countries.
Nor even that for the first time in probably a century, the likelihood that an American child will live to the age of 20 has dropped.
All that is tragic and infuriating, but to me the most heart-rending symbol of America’s failure in health care is the avoidable amputations that result from poorly managed diabetes.
A medical setting cannot hide the violence of a saw cutting through a leg or muffle the grating noise it makes as it hacks through the tibia or disguise the distinctive charred odor of cauterized blood vessels. That noise of a saw on bone is a rebuke to an American health care system that, as Walter Cronkite reportedly observed, is neither healthy, caring nor a system.
Dr. Raymond Girnys, a surgeon who has amputated countless limbs here in the Mississippi Delta, one of the poorest and least healthy parts of America, told me that he has nightmares of “being chased by amputated legs and toes.”
Dr. Raymond Girnys checks Burt Saucier’s foot after his toes were amputated.
“It starts from the bottom up,” Dr. Girnys said, explaining how patients arrive with diabetic wounds on the foot that refuse to heal in part because of diminished circulation when blood sugar is not meticulously managed in a person with diabetes. Dr. Girnys initially tries to clean and treat the lesions, but they grow deeper, until he has to remove a toe.
When more wounds develop, he takes off the foot in the hope of saving the rest of the leg. New wounds can force him to amputate the leg below the knee and perhaps, finally, above the knee. After that, Dr. Girnys said, the patient is likely to die within five years.
A toe, foot or leg is cut off by a doctor about 150,000 times a year in America, making the United States a world leader of these amputations.
I’ll be blunt: America’s dismal health care outcomes are a disgrace. They shame us. Partly because of diabetes and other preventable conditions, Americans suffer unnecessarily and often die young. It is unconscionable that newborns in India, Rwanda and Venezuela have a longer life expectancy than Native Americans newborns (65) in the United States. And Native American males have a life expectancy of just 61.5 years — shorter than the overall life expectancy in Haiti.
Sources: National Center for Health Statistics, United Nations Note: Life expectancies are for those born in 2020 for the United States and 2021 internationally. Countries with fewer than 20 million people or where data quality was questionable were excluded.
But there are fixes, and three in particular would make a huge difference: expanding access to medical care; more aggressively addressing behaviors like smoking, overeating and drug abuse; and making larger society-wide steps to boost education and reduce child poverty. One reason to believe that we can do better on health care outcomes is that much of the rest of the world already does.
Here is a first-hand account from German friends of mine who were in Lahaina vacationing when the fire broke out. They left just in time and are now back in Germany but sent me this report.
On Tuesday afternoon last week, we were in a supermarket in the town of Lahaina, when the fire began. We could see and smell the smoke, but saw no flames. Thank God we made it fast enough through the dense traffic. The poles for power lines were tossed on the street, people were trapped in their cars. We had been without electricity due to the heavy storm since the morning and wanted to buy a candle in the supermarket and some food. On Wednesday, most of the cell phone service was gone, too. So at first we really had no information about how serious the situation was in Lahaina. But my friend, who lives in the safer east half of the island, urged us to leave the area. Her messages got through after a big delay.
The main road away from the west half of Maui was closed on Wednesday except for people connected to the rescue effort. We had to take a very narrow, steep road through the mountains on the northern tip of the western half of the island, very often two cars had not enough room to pass each other. But we made it safely.
A new strain of avian flu has killed dozens of birds on a small Puget Sound island. Cases have turned up elsewhere as well. Officials are trying to better understand the disease’s spread.
BY: LAUREL DEMKOVICH– in the Washington State Standard (Thanks to Ed. M)
(Mike Carlo/U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service)
The spread of bird flu has left Washington wildlife officials scrambling to test suspected cases and cleaning up hundreds of tern and gull carcasses along the coast of an island in northern Puget Sound.
Avian flu has historically affected mostly poultry, but a new strain – H5N1 – is proving deadly for wild birds as well. More than 75,000 wild birds globally have died because of the strain. Though human infection is rare, it’s not impossible.
Since the disease first came to Washington last March, cases in wild birds have been increasing in the state. But officials say they are still trying to gauge the full effects.
“The impacts in Washington have been hard to quantify,” Katie Haman, wildlife veterinarian at the Department of Fish and Wildlife, told the state Fish and Wildlife Commission last week. “How many cases are we missing? We just don’t know.”
In Washington, the first case of the H5N1 strain was reported on March 1, 2022 in a greater white-fronted goose in Walla Walla County.
So far, the Department of Fish and Wildlife has confirmed 112 cases in Washington, but Haman said that number is likely incomplete.
One outbreak that wildlife officials are monitoring is on Rat Island, a small island in Puget Sound, near Port Townsend. The wildlife preserve on the island is currently closed to the public due to the outbreak.
Since July 1, the Department of Fish and Wildlife has collected more than 1,224 dead Caspian tern carcasses – most of which are adults – and more than 158 dead gull carcasses – most of which are chicks.
The long-term impacts of the Rat Island outbreak are “unknown,” Haman said. “I think time will tell.”
The First Republican Presidential Debate will be broadcast on FOX News the evening of August 23, 2023 from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.
According to USA Today, the following candidates state that they have met the qualifications to participate in the event: Chris Christie, Donald J. Trump, Doug Burgum, Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott, and Vivek Ramaswamy.
Other candidates have until August 21st to meet the polling and contribution requirements to qualify for the event. Watch and see if there is something from each candidate with which you can agree. I did this in 2016, and Ted Cruz was right – you really can cook bacon on the barrel of a semi-automatic weapon if you fire enough rounds fast enough.
Posted inPolitics|Comments Off on First Republican Presidential Debate
WASHINGTON (WTVO) — The Native American Guardians Association has threatened an “Anheuser Busch (Bud Light)”-style boycott, demanding the Washington Commanders change the team name back to “Redskins.”
The letter claims the Commanders are in willful denial of U.S. history and the Native American components of the founding of America and the U.S. Constitution.
NAGA claims the majority of Native Americans feel disrespected by the name change. The group was established in 1944 and advocates for the recognition of Native American heritage through sports and other public platforms.
“The name ‘Redskins’ carries deep cultural, historical, and emotional significance, honoring the bravery, resilience, and warrior spirit associated with Native American culture. It was never intended as a derogatory or offensive term but as a symbol of respect and admiration. Changing the name abruptly disregards the positive legacy that the Redskins name has built over the years and disorients the passionate fans who have invested their emotions, time, and unwavering support in the team,” the petition reads.
“The name ‘Commanders’ fails to capture the essence, tradition, and historical weight associated with the Redskins. It lacks the uniqueness, emotional connection, and pride that our team’s original name embodies,” it continued.
“At this moment in history, we are formally requesting that the team revitalize its relationship with the American Indian community by (i) changing the name back to ‘The Redskins’ which recognizes America’s original inhabitants and (ii) using the team’s historic name and legacy to encourage Americans to learn about, not cancel, the history of America’s tribes and our role in the founding of this Great Nation,” the letter said.
According to WJLA, NAGA’s President of Global Impact Campaigns, Healy Baumgardner, said the Commanders have ignored requests for meetings with the group.
“We attempted to have an open dialogue with the now Washington Commanders since they made the name change several years ago with no response by them to have a conversation,” she said. “We felt that it was time to apply public pressure.”
“For the Commanders’ owners and leadership to make such a short-sighted decision to cancel the Redskins based on their self-created DEI and ESG feelings without listening to their consumers is not only offensive, it’s pure insanity. How did that work out for Bud Light? Not so well,” Baumgardner added.
Posted inAdvocacy, Race, Social justice|Comments Off on Native American group threatens boycott if Washington NFL team doesn’t change its name back to ‘Redskins’
In 1972, after a century of mining, ranching, and farming had taken a toll on Montana, voters in that state added to their constitution an amendment saying that “[t]he state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations,” and that the state legislature must make rules to prevent the degradation of the environment.
In March 2020 the nonprofit public interest law firm Our Children’s Trust filed a lawsuit on behalf of sixteen young Montana residents, arguing that the state’s support for coal, oil, and gas violated their constitutional rights because it created the pollution fueling climate change, thus depriving them of their right to a healthy environment. They pointed to a Montana law forbidding the state and its agents from taking the impact of greenhouse gas emissions or climate change into consideration in their environmental reviews, as well as the state’s fossil fuel–based state energy policy.
That lawsuit is named Held v. Montana after the oldest plaintiff, Rikki Held, whose family’s 7,000-acre ranch was threatened by a dwindling water supply, and both the state and a number of officers of Montana. The state of Montana contested the lawsuit by denying that the burning of fossil fuels causes climate change—despite the scientific consensus that it does—and denied that Montana has experienced changing weather patterns. Through a spokesperson, the governor said: “We must focus on American innovation and ingenuity, not costly, expansive government mandates, to address our changing climate.”
Today, U.S. District Court Judge Kathy Seeley found for the young Montana residents, agreeing that they have “experienced past and ongoing injuries resulting from the State’s failure to consider [greenhouse gas emissions] and climate change, including injuries to their physical and mental health, homes and property, recreational, spiritual, and aesthetic interests, tribal and cultural traditions, economic security, and happiness.” She found that their “injuries will grow increasingly severe and irreversible without science-based actions to address climate change.”
The plaintiffs sought an acknowledgement of the relationship of fossil fuels to climate change and a declaration that the state’s support for fossil fuel industries is unconstitutional. Such a declaration would create a foundation for other lawsuits in other states.
Did the University of Washington just move to Oklahoma City?
No. UW did not replicate the stunt that cost Seattle the Sonics 15 years ago, and counting. The university and its football team remain in Montlake, where next year, and the year after that, and the year after that, six or seven games will be played at Husky Stadium, the self-proclaimed greatest setting in college sports. The Huskies also will play in those years six or seven road games, maybe including Pullman, which some consider a good thing. And the football program probably will make enough to sustain all the other UW sports that make little or no revenue.
So regarding the more hysterical responders among the People Who Wear Purple to the abandonment of the westerly Pac-12 by Washington and Oregon in favor of the midwesterly Big Ten, I have two words:
Bow down.
The Huskies are a part of a rearrangement. Not a relocation. And while the Pac-12 Conference and its antecedents survived 108 years and created many championships, heartfelt sentiments, scandals and intrigues, by the start of the 2024 school year it will be what the rotary phone is to modern telecommunications.
A relic. Deal with it.
The Pac-12 and the other big-time college sports conferences operate as part of a trade association (called the NCAA) to promote a mutual well-being of the industry (think: The Dairy Farmers of Washington). In contrast, the pro sports leagues that have come to dominate our sports-business consciousness are monopoly operators whose massive leverage includes the ability to extort their municipalities for financial benefits. Pay up tax dollars for facilities, or see a team relocate to another city more eager to bend over.
Pro sports are far more ruthless than big-time college sports, which are jealous of that. Because the programs are currently tied to those gosh-darn anvils called schools, the trade association members have no leverage to extort anyone except each other. They have given over financial control of their top programs to the entertainment industry (linear and cable networks and their streamer offspring). So the CEOs of ESPN/Disney and Fox Sports have become commissioners-without-portfolios, able to dictate business terms and conditions via their handsome rights fees.
Without saying so, the TV moguls determined the Pac-12 was inefficient, unworthy of rescue. Why? (continued)
Once you become the first person to circumnavigate the globe alone under your own power — 41,196 miles of rowing solo across the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic oceans, then pedaling a bicycle across and scaling mountains over the continents in between — what do you do for an encore?
Maybe you do it again, taking a different route to summit the highest peaks you missed the first time, while visiting or building classrooms along the way, sharing what you’ve seen and learned about the world, the environment, and yourself.
The 62-year-old Gig Harbor resident Erden Eruç (AIR-den AIR-rooch), already the holder of 16 Guinness world records, was on his way to doing just that when he launched his rowboat from Crescent City, California, on June 22, 2021. After 239 days and over 7,800 miles alone across the Pacific for the second time, he became the first person to row from North America to Asia when he landed in the Philippines on March 24, 2022, securing two more world records. From there he planned to row across the South China Sea, then pedal his way from Vietnam to Portugal, where he would rejoin his rowboat and continue west.
There was just one problem. Actually, there were many, he said, but the biggest one was China, which refused to issue him a visa because of the pandemic.
Eruç appealed to the Chinese embassy in Manila, saying he could apply again if necessary in person at the Hanoi embassy after making the crossing and meeting whatever quarantine requirements were required. “No exceptions!” was the answer.
“Myanmar (also) turned down our visa request on account of security concerns,” Eruç said. He had tried, thinking he could reroute across India and Asia Minor. (continued)
“Good Lord, Who Among Us Hasn’t Paid For A Clarence Thomas Vacation?” David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo asked this morning. Kurtz was reacting to a new piece by Brett Murphy and Alex Mierjeski in ProPublica detailing Justice Thomas’s leisure activities and the benefactors who underwrote them.
Those activities include “[a]t least 38 destination vacations, including a previously unreported voyage on a yacht around the Bahamas; 26 private jet flights, plus an additional eight by helicopter; a dozen VIP passes to professional and college sporting events, typically perched in the skybox; two stays at luxury resorts in Florida and Jamaica; and one standing invitation to an uber-exclusive golf club overlooking the Atlantic coast.” The authors add that this “is almost certainly an undercount.”
Thomas did not disclose these gifts, as ethics specialists say he should have done. House Democrats Ted Lieu (D-CA), Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), Bill Pascrell (D-NJ), Gerry Connolly (D-VA), and Hank Johnson (D-GA) have said Thomas must resign. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who has led the effort to extricate the Supreme Court from very wealthy interests for years, commented: “I said it would get worse; it will keep getting worse.”
Thomas’s benefactors, Murphy and Mierjeski noted, “share the ideology that drives his jurisprudence.” That ideology made Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, who has been in the news for the release of his December 6, 2020, memo outlining how to steal the 2020 presidential election, speculate that Thomas was the Supreme Court justice the plotters could count on to back their coup. “Realistically,” Chesebro wrote to lawyer John Eastman, “our only chance to get a favorable judicial opinion by Jan. 6, which might hold up the Georgia count in Congress, is from Thomas—do you agree, Prof. Eastman?”
Posted inEthics, Government, Law|Comments Off on Clarence Thomas hikes the price of Supreme Court decisions to keep pace with inflation
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