It’s been sixteen years since I tied in to the end of a rope.
It wasn’t an unsuccessful suicide attempt but a climb up the main peak of Mt Olympus in Washing State. I’ve climbed a few other peaks since then but I did it the easy way – just putting one foot in front of the other and using my hands for balance. I haven’t really had the desire to climb anything that took climbing skill until last week when someone asked me if I wanted to spend a couple of hours at the local rock gym. I said, “Yes” (another story) then dreaded the moment of truth when I would have to tie into a harness and try to get myself off the ground.
At the local rock gym: We had lots of options for top roping, but none looked easy to me. Mostly overhanging face climbs studded with dozens of strange-looking handholds. Once we settled on a “route” it took me a while to get my fancy harness on – the last one I used was a long piece of 1” nylon webbing with two leg loops – and get properly tied in to the rope with a rewoven figure-eight knot. The shoes were even more uncomfortable than my old pair of EBs, probably because of my oversized bunions. After we went through the standard climbing signals, I said the word I’d been dreading: Climbing! I got about two feet off the ground and fell – didn’t even have a chance to say, “Falling!” I tried again and things seemed to come together. I was climbing (not really following the route, a sort of climb-by-the-colors path) but I was going up and not falling. I finished that climb, tried a few more variations on the same route, and began to think that I might actually be enjoying the experience. Then I noticed that my grip strength was fading and I couldn’t hold on to anything for more than two seconds. The feeling was like hitting the wall at the 20-mile mark in a marathon. Everything below my wrists wanted to climb but my hands and fingers were trashed. So, just three climbs and it was all over for me. Too bad climbing is not like riding a bike; once you learn, you never forget. Bad form and sore hands… I’ll be back.
Categories: Journal · Multi sport
The ever-volatile John McCain had harsh words for former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld Monday when he said at a retirement community near Hilton Head Island, S.C., “I think that Donald Rumsfeld will go down as one of the worst secretaries of defense in history.” McCain was referring, of course, to Rumsfeld’s central role in managing the Iraq war. But we shouldn’t forget that Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith also played critical roles in shaping the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, the 2003 invasion, and the occupation of Iraq. You can be for or against the war but you can’t deny that these were the people who were responsible for putting our troops in Iraq.
These are difficult times for neoconservatives, but ideology dies hard; don’t be surprised when you hear them raising the volume for war with another adversary: Iran.
Categories: Politics
These are troubling times as Colin Bower points out in his article “Language, truth… and wine,” in the New English Review – but not for the reasons you might think: war, terrorism, suffering, global warming, and all that. Rather, it’s the concept of truth and coming to terms with it that’s the root of our troubles. Blame it on postmodernism and the “it’s all relative” crowd, says Bower. What ever happened to objective truth, anyway?
Maybe it was coincidence but I just finished reading Simon Blackburn’s, “Truth; A Guide.” I’ve never had a firm grip on the concept, so I was looking forward to reading what Mr. Blackburn had to say. (I’ve also read his other books, “Being Good” and “Think”.) It’s an informative book, worth reading. Am I less perplexed about the concept? No. But I’ll remember these words from the introduction to Blackburn’s book:
“I try to write with the creed that we need to think and to reflect, if we are to be in control of our words and ideas rather than be controlled by them. In this case that means that we should not be slaves of simplistic relativisms, or of the equally simplistic absolutisms. And whatever way our temperament pulls us, we should know at least where we are, and what there is to be said on the other side.
And, from the last chapter:
“We can take the postmodernist inverted commas off things that ought to matter to us: truth, reason, objectivity and confidence. They are no less, if no more, than the virtues that we should all cherish as we try to understand the bewildering world around us.”
And, yes, I have a wine to recommend: the Fidelitas M100, red wine. It’s dedicated to the winemaker’s grandmother, who passed away at 100 in December, 2005. The label says it all: “faithful, loyal, true.” You can’t get a better recommendation than that.
Categories: Books · Wine
I’m most at ease when I’m alone – but not too alone. I would not make a good Hamlet. I can put on a sort of an extroverted persona but it’s a hard effort in the company of strangers. It’s much easier to retreat into a well-nurtured and decades-old shyness that greets you like an old friend.
I recall reading somewhere that shyness is genetically determined but I think there’s more to it. When you’re young, feelings and decisions are based on a foreshortened perspective that may shape your behavior for years to come. I’m as much a product of my historical self as I am my genetic code.
Categories: Flotsam
Today, most people do not die suddenly. They die incrementally from sicknesses that take their lives by days or months. The days of sudden death are becoming rare for Americans, however. Now we can anticipate our mortality but too often health-care providers are unwilling or are uninformed about how to provide appropriate end-of-life care.
These are some of the key points that Stephen P. Kiernan makes in his recent book, “Last Rights; Rescuing the End of Life from the Medical System.” Kiernan argues that we desperately need to provide effective end-of-life care to patients and to give greater consideration to their emotions, finances, and their families.
“Death is not an afterthought of life,” he says, “but an opportunity to reaffirm all of life that is noblest, most compassionate, and most courageous.”
Dying with dignity – without resort to assisted suicide – is possible for all Americans but not without changes in law, policy, medical training, and in the attitudes of patients and families who refuse to accept end-of-life care that is less than what they deserve.
Satirist Art Buchwald, who died a few days a few days ago at the age of 81, also spoke to these issues last June from a hospice in Washington, DC. He defied doctors’ predictions of an early demise – don’t believe everything your doctor tells you – and survived nearly a year despite refusing dialysis treatment. His last book was, “Too Soon to Say Goodbye.”
Categories: Books · Health care
In recent weeks it seems as if legislators from every state in the nation have vowed to move forward on health reform. Massachusetts, Vermont, California, Maine, Illinois, Minnesota, Washington, Montana, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, and Illinois are all getting on the reform bandwagon but it’s still not clear whether any of the initiatives will succeed.
It’s worth considering Oregon’s experience with health-care reform, which began back in 1989 with the admirable goal of coverage for all Oregonians – but the resulting Oregon Health Plan never lived up to expectations. Jonathan Oberlander’s excellent essay, “Health Reform Interrupted: The Unraveling of the Oregon Health Plan,” describes what went wrong with the OHP – a plan that has lost 75 percent of its enrollment and that has been closed to new enrollment since 2004. Policy miscalculations, declining state revenue, and eroding political support all worked against the plan.
Mr. Oberlander points out that the unraveling of the OHP raises broader questions about the promises of state-lead health reform. “What can states now embarking on health reform learn from Oregon?” he asks. “The task is not simply to enact coverage expansions – it is to sustain them.” It’s good to see legislators talking about health reform again but the real challenges to reform have just begun.
And don’t count Oregon out yet – at least not as long as former Gov. John Kitzhaber has the energy to continue his effort for reform that’s grounded in finding an effective way to spend public dollars on health care.
Categories: Health care
After George W. Bush addressed the nation January 10 many people were disappointed – even those who call themselves Republicans. Aside from a few diehards, no one wants to believe in Bush anymore. What became of all those true believers who gave him such high approval ratings in the months after he jumped onto the deck of the Abraham Lincoln under the “Mission Accomplished” banner? Some of us suspected even then that the war in Iraq would unleash a sectarian war for which there would be no solution. Even Dick Cheney said in 1991: “Once you get to Baghdad, it’s not clear what you do with it. It’s not clear what government you put in place of the one that’s currently there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime, a Kurdish? Or one that tilts towards the Baathists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists? How much credibility is that going to have if it’s set up by the American military there? How long does the United States military have to stay there to protect the people that sign on for that government, and what happens once we leave?”
As they say, “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist…”
Categories: Belief · Politics
This article (and all those who commented on it) from Think Progress points out the economic and political problems with our current health care system but omits perhaps the most important one: the U.S. health care system is also an ethical failure. There are three questions that we need to answer if we’re going to reform health care in this country: The economic question: How do we pay for health care? The political question: How can we create a consensus that will marshal the nation’s resources to solve the health care problem? And the ethical question: “How do we make health care available and affordable for all Americans?”
Health care reform in this country won’t succeed unless it’s supported by a bipartisan democratic process that recognizes the economic, political, and ethical dimensions to the crisis.
Categories: Health care · Microphone
That was the title of an opinion piece I read the other day in the Statesman Journal. The author compares a restaurant owner’s woes with “mandatory food insurance” and Massachusetts’ new health care policy that will cover 460,000 uninsured residents by July. The author makes an absurd comparison because he reduces the complex problems with our nation’s current health care system to simple platitudes such as the following:
- The nation would be better served if America’s lawmakers stopped piling more regulations onto a (health care) system that’s absurdly overregulated.
- Deregulate health insurance and hospitals so that we could shop for the precise care we need; that would improve quality and lower costs.
- Health care needs more choice, not more coercion.
Today, 45 million Americans lack health insurance because they can’t afford it and millions more a struggling to pay their premiums as their benefits shrink. The health-care-is-just-like-food people assume that health care is just like a consumer good but it’s not. Deregulation won’t solve America’s health care crisis; finding a solution to the crisis is the great moral challenge of our time.
Categories: Health care · Microphone
Sidelined for the past week with a sore throat, an incessant cough, and a bacterial infection in my left ear and eye – and no sign of remission – I decided to read “World War Z, An Oral History of the Zombie War.” The book’s a good read. I’m glad the zombies are history (for now), but I’m still struggling against the bacteria.
Categories: Books · Flotsam
