Hurry Up!

When I was young, I wanted technology to hurry up so I could partake in new endeavors. Hurry up and send people to the moon, so I have a chance to go! Hurry up and make aircars so I can have one! Hurry up and find other planets, outside our solar system!

I haven’t yet made it to the moon. I don’t have an aircar, or even a hybrid car, and I don’t think anybody is even trying to make a hover car anymore. And they have started finding other planets around other stars, even a couple that might be considered vaguely ‘Earth-like’. But I never became an astronomer or even an astro-physicists, so I’m not involved in any of those discoveries, and probably never will be. Bummer!

Now that I’ve slipped into middle-age (when I was young, someone who was my age would be considered old), I still want technology to hurry up, but I’m looking a lot more at medical technology. Hurry up and find a better way to deal with bad knees. Hurry up and find a way to make me no longer reliant on reading glasses! Hurry up and find a way for me to actually lose weight and not have to live on dry salads and/or exercise 12 hours a day!

Today, I went to a pre-screening to see if I qualified for a new study of a new lasik surgery procedure that would eliminate my need for reading glasses. I did not qualify. I was at the upper end of the age group they were looking at, so possibly if I were 5 years younger, I would have qualified.

Hurry up! I don’t want to be ‘a little too far gone’ every time one of these new procedures comes along!

Religious Freedom

A lot of politicians seem to look to our ‘Founding Fathers’ for support for their way of thinking about an issue, such as gay marriage, a woman’s place, etc.  While I respect our Founding Fathers for setting up our country, I think of them as people, not as gods incapable of making mistakes. I have three points to make here.

#1 – A lot of modern  politicians seem to have adopted an extreme religious stand, as I see it, and for some reason, they feel they must shove their opinion and beliefs down the throats of the rest of the country. They may say how much they admire our Founding Fathers, but they completely ignore that the Pilgrims came here to escape religious persecution. And right in the preamble to the constitution, the Founding Fathers asserted they wanted to ‘secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity’. Have you looked up the meaning of ‘liberty’? The very first meaning given in my source is, “freedom from arbitrary or despotic government or control.” Of course, I don’t imagine any despot actually sees themselves as one. And how can a religious belief be despotic? When people who don’t hold that same belief are forced to act as if they do. If that isn’t religious persecution, I don’t know what is.

#2 – It also seems like these politicians have forgotten – or chose to ignore – that our Founding Fathers lived in a different time period. Not only has the date changed, but technology has changed, our language has changed, and our social morals have changed. These people want to pretend that times were much better when our Founding Fathers were putting together our nation. Really? I’ve used outhouses, sweated through summer camping trips, cooked over open fires and wood-burning stoves. That’s enough to convince me that I don’t want to go back. I’ve also been inoculated against small pox and polio, suffered through gall bladder attacks and have friends who have had a knee replaced, allowing them to walk again. Do I want to forego modern medicine to be crippled or die in agony? No thanks. The present is where I want to be, at least until the future gets here.

#3 - How would the Founding Fathers feel about being used to support a particular religious belief as a political stand? I don’t think very many would like it. The Founding Fathers were a varied lot; Roman Catholics, Episcopalian, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Lutherans, Dutch Reformed, Methodists, anti-clerical Christians and deists. If they were trying to incorporate a particular religious bent to their plans for a nation, how could they possibly have agreed what that bent would be?

Our Founding Fathers were capable of thinking for themselves, did not cater to their religious beliefs while trying to formulate a plan for a new nation. I can only hope that modern Americans can think for themselves enough not to mix oppressive religious beliefs with political issues.

Blood from a Turnip

I hear from friends about their (mostly) grown children still living at home – or coming back to live at home – because they mis-calculated how far they could make their paycheck stretch, and suddenly, they didn’t have enough money to cover the rent and groceries, along with everything else. Most of us went through something similar when we were that age, so we agree that it’s part of growing up. It’s how they’ve learned all their lives; push their boundaries until they get pushed back. Unfortunately, when young ones push their financial boundaries, it might take them years to get their finances straightened out again.

Even more unfortunate, some people never learn how to handle their finances.

But most of us do. And we manage to live most of our lives paying our bills fairly regularly, even if we are  living paycheck to paycheck.

Unless something breaks. We get laid off. A family member becomes terribly ill. You are forced into retirement in the midst of an ‘economic downturn’. That last one means that you (hopefully) get a pension, but it will be a set amount, month after month, while the cost of living goes up and up. Because of your age, you see the doctor more often, have more prescriptions to be filled, etc. And you no longer have any chance of working overtime, no chance of getting a raise to make it easier to pay those bills.

Suddenly, the collection phone calls coming to the house phone are no longer for my oldest kid; they’re for me.

What a revoltin’ development.