My 17-year-old son knows everything about
everything, and he’s not shy about telling his mother and me that we are
idiots, relics of the Dark Ages who can’t possibly have anything meaningful to
say on any topic. I don’t think I was much different at his age, though time
has dimmed my memory somewhat. My son’s youthful arrogance is unbridled and
annoying, and I wonder how many years it will be before he realizes that his parents
are not complete dunces.
The American media haven’t made it easy to
follow the situation playing out in the Crimea. The major networks focus on
evil Vladimir Putin and his thirst for power and empire. It appears that ethnic
Russians in the Crimea want to turn away from Ukraine and join Russia, while
the United States and Britain want things to remain as they are. The U.S.
reserves to itself the right to invade other countries and violate
international law, but we become puritanical when another nation (except
Israel) decides to do the same thing. Vladimir must pull his thugs and
paramilitary forces out of Crimea, stuff the genie back in the bottle…or else.
Or else what? Economic and cultural sanctions from the EU, perhaps, and a hard
slap on the wrist from U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry, maybe another
lecture from President Obama about international law…
On another subject, Syria, the west doesn’t
seem particularly interested. The plight of a few million refugees and
displaced persons simply isn’t as interesting as a missing passenger jet liner;
the major networks spend minutes on the former and hours on the latter. Part of
the problem, I suppose, is that the Syrian civil war has dragged on too long
and is too confusing to explain to an audience with a short attention span and
little interest in international events. The leader of the bad guys in Syria is
easy enough to identify – it’s trickier to identify the good guys, what they
are fighting for, and what Syria might look like if they prevail.
Weird times. Here on the Platinum Coast it’s 85
degrees, which on the one hand is wonderful – who doesn’t like warm sunshine
and blue sky? But on the other hand this kind of weather this early in the year
isn’t helping our drought condition, which can only be described as dire. I am
already capturing gray water from the washing machine to water the plants on
our deck; the other day I installed a low flow showerhead. It’s only the middle
of March. We need fans in the apartment to push the overheated air around.
March is supposed to be a month for mild temperatures and several days of rain.
I just finished an excellent non-fiction book,
the Big Burn, by Tim Egan. It’s the story of a mammoth wildfire that scorched
parts of three western states in 1910. Fine read, highly recommended. There
were powerful economic interests in the United States at that time who thought
turning millions of acres of federal lands into national parks was ludicrous;
in the eyes of these interests, it was far better to hand the land to the
highest bidder (or the most politically connected) and let the exploitation
begin.
Getting back to my son…he has been accepted at
the American University of Paris, France, and the lad is so enthralled by the
idea of studying abroad that the $45,000 annual price tag seems more a minor
nuisance than an insurmountable obstacle. Trying to tell him that debt is easy
to run up and difficult to pay down is as hard as finding an honest politician
in Washington D.C. The boy, bless his innocent heart, believes – against all
evidence to the contrary – that gobs of money will fall softly into his young
lap. I wish that were so.
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