ACCEPTABLE LOSSES REVISITED!

In case you missed it, this first part is a repeat of a blog entry from February 23, 2020, called "Acceptable Losses." 

Original Post 

(Full disclosure: I am a gun owner, and I support the Second Amendment)     

There is an old military saying that states: ‘No plan survives after the first contact with the enemy.’

When the military and other groups consider and develop a plan, there is something built in called ‘Acceptable Losses.’ What that means is if all goes as planned (which it rarely does), it will result in a certain percentage of life or materiel loss that is deemed worth losing (acceptable) to attain the objective of the mission.

Keeping that in mind, while many are calling for tweaking the current laws, doing something, there is an unyielding refusal of others to consider anything to make a positive difference in our gun culture.

Six people dying with vaping is unacceptable (now up to 59), so action is taken.

Thirty-six thousand people killed each year by guns is apparently acceptable. In mass shootings, as shocked as people profess to be, we have become numbed to the regular increase of incidents. To help, they say we should keep sending thoughts and prayers (yawn) but do nothing else.

Sandy Hook (29 killed) should have been when action was taken, but that was apparently acceptable. Las Vegas (58), Pulse (49), Virginia Tech (32), El Paso (22), etc., etc., should also have brought about action, but apparently, some still see those as acceptable losses. Any suggestion of changing any laws result in, ‘They’re coming to take our guns.’ To them, keeping the status quo is worth the piling-up bodies.

Until such killings become unacceptable to all, they will remain acceptable.

Addition and Update

So, here we are in mid-September some seven months after the above was written. 

On February 24th, tRump tweeted: "The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!"

And then on March 9th, he added: "So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!"

And today, if he says it, they believe it. September 15th, almost 200,000 U.S. citizens are dead! Bolstered by their Great Leader, probably forty percent of Americans still see that as okay - fully acceptable! They will tell you tRump has done everything perfectly, and the results couldn't be better. To say anything else might reveal some intelligence, which they don't have.

For two months, tRump lied and denied, and here we are, and there is no end in sight.

200,000 dead and climbing.

Acceptable losses.

Sad.

#trumppandemic 

HOUSE OF WHAT???

So the Ever-lovely Miss Kim, as is her wont,  was watching a show called 'Extreme Paranormal Witness." I came in toward the end and was half paying attention but still picked up on some pretty scary happenings. No, if that were our house, we wouldn't have bought it let alone be staying there.

As 'things' started happening, the couple did some research on the home they had purchased and been living in. They found the place had been the'Mansfield Training School and Hospital,' but before that it was called 'The House of Imbeciles,' which was an acceptable diagnostic term way back when.

My wife and I immediately looked at each other with the same thought: what a great name for the current White House!

😂

WHERE WERE YOU WHEN YOU HEARD?

There are four things that happened in our history that  I will never forget where I was when I heard. This is one of them.

On the morning of September 11th, 2001, I was walking into a classroom for a study hall.

Students were pretty excited, asking if I had heard about a plane that hit a building in New York. I hadn't. 

Accident? That was the only thought at that point. No one had any more information.

When things settled down, I tried to get on the computer to see what was happening, but it was even slower than usual, and none of the news sites were loading. As a news freak, I was frustrated to say the least!

That is the moment I remember. As the day progressed, I learned more, and the rest is history, as 'they' say.

The other thing connected to 9/11 I clearly remember is sometime some days later, I was driving somewhere and listening to a list of the victims being read on the car radio. There were names and ages being read, and when one was read and the age was given as three years old, I completely lost it and began sobbing.

When people today say, "Never forget," I can't and won't.

I HATED YOU!

Back in the day when I did such things, I went to a play called The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. 

From Wikipedia: "The play revolves around a dysfunctional family consisting of single mother Beatrice and her two daughters, Ruth and Tillie, who try to cope with their abysmal status in life. Shy Matilda Hunsdorfer, nicknamed Tillie, prepares an experiment involving marigolds raised from seeds exposed to radioactivity for her science fair. She is, however, constantly thwarted by her mother Beatrice, who is self-centered and abusive, and by her extroverted and unstable sister Ruth, who submits to her mother's will. Over the course of the play, Beatrice constantly tries to stamp out any opportunities Tillie has of succeeding, due to her own lack of success in life. As the play progresses, the paths of the three characters diverge: Tillie wins the science fair through perseverance; Ruth attempts to stand up to her mother but has a nervous collapse at the end of the play, and Beatrice—driven to the verge of insanity by her deep-seated enmity towards everyone—kills the girls' pet rabbit Peter and ends up wallowing in her own perceived insignificance. Despite this, Tillie (who is much like her project's deformed but beautiful and hardy marigolds) secretly continues to believe that everyone is valuable."

Anyhow, the mother Beatrice was played perfectly - she was a horrible person! After the play, the cast showed up in the lobby for a meet-and-greet. When I saw the actress who played the mother, I walked up to her, took her hand, looked her in the eye and said, "I hated you!"

She smiled, clasped my hand more firmly, and replied, "That was the best compliment you could have given me."

I mention this because I just came across an interview with actress Louise Fletcher. I hated her too (at least the part she played - Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. (If you haven't seen the movie, it's one of the best ever, having won the 'big five' Oscars and dozens of others! See it!)

Besides having read the book and seeing the movie several times, I also saw a couple of stage play productions as well. They were somewhat different from the movie, but each great in their own way (the difference in the interpretation and presentation of Randle Patrick McMurphy ("R. P.") still worked.

By the way, I hated the character of Nurse Ratched and still do! 

KITTY GENOVESE

"If you see something, say something!"

Back in 1964, a woman named Kitty Genovese was raped and murdered in a New York section called Kew Gardens. The story was that she screamed for help and virtually everyone ignored her cries. If I remember correctly, the attacked came back again after leaving her on the ground and finished what he had started.  

The attack underscored something called The Bystander Effect, which basically said the more witnesses there were, the less likely someone would intervene and help. The story at the time was no one helped (not completely accurate); people didn't want to get involved. As a result, an overnight Boston deejay named Dick Summer started a NAG campaign (Nightlighters (his group of listeners) Against Gutlessness). Outraged by the murder, he provided small plastic key chains to listeners that would hold a dime for a phone call if someone saw something hoping to move an apathetic public toward action.  

More recently (but still many years ago), students thought it was cool to call bomb threats into schools. The schools urged students to say something if they knew something. It they knew and didn't say something, they were complicit. Of course, the contemporary 'wisdom' was 'Snitches get stitches,' and I suspect that still applies, which doesn't make doing the right thing the right thing.

Anyhow, if you see something, say something. It's the right thing.