The five switches of manliness are the power switches that are connected to our primal man and deeply ingrained and embedded in the male psyche. When they’re turned off, we feel restless, angry, and apathetic. When they’re turned on, we feel alive, invigorated, motivated to be our best, and just plain manly. The two principles behind these posts that must be adopted in order for the recommendations to be successfully integrated are: 1) the switches are simply either on or off, and 2) turning them on requires only small and simple changes in behavior. The biggest obstacle to flipping the switches will be pride–the belief that firing up our masculinity requires arduous, mystical, and/or perfectly “authentic” tasks. Just because you cannot do everything, does not mean you cannot do something. The maxim to adopt is this: “By small and simple means I will flip the switches of manliness.”
When seeking to activate the deeply encoded parts of primitive masculinity, there is no better place to start than physicality. Primitive man used his body all day every day: building, hunting, walking, dancing, fighting.
For modern man, these activities have been replaced with sitting. Many of us sit for twelve hours or more a day. Sit down for breakfast, sit in the car on the way to work, sit at your desk all day, sit in your car on the way home from work, sit in front of the tv at night….Rinse and repeat.
Sitting represents the ultimate in passive living; it practically shuts your body down–your heart rate, calorie burn, insulin effectiveness, and levels of good cholesterol drop as your risk of obesity and diabetes goes up. Or, as Dr. James Levine, leader in the emerging field of “inactivity studies,” puts it: when you sit, “the muscles go as silent as those of a dead horse.”
“Excessive sitting,” Dr. Levine says, “is a lethal activity.” And he’s not kidding. A study found that men who sit for more than six hours of their leisure time each day had a 20% higher death rate than those who sat for three hours or less. The epidemiologist who conducted the study, Alpha Patel, concluded that excessive sitting literally shortens a person’s life by several years (not to mention the years that are simply wasted from sitting as opposed to doing anything). Another study showed that men who sat for 23 or more hours a week had a 64% greater chance of dying from heart disease than those who sat for 11 hours per week or less.
Not only is sitting around literally killing us, it’s also throwing a wet rag on our manliness. As Dr. Levine observed:
Go into cubeland in a tightly controlled corporate environment and you immediately sense that there is a malaise about being tied behind a computer screen seated all day. The soul of the nation is sapped, and now it’s time for the soul of the nation to rise.
Made to Move
Nearly every top killer in the Western world–heart disease, stroke, diabetes, depression, hypertension, and a dozen other forms of cancer–was unknown to our ancestors. They didn’t have medicine, but they did have a magic bullet–or maybe two, judging by the number of digits Dr. Bramble was holding up. “You could literally halt epidemics in their tracks with this one remedy,” he said. He flashed two fingers up in a peace sign, then slowly rotated them downward until they were scissoring through space. The Running Man. “So simple,” he said. “Just move your legs. Because if you don’t think you were born to run, you’re not only denying history. You’re denying who you are.” -Christopher McDougall, Born to Run
Our bodies were made to move. We’re beings of flesh, bone, and muscle. If we weren’t designed to move, we would have evolved to be great blobs of tissue–human clams.
And we didn’t evolve to move slowly, either. We’re made to move vigorously for long periods of time…to run, and run far.
How do we know this? It’s written into our anatomy. Unlike humans, walking animals like chimps lack an Achilles tendon and an ample gluteus maximus–both of which are needed for running–as well as the nuchal ligament, which keeps the head steady when an animal is moving quickly. For a long time scientists puzzled over why we have such features and yet are such seemingly ineffective runners…what was the evolutionary advantage behind our slow and steady running ability?
The answer is “persistence hunting.” Primitive tribes hunted by running down an animal until the prey dropped dead of exhaustion. The fact that humans could run for hours on end without overheating was a distinct survival advantage.
Women likely joined in these persistence hunts as well (athletic parity between the sexes increases as distance increases; some of the top finishers in ultra races like the Leadville 100 are women). But a greater share of the hunting and heavy labor fell to men. Researchers speculate that this is why, while men and women have the same number of sweat glands, men sweat more than women. Regardless of fitness level, women’s bodies are less effective at sweating, and thus dissipating body heat than men, because, researchers hypothesize, women could stay in the shade more frequently, while men had to have greater protection from overheating while out in the sun chasing the herd.
So running is what we were born to do. And of course our bodies show us that we were made to move in ways that extend far past a long jog. Our arms and grip, quadriceps and hamstrings reveal a body crying out to push and pull, lift and grab.
How a Sedentary Lifestyle Keeps This Switch of Manliness Off
Perhaps all our troubles–all the violence, obesity, illness, depression, and greed we can’t overcome–began when we stopped living as Running People. Deny your nature, and it will erupt in some other, uglier way. -Christopher McDougall, Born to Run
If we were made to move, then remaining sedentary is going to have dire consequences for our motivation and vitality. Let’s take a look at some of those consequences.
A sedentary lifestyle makes us depressed.
When men are depressed, we feel angry, apathetic, and unmotivated. While we often think about our brains when we think about depression, perhaps we should look to our bodies first.
If our bodies are made to move, then sitting passively all day is like, as we mentioned last time, keeping a well-trained regiment of soldiers who are itching to fight in perpetual reserve. Angst and anxiety will naturally follow.
Anyone who has exercised regularly is familiar with the phenomenon of the “runner’s high.” It has been described by researchers as:
pure happiness, elation, a feeling of unity with one’s self and/or nature, endless peacefulness, inner harmony, boundless energy, and a reduction in pain sensation.
That’s a pretty powerful feeling. Can you really expect to feel fully alive without a regular dose of it? It’s no wonder that studies have shown that exercise is just as effective as antidepressants in treating clinical depression.
A sedentary lifestyle makes us anxious.
I know men who can’t move ahead in life because they’re crippled by stress and anxiety. When challenged by setbacks, they curl up in the fetal position. Oftentimes, these men who struggle with their resilience are men who are not physical in their lives. It’s not a coincidence. A study done on rats showed that when the rats exercised, they created brain cells that were better able to deal with anxiety, creating a more stress-resistant brain. Says Michael Hopkins, neurobiology researcher:
“It looks more and more like the positive stress of exercise prepares cells and structures and pathways within the brain so that they’re more equipped to handle stress in other forms. It’s pretty amazing, really, that you can get this translation from the realm of purely physical stresses to the realm of psychological stressors.”
In addition to making our brains more steely over the long run, exercise has also be found to offer immediately soothing benefits. Researchers have found that exercise increases the levels of endocannabinoid molecules in our blood, the same endocannabinoids that are responsible for the pleasure and pain relief produced by the consumption of marijuana. So exercise let’s you take the edge off, without a single negative side effect.
A sedentary lifestyle kills our confidence.
Men who exercise gain more confidence because they’re happier, more relaxed and resilient, and feel more comfortable in their typically fitter bodies. But I think the biggest way exercise boosts a man’s confidence is that it gives him the experience of consciously and purposefully putting himself in pain.
If you watch any weight-loss show, you’ll notice that the person’s transformation goes though a predictable pattern. When the obese person first starts exercising, they hate it–they yell at the trainers, talk about how much they detest sweating, break down in tears (more frequently seen in female contestants), excessively whine, and generally give up, sure that they can’t go on. They’ve never exercised before and so the feelings of exercise–the shortness of breath, the burning, the sweating–feels foreign and terrible. It’s a shock to a system. Unless we make a concerted effort to get outside our comfort zones, we can glide through life very comfortably, with minimal sweating, minimal pain.
So it’s important for a man to be familiar and comfortable with what physical pain feels like, to have the knowledge that it’s not the end of the world and that he can endure it. Running has indeed been shown to boost our pain threshold; it takes a higher dose of pain for the fit man to cry uncle. Confidence grows when you feel you are up to whatever task lies before you and you know that your mind can overcome the desires of your body.
A sedentary lifestyle saps our virility.
And finally, we get to the very heart of the issue. So much of what makes men unique can be linked to the hormone testosterone. Men and women both have testosterone, but men tend to have it in greater quantities. It’s what’s responsible for the hair on our chest and faces, our lower voices, and bigger muscles–in short, all the outward marks of manhood. And testosterone is not only responsible for how we look on the outside, but how manly we feel on the inside. A lack of T makes a man feel depressed and shiftless, devoid of that drive and aggression that fuels our manliness.
Testosterone levels have been steadily falling for men over the last couple of decades, and a variety of factors are cited for this decline, from environmental toxins to diet. But we really need to look no further than the increase in time spent sitting on our asses. Strenuous exercise and weight lifting boosts our T, sitting around kills it, and the more we sit around, the less motivated we feel to get out and work out, and the cycle continues.
Vigorous exercise must be a part of every man’s life. There’s something about the feeling of sweat dripping down your body, the blood and testosterone coursing through your veins, and the lactic acid pumping through your muscles after a tough workout that makes you feel supremely manly and ready to take on the world.
How to Flip On the Switch of Physicality
Living a sedentary lifestyle keeps this switch of manliness in the off position. Getting active switches it on.
There are two aspect to flipping this switch:
1. Get in a bout of vigorous activity several times a week.
Do something that makes you sweat buckets and puts you in pain. You need to rediscover your body and what it feels like to push it to its limits.
• Run. There’s no better way to purely connect with those primal instincts. And it’s cheap and convenient. Just lace up your shoes and head out the door.
• Pump iron. Do compound exercises. They’re good for the body and good for your T.
• Join Crossfit.
• Do High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). The best workout there is. Do 20 minutes, where you alternate a minute of rest with a minute of all-out, balls to the wall exertion. Do it on the stairs and you’ve got the world’s most effective exercise. There’s no better path to copious sweat and pain.
• Take up parkour.
• Work out like an oldtime strongman. Swing the kettlebell, throw medicine balls, flip over tires.
• Don’t listen to music when you work out. I know, the music helps you take your mind off things. That’s exactly what’s wrong with it. Zoning out severs the connection between body and mind and keeps you from being fully present in your physicality, which is the whole point of exercise.
Switch Accelerators: Want to flip the switch faster and increase the manly boost you get from it? Switch Accelerators add an extra power boost:
• Take up a martial art or combat sport. Fighting gets you in touch with your aggressive, competitive, primal side.
• Hit a heavy or speed bag. Even when you’re not wailing on another man, simply kicking and punching for your workout relieves a lot of stress and makes you feel pumped up and manly.
• Start a lunchtime pick up game of basketball, football, ultimate frisbee, etc. Some friendly competition really ups the positive benefits of exercise.
• Work out outside. Exercising in the great outdoors is far better than doing it inside a gym. More on this when we get to the Nature Switch.
Need some more ideas and inspiration? Watch this mustachioed man-machine train for the Tough Mudder:
2. Incorporate more physicality into your day to day life.
Exercise is great but this switch won’t get flipped if you work out for one hour a day and sit around for fifteen. Not only will an isolated bout of exercise not cure your malaise, but scientists have shown that it won’t counteract the ill-effects of excessive sitting on your health either. Instead, you need to find little ways to move more throughout your day. Obese people make an average of 1,500 little movements a day and spend 600 minutes sitting; farm workers make 5,000 daily movements and spend only 300 minutes sitting. The closer you can get to moving as much as primitive man, the more physical you can make your life, the more motivated and manly you will feel.
Every little bit helps. Even fidgeting is believed to up your fitness. Remember, small and simple.
• Take an evening walk after dinner. This is great if you’ve got a baby–it gets you moving and out of the house and keeps the baby quiet and occupied. Ahhh.
• Get a dog so you have to go take walks.
• Bike to work.
• Make dinner yourself and wash the dishes by hand.
• Do a set of push-ups right after you get out of bed.
• Make household repairs by hand. Change your own oil or air filter.
• Take the stairs instead of the elevator.
• Purposely park your car far from the entrance to stores.
• Work standing up. You can buy a stand-up desk or place your laptop on the counter.
• Garden.
• Heat your home with a wood-burning stove and split the wood you need for it yourself.
• Pace back and forth when you’re talking on the phone.
• Do household chores, like raking the leaves, mowing the lawn, and shoveling snow yourself, instead of hiring someone to do it for you.
• Get up from your desk every hour and do 25 squats or push-ups.
• Install a pull-up bar in your door and crank out some reps every time you walk through it.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Yearning to Sail
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Friday, May 20, 2011
Breakthrough medical food reverses risk of heart disease and diabetes
Clinical trial at 3 universities finds that Metagenics’ medical food lowers cardiovascular risk factors almost twice as effectively as diet alone
New York City, NY (May 19, 2011) A— Researchers at the University of Florida and Metagenics Inc. today announced that a program consisting of a breakthrough medical food combined with a low-glycemic, Mediterranean-style diet is almost twice as effective as one of the best diets alone for lowering risk factors for cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death in the U.S.
In addition, the medical food UltraMealA® PLUS 360A° is 40 percent more likely to resolve metabolic syndrome, a condition affecting one-third of all American adults that increases the risk for heart disease and diabetes. Researchers believe that patients who incorporate the medical food into their diets as well as make necessary life style changes can improve their health faster than by using a Mediterranean diet alone.
The results of the multicenter clinical trial are published in the May/June issue of the Journal of Clinical Lipidology, a publication of the National Lipid Association.
“Chronic illness is draining our healthcare resources and keeping millions of people from enjoying healthy, vibrant lives. Many of these illnesses are the result of long-term lifestyle and behavior choices,” said Robert H. Lerman, M.D., Ph.D., director of medicine and extramural clinical research for Metagenics Inc. “This study is important because it shows how effective UltraMealA® PLUS 360A°is in resolving metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular risk factors in affected individuals, and identifies a powerful new approach to combating chronic illness.”
Metabolic syndrome is a cluster of conditions that increase an individual’s risk for developing heart disease, diabetes, and other chronic illnesses. As more countries adopt Western dietary habits and sedentary lifestyles, the number of chronic illnesses such as type II diabetes, obesity, heart disease, arthritis and autoimmune diseases has increased.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the U.S., chronic illness affects nearly half of all adults and contributes to seven out of 10 deaths. Even more alarming, chronic illness costs Americans more than $1.5 trillion annually in direct medical costs. It is for these reasons researchers and others in the medical profession believe that re-focusing medical practice treatments on the provision of lifestyle therapy will not only significantly improve the health status of most Americans, but will reduce costs.
“Preventing chronic illness is far more effective from both a cost and treatment perspective than treating the illness once it develops,” said Lerman. “Physicians have evidence-based research that now enables them to actually use lifestyle therapy in their patients to help them avoid chronic illness by treating the cause, not just the symptoms of these conditions.”
The clinical trial, which was conducted at three universities including the University of Connecticut-Storrs, the University of Florida-Jacksonville, and the University of California-Irvine, consisted of 89 women between the ages of 20 and 75. To be eligible for the study, they had to have a LDL -C of more than 2.59 mmol/L (100 mg/dL), TG equal to or greater than 1.70 mmol/L (150 mg/dL), and meet two of the four remaining criteria for metabolic syndrome. These requirements are based on standards set forth in the National Cholesterol Education Program Expert Panel on Detection, Evaluation, and Treatment of High Blood Cholesterol in Adults A– Adult Treatment Panel III (NCEP-ATPIII) criteria. Participants with heart, liver or kidney disease or who were using blood sugar or cholesterol-lowering agents were excluded. Those with type II diabetes were not excluded.
“It’s very important for physicians to learn about these new findings. Doctors have not been trained to take a therapeutic lifestyle approach with patients who have metabolic syndrome,” said Mark S. McIntosh, M.D., one of the principal researchers who is the Director of Corporate Wellness and Assistant Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Florida A– Jacksonville. “Programs like Metagenics’ FirstLine TherapyA® are needed to provide the tools and support for physicians to change the way they practice and to help patients make real lifestyle changes.”
Both doctors believe that this research underscores the importance of nutrigenomics, the science of how nutrition impacts genetic expression and its potential to improve health and avoid chronic illness.
“Patients who incorporate the medical food along with lifestyle therapy get healthier quickly and safely,” Lerman said.
“Most physicians are accustomed to prescribing drugs for people with lifestyle-related conditions, even though the first line recommended course of treatment is lifestyle therapy,” said Wayne Dysinger, M.D., current president of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine and chair of the Department of Preventive Medicine at Loma Linda University in Loma Linda, California. “This study reminds physicians that the option of prescribing food, in this case a medical food, should be considered. It demonstrates the ability of medical foods to reduce risk factors and improve health. The study results are a valuable addition to research on the impact of nutrition on health.”
In addition to Dr. McIntosh, the other two principal researchers are Maria Luz Fernandez, Ph.D, Professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Connecticut, Storrs and Wadie I. Najm, M.D., Clinical Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of California, Irvine. The study was sponsored by Metagenics.
For more information on FirstLine Therapy visit www.firstlinetherapy.com.
About Metagenics, Inc.
Metagenics, Inc. (www.metagenics.com) is a nutrigenomics and lifestyle medicine company focused on reversing chronic illness and improving health. Founded in 1983, Metagenics serves more than 75,000 healthcare providers worldwide through premium quality, science-based medical foods, nutritional formulas, and lifestyle therapy programs to help their patients achieve a lifetime of good health. Metagenics’ scientific staffA—among the largest in the nutrigenomics industryA—has published more than 80 articles in peer-reviewed journals and has been awarded more than 50 international or domestic patents. The company’s educational arm, Metagenics University, collaborates with renowned medical experts to annually deliver more than 200 events designed to help healthcare professionals stay on the leading edge of lifestyle medicine and incorporate nutrition into their clinical practice.
Metagenics maintains its corporate headquarters in San Clemente, CA; R&D headquarters in Gig Harbor, WA; and operating subsidiaries in Brussels, Belgium and Brisbane, Australia.
New York City, NY (May 19, 2011) A— Researchers at the University of Florida and Metagenics Inc. today announced that a program consisting of a breakthrough medical food combined with a low-glycemic, Mediterranean-style diet is almost twice as effective as one of the best diets alone for lowering risk factors for cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death in the U.S.
In addition, the medical food UltraMealA® PLUS 360A° is 40 percent more likely to resolve metabolic syndrome, a condition affecting one-third of all American adults that increases the risk for heart disease and diabetes. Researchers believe that patients who incorporate the medical food into their diets as well as make necessary life style changes can improve their health faster than by using a Mediterranean diet alone.
The results of the multicenter clinical trial are published in the May/June issue of the Journal of Clinical Lipidology, a publication of the National Lipid Association.
“Chronic illness is draining our healthcare resources and keeping millions of people from enjoying healthy, vibrant lives. Many of these illnesses are the result of long-term lifestyle and behavior choices,” said Robert H. Lerman, M.D., Ph.D., director of medicine and extramural clinical research for Metagenics Inc. “This study is important because it shows how effective UltraMealA® PLUS 360A°is in resolving metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular risk factors in affected individuals, and identifies a powerful new approach to combating chronic illness.”
Metabolic syndrome is a cluster of conditions that increase an individual’s risk for developing heart disease, diabetes, and other chronic illnesses. As more countries adopt Western dietary habits and sedentary lifestyles, the number of chronic illnesses such as type II diabetes, obesity, heart disease, arthritis and autoimmune diseases has increased.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the U.S., chronic illness affects nearly half of all adults and contributes to seven out of 10 deaths. Even more alarming, chronic illness costs Americans more than $1.5 trillion annually in direct medical costs. It is for these reasons researchers and others in the medical profession believe that re-focusing medical practice treatments on the provision of lifestyle therapy will not only significantly improve the health status of most Americans, but will reduce costs.
“Preventing chronic illness is far more effective from both a cost and treatment perspective than treating the illness once it develops,” said Lerman. “Physicians have evidence-based research that now enables them to actually use lifestyle therapy in their patients to help them avoid chronic illness by treating the cause, not just the symptoms of these conditions.”
The clinical trial, which was conducted at three universities including the University of Connecticut-Storrs, the University of Florida-Jacksonville, and the University of California-Irvine, consisted of 89 women between the ages of 20 and 75. To be eligible for the study, they had to have a LDL -C of more than 2.59 mmol/L (100 mg/dL), TG equal to or greater than 1.70 mmol/L (150 mg/dL), and meet two of the four remaining criteria for metabolic syndrome. These requirements are based on standards set forth in the National Cholesterol Education Program Expert Panel on Detection, Evaluation, and Treatment of High Blood Cholesterol in Adults A– Adult Treatment Panel III (NCEP-ATPIII) criteria. Participants with heart, liver or kidney disease or who were using blood sugar or cholesterol-lowering agents were excluded. Those with type II diabetes were not excluded.
“It’s very important for physicians to learn about these new findings. Doctors have not been trained to take a therapeutic lifestyle approach with patients who have metabolic syndrome,” said Mark S. McIntosh, M.D., one of the principal researchers who is the Director of Corporate Wellness and Assistant Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Florida A– Jacksonville. “Programs like Metagenics’ FirstLine TherapyA® are needed to provide the tools and support for physicians to change the way they practice and to help patients make real lifestyle changes.”
Both doctors believe that this research underscores the importance of nutrigenomics, the science of how nutrition impacts genetic expression and its potential to improve health and avoid chronic illness.
“Patients who incorporate the medical food along with lifestyle therapy get healthier quickly and safely,” Lerman said.
“Most physicians are accustomed to prescribing drugs for people with lifestyle-related conditions, even though the first line recommended course of treatment is lifestyle therapy,” said Wayne Dysinger, M.D., current president of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine and chair of the Department of Preventive Medicine at Loma Linda University in Loma Linda, California. “This study reminds physicians that the option of prescribing food, in this case a medical food, should be considered. It demonstrates the ability of medical foods to reduce risk factors and improve health. The study results are a valuable addition to research on the impact of nutrition on health.”
In addition to Dr. McIntosh, the other two principal researchers are Maria Luz Fernandez, Ph.D, Professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Connecticut, Storrs and Wadie I. Najm, M.D., Clinical Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of California, Irvine. The study was sponsored by Metagenics.
For more information on FirstLine Therapy visit www.firstlinetherapy.com.
About Metagenics, Inc.
Metagenics, Inc. (www.metagenics.com) is a nutrigenomics and lifestyle medicine company focused on reversing chronic illness and improving health. Founded in 1983, Metagenics serves more than 75,000 healthcare providers worldwide through premium quality, science-based medical foods, nutritional formulas, and lifestyle therapy programs to help their patients achieve a lifetime of good health. Metagenics’ scientific staffA—among the largest in the nutrigenomics industryA—has published more than 80 articles in peer-reviewed journals and has been awarded more than 50 international or domestic patents. The company’s educational arm, Metagenics University, collaborates with renowned medical experts to annually deliver more than 200 events designed to help healthcare professionals stay on the leading edge of lifestyle medicine and incorporate nutrition into their clinical practice.
Metagenics maintains its corporate headquarters in San Clemente, CA; R&D headquarters in Gig Harbor, WA; and operating subsidiaries in Brussels, Belgium and Brisbane, Australia.
Getting Telomere Tests
Telomere Test For Longevity Estimate
A test of the length of the caps on your chromosomes could help more accurately estimate one's life expectancy.
A new blood test soon to be launched in the United Kingdom claims to be able to tell you how long you are going to live. The £435 ($700) test measures the length of a person's telomeres - the inventor claims this is associated with longevity.
The company, Life Length, is working on approvals for sales in European countries and America.
You might not want to know. Imagine a test could predict your life expectancy to within 2 years. Would you want to know? I'm not sure I would. Death is so final, such a hard limit. Beyond this point you will not experience this life in this universe. You might not even exist beyond this point. Do you want to know when that is?
Is the claim for this test plausible? Yup. See my previous posts Short Telomeres Markers For Higher Cancer Risk, Telomere Length Indicates Mortality Risk, Chronic Stress Accelerates Aging As Measured By Telomere Length, Sedentary Lifestyles Age Chromosome Telomeres Faster, and last but not least: Telomere Lengthening Rejuvenates Mice.
Now, having said that, the test can not precisely predict your year of death. Too many factors (accidents, suicide, and murder aside) influence your date of death. Take cancer for example. There's a lot of randomness involved in determining when we'll get cancer. The accumulation of damage in cells can make them turn cancerous. But just when the right set of genetic mutations or other cancer-promoting damage will occur in some cell in one's body is as hard to predict as when someone will win a lottery. Many things have to line up just right all in the same cell to make it cancerous. Every day is basically another throw of the dice. Will a bunch of mutations all line up to send a cell of yours into dangerous mad replication and growth?
Better longevity tests seem useful for retirement planning. Should you save enough money to support yourself to age 95? Or expect to die by your late 60s? A telomere test could help you decide difficult questions about your savings rate and career choices. Do you need to work past age 70 to save enough money to avoid going broke in your 80s and avoid poverty in your 90s? A better sense of the odds would help.
Of course, before we hit our biological shelf life expiration date some of us just might live long enough to still be around when rejuvenation therapies become available. Injections of youthful stem cells with long telomeres could replace older tired cells with short telomeres. This would be great for the immune system, for example, because a youthful immune system will do a better job of fighting cancer. Also, youthful cells for the cardiovascular system could cut the risk of heart disease, stroke, and other killers.
By Randall Parker 2011 May 17 11:09 PM Aging Measurements
A test of the length of the caps on your chromosomes could help more accurately estimate one's life expectancy.
A new blood test soon to be launched in the United Kingdom claims to be able to tell you how long you are going to live. The £435 ($700) test measures the length of a person's telomeres - the inventor claims this is associated with longevity.
The company, Life Length, is working on approvals for sales in European countries and America.
You might not want to know. Imagine a test could predict your life expectancy to within 2 years. Would you want to know? I'm not sure I would. Death is so final, such a hard limit. Beyond this point you will not experience this life in this universe. You might not even exist beyond this point. Do you want to know when that is?
Is the claim for this test plausible? Yup. See my previous posts Short Telomeres Markers For Higher Cancer Risk, Telomere Length Indicates Mortality Risk, Chronic Stress Accelerates Aging As Measured By Telomere Length, Sedentary Lifestyles Age Chromosome Telomeres Faster, and last but not least: Telomere Lengthening Rejuvenates Mice.
Now, having said that, the test can not precisely predict your year of death. Too many factors (accidents, suicide, and murder aside) influence your date of death. Take cancer for example. There's a lot of randomness involved in determining when we'll get cancer. The accumulation of damage in cells can make them turn cancerous. But just when the right set of genetic mutations or other cancer-promoting damage will occur in some cell in one's body is as hard to predict as when someone will win a lottery. Many things have to line up just right all in the same cell to make it cancerous. Every day is basically another throw of the dice. Will a bunch of mutations all line up to send a cell of yours into dangerous mad replication and growth?
Better longevity tests seem useful for retirement planning. Should you save enough money to support yourself to age 95? Or expect to die by your late 60s? A telomere test could help you decide difficult questions about your savings rate and career choices. Do you need to work past age 70 to save enough money to avoid going broke in your 80s and avoid poverty in your 90s? A better sense of the odds would help.
Of course, before we hit our biological shelf life expiration date some of us just might live long enough to still be around when rejuvenation therapies become available. Injections of youthful stem cells with long telomeres could replace older tired cells with short telomeres. This would be great for the immune system, for example, because a youthful immune system will do a better job of fighting cancer. Also, youthful cells for the cardiovascular system could cut the risk of heart disease, stroke, and other killers.
By Randall Parker 2011 May 17 11:09 PM Aging Measurements
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
How To Live Forever*
I love the premise: take off on a global trek to interview the world’s oldest people, top health and fitness gurus, and smartest life-extension scientists, and ask one question: what’s your secret?
In How To Live Forever, a new film from Variance Films (opening in New York Friday)
In How To Live Forever, a new film from Variance Films (opening in New York Friday)
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Style without BLING - understated elegance. 1957 Mercedes SL300
A gentleman's car with style without BLINGBest time of day to drink water
Drinking water at the correct time
maximizes its effectiveness on the Human body:
2 glasses of water after waking up - helps activate internal organs
1 glass of water 30 minutes before a meal - helps digestion but
do not drink while eating
1 glass of water before taking a bath - helps lower blood pressure
1 glass of water before going to bed - avoids stroke or heart attack
Please pass this to the people you care about.......
I JUST DID!!!!
maximizes its effectiveness on the Human body:
2 glasses of water after waking up - helps activate internal organs
1 glass of water 30 minutes before a meal - helps digestion but
do not drink while eating
1 glass of water before taking a bath - helps lower blood pressure
1 glass of water before going to bed - avoids stroke or heart attack
Please pass this to the people you care about.......
I JUST DID!!!!
Monday, May 16, 2011
Civil Rights Advocate - Ella Baker
Who Was Ella Baker?
The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights was named after a largely unsung hero of the civil rights Freedom Movement who inspired and guided emerging leaders. Like her, we spark change by unlocking the power of people to make real change. We seek to honor Miss Baker’s legacy through our people-powered campaigns.
Ella Jo Baker was born on December 13, 1903, in Norfolk, Virginia. She developed a sense for social justice early in her life. As a girl growing up in North Carolina, Baker listened to her grandmother tell stories about slave revolts. As a slave, her grandmother had been whipped for refusing to marry a man chosen for her by the slave owner.
Ella Baker Center honors Ella's legacy of building justice and peace through grassroots action:
Books Not Bars fights to redirect California's resources away from youth incarceration and towards youth opportunities.
Miss Baker often asked, "What is the excuse for so much poverty in a country as rich as America?" Our Green Collar Job Campaign works to ensure that the emerging green economy is strong enough to lift people out of poverty.
Miss Baker said, "Oppressed people, whatever their level of formal education, have the ability to understand and interpret the world around them, to see the world for what it is, and move to transform it." Soul of the City is our hands-on, hands-together campaign to create an Oakland that is safe, healthy, and balanced.
Heal the Streets, like SNCC and many other youth-led groups before it, is built on Miss Baker's theory that young people are resources and asserts to the movement for freedom. This 10 month fellowship creates proactive youth voices in the fight for social change in Oakland.
Baker studied at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. As a student she challenged school policies that she thought were unfair. After graduating in 1927 as class valedictorian, she moved to New York City and began joining social activist organizations. In 1930, she joined the Young Negroes Cooperative League, whose purpose was to develop black economic power through collective planning. She also involved herself with several women's organizations. She was committed to economic justice for all people and once said, "People cannot be free until there is enough work in this land to give everybody a job."
Ella Baker began her involvement with the NAACP in 1940. She worked as a field secretary and then served as director of branches from 1943 until 1946. Inspired by the historic bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, Baker co-founded the organization In Friendship to raise money to fight against Jim Crow Laws in the deep South. In 1957, Baker moved to Atlanta to help organize Martin Luther King's new organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). She also ran a voter registration campaign called the Crusade for Citizenship.
On February 1, 1960, a group of black college students from North Carolina A&T University refused to leave a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina where they had been denied service. Baker left the SCLC after the Greensboro sit-ins. She wanted to assist the new student activists because she viewed young, emerging activists as a resource and an asset to the movement. Miss Baker organized a meeting at Shaw University for the student leaders of the sit-ins in April 1960. From that meeting, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee -- SNCC -- was born.
Adopting the Gandhian theory of nonviolent direct action, SNCC members joined with activists from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to organize in the 1961 Freedom Rides. In 1964 SNCC helped create Freedom Summer, an effort to focus national attention on Mississippi's racism and to register black voters. Miss Baker, and many of her contemporaries, believed that voting was one key to freedom. 50 years later, folks of color and low-income people still face barriers to voting. If we do not exercise our collective voice, we are unable to influence the policies and laws that impact our lives. To be counted, we must be heard. Our Soul of the City civic engagement work and participation with Oakland Rising builds on the Voting Rights work of the 60s.
With Ella Baker's guidance and encouragement, SNCC became one of the foremost advocates for human rights in the country. Ella Baker once said, "This may only be a dream of mine, but I think it can be made real." Her audacity to dream big is a cornerstone of our philosophy.
Her influence was reflected in the nickname she acquired: "Fundi," a Swahili word meaning a person who teaches a craft to the next generation. Baker continued to be a respected and influential leader in the fight for human and civil rights until her death on December 13, 1986, her 83rd birthday.
Wanting to celebrate Ella Jo Baker as an unsung hero of racial and economic justice and seeking to honor her legacy of leadership and movement building, our founders chose to name our Center for Ella Baker. Our Executive Director, Jakada Imani reflects, "Long before I would ever hear the name of Ella Jo Baker, I was living inside of the world her leadership help create. As a child of Oakland I grew up hearing about the role of young people as front line fighters for freedom in the Civil Rights Movement. I got my start in the movement in youth programs that were based on the work Ms. Baker had done with SNCC, leadership programs based in the idea that young folks had something special to contribute to the struggle for freedom. That's now part of my DNA and I take it everywhere I go."
“The major job was getting people to understand that they had something within their power that they could use, and it could only be used if they understood what was happening and how group action could counter violence…” - Ella Jo Baker
The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights was named after a largely unsung hero of the civil rights Freedom Movement who inspired and guided emerging leaders. Like her, we spark change by unlocking the power of people to make real change. We seek to honor Miss Baker’s legacy through our people-powered campaigns.
Ella Jo Baker was born on December 13, 1903, in Norfolk, Virginia. She developed a sense for social justice early in her life. As a girl growing up in North Carolina, Baker listened to her grandmother tell stories about slave revolts. As a slave, her grandmother had been whipped for refusing to marry a man chosen for her by the slave owner.
Ella Baker Center honors Ella's legacy of building justice and peace through grassroots action:
Books Not Bars fights to redirect California's resources away from youth incarceration and towards youth opportunities.
Miss Baker often asked, "What is the excuse for so much poverty in a country as rich as America?" Our Green Collar Job Campaign works to ensure that the emerging green economy is strong enough to lift people out of poverty.
Miss Baker said, "Oppressed people, whatever their level of formal education, have the ability to understand and interpret the world around them, to see the world for what it is, and move to transform it." Soul of the City is our hands-on, hands-together campaign to create an Oakland that is safe, healthy, and balanced.
Heal the Streets, like SNCC and many other youth-led groups before it, is built on Miss Baker's theory that young people are resources and asserts to the movement for freedom. This 10 month fellowship creates proactive youth voices in the fight for social change in Oakland.
Baker studied at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. As a student she challenged school policies that she thought were unfair. After graduating in 1927 as class valedictorian, she moved to New York City and began joining social activist organizations. In 1930, she joined the Young Negroes Cooperative League, whose purpose was to develop black economic power through collective planning. She also involved herself with several women's organizations. She was committed to economic justice for all people and once said, "People cannot be free until there is enough work in this land to give everybody a job."
Ella Baker began her involvement with the NAACP in 1940. She worked as a field secretary and then served as director of branches from 1943 until 1946. Inspired by the historic bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, Baker co-founded the organization In Friendship to raise money to fight against Jim Crow Laws in the deep South. In 1957, Baker moved to Atlanta to help organize Martin Luther King's new organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). She also ran a voter registration campaign called the Crusade for Citizenship.
On February 1, 1960, a group of black college students from North Carolina A&T University refused to leave a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina where they had been denied service. Baker left the SCLC after the Greensboro sit-ins. She wanted to assist the new student activists because she viewed young, emerging activists as a resource and an asset to the movement. Miss Baker organized a meeting at Shaw University for the student leaders of the sit-ins in April 1960. From that meeting, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee -- SNCC -- was born.
Adopting the Gandhian theory of nonviolent direct action, SNCC members joined with activists from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to organize in the 1961 Freedom Rides. In 1964 SNCC helped create Freedom Summer, an effort to focus national attention on Mississippi's racism and to register black voters. Miss Baker, and many of her contemporaries, believed that voting was one key to freedom. 50 years later, folks of color and low-income people still face barriers to voting. If we do not exercise our collective voice, we are unable to influence the policies and laws that impact our lives. To be counted, we must be heard. Our Soul of the City civic engagement work and participation with Oakland Rising builds on the Voting Rights work of the 60s.
With Ella Baker's guidance and encouragement, SNCC became one of the foremost advocates for human rights in the country. Ella Baker once said, "This may only be a dream of mine, but I think it can be made real." Her audacity to dream big is a cornerstone of our philosophy.
Her influence was reflected in the nickname she acquired: "Fundi," a Swahili word meaning a person who teaches a craft to the next generation. Baker continued to be a respected and influential leader in the fight for human and civil rights until her death on December 13, 1986, her 83rd birthday.
Wanting to celebrate Ella Jo Baker as an unsung hero of racial and economic justice and seeking to honor her legacy of leadership and movement building, our founders chose to name our Center for Ella Baker. Our Executive Director, Jakada Imani reflects, "Long before I would ever hear the name of Ella Jo Baker, I was living inside of the world her leadership help create. As a child of Oakland I grew up hearing about the role of young people as front line fighters for freedom in the Civil Rights Movement. I got my start in the movement in youth programs that were based on the work Ms. Baker had done with SNCC, leadership programs based in the idea that young folks had something special to contribute to the struggle for freedom. That's now part of my DNA and I take it everywhere I go."
“The major job was getting people to understand that they had something within their power that they could use, and it could only be used if they understood what was happening and how group action could counter violence…” - Ella Jo Baker
Cornel West: On Obama
The Obama Deception: Why Cornel West Went Ballistic
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_obama_deception_why_cornel_west_went_ballistic_20110516/
Posted on May 16, 2011
By Chris Hedges
The moral philosopher Cornel West, if Barack Obama’s ascent to power was a morality play, would be the voice of conscience. Rahm Emanuel, a cynical product of the Chicago political machine, would be Satan. Emanuel in the first scene of the play would dangle power, privilege, fame and money before Obama. West would warn Obama that the quality of a life is defined by its moral commitment, that his legacy will be determined by his willingness to defy the cruel assault by the corporate state and the financial elite against the poor and working men and women, and that justice must never be sacrificed on the altar of power.
Perhaps there was never much of a struggle in Obama’s heart. Perhaps West only provided a moral veneer. Perhaps the dark heart of Emanuel was always the dark heart of Obama. Only Obama knows. But we know how the play ends. West is banished like honest Kent in “King Lear.” Emanuel and immoral mediocrities from Lawrence Summers to Timothy Geithner to Robert Gates—think of Goneril and Regan in the Shakespearean tragedy—take power. We lose. And Obama becomes an obedient servant of the corporate elite in exchange for the hollow trappings of authority.
No one grasps this tragic descent better than West, who did 65 campaign events for Obama, believed in the potential for change and was encouraged by the populist rhetoric of the Obama campaign. He now nurses, like many others who placed their faith in Obama, the anguish of the deceived, manipulated and betrayed. He bitterly describes Obama as “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats. And now he has become head of the American killing machine and is proud of it.”
“When you look at a society you look at it through the lens of the least of these, the weak and the vulnerable; you are committed to loving them first, not exclusively, but first, and therefore giving them priority,” says West, the Class of 1943 University Professor of African American Studies and Religion at Princeton University. “And even at this moment, when the empire is in deep decline, the culture is in deep decay, the political system is broken, where nearly everyone is up for sale, you say all I have is the subversive memory of those who came before, personal integrity, trying to live a decent life, and a willingness to live and die for the love of folk who are catching hell. This means civil disobedience, going to jail, supporting progressive forums of social unrest if they in fact awaken the conscience, whatever conscience is left, of the nation. And that’s where I find myself now.
“I have to take some responsibility,” he admits of his support for Obama as we sit in his book-lined office. “I could have been reading into it more than was there.
“I was thinking maybe he has at least some progressive populist instincts that could become more manifest after the cautious policies of being a senator and working with [Sen. Joe] Lieberman as his mentor,” he says. “But it became very clear when I looked at the neoliberal economic team. The first announcement of Summers and Geithner I went ballistic. I said, ‘Oh, my God, I have really been misled at a very deep level.’ And the same is true for Dennis Ross and the other neo-imperial elites. I said, ‘I have been thoroughly misled, all this populist language is just a facade. I was under the impression that he might bring in the voices of brother Joseph Stiglitz and brother Paul Krugman. I figured, OK, given the structure of constraints of the capitalist democratic procedure that’s probably the best he could do. But at least he would have some voices concerned about working people, dealing with issues of jobs and downsizing and banks, some semblance of democratic accountability for Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats who are just running amuck. I was completely wrong.”
West says the betrayal occurred on two levels.
“There is the personal level,” he says. “I used to call my dear brother [Obama] every two weeks. I said a prayer on the phone for him, especially before a debate. And I never got a call back. And when I ran into him in the state Capitol in South Carolina when I was down there campaigning for him he was very kind. The first thing he told me was, ‘Brother West, I feel so bad. I haven’t called you back. You been calling me so much. You been giving me so much love, so much support and what have you.’ And I said, ‘I know you’re busy.’ But then a month and half later I would run into other people on the campaign and he’s calling them all the time. I said, wow, this is kind of strange. He doesn’t have time, even two seconds, to say thank you or I’m glad you’re pulling for me and praying for me, but he’s calling these other people. I said, this is very interesting. And then as it turns out with the inauguration I couldn’t get a ticket with my mother and my brother. I said this is very strange. We drive into the hotel and the guy who picks up my bags from the hotel has a ticket to the inauguration. My mom says, ‘That’s something that this dear brother can get a ticket and you can’t get one, honey, all the work you did for him from Iowa.’ Beginning in Iowa to Ohio. We had to watch the thing in the hotel.
“What it said to me on a personal level,” he goes on, “was that brother Barack Obama had no sense of gratitude, no sense of loyalty, no sense of even courtesy, [no] sense of decency, just to say thank you. Is this the kind of manipulative, Machiavellian orientation we ought to get used to? That was on a personal level.”
But there was also the betrayal on the political and ideological level.
“It became very clear to me as the announcements were being made,” he says, “that this was going to be a newcomer, in many ways like Bill Clinton, who wanted to reassure the Establishment by bringing in persons they felt comfortable with and that we were really going to get someone who was using intermittent progressive populist language in order to justify a centrist, neoliberalist policy that we see in the opportunism of Bill Clinton. It was very much going to be a kind of black face of the DLC [Democratic Leadership Council].”
Obama and West’s last personal contact took place a year ago at a gathering of the Urban League when, he says, Obama “cussed me out.” Obama, after his address, which promoted his administration’s championing of charter schools, approached West, who was seated in the front row.
“He makes a bee line to me right after the talk, in front of everybody,” West says. “He just lets me have it. He says, ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself, saying I’m not a progressive. Is that the best you can do? Who do you think you are?’ I smiled. I shook his hand. And a sister hollered in the back, ‘You can’t talk to professor West. That’s Dr. Cornel West. Who do you think you are?’ You can go to jail talking to the president like that. You got to watch yourself. I wanted to slap him on the side of his head.
“It was so disrespectful,” he went on, “that’s what I didn’t like. I’d already been called, along with all [other] leftists, a “F’ing retard” by Rahm Emanuel because we had critiques of the president.”
Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to the president, has, West said, phoned him to complain about his critiques of Obama. Jarrett was especially perturbed, West says, when he said in an interview last year that he saw a lot of Malcolm X and Ella Baker in Michelle Obama. Jarrett told him his comments were not complimentary to the first lady.
“I said in the world that I live in, in that which authorizes my reality, Ella Baker is a towering figure,” he says, munching Fritos and sipping apple juice at his desk. “If I say there is a lot of Ella Baker in Michelle Obama, that’s a compliment. She can take it any way she wants. I can tell her I’m sorry it offended you, but I’m going to speak the truth. She is a Harvard Law graduate, a Princeton graduate, and she deals with child obesity and military families. Why doesn’t she visit a prison? Why not spend some time in the hood? That is where she is, but she can’t do it.
“I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men,” West says. “It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He is just as human as I am, but that is his cultural formation. When he meets an independent black brother, it is frightening. And that’s true for a white brother. When you get a white brother who meets a free, independent black man, they got to be mature to really embrace fully what the brother is saying to them. It’s a tension, given the history. It can be overcome. Obama, coming out of Kansas influence, white, loving grandparents, coming out of Hawaii and Indonesia, when he meets these independent black folk who have a history of slavery, Jim Crow, Jane Crow and so on, he is very apprehensive. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination. It is understandable.
“He feels most comfortable with upper middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart, very savvy and very effective in getting what they want,” he says. “He’s got two homes. He has got his family and whatever challenges go on there, and this other home. Larry Summers blows his mind because he’s so smart. He’s got Establishment connections. He’s embracing me. It is this smartness, this truncated brilliance, that titillates and stimulates brother Barack and makes him feel at home. That is very sad for me.
“This was maybe America’s last chance to fight back against the greed of the Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats, to generate some serious discussion about public interest and common good that sustains any democratic experiment,” West laments. “We are squeezing out all of the democratic juices we have. The escalation of the class war against the poor and the working class is intense. More and more working people are beaten down. They are world-weary. They are into self-medication. They are turning on each other. They are scapegoating the most vulnerable rather than confronting the most powerful. It is a profoundly human response to panic and catastrophe. I thought Barack Obama could have provided some way out. But he lacks backbone.
“Can you imagine if Barack Obama had taken office and deliberately educated and taught the American people about the nature of the financial catastrophe and what greed was really taking place?” West asks. “If he had told us what kind of mechanisms of accountability needed to be in place, if he had focused on homeowners rather than investment banks for bailouts and engaged in massive job creation he could have nipped in the bud the right-wing populism of the tea party folk. The tea party folk are right when they say the government is corrupt. It is corrupt. Big business and banks have taken over government and corrupted it in deep ways.
“We have got to attempt to tell the truth, and that truth is painful,” he says. “It is a truth that is against the thick lies of the mainstream. In telling that truth we become so maladjusted to the prevailing injustice that the Democratic Party, more and more, is not just milquetoast and spineless, as it was before, but thoroughly complicitous with some of the worst things in the American empire. I don’t think in good conscience I could tell anybody to vote for Obama. If it turns out in the end that we have a crypto-fascist movement and the only thing standing between us and fascism is Barack Obama, then we have to put our foot on the brake. But we’ve got to think seriously of third-party candidates, third formations, third parties.
“Our last hope is to generate a democratic awakening among our fellow citizens. This means raising our voices, very loud and strong, bearing witness, individually and collectively. Tavis [Smiley] and I have talked about ways of civil disobedience, beginning with ways for both of us to get arrested, to galvanize attention to the plight of those in prisons, in the hoods, in poor white communities. We must never give up. We must never allow hope to be eliminated or suffocated.”
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_obama_deception_why_cornel_west_went_ballistic_20110516/
Posted on May 16, 2011
By Chris Hedges
The moral philosopher Cornel West, if Barack Obama’s ascent to power was a morality play, would be the voice of conscience. Rahm Emanuel, a cynical product of the Chicago political machine, would be Satan. Emanuel in the first scene of the play would dangle power, privilege, fame and money before Obama. West would warn Obama that the quality of a life is defined by its moral commitment, that his legacy will be determined by his willingness to defy the cruel assault by the corporate state and the financial elite against the poor and working men and women, and that justice must never be sacrificed on the altar of power.
Perhaps there was never much of a struggle in Obama’s heart. Perhaps West only provided a moral veneer. Perhaps the dark heart of Emanuel was always the dark heart of Obama. Only Obama knows. But we know how the play ends. West is banished like honest Kent in “King Lear.” Emanuel and immoral mediocrities from Lawrence Summers to Timothy Geithner to Robert Gates—think of Goneril and Regan in the Shakespearean tragedy—take power. We lose. And Obama becomes an obedient servant of the corporate elite in exchange for the hollow trappings of authority.
No one grasps this tragic descent better than West, who did 65 campaign events for Obama, believed in the potential for change and was encouraged by the populist rhetoric of the Obama campaign. He now nurses, like many others who placed their faith in Obama, the anguish of the deceived, manipulated and betrayed. He bitterly describes Obama as “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats. And now he has become head of the American killing machine and is proud of it.”
“When you look at a society you look at it through the lens of the least of these, the weak and the vulnerable; you are committed to loving them first, not exclusively, but first, and therefore giving them priority,” says West, the Class of 1943 University Professor of African American Studies and Religion at Princeton University. “And even at this moment, when the empire is in deep decline, the culture is in deep decay, the political system is broken, where nearly everyone is up for sale, you say all I have is the subversive memory of those who came before, personal integrity, trying to live a decent life, and a willingness to live and die for the love of folk who are catching hell. This means civil disobedience, going to jail, supporting progressive forums of social unrest if they in fact awaken the conscience, whatever conscience is left, of the nation. And that’s where I find myself now.
“I have to take some responsibility,” he admits of his support for Obama as we sit in his book-lined office. “I could have been reading into it more than was there.
“I was thinking maybe he has at least some progressive populist instincts that could become more manifest after the cautious policies of being a senator and working with [Sen. Joe] Lieberman as his mentor,” he says. “But it became very clear when I looked at the neoliberal economic team. The first announcement of Summers and Geithner I went ballistic. I said, ‘Oh, my God, I have really been misled at a very deep level.’ And the same is true for Dennis Ross and the other neo-imperial elites. I said, ‘I have been thoroughly misled, all this populist language is just a facade. I was under the impression that he might bring in the voices of brother Joseph Stiglitz and brother Paul Krugman. I figured, OK, given the structure of constraints of the capitalist democratic procedure that’s probably the best he could do. But at least he would have some voices concerned about working people, dealing with issues of jobs and downsizing and banks, some semblance of democratic accountability for Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats who are just running amuck. I was completely wrong.”
West says the betrayal occurred on two levels.
“There is the personal level,” he says. “I used to call my dear brother [Obama] every two weeks. I said a prayer on the phone for him, especially before a debate. And I never got a call back. And when I ran into him in the state Capitol in South Carolina when I was down there campaigning for him he was very kind. The first thing he told me was, ‘Brother West, I feel so bad. I haven’t called you back. You been calling me so much. You been giving me so much love, so much support and what have you.’ And I said, ‘I know you’re busy.’ But then a month and half later I would run into other people on the campaign and he’s calling them all the time. I said, wow, this is kind of strange. He doesn’t have time, even two seconds, to say thank you or I’m glad you’re pulling for me and praying for me, but he’s calling these other people. I said, this is very interesting. And then as it turns out with the inauguration I couldn’t get a ticket with my mother and my brother. I said this is very strange. We drive into the hotel and the guy who picks up my bags from the hotel has a ticket to the inauguration. My mom says, ‘That’s something that this dear brother can get a ticket and you can’t get one, honey, all the work you did for him from Iowa.’ Beginning in Iowa to Ohio. We had to watch the thing in the hotel.
“What it said to me on a personal level,” he goes on, “was that brother Barack Obama had no sense of gratitude, no sense of loyalty, no sense of even courtesy, [no] sense of decency, just to say thank you. Is this the kind of manipulative, Machiavellian orientation we ought to get used to? That was on a personal level.”
But there was also the betrayal on the political and ideological level.
“It became very clear to me as the announcements were being made,” he says, “that this was going to be a newcomer, in many ways like Bill Clinton, who wanted to reassure the Establishment by bringing in persons they felt comfortable with and that we were really going to get someone who was using intermittent progressive populist language in order to justify a centrist, neoliberalist policy that we see in the opportunism of Bill Clinton. It was very much going to be a kind of black face of the DLC [Democratic Leadership Council].”
Obama and West’s last personal contact took place a year ago at a gathering of the Urban League when, he says, Obama “cussed me out.” Obama, after his address, which promoted his administration’s championing of charter schools, approached West, who was seated in the front row.
“He makes a bee line to me right after the talk, in front of everybody,” West says. “He just lets me have it. He says, ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself, saying I’m not a progressive. Is that the best you can do? Who do you think you are?’ I smiled. I shook his hand. And a sister hollered in the back, ‘You can’t talk to professor West. That’s Dr. Cornel West. Who do you think you are?’ You can go to jail talking to the president like that. You got to watch yourself. I wanted to slap him on the side of his head.
“It was so disrespectful,” he went on, “that’s what I didn’t like. I’d already been called, along with all [other] leftists, a “F’ing retard” by Rahm Emanuel because we had critiques of the president.”
Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to the president, has, West said, phoned him to complain about his critiques of Obama. Jarrett was especially perturbed, West says, when he said in an interview last year that he saw a lot of Malcolm X and Ella Baker in Michelle Obama. Jarrett told him his comments were not complimentary to the first lady.
“I said in the world that I live in, in that which authorizes my reality, Ella Baker is a towering figure,” he says, munching Fritos and sipping apple juice at his desk. “If I say there is a lot of Ella Baker in Michelle Obama, that’s a compliment. She can take it any way she wants. I can tell her I’m sorry it offended you, but I’m going to speak the truth. She is a Harvard Law graduate, a Princeton graduate, and she deals with child obesity and military families. Why doesn’t she visit a prison? Why not spend some time in the hood? That is where she is, but she can’t do it.
“I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men,” West says. “It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He is just as human as I am, but that is his cultural formation. When he meets an independent black brother, it is frightening. And that’s true for a white brother. When you get a white brother who meets a free, independent black man, they got to be mature to really embrace fully what the brother is saying to them. It’s a tension, given the history. It can be overcome. Obama, coming out of Kansas influence, white, loving grandparents, coming out of Hawaii and Indonesia, when he meets these independent black folk who have a history of slavery, Jim Crow, Jane Crow and so on, he is very apprehensive. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination. It is understandable.
“He feels most comfortable with upper middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart, very savvy and very effective in getting what they want,” he says. “He’s got two homes. He has got his family and whatever challenges go on there, and this other home. Larry Summers blows his mind because he’s so smart. He’s got Establishment connections. He’s embracing me. It is this smartness, this truncated brilliance, that titillates and stimulates brother Barack and makes him feel at home. That is very sad for me.
“This was maybe America’s last chance to fight back against the greed of the Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats, to generate some serious discussion about public interest and common good that sustains any democratic experiment,” West laments. “We are squeezing out all of the democratic juices we have. The escalation of the class war against the poor and the working class is intense. More and more working people are beaten down. They are world-weary. They are into self-medication. They are turning on each other. They are scapegoating the most vulnerable rather than confronting the most powerful. It is a profoundly human response to panic and catastrophe. I thought Barack Obama could have provided some way out. But he lacks backbone.
“Can you imagine if Barack Obama had taken office and deliberately educated and taught the American people about the nature of the financial catastrophe and what greed was really taking place?” West asks. “If he had told us what kind of mechanisms of accountability needed to be in place, if he had focused on homeowners rather than investment banks for bailouts and engaged in massive job creation he could have nipped in the bud the right-wing populism of the tea party folk. The tea party folk are right when they say the government is corrupt. It is corrupt. Big business and banks have taken over government and corrupted it in deep ways.
“We have got to attempt to tell the truth, and that truth is painful,” he says. “It is a truth that is against the thick lies of the mainstream. In telling that truth we become so maladjusted to the prevailing injustice that the Democratic Party, more and more, is not just milquetoast and spineless, as it was before, but thoroughly complicitous with some of the worst things in the American empire. I don’t think in good conscience I could tell anybody to vote for Obama. If it turns out in the end that we have a crypto-fascist movement and the only thing standing between us and fascism is Barack Obama, then we have to put our foot on the brake. But we’ve got to think seriously of third-party candidates, third formations, third parties.
“Our last hope is to generate a democratic awakening among our fellow citizens. This means raising our voices, very loud and strong, bearing witness, individually and collectively. Tavis [Smiley] and I have talked about ways of civil disobedience, beginning with ways for both of us to get arrested, to galvanize attention to the plight of those in prisons, in the hoods, in poor white communities. We must never give up. We must never allow hope to be eliminated or suffocated.”
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Friday, May 13, 2011
From "The Art of Maniless" - Atticus Finch - The Man
When it comes to manly characters in literature, my thoughts always return to one man:
Atticus Finch.
Perhaps this character from To Kill a Mockingbird seems like an unusual choice. A gentleman in a three piece suit. A widower of two kids, Jem and Scout. A man who was quiet instead of brash. Polite instead of macho. A lawyer who used his mind instead of his fists, who walked away from insults. Who didn’t gamble or smoke, who liked to walk instead drive. A man who liked nothing better than to bury himself in a book. Yes, Atticus may not seem very “manly,” at least when measured by the modern rubric for manliness.
But it is the subtly of his manliness, the way he carried himself, taught his children, made his choices, that makes his manliness all the more real, all the more potent. His manhood was not displayed in great showy acts but in quiet, consistent strength, in supreme self-possession. The manliness of Atticus Finch does not leap off the page; instead, it burrows its way inside of you, sticks with you, causes your soul to say, “Now that is the kind of man I wish to be.”
The examples of honorable manhood that can be wrung from To Kill a Mockingbird are plentiful and powerful, and today we’d like to explore just a few.
Lessons in Manliness from Atticus Finch
A man does the job no one else wants to do.
To Kill a Mockingbird unfolds against the backdrop of Atticus’s representation of Tom Robinson. Robinson, a black man, has been accused by Mayella Ewell, a white woman, of rape. While Atticus is assigned to be Robinson’s public defender by a judge, he earns the townspeople’s ire in his determination to actually defend him, honorably and fairly, to the best of his abilities.
He does the job that must be done, but that other people are unwilling and afraid to do.
Indoors, when Miss Maudie wanted to say something lengthy she spread her fingers on her knees and settled her bridgework. This she did, and we waited.
“I simply want to tell you that there are some men in this world who were born to do our unpleasant jobs for us. Your father’s one of them.”
“Oh,” said Jem. “Well.”
“Don’t you oh well me, sir,” Miss Maudie replied, recognizing Jem’s fatalistic noises, “you are not old enough to appreciate what I said.”
A man stands in the gap and does what must be done. Doing so earns the respect even of one’s most ardent critics; after facing a myriad of taunts and threats from his neighbors for his defense of Tom Robinson, Atticus is once more re-elected to the state legislature …unanimously.
A man lives with integrity every day.
In Maycomb County, Atticus was known as a man who was “the same in his house as he is on the public streets.” That was the standard he lived by. He did not have one set of morals for business and one for family, one for weekdays and one for weekends. He was incapable of doing anything that would broach the inviolable sanctity of his conscience. He made the honorable decision, even when that decision was unpopular.
“This case, Tom Robinson’s case, is something that goes to the essence of a man’s conscience-Scout, I couldn’t go to church and worship God if I didn’t try to help that man.”
“Atticus, you must be wrong…”
“How’s that?”
“Well, most folks seem to think they’re right and you’re wrong…”
“They’re certainly entitled to think that, and they’re entitled to full respect for their opinions,” said Atticus, “but before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”
Atticus understood that a man’s integrity was his most important quality-the foundation upon which his honor and the trust of others was built. Stripped of integrity, a man becomes weak and impotent, no longer a force for good in his family or community.
“If you shouldn’t be defendin’ him, then why are you doin’ it?”
“For a number of reasons,” said Atticus. “The main one is, if I didn’t I couldn’t hold up my head in town, I couldn’t represent this county in the legislature, I couldn’t even tell you or Jem to do something again.”
“You mean if you didn’t defend that man, Jem and me wouldn’t have to mind you any more?”
“That’s about right.”
“Why?”
“Because I could never ask you to mind me again. Scout, simply by the nature of the work, every lawyer gets at least one case in his lifetime that affects him personally. This one’s mine.”
The most important form of courage is moral courage.
There are different types of courage: physical, intellectual, and moral.
While unassuming, Atticus certainly possessed physical courage; when Tom was in jail, he sat outside all night reading and faced down an angry mob intent on lynching the prisoner.
But moral courage is arguably the most important type of bravery, and this Atticus had in spades. Moral courage involves the strength to stick with your convictions and do the right thing, even when the whole world criticizes and torments you for it. Atticus’s decision to represent Tom Robinson brought a slew of insults and threats to him and his family. But he was willing to bear the onslaught with head held high.
Moral courage also supplies the fortitude to take on a fight you know you’ll lose, simply because you believe the cause to be honorable. Atticus knows that he will lose his defense of Tom Robinson. When Scout asked him why he continued to press on, Atticus answered:
“Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win.”
Atticus used the example of Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose to teach Jem the power of this kind of moral courage.
Mrs. Dubose was a sick, cantankerous old woman who would berate Jem and Scout whenever they passed by her house. Jem tried to heed his father’s counsel to be a gentleman, but finally snapped one day and tore up her flower beds. As punishment, Atticus made Jem read books to Mrs. Dubose every day after school. She hardly seemed to pay attention to his reading, and he was relieved when his sentence finally ended.
When Mrs. Dubose died soon afterwards, Atticus revealed the true nature of Jem’s assignment. She had been a morphine addict for a long time, but wanted to overcome that addiction before she left the world; Jem’s reading had been a distraction as she worked to wean herself from the drug. Atticus explained to Jem:
“Son, I told you that if you hadn’t lost your head I’d have made you go read to her. I wanted you to see something about her-I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do. Mrs. Dubose won, all ninety-eight pounds of her. According to her views, she died beholden to nothing and nobody. She was the bravest person I ever knew.”
Live with quiet dignity.
Despite the fact that Bob Ewell “won” the case against Tom Robinson, he held a grudge against everyone who participated in the trial for revealing him as a base fool. After the trial, Ewell threatened Atticus’s life, grossly insulted him and spat in his face. In response, Atticus simply took out a handkerchief and wiped his face, prompting Ewell to ask:
“Too proud to fight, you nigger-lovin’ bastard?”
“No, too old,” Atticus replied before putting his hands in his pockets and walking away.
It’s often thought that the manly thing to do is answer tit for tat. But it can take greater strength to refuse to sink to another man’s level and to simply walk away with dignity. Frederick Douglass said, “A gentleman will not insult me, and no man not a gentleman can insult me.” This was a credo Atticus lived by.
Atticus’s quiet dignity was also manifested in his authentic humility.
At one point in the book, Jem and Scout feel disappointed in their father; at 50, he is older and less active than the dads of their peers. He doesn’t seem to know how to do anything “cool.” This opinion is transformed when Atticus takes down a rabid dog with a single bullet, and they learn that their father is known as the “deadest shot in Maycomb County.” Jem becomes duly impressed with his father for this display of skill, all the more so because Atticus had never felt the need to brag about his prowess.
“Atticus is real old, but I wouldn’t care if he couldn’t do anything-I wouldn’t care if he couldn’t do a blessed thing.”
Jem picked up a rock and threw it jubilantly at the carhouse. Running after it, he called back: “Atticus is a gentleman, just like me!”
Cultivating empathy is paramount.
If Atticus had one dominating virtue, it was his nearly superhuman empathy. Whenever his children felt angry at the misbehavior or ignorance of the individuals in their town, he would encourage their tolerance and respect by urging them to see the other person’s side of things:
“If you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view—until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
Atticus understood that people could only be held responsible for what they knew, that not everyone had an ideal upbringing, that folks were doing they best they could in the circumstances in which they found themselves. Atticus strove above all to see the good in folks and to figure out why they did the things they did.
When Scout complained about her teacher embarrassing a poor student, Atticus got her to see that the teacher was new in town and couldn’t be expected to know the background of all the children in her class right away. When a poor man that Atticus had helped with legal problems showed up in the mob to hurt him and lynch Tom, Atticus defended him, explaining that he was a really good man who simply had some blind spots and got caught up in the mob mentality.
Even when Bob Ewell spit in his face, he responded with empathy:
“Jem, see if you can stand in Bob Ewell’s shoes a minute. I destroyed his last shred of credibility at that trial, if he had any to begin with. The man had to have some kind of comeback, his kind always does. So if spitting in my face and threatening me saved Mayella Ewell one extra beating, that’s something I’ll gladly take. He had to take it out on somebody and I’d rather it be me than that houseful of children out there. You understand?”
Teach your children by example.
Atticus is probably best remembered as an exemplary father. As a widower he could have shipped his kids off to a relative, but he was absolutely devoted to them. He was kind, protective, and incredibly patient with Jem and Scout; he was firm but fair and always looking for an opportunity to expand his children’s empathy, impart a bit of wisdom, and help them become good people.
“Do you defend niggers Atticus?” I asked him that evening.
“Of course I do. Don’t say nigger, Scout. That’s common.”
“’s what everybody else at school says.”
“From now on it’ll be everybody less one.”
As a father he let his kids be themselves and nurtured their unique personalities. During a freak snowstorm in Alabama, Jem, determined to build a snowman from the scant snow on the ground, hauled a bunch of dirt from the backyard to the front, molded a snowman from the mud, and then covered the mudman with a layer of snow. When Atticus arrived home, he could have been angry with the kids for messing up the lawn, but instead, he was pleased with Jem’s enterprising creativity.
“I didn’t know how you were going to do it, but from now on I’ll never worry about what’ll become of you, son, you’ll always have an idea.”
Atticus’s sister wished that tomboy Scout would wear dresses, play with tea sets, and be the “sunshine” for her father; she often hurt Scout’s feelings with her disparaging remarks. But when Scout asked her father about this criticism:
He said there were already enough sunbeams in the family and to go about my business, he didn’t mind me much the way I was.
And he bought her what she wanted for Christmas-an air rifle.
Most of all, Atticus taught Jem and Scout by example. He was not only always honest with them, he was honest in everything he did himself.
He not only read them the newspaper each evening, but modeled a love of reading himself. And as a result, his kids devoured every book they could get their hands on. (Modern studies actually bear the truth of this out; kids with fathers who read are more likely to read themselves).
And he not only taught his children to be courteous, he was a model of courtesy and kindness himself, even to prickly types like Mrs. Dubose:
When the three of us came to the house, Atticus would sweep off his hat, wave gallantly to her and say, “Good evening, Mrs. Dubose! You look like a picture this evening.”
I never heard Atticus say like a picture of what. He would tell her the courthouse news, and would say he hoped with all his heart she’d have a good day tomorrow. He would return his hat to his head, swing me to his shoulders in her very presence, and we would go home in the twilight. It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.
Atticus Finch.
Perhaps this character from To Kill a Mockingbird seems like an unusual choice. A gentleman in a three piece suit. A widower of two kids, Jem and Scout. A man who was quiet instead of brash. Polite instead of macho. A lawyer who used his mind instead of his fists, who walked away from insults. Who didn’t gamble or smoke, who liked to walk instead drive. A man who liked nothing better than to bury himself in a book. Yes, Atticus may not seem very “manly,” at least when measured by the modern rubric for manliness.
But it is the subtly of his manliness, the way he carried himself, taught his children, made his choices, that makes his manliness all the more real, all the more potent. His manhood was not displayed in great showy acts but in quiet, consistent strength, in supreme self-possession. The manliness of Atticus Finch does not leap off the page; instead, it burrows its way inside of you, sticks with you, causes your soul to say, “Now that is the kind of man I wish to be.”
The examples of honorable manhood that can be wrung from To Kill a Mockingbird are plentiful and powerful, and today we’d like to explore just a few.
Lessons in Manliness from Atticus Finch
A man does the job no one else wants to do.
To Kill a Mockingbird unfolds against the backdrop of Atticus’s representation of Tom Robinson. Robinson, a black man, has been accused by Mayella Ewell, a white woman, of rape. While Atticus is assigned to be Robinson’s public defender by a judge, he earns the townspeople’s ire in his determination to actually defend him, honorably and fairly, to the best of his abilities.
He does the job that must be done, but that other people are unwilling and afraid to do.
Indoors, when Miss Maudie wanted to say something lengthy she spread her fingers on her knees and settled her bridgework. This she did, and we waited.
“I simply want to tell you that there are some men in this world who were born to do our unpleasant jobs for us. Your father’s one of them.”
“Oh,” said Jem. “Well.”
“Don’t you oh well me, sir,” Miss Maudie replied, recognizing Jem’s fatalistic noises, “you are not old enough to appreciate what I said.”
A man stands in the gap and does what must be done. Doing so earns the respect even of one’s most ardent critics; after facing a myriad of taunts and threats from his neighbors for his defense of Tom Robinson, Atticus is once more re-elected to the state legislature …unanimously.
A man lives with integrity every day.
In Maycomb County, Atticus was known as a man who was “the same in his house as he is on the public streets.” That was the standard he lived by. He did not have one set of morals for business and one for family, one for weekdays and one for weekends. He was incapable of doing anything that would broach the inviolable sanctity of his conscience. He made the honorable decision, even when that decision was unpopular.
“This case, Tom Robinson’s case, is something that goes to the essence of a man’s conscience-Scout, I couldn’t go to church and worship God if I didn’t try to help that man.”
“Atticus, you must be wrong…”
“How’s that?”
“Well, most folks seem to think they’re right and you’re wrong…”
“They’re certainly entitled to think that, and they’re entitled to full respect for their opinions,” said Atticus, “but before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”
Atticus understood that a man’s integrity was his most important quality-the foundation upon which his honor and the trust of others was built. Stripped of integrity, a man becomes weak and impotent, no longer a force for good in his family or community.
“If you shouldn’t be defendin’ him, then why are you doin’ it?”
“For a number of reasons,” said Atticus. “The main one is, if I didn’t I couldn’t hold up my head in town, I couldn’t represent this county in the legislature, I couldn’t even tell you or Jem to do something again.”
“You mean if you didn’t defend that man, Jem and me wouldn’t have to mind you any more?”
“That’s about right.”
“Why?”
“Because I could never ask you to mind me again. Scout, simply by the nature of the work, every lawyer gets at least one case in his lifetime that affects him personally. This one’s mine.”
The most important form of courage is moral courage.
There are different types of courage: physical, intellectual, and moral.
While unassuming, Atticus certainly possessed physical courage; when Tom was in jail, he sat outside all night reading and faced down an angry mob intent on lynching the prisoner.
But moral courage is arguably the most important type of bravery, and this Atticus had in spades. Moral courage involves the strength to stick with your convictions and do the right thing, even when the whole world criticizes and torments you for it. Atticus’s decision to represent Tom Robinson brought a slew of insults and threats to him and his family. But he was willing to bear the onslaught with head held high.
Moral courage also supplies the fortitude to take on a fight you know you’ll lose, simply because you believe the cause to be honorable. Atticus knows that he will lose his defense of Tom Robinson. When Scout asked him why he continued to press on, Atticus answered:
“Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win.”
Atticus used the example of Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose to teach Jem the power of this kind of moral courage.
Mrs. Dubose was a sick, cantankerous old woman who would berate Jem and Scout whenever they passed by her house. Jem tried to heed his father’s counsel to be a gentleman, but finally snapped one day and tore up her flower beds. As punishment, Atticus made Jem read books to Mrs. Dubose every day after school. She hardly seemed to pay attention to his reading, and he was relieved when his sentence finally ended.
When Mrs. Dubose died soon afterwards, Atticus revealed the true nature of Jem’s assignment. She had been a morphine addict for a long time, but wanted to overcome that addiction before she left the world; Jem’s reading had been a distraction as she worked to wean herself from the drug. Atticus explained to Jem:
“Son, I told you that if you hadn’t lost your head I’d have made you go read to her. I wanted you to see something about her-I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do. Mrs. Dubose won, all ninety-eight pounds of her. According to her views, she died beholden to nothing and nobody. She was the bravest person I ever knew.”
Live with quiet dignity.
Despite the fact that Bob Ewell “won” the case against Tom Robinson, he held a grudge against everyone who participated in the trial for revealing him as a base fool. After the trial, Ewell threatened Atticus’s life, grossly insulted him and spat in his face. In response, Atticus simply took out a handkerchief and wiped his face, prompting Ewell to ask:
“Too proud to fight, you nigger-lovin’ bastard?”
“No, too old,” Atticus replied before putting his hands in his pockets and walking away.
It’s often thought that the manly thing to do is answer tit for tat. But it can take greater strength to refuse to sink to another man’s level and to simply walk away with dignity. Frederick Douglass said, “A gentleman will not insult me, and no man not a gentleman can insult me.” This was a credo Atticus lived by.
Atticus’s quiet dignity was also manifested in his authentic humility.
At one point in the book, Jem and Scout feel disappointed in their father; at 50, he is older and less active than the dads of their peers. He doesn’t seem to know how to do anything “cool.” This opinion is transformed when Atticus takes down a rabid dog with a single bullet, and they learn that their father is known as the “deadest shot in Maycomb County.” Jem becomes duly impressed with his father for this display of skill, all the more so because Atticus had never felt the need to brag about his prowess.
“Atticus is real old, but I wouldn’t care if he couldn’t do anything-I wouldn’t care if he couldn’t do a blessed thing.”
Jem picked up a rock and threw it jubilantly at the carhouse. Running after it, he called back: “Atticus is a gentleman, just like me!”
Cultivating empathy is paramount.
If Atticus had one dominating virtue, it was his nearly superhuman empathy. Whenever his children felt angry at the misbehavior or ignorance of the individuals in their town, he would encourage their tolerance and respect by urging them to see the other person’s side of things:
“If you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view—until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
Atticus understood that people could only be held responsible for what they knew, that not everyone had an ideal upbringing, that folks were doing they best they could in the circumstances in which they found themselves. Atticus strove above all to see the good in folks and to figure out why they did the things they did.
When Scout complained about her teacher embarrassing a poor student, Atticus got her to see that the teacher was new in town and couldn’t be expected to know the background of all the children in her class right away. When a poor man that Atticus had helped with legal problems showed up in the mob to hurt him and lynch Tom, Atticus defended him, explaining that he was a really good man who simply had some blind spots and got caught up in the mob mentality.
Even when Bob Ewell spit in his face, he responded with empathy:
“Jem, see if you can stand in Bob Ewell’s shoes a minute. I destroyed his last shred of credibility at that trial, if he had any to begin with. The man had to have some kind of comeback, his kind always does. So if spitting in my face and threatening me saved Mayella Ewell one extra beating, that’s something I’ll gladly take. He had to take it out on somebody and I’d rather it be me than that houseful of children out there. You understand?”
Teach your children by example.
Atticus is probably best remembered as an exemplary father. As a widower he could have shipped his kids off to a relative, but he was absolutely devoted to them. He was kind, protective, and incredibly patient with Jem and Scout; he was firm but fair and always looking for an opportunity to expand his children’s empathy, impart a bit of wisdom, and help them become good people.
“Do you defend niggers Atticus?” I asked him that evening.
“Of course I do. Don’t say nigger, Scout. That’s common.”
“’s what everybody else at school says.”
“From now on it’ll be everybody less one.”
As a father he let his kids be themselves and nurtured their unique personalities. During a freak snowstorm in Alabama, Jem, determined to build a snowman from the scant snow on the ground, hauled a bunch of dirt from the backyard to the front, molded a snowman from the mud, and then covered the mudman with a layer of snow. When Atticus arrived home, he could have been angry with the kids for messing up the lawn, but instead, he was pleased with Jem’s enterprising creativity.
“I didn’t know how you were going to do it, but from now on I’ll never worry about what’ll become of you, son, you’ll always have an idea.”
Atticus’s sister wished that tomboy Scout would wear dresses, play with tea sets, and be the “sunshine” for her father; she often hurt Scout’s feelings with her disparaging remarks. But when Scout asked her father about this criticism:
He said there were already enough sunbeams in the family and to go about my business, he didn’t mind me much the way I was.
And he bought her what she wanted for Christmas-an air rifle.
Most of all, Atticus taught Jem and Scout by example. He was not only always honest with them, he was honest in everything he did himself.
He not only read them the newspaper each evening, but modeled a love of reading himself. And as a result, his kids devoured every book they could get their hands on. (Modern studies actually bear the truth of this out; kids with fathers who read are more likely to read themselves).
And he not only taught his children to be courteous, he was a model of courtesy and kindness himself, even to prickly types like Mrs. Dubose:
When the three of us came to the house, Atticus would sweep off his hat, wave gallantly to her and say, “Good evening, Mrs. Dubose! You look like a picture this evening.”
I never heard Atticus say like a picture of what. He would tell her the courthouse news, and would say he hoped with all his heart she’d have a good day tomorrow. He would return his hat to his head, swing me to his shoulders in her very presence, and we would go home in the twilight. It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.
How long we're going to Live
With the coming age of biotechnology, increased knowledge and understanding of the biology of aging, there is speculation that the 1st person to live to be 1000 years old is walking the earth right now. I am inspired and hopeful.
Sunday, May 08, 2011
The Bentley Continental GTC - The Gentlemen's Car
My choice for a Gentlemen's Car, is the Bentley Continental GTC as it represents elegance, freedom, top craftmenship, and with a V12 Turbocharged Engine capable of 200 mph, it's got swagger.
Friday, May 06, 2011
My Creed - by -Edgar A. Guest
To live as gently as I can;
To be, no matter where, a man,
To take what comes of good or ill
And cling to faith and honour still;
To do my best, and let that stand
The record of my brain and hand,
And then, should failure come to me,
Still work and hope for victory.
To have no secret place wherein
I stoop unseen to shame or sin;
To be the same when I'm alone
As when my every deed is known;
To live undaunted, unafraid
Of any step that I have made;
To be without pretense or sham
Exactly what men think I am.
To leave some simple mark behind
To keep my having lived in mind;
If enmity to aught I show,
To be an honest, generous foe,
To play my little part, nor whine
That greater honors are not mine.
This, I believe, is all I need
For my philosophy and creed.
To be, no matter where, a man,
To take what comes of good or ill
And cling to faith and honour still;
To do my best, and let that stand
The record of my brain and hand,
And then, should failure come to me,
Still work and hope for victory.
To have no secret place wherein
I stoop unseen to shame or sin;
To be the same when I'm alone
As when my every deed is known;
To live undaunted, unafraid
Of any step that I have made;
To be without pretense or sham
Exactly what men think I am.
To leave some simple mark behind
To keep my having lived in mind;
If enmity to aught I show,
To be an honest, generous foe,
To play my little part, nor whine
That greater honors are not mine.
This, I believe, is all I need
For my philosophy and creed.
Wednesday, May 04, 2011
Telemeres and Aging
February 14, 2011
Harvard finds the core pathway of aging is malfunctioning telomeres
Scientists at the Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute say they have identified the root molecular cause of a variety of ills brought on by advanced age, including waning energy, failure of the heart and other organs, and metabolic disorders such as diabetes. The scientists found that the basic cause of age-related health decline is malfunctioning telomeres — the end caps on cells’ chromosomes that protect them against DNA damage. As cells reach their predetermined limit of times that they can divide, the telomeres become shortened and frayed, making the chromosomal ends vulnerable to increased rates of unrepaired DNA damage.
UPDATE Aubrey de Grey (of SENS) opinion - It's not a very important paper. The presence of short telomeres makes cells unhappy, and they respond by changing their behaviour in various ways, including depression of mitochondrial activity. That tells us nothing at all about what happens in the absence of short telomeres, which is what we need to know for normal aging.
NBF analogy based on Aubrey comment - having no oil in your car causes parts to wear out faster but just maintaining oil levels is not sufficient to keep your car running for hundreds of years.
Journal Nature - Telomere dysfunction induces metabolic and mitochondrial compromise
Harvard finds the core pathway of aging is malfunctioning telomeres
Scientists at the Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute say they have identified the root molecular cause of a variety of ills brought on by advanced age, including waning energy, failure of the heart and other organs, and metabolic disorders such as diabetes. The scientists found that the basic cause of age-related health decline is malfunctioning telomeres — the end caps on cells’ chromosomes that protect them against DNA damage. As cells reach their predetermined limit of times that they can divide, the telomeres become shortened and frayed, making the chromosomal ends vulnerable to increased rates of unrepaired DNA damage.
UPDATE Aubrey de Grey (of SENS) opinion - It's not a very important paper. The presence of short telomeres makes cells unhappy, and they respond by changing their behaviour in various ways, including depression of mitochondrial activity. That tells us nothing at all about what happens in the absence of short telomeres, which is what we need to know for normal aging.
NBF analogy based on Aubrey comment - having no oil in your car causes parts to wear out faster but just maintaining oil levels is not sufficient to keep your car running for hundreds of years.
Journal Nature - Telomere dysfunction induces metabolic and mitochondrial compromise
Tuesday, May 03, 2011
From the Positive Futurist
Biotech will spur decade-long medical revolution 2010 to 2020
"If you live 20 more years, you may never die”. Much decorated entrepreneur and technologist Ray Kurzweil sums up how new technologies might play out between now and 2025 in this simple futuristic claim. Most of the progress Kurzweil refers to will happen from 2010 to 2020, resulting from new biotech innovations in stem cell research and genetic engineering.
Nearly all diseases will become curable during this period; replacing aging and worn body parts will become common practice. By 2020, barring accidents, most adults will look forward to a radically increased lifespan with near-perfect health.
It's interesting that when I bring the topic to family and friends, the shun the idea of greatly extended lifespans that on the horizon, but I've followed the science enough now to be confident that it's perhaps with even 10 years sufficient advancements will arrive to improve our health and lives. I don't know if I'll personally survive long enough to reach that watershed eventuality, but there will be those alive today that will. Best advise - turn off the TV and all the negative thinking - live your life with joy, passion, and with a new paradigm, you can live a life time unimaginable just a decade ago!
"If you live 20 more years, you may never die”. Much decorated entrepreneur and technologist Ray Kurzweil sums up how new technologies might play out between now and 2025 in this simple futuristic claim. Most of the progress Kurzweil refers to will happen from 2010 to 2020, resulting from new biotech innovations in stem cell research and genetic engineering.
Nearly all diseases will become curable during this period; replacing aging and worn body parts will become common practice. By 2020, barring accidents, most adults will look forward to a radically increased lifespan with near-perfect health.
It's interesting that when I bring the topic to family and friends, the shun the idea of greatly extended lifespans that on the horizon, but I've followed the science enough now to be confident that it's perhaps with even 10 years sufficient advancements will arrive to improve our health and lives. I don't know if I'll personally survive long enough to reach that watershed eventuality, but there will be those alive today that will. Best advise - turn off the TV and all the negative thinking - live your life with joy, passion, and with a new paradigm, you can live a life time unimaginable just a decade ago!
Monday, April 25, 2011
Memorial Service - Easter Weekend
Well, we finally had my father's memorial service (after his passing on 12-16-2010). It was held in Portland Oregon so I had to catch a grey hound bus down from Seattle. The service itself was nice, and attended by many of our relatives who lived in Portland. It was a small service, having perhaps 50 or so people attend and though it has been months since his passing, it still brought me to tears. It was also a beautiful, sunny day, which made the service even better. I stayed at my sister's Joyce's house the weekend, visiting with her and her family, as well as, my younger sister Wanda who flew in from Chicago. My older brother Tony, decided to not attend the service, instead, he went to Chicago to visit with our mother, who has been sick lately. My younger brother William opted not to attend as well, since he has to wait to go to Portland next month when his son Taylor's returns from Egypt.
On Sunday, I went to the Southwest Hills Baptish Church for Easter Service with my both my Sister's and my sister Joyce's family. Overall, it was a good weekend, and I'm glad to get some closure on my dad's passing.
On Sunday, I went to the Southwest Hills Baptish Church for Easter Service with my both my Sister's and my sister Joyce's family. Overall, it was a good weekend, and I'm glad to get some closure on my dad's passing.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Michael Rose
Michael Rose, longevity researcher is interviewed at Kurzweil AI and at Science20
Genescient’s hief Scientist (and professor at the University of California at Irvine) is the evolutionary geneticist Michael Rose
Over the years, Rose and his lab have bred fruit flies to live four times the life span of an average fruit fly. Reasoning from those studies, Rose has proposed that, because the life spans of fruit flies have the genetic capability to be extensively prolonged, human life can be manipulated in the same way.
Last December, Rose spoke at a wide-ranging conference at Caltech called Humanity Plus, but he was not talking fruit flies. He was talking about humans, about “Building Methuselahs,” and about, as the conference session was named, “Radically Increasing the Human Healthspan.”
Rose’s natural recipe for immortality
* Adopt a hunter-gatherer lifestyle after 35 to 40 if Eurasian, earlier if ancestry is less Eurasian. If younger than 30 and Eurasian, continue on a post-agricultural revolution diet (or Andrew Weil-style diet).
* Use the best modern medicine
* Use autologous (from your own cells) tissue repair as it becomes available in five or more years
* Use next-generation pharmaceuticals in the next 10 or more years
“With this recipe, I feel, many of you could be alive, basically, indefinitely,” Rose said.
Paleo diet
The paleo diet, sometimes called the “caveman diet,” is one that mimics the diet of our ancestral hunter-gatherer ancestors in the Paleolithic era before the advent of the agricultural revolution of the Neolithic and animal husbandry.
It includes meats, seafoods, fruits, nuts, and vegetables. It excludes processed foods (including meats), grain-derived foods such as pasta and breads, and dairy-derived foods such as milk, yogurt and cheese.
Proponents of the diet such as Loren Cordain and S. Boyd Eaton argue that the agricultural revolution caused an “evolutionary discordance” between diet and our “genetically determined biology” as shaped through evolution.
Rose advocates a diet of food that our ancestors were accustomed to thousands of years ago. Often referred to as the “Paleolithic diet”, it includes meat, fish, vegetables, fruits and nuts—food that’s not often a part of today’s preservative-ridden, over-processed cuisine. Winding back the clock back even more, the invention of agriculture alone isn’t part of human nature as biology intended it. For most of our existence, humans have had a diet that consists of natural foods (hence the “Caveman diet” nickname). According to Rose, natural selection has favored physiological adaptations that help us process those types of foods without developing diseases or disorders from them.
Rose’s “Recipe for Natural Immortality” begins with adopting the diet of a hunter-gatherer when you turn 35. The next step is to use the best of modern medicine to get you to the immortality plateau. Then, as time passes and technology continues to advance and becomes more available, use autologous tissue repair (a type of repair in which tissue is derived from your own body). This type of tissue replacement, used for the generation of skin graft tissue, corneal cells, heart muscle, and more, isn’t something that Rose personally works on, but is imperative to incorporate this therapy in a venture towards immortality. Think of the body like a vintage car. If you replace certain parts as the years go by, it can keep running indefinitely—a well-oiled machine. Finally, Rose advocates for “new-generation pharmaceuticals” as they become available in about ten years.
While Rose believes that humans can reach a plateau of biological immortality where personal death odds become constant, De Grey is convinced that a large percent of aging is due to accumulated damage in the body. Personal death odds increase as damage accumulates. Rather than stopping aging at an earlier age and maintaining the properties of middle-aged person, De Grey thinks that aging, as a product of accumulating damage, can happen and then be repaired. The exponential curve that Rose’s studies have demonstrated to level off at the end are inaccurate, said De Grey. The curve actually levels off, rises, and then levels off again. He believes that we cannot tell whether an immortality curve actually exists because we don’t have a direct way to tell how each individual’s risk of mortality is changing during life.
Genescient’s hief Scientist (and professor at the University of California at Irvine) is the evolutionary geneticist Michael Rose
Over the years, Rose and his lab have bred fruit flies to live four times the life span of an average fruit fly. Reasoning from those studies, Rose has proposed that, because the life spans of fruit flies have the genetic capability to be extensively prolonged, human life can be manipulated in the same way.
Last December, Rose spoke at a wide-ranging conference at Caltech called Humanity Plus, but he was not talking fruit flies. He was talking about humans, about “Building Methuselahs,” and about, as the conference session was named, “Radically Increasing the Human Healthspan.”
Rose’s natural recipe for immortality
* Adopt a hunter-gatherer lifestyle after 35 to 40 if Eurasian, earlier if ancestry is less Eurasian. If younger than 30 and Eurasian, continue on a post-agricultural revolution diet (or Andrew Weil-style diet).
* Use the best modern medicine
* Use autologous (from your own cells) tissue repair as it becomes available in five or more years
* Use next-generation pharmaceuticals in the next 10 or more years
“With this recipe, I feel, many of you could be alive, basically, indefinitely,” Rose said.
Paleo diet
The paleo diet, sometimes called the “caveman diet,” is one that mimics the diet of our ancestral hunter-gatherer ancestors in the Paleolithic era before the advent of the agricultural revolution of the Neolithic and animal husbandry.
It includes meats, seafoods, fruits, nuts, and vegetables. It excludes processed foods (including meats), grain-derived foods such as pasta and breads, and dairy-derived foods such as milk, yogurt and cheese.
Proponents of the diet such as Loren Cordain and S. Boyd Eaton argue that the agricultural revolution caused an “evolutionary discordance” between diet and our “genetically determined biology” as shaped through evolution.
Rose advocates a diet of food that our ancestors were accustomed to thousands of years ago. Often referred to as the “Paleolithic diet”, it includes meat, fish, vegetables, fruits and nuts—food that’s not often a part of today’s preservative-ridden, over-processed cuisine. Winding back the clock back even more, the invention of agriculture alone isn’t part of human nature as biology intended it. For most of our existence, humans have had a diet that consists of natural foods (hence the “Caveman diet” nickname). According to Rose, natural selection has favored physiological adaptations that help us process those types of foods without developing diseases or disorders from them.
Rose’s “Recipe for Natural Immortality” begins with adopting the diet of a hunter-gatherer when you turn 35. The next step is to use the best of modern medicine to get you to the immortality plateau. Then, as time passes and technology continues to advance and becomes more available, use autologous tissue repair (a type of repair in which tissue is derived from your own body). This type of tissue replacement, used for the generation of skin graft tissue, corneal cells, heart muscle, and more, isn’t something that Rose personally works on, but is imperative to incorporate this therapy in a venture towards immortality. Think of the body like a vintage car. If you replace certain parts as the years go by, it can keep running indefinitely—a well-oiled machine. Finally, Rose advocates for “new-generation pharmaceuticals” as they become available in about ten years.
While Rose believes that humans can reach a plateau of biological immortality where personal death odds become constant, De Grey is convinced that a large percent of aging is due to accumulated damage in the body. Personal death odds increase as damage accumulates. Rather than stopping aging at an earlier age and maintaining the properties of middle-aged person, De Grey thinks that aging, as a product of accumulating damage, can happen and then be repaired. The exponential curve that Rose’s studies have demonstrated to level off at the end are inaccurate, said De Grey. The curve actually levels off, rises, and then levels off again. He believes that we cannot tell whether an immortality curve actually exists because we don’t have a direct way to tell how each individual’s risk of mortality is changing during life.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
April 2011
Wow, it's been a long time since I've added anything to my blog. I am still working at Grange Insurance in Seattle, and enjoy my job. The office created a litigation unit that I've been assigned to with good result. My wrist, which I fractured last year is starting healing well and becoming a forgotten issue in my day to day affairs. My father past away on Dec 16th, 2010, and the family is holding his memorial service on April 23rd in Portland at the Antioch Church in N.E. Portland. Even though his passing was in a way anticipated, due to his suffering from Alzheimzer's disease, it hit really hard. My personal life is in scambles and I hit rock bottom emotionally, but starting to recover. I am total optimist all the same. A few weeks ago I got in a boxing match with someone more than 1/2 my age and although I still have some good boxing skills, and proved I still had some punch left in me (essentially winning the match) I was exhausted and tired afterwards. My ego wouldn't let anyone see I could barely breath afterwards, and excused myself to the bathroom to catch my breath. Now I am embarking on a new exercise program through my job to assist me in getting back in shape. I am particularly optimistic about our future, especially for my children, you will live in the most accelerated technological future yet to be experience by humans. Michio Kaku, says that by 2100, we will be able to enjoy good health while living an indefinite lifespan. They will be part of the hamanity that immigrates to space colonies on the moon, Mars, and inhabit artificial habitats orbiting the earth, and in a real sense, be part of a global village, where scarcity is no longer an over riding concern, and the economics of living evolves where no one lives in poverty.
Sunday, January 02, 2011
Jan 2nd, 2011
Saw the movie, How Do You Know That. I was pleasantly surprised and found myself thinking this was one of the best movies I've seen in some time. It's a great love story and touched me deeply....
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Longevity and Aging - My thoughts ending 2010
It's the end of another year, and a new beginning of a fresh year. My imagination this year was captivated by the amazing progress that is being made in the biological and medical sciences, particularly that possibility of greatly extending your functional years of life. Everyday, I get scientific research emails on stem cell treatments, telemerase therapies, genetic findings etc, all taking place around the world. Each new development and treatments that are available adds to the probability of postponing our deaths albeit significantly for centuries. I read an amazing book by Michael Fossel, MD Ph D, that has been involved with telemerase treatments - The Immortality Edge. I knew a great deal about the science behind telemerase, the state of the science, and what is available for you now, but what caught my attention was a few paragraphs relating to the issue of over population; he advises, that although there is a lot of cutting edge science available now that would greatly prolong your life and youthfulness, but most, nearly the entire population of the U.S. and the world accepts, and believes death as inevitable, and there is nothing you can do about it, though the science now available clearly points to significant life span enhancement, the paradigm and mindset of most people, would be not to utilize those therapies. So, only a rare few - the believers will benefit. It made me wonder about the sciences and treatment of the past century that lead to medical break throughs everyone gets now - polio vaccines, blood transfusions, heart surgeries, organ replacements, or even something now medical, like flight & the development of planes. Were there not people who said, if G-D wanted you to fly he would had given you wings. Well, population growth isn't going to be a significant issue no time soon, because those people with diabetes will continue to treat with conventional therapies and won't seek cures now available overseas untilizing stem cell injections.
Monday, December 27, 2010
Christmas Weekend 2010
I spent from Thursday the 23rd to the 27th in Portland Oregon visiting and enjoying my relatives. I ended up staying at my Shelton Harrison's residence vice my sister Joyce's, since it was more convenient to get around and visit with other members of my family. My elder brother Tony was here from Texas with his wife - and we reconnected with my father's younger son, my brother, Brian Perry, is 30 years old, and had married just 8 months. It had been 15 years since I last saw Tony, and maybe 10 years since I last saw Brian. The 3 of us, spent a lot of time visiting with other relatives who not seen either of them in over of decade. It was a great christmas. I didn't hear anything from any of my daughters, which was a disappointment, but they are both in their 20's, enough said.
I must have been in 6th or 7th grade when this was taken at woodlawn grade school in Portland, OR. I can remember how the black shirt I'm wearing was one of the first shirts I personally chose to buy with earnings from working after school at Ray's Custom Body Shop, where I swept the shop and sanded the bottoms of fiberglass boats.
Monday, December 20, 2010
The Fro
Man, I hadn't seen a picture of myself with a big ball of hair on my head in 20 years or more. When I met my younger Brian this past weekend, he had a set of pictures that he had possessed for years, including my below highschool photos. It reminds me of how much our lives change over decades. I can recall never thinking about losing my year, or finding a creeping area of baldness visabily thinning out that mass of hair folicles. Those were the days of independence, freedom, and thinking outside the box.
Weekend of December 18th
Spent the weekend in Portland. On Saturday, I met up with my little brother Brian Perry, whom I found out has been married for 8 months. He's living and working in Vancouver, WA. I took him around to relatives in Portland who haven't seen him in 10 years or so. It was great seeing him again. On Sunday, I met up with my older Brother Tony, who had driven up from Beaumont, Texas. Man, it's been nearly 15 years since I saw him. We hugged each other for a good minute, took off from our cousin Mary's house, to talk for 15 to 20 minutes, then I escorted over to other relatives to visit. He had to leave to go and take pizza's to his grandson's who live with their mother in Vancouver. Plus, he was tired from 3 days of driving. I ended up the night, riding with my sister Joyce, and her family, to Adam's graduation from Firefighter's Academy in Woodland WA, where he works as a volunteer fireman.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
2010 A Tough Year
There is so many things that went wrong this year - a pit pull dog attack in March, failing to reach out and communicate with my daughter Nia who somehow did not feel loved, falling and shattering both my ulna and radius in my left wrist on July 22nd, the passing of my dad (Dec 15th, 2010 RIP) , finding our my mom has 2 nodules in her lungs (unknown yet whether they're cancerous), being estranged by my daughter Nia, then to make positive changes and steer a more moral course in my life, I made a radicular leap of faith and moved out when I had no where to go. But I'm been blessed, have many siblings to talk with, a good job, and truly have many more positives in my life than negatives.
R.I.P Robert A. Perry (Dad)
My dad past away yesterday morning. I got the call at around 9:30 a.m. Hearing my sister voice, quiet, low - I could hear her sobs...she didn't need to say it, but did. My eyes watered, the tears flowed. My Dad had passed away in his sleep and she had gotten the call at 5:30 a.m. I called my other siblings and weeped with them. I paused, reflected and then opted to head down to Portland to conjol my sister and family who was close enough for me to see. The entire 2 1/2 hour trips, I cried. I found soloce when I greeted her with hugs and tears at her front door. After about 15 minutes, I cleared past the sorrow. Truth was, his body had already been moved to the crematorium, and I would be able to see him. He would be cremated on 12-15-2010, today. The services would be delayed due to the holiday. Either toward the end of January, or even after the new year. I will love and miss him dearly.
Friday, November 05, 2010
November 2010
life continues on it's journey. My mom found on Wednesday she has 2 tumors in her lungs, one in each side. She still undergoing further testing to seeing their growing. My dad is now in Hospice Care, and hasn't eaten anything in 5-6 days. Doctors don't know if he may come back and revive himself, or if he'll be passing soon. For me, my wrist fractures have improved significantly and I have nearly 80% pre fracture range of motion. I'm now working on get the strength back in my hand. The medical bills are crazing though - the total bills were around $82,000 for 2 surgeries and physical therapy. Good thing I had insurance, but I am still responsible for about $18,000 or so...not good. My finances were hit "HARD". My job recently restructured our office, creating a specialized litigation unit which I am now part of. Overall, I'm in good spirits.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
My left wrist was broken
About mid-night on July 22nd, 2010, I was running outside, fell, and broke both my ulna and radius bones in my left wrist. Actually my radius was shattered into 8 pieces. I initially was taken Tacoma General Hospital and was admitted 3 days. I left with titanium road contacted to my hand and upper arm but running on the outside length. A week later during a follow up visit, the unwrapped my arm and I was horrified because my arm looked terribly deformed because the hadn't actually repaired the fractures. The treating physician said my wrist so shattered and inflammed that there wasn't they could do, and it probably be 2 weeks before they would be able to get me into surgery again! Shocked, I left the hospital on the 30th, and went to Virginia Mason Hospital in Seattle for a 2nd opinion. What a blessing. They took xrays, and told me I needed immediate surgery to plate the radius fractures. On August I had surgery. Since my surgery, I have made tremendous progress. I still have a large lump just behind my left wrist from where the ulna went thru, but the radius is solid and stable now. I doing physical therapy twice a week to get the range of motion back in my fingers and wrist. I progressing...
Saturday, April 03, 2010
Tyler Perry's "WHY DID I GET MARRIED TOO?"
I saw Tyler Perry's new movie last night and found it was incredibly entertaining, reminding me of those things and friendships that life presents us with. But more importantly, it visually reminded me of our hopes when embarking on marriages, friendship on our life journey. The show center's on 4 couples who are life long friends who take a yearly vacation. We see through 3rd party eyes, the troubles, drama, and dilema's of strained marriages and friendship; the simple truth is, we see a movie shadowing our lives, or the dream of having a truly life long lasting marriage. It rekindles our memories of those loves we lost in our in lives that held so much promise. But it's a movie about loss as well.
Friday, April 02, 2010
Locating the Sexton's
By happenstance, I had a conversation with a co-worker at work regarding aka's and alias which prompted me to do an internet search for my birth name MACIO LENNOX SEXTON, knowing and having met, George Sexton Jr., my nephew Aaron Sexton, Goree Sexton, Annette Sexton, and others in the late 80's while stationed in San Diego, CA. It filled a void in my life, I always knew my birth name was Macio Sexton since my teens, but never was able to meet them until my early 30's. My biological father, George Sexton had passed away years before, but his wife, Goree and my 1/2 brothers and sisters, as well as, my own uncles, all still lived in Los Angeles. Life being is, after decades of desiring to meet them, I lost contact with them all after I returned to Portland in 1990. Ever since, I have tried occasional to run the names I could remember via the internet to find some contact info. Yesterday, I was blessed, and found Aaron Sexton, my nephew, had a FACEBOOK account and it had a email address attached to it. He lives in Compton CA. His FACEBOOK photos caused me to get a little enthusiastic, happy even. Could this be my nephew. I recalled meeting him in 1990, and this facebook picture was familar. I sent off a email asking whether his father was George Sexton....I received a response, it was my nephew. We spoke on the phone for maybe 5 minutes, but it made my year. A void in my life is filled. I past on my information for him to have my older brother George call me...
Thursday, April 01, 2010
Spring 2010
Things are going well. Nothing exciting in my life, and thing remain fairly routine. I'm still working at Grange Insurance in downtown Seattle. I walk everyday 10 miles. Recent challenges have related to my daughter Nia relocating here with me. She's not happy with my living circumstances, as I have been living at a relative's trying to dig out a financial hole I've dug myself into. I do see light at the end of tunnel though and should be seeing a turn around financially by June. I think Nia will be fine once she is able to overcome these temporary circumstances and she's moving forward with her life and getting back into pursuing her dreams.
Monday, February 15, 2010
President's Day Holiday
Wow, it was a really nice, beautiful day in Seattle. It sunshined all day. I didn't have to work today, and spent the day running around, as usual. Ate Vegan Buffet for lunch, and a large salad for dinner. I also have a bag of sunflower seeds I'm bunching on. I also spent a few hours hanging out at the REI outdoors store reflecting on my desires to get outdoors and into the wilderness at least a few times this summer. Seattle is near the Olympic Rain Forest as well as Mt. Rainier, 2 premier wilderness designations in the entire U.S. I've lived here for 5 years now, and haven't gotten to either location, but it's on my list of things to accomplish. There was a 12'1" Laird Surf Board on sale at REI too, and made me want to learn to surf this year. I have lots of vacation on the books, over 5 weeks, perhaps I can take a vacation to Hawaii and learn to surf...It's about 5:45 p.m. and I'm still downtown Seattle. I didn't get my resume done this weekend like I had hoped, but oh well
I have to head out back to Tacoma, and then enjoy my 5 mile hike home. It's probably going to be close to 9 p.m. before I get home...
I have to head out back to Tacoma, and then enjoy my 5 mile hike home. It's probably going to be close to 9 p.m. before I get home...
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Valentine's Day/Weekend
You know Valentine's Day elicit alot of emotions from a lot of people, but for me, it's a quiet self reflective time to be mindful and loving of all the things and people I have been blessed with in my life. Yep, it's ironic, but I'm single and have been for the past few years, but most peaceful. I admire the simplier things, the quiet, the solitude of an adventure alone. This weekend, I haven't had to speak too many words, nor participate in small talk just to entertain someone else. I enjoyed the Valentine's Day in quiet adventure, it getting out, and being mindful of those moments when life is wonderful, where your mind can grasp the grace of the simple phrase, such as what caught my eye today, "Life is good!" There's a new store at the University Village Mall, selling Life of Good wear. It's simple, but it's true. Love your life and be thankful for all that it is, and not worry about all that it isn't. I was happy all weekend. A simple truth - I am happy!
I spent the weekend running around Seattle, going to movie, eating vegetarian, reading magazines, and books. Even running out to the U-District, University Village Mall searching to see if I could see the new Apple Ipad computer. (It won't be out for 6 more weeks). I asked them why the pronouncement weeks ago, and the so called release of the Ipad, when it's not even available for another 2 months? Well, they lost a potential customer. It was a pleasant weekend, a pleasant Valentine's Day, perhaps next year, there will be someone to share it with....
I spent the weekend running around Seattle, going to movie, eating vegetarian, reading magazines, and books. Even running out to the U-District, University Village Mall searching to see if I could see the new Apple Ipad computer. (It won't be out for 6 more weeks). I asked them why the pronouncement weeks ago, and the so called release of the Ipad, when it's not even available for another 2 months? Well, they lost a potential customer. It was a pleasant weekend, a pleasant Valentine's Day, perhaps next year, there will be someone to share it with....
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