Amber

It began innocently enough. Ian Marks started collecting sorority and fraternity pins. Not being a collector myself, I don’t really get it. My theme is more decluttering and simplifying. Collections of stuff mainly make dusting harder. But I bear no grudge against others who like to collect, and millions of people do.

So Ian Marks collects Greek pins. And he’s a member of the Fraternity Pin Collector Society, which is a real organization. The society met this summer in a basement room at the airport Sheraton in Cleveland, to hold their sixth annual conference, called Pinfest, featuring the combined collections of the members: over 5,000 pins, some studded with pearls and diamonds, and many dating back to the 19`^h century.

Objectively speaking, most of these pins aren’t worth much; they were given to fraternity or sorority members when they joined, and most spent decades in junk drawers until they were finally given away or maybe sold at a yard sale.

However, something has gone awry in the Greek pin world. Pinfest, this year, was held under Top Secret conditions. The date and place were held in confidence among the members, and they even posted a false date on their web page, to throw off their pursuers.

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This is a fascinating article by one of the most insightful columnists in the English speaking world, Caroline Glick.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky was the richest man in Russia, until he thought he could challenge Vladimir Putin for the leadership of Russia through the Russian electoral process. Ten years later, upon being released from jail, he indicates he has changed his mind…and that the problem isn’t Putin. He says, “”“The Russian problem is not just the president as a person,” he explained. “The problem is that our citizens in the large majority don’t understand that their fate, they have to be responsible for it themselves. They are so happy to delegate it to, say, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and then they will entrust it to somebody else.”

We can see parallels in this country. Our problem is not our form of government, but our generation of people who think that our future lies more in collective action than in personal initiative.

In responding to a question about his inclusion in his book, Things That Matter, a 2007 column about baseball player Rick Ankeil’s fall and return to the major leagues, Charles  Krauthammer responded with a reference to a line from one of his articles: “…the catastrophe that awaits everyone from a single false move, wrong turn, fatal encounter. Every life has such a moment. What distinguishes us is whether — and how — we ever come back.” We have lost faith that we, as a people can solve problems ourselves. Like children, enough people want their mother to take care of their problems that they have elected, twice a man to the highest office who has failed in everything he has ever tried, except in getting people to vote for him…solely because he promised to perform miracles.

 Tom Brokaw wrote in his 1998 book The Greatest Generation,  that the generation who grew up in the United States during the deprivation of the Great Depression, and then went on to fight in World War II, as well as those whose productivity within the war’s home front made a decisive material contribution to the war effort, “is, I believe, the greatest generation any society has ever produced.” He argued that these men and women fought not for fame and recognition, but because it was the “right thing to do.”

What in the world happened to the children of this generation? The “greatest generation any society has ever produced” has left us a generation of incapable whiners, children who are living with their parents, because no job is good enough for them. A teenager in Texas kills four people in an accident where his alcohol content was twice the legal limit, and is sentenced to 10 years’ probation, with no jail time, because of “affluenza,” the notion that his parents never denied him a thing in his life so he didn’t know right from wrong. Our children do not understand consequences, have never been deprived…and somehow think they are owed a living.

We have a chance to turn this virus in our culture, in the 2014 elections. We need people elected who understand what are American values, which are, as Denis Prager says, “Liberty, In God We Trust, and E Pluribus Unum.” We need to elect, to the Senate, people who embody these values…and who understand that marriage between a man and a woman is the rock upon which our nation stands, that legalizing drugs has consequences, that there are no free lunches, and that social programs need to be paid for in order for them to be effective. We need to try as hard as we can to emulate that Greatest Generation, and become people who solve our own problems, with the help of our friends, instead of looking to bureaucracy to do that for us. We need to become Americans, agan!

If you look at the top of my blog, you will see a tab, titled “Cowboy Wisdom.” I urge you to read through this…there is some wisdom, and a lot of humorous observations that will give you a laugh, and maybe a warm feeling in your heart. Some of these I find especially useful, and I wanted to comment on them.

No good deed goes unpunished

This is a common aphorism today, but one that is very important to remember. We all expect to be rewarded for good deeds. We expect God to look upon us kindlier because of the good deeds we do. Many of us do good deeds for that reason.

Unfortunately, good deeds are not necessarily rewarded. Whether or not they are is as subject to chance as anything else. The Universe looks kindlier, perhaps, on those who do good deeds, but we cannot expect this.

Does that mean that we should not do good deeds? No. We should, however, not do good deeds for the sake of the reward we get. We should do good deeds because they are the right thing to do. Doing the right thing is a life aphorism that we should all keep to heart. It just makes life better for everyone.

 ”Talk low, talk slow, and don’t say too much.”–John Wayne

One thing I have found, in life, was that I get into far more trouble for what I say, than I do for what I don’t say. I have tried, over the past few years, to teach myself to say as little as possible, and only speak when it is necessary. That is a good deed, with respect to the above. The less said, more often than not, the better it is for everyone.

“Musicians are one step closer to God than the rest of us.”–Cap Iverson

I have this theory, one that has no scientific basis, is unsupported, and cannot be proved, that musicians are closer to God. The theory goes like this:

The theory which describes the ultimate workings of the Universe is called Quantum Mechanics. Quantum Mechanics teaches us that everything is made of wave functions (you need a course in Quantum Mechanics to understand what a wave function is. Just take my word for this).

What that means, to me, is that the Universe is humming; there is a Universal sound created by these waves…and musicians are, subconsciously, tuned into these waves. They hear a music coming from the Universe, and spend their lives trying to duplicate this music. This music is the voice of God…and musicians hear it best.

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There is a stretch of land, in Western Oklahoma called the ‘Staked Planes,” or, in the original, Plano Estacado. It was supposedly named by the Spanish Explorer, Cortez, because it was so incredibly flat that he had to mark his route with stakes so he could get back…and, in fact, if you drive across the Oklahoma Panhandle, you can’t miss this land feature…or lack of feature, as the case may be. Before I knew what it was called, I drove across this part of the country, and it was one of the most depressing drives I ever had, mile after mile of emptiness, like crossing the ocean, but without waves to break up the monotony. I couldn’t wait to get over it, to the other side.

I knew a woman, once, who felt the need to take her horse across the country. She started out in Missouri, and planned to spend a half a year riding to California, where she lived. She described the trip in glowing terms, except for the point where she hit the staked plains. Here, she became overwhelmed with the sheer emptiness of it all and, at one point, decided she couldn’t go on any further. She got off her of horse, and sat down, and waited…and waited. Finally, she realized that giving up was not an option, because the only choice that left her was to die, so she got back on her horse and finished that trip.

That is the problem with giving up. There is really no place else to go, and the alternative is often far more drastic than simply going on, no matter what the difficulty, and giving up negates the possibility that better things can happen. The woman, mentioned above, got over her hurdle on the Staked Planes and had a wonderful trip afterwards, that she would have missed if she had decided to give up when things got hard.

We often reach that point in our lives, where everything seems just too hard to go on, and where it seems easier to achieve the peace of eternal sleep, or other simpler alternatives. In truth, in many cases, it is hard to argue with someone that this might be true, especially someone for whom the pain seems to never end. Some of us are born into a life that is far harder than anyone to have to bear, and no one is really in a position to judge that life; the ability of each of us to weather pain is different, and some of us are simply not as strong, brave or fearless as others. My only point is that giving up removes the possibility of things getting better…and if the Universe has some eternal plan for you, perhaps those hard times are in preparation for something better. You’ll never know.

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