Indiana Oh Indiana

The usual meaning of the phrase “over the hill” is in reference to a person’s having passed his or her prime. It is an expression of at least mild derision with an overtone of dismissal after one has reached life’s zenith of success and productivity. However, the words have a much different and more personal significance to me. They take me back to the first twelve years of my life and the times my family and I paid visits to my mother’s favorite cousin, Jean Moore.

It was always summer when Dad, Mom, my younger siblings David and Connie, and I would pack our swimwear and beach towels, heading for Miller Beach in Northern Indiana’s Lake County. Jean, her husband Clyde, their children Jim, Judy and Mike, along with Clyde’s father Sam, lived on Lake Michigan in a cedar shingled house that was only steps away from a huge sand dune separating them from the beach and lake on the other side. We kids, with our parents, would scale the dune like intrepid explorers on those warm summer days, sliding back two steps for every three we attempted, carrying picnic baskets, a cooler of iced tea, our colorful beach towels and blankets and beach balls up to the crest of the hill where the air changed suddenly to a breezy coolness, even on the hottest days.

The fragrance of the water and sand was so invigorating during our easier trek down the other side of the dune to the beautiful white sand ,where our parents would spread out beach blankets with umbrellas, while we kids would head straight for the lake and inch our way into the clear water from icebergs melted eons before even our parents were born. It was the most wonderful part of what summer provided, besides the three-month parole from Warren G. Harding Elementary School.

When evening came, we always built a fire on the beach, roasting hot dogs and marshmallows while watching the sun disappear over what we kids imagined was the distant Illinois border, shadows and light flickering across our faces as the flames crackled, scenting the air with wood smoke. The climb up the hill again was the finale to our time outdoors as we saw lights of surrounding houses. Then we kids would play Monopoly or Old Maid at Jean and Clyde’s house, drinking Kool-Aid and eating popcorn while the adults droned on about politics, sports, and fashion.

So the term “over the hill” summons for me those sensory recollections of a lovely part of childhood, and the make-believe mountain that, after a climb, would take us over the top into a kind of paradise, where cool breezes and shimmering water gave us a summer idyll that would remain among the happiest memories of being so young.   JB

My sister Connie lived in a very private world, usually keeping people, even those closest to her, at a respectful distance, not because she didn’t love them, but rather because she felt that any problems she might be carrying should never weigh down those around her, and opening those locked doors meant releasing pain she did not want to share with others even if it signified receiving the regard and healing that those around her often wanted so much to give her.  Part of this, of course, was based upon Connie’s fierce pride in her own independence, but part came also from her staunch personal resolution never to wound anyone with her own burdens.

The place where my sister found peace, beauty, and healing was in music.  That is where the material world dissolved for her through seeing new harmonies and breathtaking melodies.  Anyone who ever found the real Connie discovered her there, where musical invention came from her speaking to God and from God’s responses through Connie’s heart and down through her fingers at the keyboard.

My sister had a short temper and could, with little provocation, verbally julienne someone like a cat shredding window drapes.  But, she also had a wonderful sense of humor, a generous heart, and a faith in God not often shaken, even by the enormous trials she faced.

I remember holding my sister in the little pink blanket used to bring her home from the hospital after her birth.  I was seven years old.  We became over time each other’s chief promoter and protector, and now that I will miss her, I am thankful for the fifty-eight years of memories we shared together.  Thank God for Connie Lynn.

Shortly before she died, Connie gave me a copy of the poem “On Playing a Church Piano,” which she said expressed perfectly what she felt each time she sat at the keyboard in that place.

On Playing a Church Piano

It’s something about the darkness of the place, when I relax a moment to decide what makes this work so pleasing; is it the thrill of lights fixed on the tall bronze cross, or perhaps the colored figures in the glass?  But then the stack of staves upon the stand cries out for study, and my fingers arch again and dance, though not gracefully at first — more like cautious children avoiding creaky boards. Yet hidden strings in the wood awake and sing –and the dark, cool room seems full.  And then I realize:  It is.

As a former school teacher, I find that as I age, I see behind me a panorama of those who are gone now, those whom I have loved and those who were A+ human beings among friends, former students, and family and who in life’s grand record book are now sadly absent. Though it has been five years since my sister’s death, I sometimes still have a fleeting urge to pick up the phone for a chat with Connie Lynn and to hear her laughter again.  JB

Connie with our maternal grandparents, June, 1978

I have written other commentaries about my alarm concerning the number of new pharmaceutical drugs flooding the market and their prevalence on television as commercials every few minutes. The FDA approves a staggering number of new medications almost daily as we Americans are lulled dreamily into accepting a blur of new names which no one can possibly remember.  We are so accustomed to hearing about new ones in a quiet parade of silly names that we hardly blink an eye during the hundreds of new commercials that quietly slip into our collective subconscious mind.

There is usually some kind of harmless, lilting music in the background humming happily along as the characters, often elderly folks in euphoric family locale with their grandchildren, demonstrating an almost impossible ideal of the perfect life, filled with laughter, and bucolic scenes as those folks smile through the list of terrifying side-effects that accompany most or all of these drugs, side-effects that are often much worse than the original ailment itself.

I’ve compiled a list of the names of the new drugs that I find most amusing in terms of the effort it must have taken to create those names. I picture late night meetings by physicians, ad men and women, legal teams, and empty gin bottles littering the office floor at two in the morning, when everyone really wants just to go home as a chorus of “Yeah, that sounds good” resounds as a name is finally accepted. Here is a brief list of ones with the ailments they are supposed to alleviate and that, for one reason or another, made me smile in imagining the awful struggle to keep up with finding labels for the deluge of new pharmaceuticals overwhelming us Americans.

Abilify……….antipsychotic

Brilinta………blood thinner

Eliquis……….blood thinner

Dulera………..depression, pain, asthma

Epidno……….acne

Farriga……….diabetes

Jublia…………toenail fungus

Latuda………..antipsychotic        This is my favorite and brings a vision of a little girl with a saucy attitude :    

Lovaza………..constipation

Myrbetrig……overactive bladder

Raptiva……….psoriasis

Spiriva………..bronchospasm (bronchial issue or something in a corral?)

Vaniqua………hair removal

Zostavax……..Shingles preventative

Imagine trying to keep up with creating a fresh supply of names. No wonder the names are getting sillier and sillier as they submerge our ability even to process the number of them as they appear with astonishing frequency (almost every seven minutes), especially on evening television programs. Even more disturbing is the almost cavalier way in which a disembodied voice near the end of each commercial lists the grisly side-effects, read with calm in a vision of flowers, laughing grandkids, and warm, fuzzy music. Either we are becoming joyfully numbed to the scary innuendo of such messages, or there is a gigantic amount of money being made in foisting off all these panaceas upon the American public. Now which of those two explanations do you, the reader, think is the more likely and more accurate?    John Bolinger

English, along with its dialects, is a language developed and nurtured over many centuries. It is a standard used for clarity in everything from law to poetry. It is certainly not the only language, but for anyone to call Standard English racist descends from some social and moral decrepitude that smacks of laziness, envy, and some level of self-imposed ignorance. Standard English is the conventional templet that provides the benchmark or measure for clear communication. It is for those who wish to share basic verbal communion in The United States, Great Britain and other places where the language and grammar are used as a yardstick of verbal exchange through speaking, reading, and writing it in a shared effort to make thoughts understood by all who have taken the time and effort to study and learn it. It doesn’t mean one has to read and learn Chaucer or Shakespeare, but it does mean putting forth the effort to use standard basic rules of grammar and communication that will work everywhere from Seattle to Little Rock. All races have their own idioms as well, but they are not standard in business and law. That’s just the way it is.

Frankly, someone who plays the race card for language itself is indulging in the worst case of sour grapes I can imagine. The study of Standard English is open to all who wish to learn and use it. It would seem that anyone who wishes to rise socially or at least to participate in a society shared by others would take advantage of the most important key to convivial communication with the same basic rules and expectations anywhere it is taught and studied. Does anyone call Ebonics or other forms of dialect “racist?” Someone traveling to a foreign country doesn’t call the language there (i.e. French, Spanish, German) racist just because he or she is having trouble learning it. The choice to learn a language well is open to anyone who wishes to put forth the effort required. That knowledge is an arsenal against the poverty, ignorance, and bitterness that come from the shadow of not understanding a standard language in one’s own country, wherever that may be.

Language is fundamental to prospering in any nation. English is not an easy language to learn, but as soon as someone begins fishing for excuses not to endure the labor of knowing and using English (or any other language), he is doomed to a life of blaming others for his own indolence and sloth. Excuses and accusations will not change the landscape of that person’s life, nor that of the nation itself. One part of the American system, for better or worse, is that anyone may choose to wallow in his own ignorance and make it appear as though it’s always someone else’s fault, but if one looks at history, he can see so many examples of those from all races who rose from poverty and prejudice (which exists on both sides of that coin) by resolve and hard work without spending all their time and energy blaming others for their own lack of ambition and toil, as well as their choice not to embrace our best mode of universal communication, which is language itself. Standard language usage is intended to bring people together in something shared, not to separate people as if language were some impossible code to break in an elitist club.

History is filled with ugly and irreparable error and greed of one race against others, but the tools for reparation are here now for everyone to use. It is a choice to learn or not to learn the standard language of one’s own country, but choosing not to learn it and blaming history as an excuse is simply not reasonable. Using standard communication through speaking and writing is essential. Language is power, and only the individual can choose to take advantage of that power…but no one ever said it would be easy.   My question to those who are against keeping a set of language standards is what do you see as a solution? Shall we scrap standard language and start over or simply have hundreds of mini-forms of English to confuse even further the issue of communication?  JB

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived….I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”  Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1849)

During junior year in high school I recall the passionate introduction by our wonderful English teacher, Mrs. Bea Johnson, to Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden. It was 1963, and the digital age was yet only a glimmer of what it is in 2016, but the message was immediately a profound one for me, a gangly teenager with rather low self-esteem, and with social skills that made Silas Marner look gregarious. It wasn’t that Thoreau was a hermit. He was in his Walden years less than two miles from the City of Concord, Massachusetts, and his ten by fifteen-foot cabin occasionally accommodated as many as thirty guests at once. His solitude was by choice and more about attaining some sort of perspective and balance in an ever busier and noisier world that, by then, had trains and the telegraph.

Walden Pond was a place where Thoreau was better able to connect with nature and his own thoughts without what at that time seemed to him a bombardment of noise and busyness of less than profound importance to his own psyche. I wonder what he would think of the constant infringements today upon humanity via cellphones, endless texting, neon signs, the barrage of media messages every few moments urging us to purchase cars, medications, and electronic devices with equal zeal, not to mention the never-ending coverage of natural disasters, human stories about crime, war, massacres and mudslinging in politics around the globe. In this deluge of information (requested or not) and entertainment of the modern age, we have developed numbing devices in our brains that separate quickly the TV images of toilet paper commercials from the news features about beheadings of American journalists by Isis. It’s how we survive the mountains of messages thrown at us without ceasing.

At least subliminally, we have evolved a kind of off-switch without which our minds would almost certainly go into overdrive. This unconscious but perhaps necessary mode of protective desensitizing has come about by our seeing televised images almost daily (sometimes hourly) of everything from graphic ravages of war to hundreds of people being swept away by tsunamis, images with which the sensitive mind cannot hope to deal, especially in such frequency.

Thoreau, if he were somehow transported to our time, could easily go mad, which makes me think further about how much more technology will intrude upon and perhaps stifle our humanity over the next century. Is there a limit to the illusions about technology’s solving all our problems and that we are more in control through electronics, when technology is controlling us instead? The word “upgrade” has become a term of almost religious reverence in our time, and many of us leap without question at every new device or “improvement” that insists it will be leaving us behind if we don’t install it right away. Everything seems to be about being further “connected” in a world where many teenagers are becoming almost android in their devotion and attachment to devices like cellphones and actions like texting, reducing our language to its lowest terms, so that at last we seem to be more disconnected than we can imagine. The delusion of being constantly “tuned in” and forever in contact is already, I believe, having negative effects upon personal growth, social skills, and contemplative thought. We all need to be asking the cost, not in dollars but in terms of what being connected really means, and if there are limits to human beings becoming automatons themselves through a seemingly eternal flood of external stimuli that can often inform but also smother the creativity that is such a vital part of being human.

The “marrow of life” to which Thoreau referred is not necessarily to be found through technology alone. Other writers after Thoreau, like Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein have shown other imagined future scenarios through their fiction, based upon trends current to their times and upon human nature itself, which is at last something that cannot be “plugged in” or use batteries. A balance must be found between the benefits of technology and the most profound and timeless meanings of what it is to be human in the first place.    John Bolinger    4/20/16

Colorful buildings in Havana.

No Republican candidate for the presidency (not even The Trumpster) can raise my adrenalin and ire faster and more effectively than Ted Cruz. I don’t think there is an iota of sincerity in him, but he continues to twist issues enough to render himself a proverbial martyr in the political scheme of things, and of course, President Obama is generally the evil wizard at the castle door, ready to destroy Ted’s fantasy land of the 1950’s (assuming it ever really existed in the first place).

On Saturday Cruz spoke at a campaign rally in Provo, Utah, slamming President Obama’s trip to Cuba on Sunday, claiming that a dangerous message was being sent to “political prisoners languishing in dungeons across the island.” Cruz went on to suggest that the Obamas would be rubbing elbows with only the elite rulers of the oppressed land. Though Cruz has not previously been very open about his Cuban heritage, he is suddenly telling the press about his Cuban immigrant father, “who was beaten and tortured during Batista’s regime” and the President’s visit would send only a message of approval to the Communist rulers who are still using oppression to deny basic human freedoms.

Most of What Cruz said had little, if anything, to do with the President’s purpose, which is long term in bringing about some level of positive change for the Cuban people. What Cruz forgot in his ridiculous editing of Obama’s visit is that it isn’t really about Raul Castro, his brother Fidel, or about Batista, or any other dictator with no regard for humanity or individual rights. It is, however, ultimately about the Cuban people, about victims, reform, and compassion. Did Cruz expect the President to arrive with six-shooters ready for a gunfight at some corral?

This is a slow process, Mr. Cruz, one that has been tossed aside for the past fifty years, one that will require patience, diplomacy, and intelligence, all of which President Obama has in abundance. Get your story straight and stop editing everything the President does in order to make yourself look like some political savant or persecuted angel, neither of which you can ever be. Work instead on telling us something constructive you plan to do in order to make America and the world a better place. If you know so much about present conditions in Cuba, why aren’t you there with your people to help bring about change, and if you were to become President, what would YOU do? Please remember that snubbing our noses at the dictators is also a way of ignoring their people, people who need to be brought into the 21^st Century, not by bombs and force, but with diplomacy of the most cunning kind.   JB

I usually don’t let anger get hold of me when it comes to politics, but there has been an accumulation of outrage going back for some months over the obstructionist tactics of the Republican Senate.

The utter equivocation offered today by Mitch McConnel, Majority Leader of the senate, absolutely squeaked of a desperate attempt to make the blocking of Merrick Garland seem non-partisan. McConnel was right about one thing. The refusal to consider Garland for the Supreme Court had nothing to do with the man, at least not THAT man. It had everything to do with President Obama, whom the reactionary Republicans revile beyond all reason. Embarrassed again and again by the President’s cunning and his political triumphs, Mr. McConnel and his cronies saw yet another opportunity to upend whatever Obama wanted to accomplish.

Predictably, there is no plan except to shut down in terms of letting inaction prevail as it has so often in Congress during this administration. Such work could be accomplished by people who are comatose or have padlocks on their brains, but because they actually still walk and make disapproving grunting sounds, they remind me more of zombies, who could have achieved just as much for America via the Senate during the past eight years.

McConnel criticized the President for staging his choice as a political ploy. Honestly? I had to hear the silly speech three times before I was able to believe that anyone would actually take such a ridiculously transparent commentary seriously instead of the duplicitous mask it was.

I’m weary of McConnel and his monumentally and politically constipated followers doing nothing for the nation except impeding whatever the President is trying to do for the good of all citizens, not just a small group of disgruntled senators who are bitter about Obama’s successes. The denial isn’t about Garland. It’s about the chance to put a knife in the back of the President in an easy way while calling it something else.

All the Republican Senate has to do is nothing, which is what they’re so accustomed to be doing. It’s another case of “not backing down” being a passive refusal to create some level of harmony and needed action. It’s personal. It’s rude, and it’s bad sportsmanship of the worst kind, especially in light of the two-faced excuses offered to the press today by the majority leader.

The pawn in this is Merrick Garland himself, an eminently qualified and politically moderate choice for a seat in the Supreme Court. I believe that accusing the President of political shenanigans is once again the pot calling the kettle black (no pun intended). Sometimes I feel like Jimmy Stewart in the film, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, a man too idealistic, expecting the Washington political machine to serve the people instead of catering to a small group of jaded, out-of-touch codgers who believe the government was designed to serve them personally and exclusively.

Frank Capra is turning over in his grave.   JB

All candidates become media creations…one way or another, through a combination of vitriol and sentimental hogwash, eventual belief in any of it depending upon the viewer’s predisposed political views. As much money and work go into such propaganda as in Oscar-winning films. With the right material arranged cleverly, Joseph Stalin became a media god to his own people. I’m cautious about any such blurbs of anyone running for public office.

I’d rather see a combination of good and bad things in making up my mind, based primarily upon facts and my own intelligence to tell the difference between truth and media hype. I’m just as suspicious of those little films about Hillary, Bernie, and all the other prospects as I am about The Trumpster. Candidates who are reviled by the opposition appear also in misleading clips edited almost to death in order to make those folks appear villainous (i.e. President Obama via Fox News). The media cannot just influence our political views. The media can create them, so I take all such TV coverage, positive AND negative, with a grain of salt, which usually puts me somewhere in the middle between extreme conservatives and wacko liberals.

This is another reason that listening to only one television network for one’s political views is probably dangerously skewed. On television the two extremes are Fox News (hyper-conservative) and MSNBC (hyper-liberal). Issues are tweaked on both, though I gravitate toward the latter, as I believe its fact-checking is rigorous most of the time, and I’m not sure that Fox News even knows what fact-checking is.

We sometimes think of “propaganda” as being used only in third-world countries or in regimes like that of Mao Zedong, Hitler, Mussolini, etc., tweaked truths shifted to recreate, enhance, or hide a leader’s image, but the fact is we still use the media to cajole, convince, persuade or convert especially those who may still be on the fence about their affiliations.

A brief but perhaps expensive film placed in the right time slot with the right images, narrative and music can create loyalty or loathing, depending upon the viewers intellectual and emotional inclinations. Such media tactics can reaffirm one’s already established views or sometimes alter them, but it’s one of the reasons campaigning is so exorbitantly expensive in America, though there generally has to be some level of charisma in a politician’s profile to make even the most expensive commercial have any effect. Jeb Bush spent an enormous amount of money (more than any other candidate) on his campaign but didn’t have the draw in terms of his own personal charisma to build much of a bonfire and ended with hardly a candle flame to illuminate whatever political prowess he had.

Finally it’s up to every voter to do his homework about anyone with whom he or she is politically smitten. It’s important to see various views from various news sources in order to avoid the all too comfortable state of being rendered another of the many marionettes voting for an image instead of a living, breathing person.   JB

Yesterday morning I took my dog Dudley to Petco for grooming. Because we were a few minutes early, I decided to wander with the Dudmeister through the store and look at dog toys. Indoors when I wear my sunglasses on top of my head, I look like an extraterrestrial from a bad B movie in the 1950’s, so I decided this time to keep them in their position over my eyes as Dudley, still on his leash, continued walking ahead of me. Then I heard a young woman’s voice asking, “Excuse me, sir, but are you blind?”

Believing there was a blind man nearby, I tightened my hold slightly on the leash in anticipation of Dudley’s possible reaction to another dog in the vicinity. Then I was surprised, turning around, to see the woman who had posed the question, looking at Dudley and me. She and her male companion were both examining me in the most sympathetic way, as though I were a lost puppy or an injured toddler. Feeling my face turning red, I lowered my sunglasses to gaze over them at the couple, saying to them, “No, I am NOT blind,” which brought to the woman’s face a look of both relief and embarrassment.

“We wanted to pet your beautiful dog,” she said, “and it looked as if he was leading you. What breed is he?”

“He’s a West Highland White Terrier,” I answered. “The breed isn’t used as guide dogs. Those are usually German Shepherds or Labs.”

“Well he’s adorable,” She said. I was tempted to say, “Well, I guess he fooled YOU.” But I held back and responded instead with, “You’re welcome to pet him. He loves people.”

Then she and her companion knelt to greet Duds, who was enthusiastic over their attention.

“He’s a handsome dog,” said the man.

“He’ll be much handsomer after his grooming today,” I answered. “Right now he looks a bit like a dust mop without a stick.”

“Thank you,” said the woman, as she and the young man continued walking through the aisle of dog toys.

The experience gave me pause (paws?) to consider for the first time how I might appear in public with my slight limp from neuropathy in my right leg, my dog on his leash, seeming to be leading a man with gray hair wearing dark glasses indoors.

My perspective changed irretrievably, regarding my age, but I must remember also the dependable glint of humor from such experiences as they become more frequent with the years. I guess I’d much rather age while smiling than age through embarrassment and fear.   JB

Teenage rebellion is nothing new. During my seventy years I’ve seen and perpetrated jabs at the establishment and was certainly witness to a long festival of revolts from criticism of the war in Vietnam to anger over having the school gymnasium as the venue for the senior prom. When a teen does something deliberately off the beaten path in a vocal or visible way, it’s often because he or she is making a statement of malaise about existing conditions or to establish his or her own identity, which often means just copying other teens.

 Such displays or demonstrations of revolt have generally been done through music and fashion from punk rock to miniskirts and Mohawk haircuts. Rock and roll of the 1950’s began a wave of new identity that made bebop of the 1940’s and jazz from the flapper 1920’s look tame, but music has been tweaking itself ever since Bill Haley and Elvis in order to create a subculture of the young that continues to push boundaries to raise eyebrows and scream, “I’m here!”

One of the forms of rebellion in clothing of recent years for teens is sagging jeans that show undershorts, because the pants waist is worn so low that it makes the wearer look either like a troglodyte with stunted legs or an adult donning a loaded diaper. The origin of this “fashion” statement seems to have been gang-related and encouraged by some forms of Hip Hop and Gangster Rap, whose origins were also very anti-establishment.

Sagging pants are just another in a series of nudges that are meant to push the buttons of adults. Those nudges go back to things like DA (duck ass) haircuts of the 1950’s and newer statements like nose rings, steel tongue inserts, eyebrow pins, etc. The more disgusted we adults are, the greater success the teen statement to repulse us. Save photos of them though for when those kids actually grow up (assuming they ever will). Parents will have loads of blackmail material for years to come. If kids think that vomit-covered tee shirts will get a negative reaction from adults, those tees will become a sensation and fly off the shelves of clothing stores overnight. It’s all about getting a reaction, and I imagine such behavior goes back in history many centuries. Laughing at them is probably more effective than having painful grimaces on our faces. Everything goes back to achieving an identity, even if it’s a moronic one.

Someday we might look back at sagging pants with nostalgia after kids come up with other stuff that is yet more ridiculous and offensive. The bottom line on this for me is parents themselves, the ones who give carte blanche to their kids, sending a message that either the parents don’t care, or that the kids are in charge and may look as stupid as they wish. Those boundaries for many parents have been let go so that there is no longer any border or authority. Thus, a kid’s model for behavior becomes that of his dumb friends, who also have oblivious parental guidance. So it goes.

One wonders what possibly dangerous and irreversible fashion statements may lie just around the corner. Are there any places on the human body where metal inserts haven’t been embedded, or any places that haven’t been tattooed? It may be sad eventually to see kids of today when they’re in their 70’s and 80’s, withered flesh held together by metal pins, barbs, and rings that, on the bright side, will at least render electrical storms more exciting. Stay tuned.   JB