Tuesday, July 10, 2018

Everybody Dies

I had a birthday the other day.  I'm old enough that I found it a little irritating.  Then I had a couple of thoughts.

everybody dies.

 

You are dying.  I am dying.  We are dying.  The only sentence in which the personal pronoun form does not modify the terminal meaning.  All of Us are dying.  Everyone is dying.  You yourself and everything you know...  are in the process of dying.

After you get to age 50 or 60 who really cares if you die of pneumonia or the next cancer you are in line for? Hell, your knees hurt, your sight is going and driving gets a little scarier every year. Time to check out of the hotel that is life and hit the revolving door.
The USA wastes incredible time, money and human energy trying to cheat death.  This creates untold human misery due to our dual obsessions of early detection and prolonging life.

Prolonging life for what? They aren't going to give you another five years of being 20 years old.
This healthcare crisis is partly due to our fanatical obsession here in the U.S.A. with medicine - not the good kind of medicine that cures kids and relieves suffering, but the expensive stupid late-in-life kind that tries to pretend people get to live happy California lives forever.

Hogwash.


As soon as I hit 50 I made a firm decision to die of the first damn thing I catch that is strong enough to kill me. Seems like a good way to go.



CLICK HERE for the next humorous essay


CLICK HERE for John's more serious work

Monday, July 9, 2018

Meme Linguistics and the Great American Political Divide

You say this to me:  "I am proud I voted Trump, and I think he is doing a great job.

I hear:  "I am a cruel, evil and vile person - almost subhuman.  You should kill me now, and hunt and kill every person with even a tiny bit of my DNA."

I ask you, how far should a good person go to react to someone with genocidal actions, genocidal votes, and genocidal intent?  How far would I go to prevent Hitler, to prevent slavery and economic genocide, where all the old and weak and poor are starved?

How far should I go to stop the wall?


















Honduran child placed in solitary and waterboarded for making unreasonable demands.