The close of something big.

 The end of the American war in Afghanistan.

Working on Ft. Leavenworth, the flags were at half mast on the last day of August.  The last C-17 was wheels up on the biggest airlift operation in history, 120,000+ souls evacuated out of Afghanistan and beginning a resettlement process.  All done during a pandemic while surrounded by Taliban.   It was some hero shit on a scale that is hard to imagine.

Some ISIS group claimed the attack that killed 13 American Service Members and at least 90 Afghans.   12 Marines and 1 37F SSG were the servicemembers lost. That last one hits close to home.  All of those lost were closer to my high school son's age than mine.  SSG Knauss was still younger than the age I was when I enlisted almost 20 years ago.  Hero shit comes at a hell of a price.

I still feel war embers of pride thinking at all the things the United States Military was doing on the humanitarian side just these last few days: Hurricane relief across a dozen states domestically - still helping some places with vaccination and pandemic response - earthquake recovery in Haiti and of course evacuating over a hundred thousand souls to safety in Afghanistan.

My work email, my veteran's groups, my physical mailbox all receiving closing statements about the end of America's longest war.  I am immensely proud of Biden for his "I am the fourth President presiding over this war and I will NOT hand it over to a fifth" resolve.  End this.  In 20 years Coalition Forces NEVER held all of Afghanistan.  It was naive to expect the Afghan National Army to stand and fight to the death when their President and Military Leadership were literally fleeing the country.

I don't know what becomes of that place now, never was my fight, my GWOT years were spent in the desert, not the mountains.  

I found out about another 37F who was lost back home this summer as well.  A soldier from St. Louis, too young to be one I deployed with.  Another loss of one closer to my son's age than my own.

I do what I can. Keep some Army tech running as smoothly as it can to avoid wasting their time.  Donate to memorial funds and to the charities and efforts to help fulfill the missions of helping those in need.

So proud of the giant network of volunteers and donors and professionals helping support and resettle Afghans, aid in recovery from the Hurricane, from the wildfires, from the Pandemic.  Lots of strong shoulders carrying some serious weight right now.

We are losing a generation of kids and have not long to fix it.

The "Long Winter" of lockdowns and Pandemic deaths has been followed by the worst Cold Spell since the 1980s - at least here in Missouri. This is exposing a horrible mistake. Once the infrastructure for "Online School" was in place educators now have a new option ready for days of inclement weather or whatever. My district calls these "A.M.I." days, Alternative Means of Instruction. 

 Whatever this means in theory, in practice it is this: 1) At 5:44 a.m. Parents get an email that their child will not be in school. Parents are also supposed to not just ensure their child is clothed/fed/sheltered but will need to take on the full time task of aiding their student with assignments and policing their student to get their assignments done. 2) Instead of instruction, the teacher will send a link to a video or a text to read and perhaps a quiz that the student is supposed to self-instruct themselves on. This is, of course, not adequate for instruction and this is the very reason why teachers and schools exist. 3) The teachers will then grade/judge the untaught/unsupported student's work as a failure and perhaps report the parent to some kind of secret police list or whatever happens when your child fails. 

 This allows the school to not take a "Snow Day" and not add a day to the school year in the Summer and all it costs is the loss of a day of the child's developmental success and the mental health of the working parents. Snow days were fine - they were better - we need to return to this as soon as possible. An email saying "Read this chapter" is not the same thing as an hour in class. It is not a substitute or even an acceptable facsimile. This is my new crusade and I am reaching out to my school district ASAP. An entire Generation of children are being failed by the horrible idea that interacting with a glowing rectangle can be a full substitute for the entire community of people that make a child's education. We made this policy, we can unmake it. We need to.

Childhood, Meaning, Reality and Cyberpunk

Warning:  Rambling without much insight ahead

It's early 2021 and I am in a short gap between managing technology and people for the Decennial Census and supporting tax software for Intuit helping as a large number of people want to make sure stimulus is properly accounted for or claimed (if it wasn't processed).  My wife is about to fly off to the East Coast to help with critical care during the pandemic for a month and it's very clear that the current events of the world impact our lives.   I'm glad I can work from home as my boys are still in some modified pandemic schedule for school, even if working with financial software isn't some aspirational goal. Sometimes it's easy to feel like we are adrift on bigger currents - not the masters of our own ships. 

I have had some time to do more - but the pandemic makes doing more with other people irresponsible.  The local health department states getting a vaccine for the general population isn't likely in Missouri until May.... so here we are, entertaining ourselves at home.

I've started reading fiction again and gaming again and two things from 2020 I am enjoying are Cyberpunk 2077 and Ready Player Two.  These have both been in the works for some time and show signs of a work that had its vision change as the thing came to be.  Ready Player Two is a sequel to a novel written in 2011 and Cyberpunk 2077 has been in development since 2013.  Both have some kind of theme of returning to childhood, the meaning of those memories in how they shape who we are and how we interpret the world.  

I'm writing this after reading about how the Ready Player Two's protagonist is perplexed by the idea that despite living in ridiculous luxury and comfort he feels the need to re-create his childhood of sleeping in a laundry room in the impoverished conditions he came from, how he needs to memorialize the little places of respite he had carved out in his harsh world.  I'm writing this after a Cyberpunk side character takes you underwater to her childhood town where she was raised in humble conditions by her grandparents in some little community with one diner, one school, etc... and she has this moment where she describes local burgers as too greasy, too big... but to childhood me it was the best thing I had ever eaten and these sentiments are resonating with me.

My childhood had... swings... moments of plenty and comfort and moments where the adults in my life took efforts to keep me from worrying about how uncertain things were. There were times where you knew all the adults around you wanted you in their lives and times where some of them clearly did not. I had great parents who made good, if tough, choices 90% of the time and grandparents who were a blessing for any child to have in their lives.  I spent a Summer with my grandmother in the Ozarks in a home that was essentially one big room, I lived in one of the most dangerous zip codes in America in the 90s, and I also spend much of the 80s in what one of my friends called "A mansion".  My parents each were/weren't in parts of my life growing up a and I would like to thing this has given me a more complete view of being human than I could have had. 

A ridiculously happy memory for me is playing "no equipment" tackle football in a fenced in yard with glass bottles and wrappers on Cypress and Kensington with about 8 kids from the neighborhood and just not caring about much in the world.

Cyberpunk does a great job of visiting critical memories (there is a great McGuffin/Plot Device that makes this possible and necessary) and making you spend a moment to think about how essential some of these have on who we become and the world you live in.  It's weird because I can remember the room where I opened my first P.C. to add RAM, where I first wrote a batch file save to a floppy drive and changed a BIOS setting to have the system boot to play DOOM on a 486SX25 processor.  I remember the garage my dad and I set up a punching bag and weight set in.  That was the same home I dove in the world of paper and dice RPGs, D&D, Cyberpunk 2020, Werewolf, Vampire, Mage.... but most of all Shadowrun.  In a weird Meta way, this experience - seeing these plots and themes revisited but not as some little niche product but with multi-million dollar budgets and talented professional staff working for years... it is like visiting that world we imagined back then.  A friend of mine (A cop holed up with the Covid-19 until it runs it's course who finds himself with time again) told me it reminds him of what he pictured in his head during the Shadowrun game sessions we had as kids.

I just took out my two loving dogs at sunrise and watched them play next to the trees, swing set, garden, and bushes in the back yard of my quite sizeable house.  This isn't bragging, just a setup that the life I live is the life I thought I was supposed to strive for - some kind of end prize for hard work and saving.

I also own a quite nice VR headset - Pandemic 2020 was a good year for VR - and can set up a "Home"
area where you load and interface with program and so on - they have luxury apartments and ski lodges and moon colonies as choices.... and what do I use?  A grungy setup with graffiti and alleys that reminds me of the most austere years of my childhood.  If I had a therapist, I would want to get some feedback on how strange it is to feel that need to return to our childhood - even if our present is objectively better.

The lure of nostalgia trap, which many readers and critics missed, was the whole theme of Ready Player One - that given limitless potential to create from the well of our imaginations we often end up limiting ourselves to recreate the nostalgia of youth and that growth requires moving beyond that.  Don't live in the memories of the past while you can still be making a present wonderful enough for forging new memories.

My grandparents, my parents... only my mother remains alive.  My father asked me to repeat back some memories he had shared with me - quitting smoking, starting to live better - of being the same age as Elvis and having a son later in life and learning, while his youngest son was being born, that Elvis had just died in his 40s... it made my father reconsider how he was treating his body and his obligation to take care of himself and live...  but I don't remember all of the details right.   This distressed him, his memories, his life story - from being a child of the Great Depression, his high school pole vaulting, his time in the Infantry and overseas, his decades in the steel mill, his building a business, his time as a husband and father... all of those were going to fade away with his old frail body.  He had shared some things with me but, of course, it could only be a fraction -  most of which would also fade away in time.

And finally, that sad inevitable realization that who we are, what we are is so much a collection of moments and memories that live on mostly in ourselves... and that they will fade... that was a big part of one of the first seminal Cyberpunk works - Blade Runner - a film written by two men in their early forties, a common age to realize that truth that we are impermanent and will fade... has a character use an artificially shortened life span to come to his own realization about this after struggling with it for two hours:

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die".

 So it goes, the need to celebrate and learn from the past and grow into the future... I am cautiously optimistic at the moment - we are coming out of the pandemic's dark winter and have the opportunity for better things ahead.  I want to share an article from the right now - a list of fairly well thought out things that should give us all reason to be at least a little hopeful:

https://www.fastcompany.com/90591674/21-reasons-to-hope-in-2021

The storm before the calm.

 I had been anxious building up to last week and my specific anxiety proved prescient: 

Anxious on Jan 4th

We are on our way to moving forward - moving forward past family members in charge of important rollouts, past TV personalities in charge of agencies, past governing-by-conspiracy-theory and a dozen other things specific to the last few years that have diminished our lives.

But there is at least one last gasp left in the movement that tried to decapitate the government of our United States on the 6th.

Tomorrow, Donald Trump is going to speak at the Alamo in Texas.  The choice of sending a message by picking a venue is clear.  The Alamo isn't remembered for "Peaceful Transitions of Power".  

The same people who were smart enough to cancel conventions and have as many of their folks work from home as possible when the Pandemic began are smart enough to see the emerging threat now.  Facebook, Twitter, Amazon Web Services, Google.... all of these have made some effort to slow down the coordination of planned violence in the United States.

Violent Coups, Civil Wars, Theocracies, and permanent minority rule are all bad for business. Big Tech has acted accordingly. 

Even people who don't follow the news closely can almost feel "something".  The shelves were clear of many staple items as I stocked up for a family of four.  We are a nation of soft targets, a shooter or bomber convinces of some online idiocy could hurt a lot of people in some city or community he or she decides is "evil".  

The Pandemic is at it's peak here and not slowing down because we chose this particular moment to get extra stupid and belligerent.  The emergency rooms would be in dire straights to treat mass casualties and Covid-19 in most places.

If you lean towards Trump, and you hear me or anyone else dissuade you from joining in the ruckus, please, please.  Don't.  People are losing family, friends, careers, and lives over this and this particular man is - without ANY doubt - not worth it. 

The Anxiety Continues

January 4th and the election concern continues:

I know the Georgia Senate election is tomorrow and the Electoral College results go to Congress and there are bloggers and journalists and analysts and such who are telling me not to worry it is all wrapped up... BUT....

I've had my share of talking heads tell me that Trump wouldn't get elected... or that he wouldn't attack our institutions successfully... or that the world order wouldn't change much... or that Iraq would be all wrapped up in six months....

The point is that I don't take consensus conventional wisdom as a cure for anxiety.

Donald Trump dismissed our Pandemic Taskforce and a not small number of my friends and family legitimately believe all the worlds scientists, doctors, and nations... as well as a million dead... all conspired with a fictional disease to make their Game Show President look bad.  That is some STRONG bullshit right there.  

A man all hopped up on Internet Bullshit suicide bombed Tennessee....  a man all hopped up on Internet Bullshit sabotaged a batch of vaccines... a woman all hopped up on Internet Bullshit kidnapped her child out of care....

A president all hopped up on Internet Bullshit just asked an official to create false votes for him... 

It wasn't long ago I witnessed the U.S. Senate heard a sitting President ask a foreign leader who was asking for American Arms to fight Russian Aggressors "For a favor, though" and that favor was to announce an investigations into his political rival.... and that Senate could not conclude that was an abuse of power.

If that isn't an abuse of power, what is?

So I have no confidence that those Senators will all respect the constitution, or the will of the people, or their oath of office or whatever. I no longer rest safe on their honor.

So I'm worried about the next 14 days.  I'm worried about the pandemic, I'm worried about jobs and work and opportunity and a million other things and I'm most worried that our addiction to Internet Bullshit is throwing a wrench or several in every single serious undertaking that needs to be done to keep the wheels spinning, the lights on, the mouths fed, and so on.