Bookends

In about a month, I will have officially logged another year on Earth, and there have been quite a few of them. This being Throwback Thursday, it’s simply a reminder that we Boomers have a lot more backward time “in the can” than forward time left. But it also means we’ve been alive long enough now to see what seems like the beginning and the end of big things – bookends, if you like.

Many of us are talking this morning about Caitlyn Jenner, who won the Arthur Ashe Courage Award last night on ABC. I must confess that when I first heard about this earlier in the day, I did an eye-roll. But the “preview” piece about Bruce Jenner’s struggle to accept him (now her) self, followed by Caitlyn’s moving speech crafted to persuade others to accept trans people, moved me. Perhaps I was moved because I was alive in the Bruce Olympian days – the first bookend – which is just “the past” to some younger people for whom history is not a favorite subject. But even for young people, “transes” were the butt of jokes just a few months ago. Not anymore.

Then there is Pluto. I have been alive long enough to remember the consternation in this country over the Russians getting into space first (Sputnik, 1957). I also remember our manned spacecraft circling the moon on a Christmas Eve, with one astronaut reading Bible verses while the Earth was in the background on our black-and-white TV, and then our guys landing on the moon a relatively short time later. And now, our spacecraft flying by this ex-planet several billion miles away, and sending back pictures.

President Obama is calling this week for major prison reform, and to that end, commuted the sentences of almost 50 nonviolent drug offenders. I’ve been around long enough to remember when possessing even a tiny amount of marijuana for personal use could get you a very long time in the slammer, and that marijuana was considered eeeevil.

(Now if they could only do something about immigration. I’d like to see a bookend on that one.)

If we’re around long enough, these “bookend” events really stand out to us. But our very lives are bookends: they start somewhere and end somewhere else. We just have to remember that these big stories began before we were born and will continue on after we die.

I’m glad that I have lived long enough (so far) to have one foot in the relatively distant past and the other here, to see all these changes. Do most older people feel that way?

Many of us thought the year 2012, according to the Mayan calendar, would mark the end of the world. Well, maybe it did, but we didn’t finish the phrase: it was just the end of the world as we thought we knew it.

The Big Thaw

Spring is only a few weeks away. The ice, still solid enough on northern lakes to support heavy trucks, is imperceptibly weakening as the sun angle increases a few degrees each day. When the ice finally starts to break up and water reappears, it will seem as if it happened all of a sudden, but the process will have started much earlier – we just couldn’t detect the evidence of it.

It’s my feeling that thaws are breaking out all over. Take immigration reform – an insoluble problem for decades. But Romney lost the election, many say, because of the Latino vote. It wasn’t some wild political swing. For decades, Latinos have been having more children than folks of other ethnicities – there are simply more of them, but the evidence is only now making headlines. True, not all Latinos are Democrats, but a lot voted that way. So now even Republicans are talking about immigration reform. Positions frozen for decades are unfreezing.

The same is happening with gun control, although it took a terrible tragedy to spur the breakup of long-frozen positions on that score. The NRA is no longer a solid block of immovable ice, or at least the block is smaller than it once was. Women will be officially allowed combat roles in the military – unthinkable until this month. Will widely accepted gay marriage and the legalization of marijuana be next? I wish the big thaw would extend to tax reform, but that ice is pretty thick yet.

Then there’s the economy. The struggling stock market has actually been improving for years, but it seems like it happened just last week, when the Dow closed above 14,000 for the first time in recent memory. Home sales are increasing; money is flowing again.

Even internationally, I hear ice cracking. Iran has agreed to return to the talks on its nuclear program. Is this simply deception, or is a hard frozen position melting? Even some members of the Syrian opposition are no longer ruling out talks with the brutal Assad regime.

Is common sense actually starting to bloom? I don’t know about you, but I’m convinced something is going on. Spring is a hard season not to like.

Picking Your Poison

Well, it’s starting. A prominent physician at UCSF, Dr. Robert Lustig,  has declared refined sugar to be toxic (you can learn more about that here). I submit this is just the beginning, and predict that before I check out of Hotel Earth (I hope it’s not Express Check Out), the following substances will be designated as controlled or outright illegal:

• Meat, including poultry
• Dairy products
• White bread
• Potato chips, French fries
• Alcohol (illegal)
• Tobacco (illegal)
• Caffeine
• Table salt
• Most soft drinks
• Refined sugar

I can hear some of you cheering and wondering why these things haven’t already happened. Patience, patience. Just give it time.

Actually, time is a big issue, because if you take the long view, things that were once essential to our health are no longer considered so (leeches), while those experts who issued warnings years ago were not always listened to.

When I was growing up in New York, there was a guy on the radio named Dr. Carlton Fredericks, who lectured every Sunday on his show about the evils of cholesterol. He favored a low-carbohydrate diet and promoted the use of vitamins because he said most essential nutrients were lost in food processing. Were he alive today, he would have been elevated to sainthood, bur at the time, more than a few people thought he was a bit of a nut.

I used to drink a popular Coca-Cola product called Tab, the production of which was drastically decreased after its principal sweetener, saccharin, was found to be a carcinogen. Years later, saccharin was un-found to be cancerous, so at least in that regard, Tab is OK. It’s still produced in some areas and has millions of fans, even though not a single word of advertising has appeared for it in decades. I don’t drink it now because it’s hard to find and rather expensive.

As for the evils of meat, poultry and dairy, my solution would be to allow continued consumption of these things on the grounds that consumers produce their own – which means doing their own slaughtering. How many of us would wring the necks of chickens or butcher our own pigs or cows? Speaking of cows, would the average American enjoy getting up in the wee hours and milking one? If stays on farms were mandatory, it would do wonders for the vegan movement (which, as you have probably guessed, I haven’t yet joined).

There is one thing likely to happen relatively soon that will cheer many folks up: something coming OFF the no-no list. MARIJUANA! The only problem is, when you get the munchies, what will your choices be?