2012, not "2016"

In the 80s, I went to see "Roger and Me," Michael Moore's first documentary chronicling General Motors CEO Roger Smith's oversight of the automaker's downsizing, and the subsequent decline of the standard of living for former GM employees. Moore reminded me of Columbo, who played a harmless idiot to disguise that he was onto the criminals. I also liked "Bowling for Columbine," the expose of the National Rifle Association's role in liberalizing gun sales to deadly effect. Moore lost me when he exchanged his rumpled Columbo-ness for being another loudmouth on cable news.

It's the same way I feel about watching MSNBC. While emotionally it makes me feel good to watch people with philosophies similar to mine sticking it to some Tea Party wingnut, I know that what I'm hearing are extremely one-sided opinions. I can't watch Rachel Maddow or Lawrence O'Donnell for very long without feeling queasy and changing the channel.

Because propaganda of any kind makes me physically ill, I have no intention of paying good money to see "2016: Obama's America," the extreme right's version of a Michael Moore documentary. Here's what Daniel Larison, a columnist for the American Conservative (not a fawning guest on Rachel Maddow's show) has to say about Dinesh D'Souza's assessment of President Obama:

"It is hardly necessary to delve deeply into the Kenyan past or trace the roots of anticolonialist thought to discern why Obama, a thoroughly conventional center-left Democrat, favors raising taxes on wealthier people. This is a standard part of the Democratic agenda and has been for the last decade. Having opposed tax cuts for wealthier Americans earlier in the decade, Democrats are continuing to be against them. This is not mystifying. What is a little mystifying is why so many conservative pundits and writers feel the need to construct preposterous, overly-complicated Obama theories to explain what is perfectly obvious and straightforward."

"We Need Better People"

That was a line in a letter to the editor in my local newspaper. Preceding it: "We don't need better gun control laws."

I agree that we need better people. Education is the first thing that leaps to mind. To me, education means giving students multiple pathways to belonging, recognizing that all people have different strengths. Some will be scholars. Others will be athletes, musicians, teachers or entrepreneurs. In an educational setting, there ought to be ways for people to identify their gifts and to go about cultivating them.

The trouble is, there is huge cultural disagreement about how to properly educate our young people. My concern is that disagreements about education is just another thing for us to fight about, and therefore to do nothing about. 

All the fighting about Chick-fil-a and the president's birth certificate and Mitt Romney's tax returns is very confusing. I've always thought Americans are pragmatic people, capable of working toward big public goals while agreeing to disagree about some of the steps along the way. There are some projects that are just too big to solve overnight, and we need to hang in there with each other. Educating our kids to become contributors is one of these big projects. It's time well-invested.

In the meantime, we do need better gun control laws.Tweaking these laws is an exercise in pragmatism. Requiring a waiting period where peoples' backgrounds are checked is something we can do soon. If you're electing yourself to be a gun owner, you're electing yourself to an intrusion of your privacy. If that privacy includes ties to a neo-Nazi hate groups, then so be it. Banning sales of assault weapons would be another. I'd like to see gun sellers tracking how much ammunition they're selling to individuals who live at real addresses, and alerting authorities when a buyer exceeds the limit.

Because if we're really serious about needing better people, we need to make it a lot harder for disturbed people to implement their murderous plans.

Athlete-Champions

Kim Rhode, a skeet athlete, became the first Olympian to win medals in five consecutive appearances at the Games. I didn't see the competition, but I saw an interview with her afterward and was impressed--not a strong enough word--WOWED by the fact that she hit 99 of 100 targets. She's clearly an athlete, but beyond that, she's a champion. She also struck me as a really nice, likeable person, who posts recipes on her blog.

Watching coverage of her on the podium also made me realize how biased I am about what athletes should look like. Ms. Rhode is not ripped. She's got an athlete's reflexes and peripheral vision, and yesterday she proved she's the best in the business.

I watched the women's gymnastic qualifying competition last night, and was impressed--no, WOWED by their strength, grace and precision. When Jordyn Wieber didn't qualify, for the simple reason that each team is limited to two gymnasts in the all-around, though she came in fourth in the overall standings, my mother's heart broke. I so wanted to tell Andrea Joyce to get the microphone out of her face already, and let her go off and have a good cry. In retrospect, the replay showing her toes gripping the balance beam to prevent a fall told me how bad Ms. Wieber wanted it. I'm rooting for her to go for the gold in the individual events and to do everything she can to help her team win.

As strict as gymnastics' rules are, there is still more margin of error for them than there was in yesterday's skeet competition. I noticed form breaks and bobbles and wobbles that were by no means fatal to the overall performances. Who am I to criticize? Balancing in yoga poses is hard enough--I can't imagine balancing on a four-inch-wide beam four feet off the ground while doing flips. . . I thought they were all amazing.

But to hit 99 of 100 targets? That's otherworldly. Ms. Rhode missed one target in the qualifying round, where each athlete aimed for 75 targets. I wonder where in the qualifying competition she missed that one target. To someone who like yours truly who is easily thrown off balance by anything less than perfection, I'm sure in Ms. Rhode's place I would have talked myself into missing some more targets. Because after all, who am I to believe I can be perfect?

That's what separates the champions from the rest of us. Champions are just as flawed as the rest of us, but in that time and that place and that medium they have the will and the preparation to be the best. To put in perspective how big Ms. Rhode's  achievement is, the silver medalist hit 91 targets, while the bronze medalist hit 90.

So bravo to Kim Rhode, bravo to Jordyn Wieber, and bravo to anyone who tries to be the best at anything.

Slow-Moving Civil War

Another massacre, this time about 20 miles away from me, 12 killed and scores wounded. Another psychopathic killer, who-shall-not-be-named. Another emotional outpouring, of anger, of grief, of confusion. Another spontaneous memorial for people to express their sadness and their outrage. Another showdown between the NRA and gun-control advocates.

Incredibly, experts and politicians say nothing will change. The American public seems resigned that some time in the near future, another disturbed person will open fire and kill and wound more people in a school, or a church, a shopping mall, or wherever people gather. Even worse, gun sales have increased during the last week to "defend" against such attacks. I'd prefer not to live in a world where every other person is packing heat.

I can't believe a civilized society like ours could allow PhD student who lives in suburban Denver access to huge amounts of weaponry and firepower. I've never heard a good explanation for why citizen gun owners should have access to assault weapons. The answer is always about the abstract--the Second Amendment, citizens have an unlimited right to bear arms. Really? Because that seems to me to be stretching things a lot. The real reason is that gun manufacturers and gun dealers are making a lot of money.

Ten states have instituted regulations on the purchase of decongestants that contain pseudoephedrine, one of the ingredients used to make methamphetamine. Meth is undeniably hollowing out families and communities. I'm not talking about buying a couple of packages of Sudafed to get you and your family through a cold. But a suspicious eye ought to be cast on customers who are buying a store's entire stock of decongestant. I don't have a problem with store managers alerting police to a potential threat like this.

If laws can stop meth cooks from buying a huge supply of meth, I don't see why we can't we similarly limit the amount of artillery gun owners can buy. Notice I said a limit, not a ban. However, I am comfortable with banning the sale of assault weapons to anyone. No citizen can buy a nuclear bomb online. I'm not thrilled with the military having weapons of mass destruction, but let's leave assault weapons in their hands.

Whether we're resigned to more mass shootings, or we're going out and buying guns with the fantasy we can defend ourselves against heavily armored, heavily armed psychopaths, we're basically accepting the fact that we're in a slow-moving civil war. We're resigned to pitting our citizens against one another. We don't need supposed Muslim terrorists. Without reasonable gun control laws, we're making it way too easy for disturbed people to pick us off, one school, one movie theater at a time.

It's time to admit that allowing commerce to drive the ways weapons are bought and sold isn't keeping our citizens and communities safe. As a country of laws, it's long past time to legislate extensive background checks that track the kind and numbers of weapons and ammo gun owners are buying.

Re-raveling

A friend who is traveling the great midlife highway with me said, "We're both unraveling."

Coming undone? I didn't know whether to say Uh-uh, or Uh-oh, or Uh-huh. She is a weaver, so maybe she knew what she's talking about. I thought about it for a few days and decided I didn't like the idea of coming apart. I prefer re-raveling to unraveling. The Urban Dictionary's definition of reravel is "the process of undoing something that was 'unraveled.' " That's no improvement.

So as a cranky woman of a certain age, I reserve the right to make my own definition. Re-raveling means making something new from material that already exists.

This is precisely what is happening at Cheese Importers, my workplace. Tomorrow begins the move to a new building a couple of blocks away from where it's been located for nearly thirty years. It's rare to encounter this kind of symmetry, where outer circumstances like a business relocating matches my inner circumstances. Fertility is formally leaving the building. I am going from being a woman who can reproduce offspring to a woman who can't.

I'm thankful I live at a time where I have actually had a choice in the matter, though there are people and institutions who dispute this. And to this I say: Until men can get pregnant, women ought to at least have the courtesy of deciding whether, and when, they want to bear children.

Women have access to all kinds of information about how to care for their bodies after menopause. Christiane Northrup writes books to help women maintain vibrant good health within the context of a still feminine, if not reproductively viable, body, not to mention benefits to mental health. Yoga is a blessing along the same lines. Resources like this give me a form to re-ravel around. I'm looking forward to creating a few new loops and patterns of my own.

Wise Pacing

This week my son had some tough issues come up at work. We talked about it more than he would have liked. While our discussions gave me a good understanding of what happened and what he can do going forward, what's most important is his understanding and how he proceeds.

In one of our conversations, he said he prefers to solve problems in his own way and his own time. Truth is, that's how he's been since he was a baby. He came into the world wanting to be his own man. I like to think Don and I have allowed him the freedom to do just that.

"That's all well and good," I said, "but sometimes you need to speed up or slow down the pace of your problem-solving, depending on the situation."

Learning how to pace myself has been one of my touchstones. For most of my life, the pace has been fast. The maid of honor at my wedding, Cheryl Brown Manning, called me a "driver" when we were students at Montana State. Renay Oshop, the vedic astrologer I work with, refers to my "gung-ho" attitude.

Over the past seven years or so, I've consciously slowed my pacing. I can't say I'm a very good student of the art of slowness, other than to say I'm a slow learner of this particular art.

Teaching others to slow down via yoga has helped me with my own pacing. When I teach pranayama, for instance, it's all about the pacing of the breath. I invite students to breathe in through the nose, slowly threading it past the navel. At the bottom of the inhale, hold it for a couple of heartbeats before slowly exhaling back up the torso and through the nose. At the top of the exhale, again hold the breath for a few heartbeats before allowing the next in-breath. Repeat at least 10 times. It takes maybe three minutes to get yourself breathing at a pace that sustains real living.

In the have-it-fast, have-it-now world we inhabit, the word allowing is probably the hardest to cope with. Back in my gung-ho, driver days, there was no allow. I made things happen. I didn't let them happen to me. But when they did, I got angry, especially at things I viewed as negative or that diminished me somehow. Because I was already so small in my own mind, I couldn't bear to think of losing any more. And forget about savoring the good things that happened. They'd already arrived too late, when I'd given up wanting them.

Being on edge like this took a toll on my nervous system, which yoga master BKS Iyengar says spans 600 miles in the human body. Yowza. That's a veritable superhighway. I've been on road trips, and a lot can go terribly wrong in 600 miles. Yogic breathing goes a long way toward repairing those stress-created rough patches of road.

One of the acharyas at the ashram mentioned a study she'd read about the effects of stress. It takes about twenty minutes of shallow breathing to dump an unsustainable amount of stress hormones into your system. The antidote, of course, is to breath slowly, deeply and consciously.

Sometimes I have to go fast, like when I drove I-25 to Denver on Wednesday night. You can get squashed if you go less than 75 mph on some stretches. But mostly I go slow. It takes some planning. It takes me about eight minutes to get to work every morning, when conditions are perfect. But they rarely are. The stoplights are out of sync, road construction, a pedestrian in the crosswalk. So I tack on another five minutes to make sure I'm not rushing before I get to work. I throw in as many deep, conscious breaths as I can along the way. Try it some time. You'll enjoy the time you have more.

Obamacare Upheld

In today's Longmont Daily-Times Call, there was a story about a tourist from California who was evacuated from her motel in Estes Park during the fire there last Saturday. Her next destination: Colorado Springs, specifically in the area of the Waldo Canyon fire. It must seem to this poor woman that the whole state of Colorado is on fire.

Similarly, there has been so much overheated rhetoric over the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, as I'm now resigned to calling it, that I'm hoping today's Supreme Court's decision at least puts an ice cube or two on the debate. I'm relieved that the ruling came down in favor of preserving Obamacare. On SCOTUSblog, UCLA constitutional law professor Adam Winkler writes:

"With this deft ruling, Roberts avoided what was certain to be a cascade of criticism of the high court. No Supreme Court has struck down a president's signature piece of legislation in over 75 years. Had Obamacare been voided, it would have inevitably led to charges of aggressive judicial activism. Roberts peered over the abyss and decided he didn't want to go there."

 Hallelujah. Today sanity prevailed.

Now can somebody please put out all these fires in Colorado, already?