Running Out of Time

 Musings on Tim Urban's "The Tail End" (link below)

The "tail end," as in, putting our entire lifetime into perspective: the tail end of time together with parents (if they’re still with us), with siblings, with friends. 

 

As in…maybe we can only count on one hand or two how many more days we spend with these people.

As in, maybe we’re running out of time. 

A snippet from Urban's article: 

“Relationships. I’ve been thinking about my parents, who are in their mid-60s. During my first 18 years, I spent some time with my parents during at least 90% of my days. But since heading off to college and then later moving out of Boston, I’ve probably seen them an average of only five times a year each, for an average of maybe two days each time. 10 days a year. About 3% of the days I spent with them each year of my childhood. 

Being in their mid-60s, let’s continue to be super optimistic and say I’m one of the incredibly lucky people to have both parents alive into my 60s. That would give us about 30 more years of coexistence. If the ten days a year thing holds, that’s 300 days left to hang with mom and dad. Less time than I spent with them in any one of my 18 childhood years. 

When you look at that reality, you realize that despite not being at the end of your life, you may very well be nearing the end of your time with some of the most important people in your life . . . it turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end. 

It’s a similar story with my two sisters. After living in a house with them for 10 and 13 years respectively, I now live across the country from both of them and spend maybe 15 days with each of them a year. Hopefully, that leaves us with about 15% of our total hangout time left. 

The same often goes for old friends. In high school, I sat around playing hearts with the same four guys about five days a week. In four years, we probably racked up 700 group hangouts. Now, scattered around the country with totally different lives and schedules, the five of us are in the same room at the same time probably 10 days each decade. The group is in its final 7%. So what do we do with this information?”

 ***** 

I don't know, honestly, what to do with this information. 

 

My parents are already long gone.

My siblings and in-laws are nearby but busy with their lives. Holidays are our best bet--one, maybe two a year?

My closest friends are nearby-ish, but like everyone, they're busy with their own lives and families.

My three adult children live out of town/out of state. We text frequently but see seldom each other. Maybe a few times a year, if we plan well. 

My (so far) one and only grandson lives out of state. He's already walking and causing all kinds of mayhem which I see in pictures and videos. I'm missing out. Should I up and move?

It's the tail end of time. 

And I'm running out of it.

*****

The Tail End, by Tim Urban (Wait But Why)

Time to Learn About Jewish History?

 A Little Rant 

I’m aware that I’m only slightly less ignorant than the people on the streets (mostly college age and younger) calling Israel a colonizer/oppressor/apartheid state, so I decided to try and learn its history. Websites are helpful for sort of a quick overview but can’t compare with books written by historians and researchers. 

So, on the recommendation of John Podhoretz of Commentary, I bought this old book, published in 1986, called The Siege: The Saga of Israel and Zionism, by Conor Cruise O’Brien, an Irishman and Catholic, not that it matters. His interest in the region’s conflicts began (he says in the Prologue) in the mid-fifties after Ireland became a member of the United Nations and he became a delegate and represented Ireland on the Special Political Committee, where there was an ongoing debate on The Question of the Palestine Refugees. He was seated between the delegates from Iraq and Israel. He enjoyed the Israeli delegates more than he did the Iraqis. 

It’s a long-ish book for someone like me, who reads every word and usually glances at endnotes, and I’m the kind of reader that sometimes has to sort of step back and try to get the bigger picture before working through it chapter by chapter. After skimming the chapter headings, examining some of the maps and timelines, and reading the Prologue, I followed a footnote reference at the end of Prologue which led me to the Epilogue, which is where I read this paragraph (see image). This one paragraph seems to explain in a nutshell what the protesters on the streets don’t seem to understand. 

This book was written in the early eighties, yet what the author writes in this paragraph seems as if it’s still true today. Israel’s pattern of what appears at first glance to be an “asymmetrical” military response “shocks the outside observer” because the outside observer simply can’t do math (my words, not the author's). In other words, if Israel’s military response to an attack on its citizens within its border seems asymmetrical, it’s because the loss of a thousand young Israelis is devastating if your population is already small. It's not unlike the problem with calling October 7th “Israel’s 9/11.” Numerically that’s not accurate. For October 7th be Israel's 9/11, we would have needed to have lost over 30,000 people on that day. 

Anyway, all this to say…details and accuracy and truth matters. When college kids on the streets scream “colonizer” or “oppressor,” I want to ask them to please explain what they mean. I want to see if they’ve done any reading on the issue, if they understand the history, if they’re informed. Unfortunately, I already know the answer. 

And so, the beat goes on. Jew hatred has crawled back up from the sewers. Yet for some reason, it seems even more vile than ever since it’s being spewed not by neo-Nazis but by some of our own—elites in academia, members of Congress, journalists, op-ed writers, editors at top newspapers, and perhaps scariest of all, young people: college kids, young adults in their mid-twenties, full of rage and bile, who get all their information not from historians but from memes they read on TikTok.

 Let's (Not) Talk About the Children

Just collecting stuff here (for future reference)

De-transitioning

TransLife Survivors

(book by Walt Heyer and also commentary about the Texas law by Heyer HERE)

Sex Change Regret

Artifact of 2021: Social Justice Convening

I post this here as an artifact of the year America went mad. 

Imagining Society if the Covid 19 Pandemic Happened in the 90's

 Understanding Covid 19 as a Social Construct

Thoughts on Bari Weiss Interview with Dr. Vinay Prasad

"Social construct" is a term that I hear often but have not bothered to examine. I guess, in a way, that qualifies it as a cliché. Something you hear often, think you knew what it means, and then move on. 

In fact, I didn't quite know what it meant, so I looked it up. 

Warning: deep research dive ahead.

Here's a dictionary definition (Merriam-Webster) and a little explanation (yourdictionary.com): 

Social construct is an idea that has been created and accepted by the people in a society.

Social constructs develop within a society or group. They don't represent objective reality but instead are meaningful only because people within the society or group accept that they have meaning. Simply put, social constructs do not have inherent meaning. The only meaning they have is the meaning given to them by people.

So I'm thinking about this term because it came up in a Bari Weiss podcast interview with Dr. Vinay Prasad (link below). During the interview. Dr. Prasad referred to the pandemic as a social construct. 

One thing I like about Bari Weiss is she does bother to examine things. Her interviews are often sprinkled with things like, "What do you mean by that?" or, "Here's what I hear you saying." 

True to form, Bari asked him to explain what he mean. After listening to the podcast twice, I think I get his point. Here's how I understood what he said.

Dr. Prasad said that we should try to imagine the exact same scenario happening in the 1990's. In the 90's, there could not have been an option of shutting down the economy in order to stay safe. There was no Zoom. There was barely an Internet. We would have had to figure out a way to carry on, keep going to work, regardless of what kind of occupation we had. White collar, blue collar—what was true for one was true for the other.

In 2021, technology has permitted the kind of class division we’re seeing. I think that’s what he means by a “social construct.” Not the virus itself, but the societal reaction, the class division, us. vs. them. Us—those of us who can still bring in a paycheck while working from home, can order food or groceries to be delivered to our doorstep. Them—those who work in the kitchens (wearing masks!), or deliver the food to the rest of us, who stock the shelves, take our money at the grocery store. Us—we can shelter in place, recover from the virus if we get it (and still get paid). Them—what happens if they get sick? Or small business owners whose businesses had to close?

I think this is what Dr. Prasad means when he talks about the virus being a “social construct.” In both cases, the (hypothetical) 90’s and the 2020’s—the actual virus is the same. It infects us individually exactly the same way. But it infects society differently: because we have different survival options (economically speaking), it creates a class schism. So when he refers to "the poor” and the role of the government helping them, I don’t think he’s talking about the idea of giving handouts. Rather, I think he's wondering what more could have been done to protect those who didn’t benefit from the advances in technology that shielded the white-collar worker during a time of pandemic and shut down.

************

Vaccine Hesitant? A Doctor Responds 

September 22, 2021