Blog Holiday

Greetings! Well, the month has been great so far, but the days are long and the Internet connection spotty. Thanks for reading, as always, and I'll be back in July, looking forward to share a lot of the observations and photos I've been picking up here along the way.

In the meantime, here's a Cape Cod Times article talking about this month's training.

Combat Lifesaver Course

Today a bunch of us wrapped up a four-day iteration of Combat Lifesaver Course, which is a basic primer in field medicine taught by, but not to, combat medics.

We learned how to do a bunch of fun things like produce makeshift tourniquets and windlasses, identify tension pneumothorax, and push nasopharyngeal airways (NPA) into the nostrils and out the roof of the mouth.

All in all, a great course. I snapped a couple pics along the way, to include one from our litter relay races, where we got to see the pros and cons of everything from blankets to specially made backboards for carrying casualties. One of these pics is kind of hard to see, but it shows an NPA jammed up a guy's nose.

The Bourne Destination

Well, I'm packing up a rucksack, a duffel bag, and a "three-day pack," and getting ready to trek down to Camp Edwards (sort of Bourne, sort of Sandwich, sort of Falmouth) for thirty days of playing in the woods, setting up tents, learning/honing basic soldiering skills, wiring computer systems, and goodness knows what else.

I might take a bit of a blog holiday during this time. But then again, I might not. If we have some downtime at night, and I've got a chance to get online, I might try to capture some of what's going on. As I've gotten way more into the habit lately of using my iPhone to photograph my surroundings, I may try to just capture what surrounds me -- the single biggest Army training exercise on the Cape since World War II -- and save the proverbial thousand words for the reader's imagination.

In the meantime, thanks, as always, for reading.

Of course, there is much talk of *service* on this solemn holiday, and no shortage of eloquent, moving, and sincere words written, typed, or spoken to mark the occasion.

The one thought I'll leave you with here is that there are many ways to serve your community, state, nation, planet, etc. and that military service is just one of them. I recently caught a newspaper headline stating that the percentage of our overall national payroll coming from the public sector is the highest it has ever been in our history. Far from being a self-loathing government employee, I just think that's worth noting, and that it might not be a good recipe for long-term sustainability.

Military servicemembers, teachers, police, and firefighters are usually the first who come to mind when we're crediting people who protect and/or make our society as great as it is. That praise is absolutely deserved, as those are noble professions and they really do enable pretty much everything else we do to happen.

But I would also add dozens of other professions, groups, and people to my list of those who make us cohesive, great, and strong. Entrepreneurs who bear personal risk to provide goods or services in a newer, better way, and provide jobs for other people in the process, rank very high on my list.

The Value of 625,000

On Wednesday night at Pollard, Richard Howe, co-author of the eponymous blog conveniently linked here and to your right, led a discussion of three Abraham Lincoln-related books in which about 20 or so local residents participated.

I decided to just engage in the discussion rather than try to take notes to summarize here on the site. As you might imagine, there were a lot of thought- and conversation-provoking points brought up by the crowd, but for this entry I'm just going to focus on two.

First, there was the question of whether the human cost of 625,000 men (roughly 4% of the male population of the U.S. at the time) justified the gains from the war for the nation.

The reason this question has stayed with me for the past couple of days during my solitary time on 495 and 93, or the more scenic 133 to 28, or wherever else I was between Lowell and Reading, is that it's not as frequently-raised as questions like whether Lincoln truly deserves credit as a "Great Emancipator" or whether the antebellum North has a claim to moral superiority over its Southern neighbors at the time.

Anyway, I'm obviously bringing some heavy-duty biases into the discussion -- I was born and raised north of the Mason-Dixon line and formed most of my original ideas about the Civil War in that environment. I've since chosen to *base* myself and form my identity around a region that fell pretty squarely on the winning side of the conflict. What's more, I'm a member of its longest-standing citizen militia, and hope to continue sporting a "Yankee Division" patch on my left shoulder for many years to come.

All that said, I still keep coming back to yes. Let's look at this fact alone -- whatever your beliefs about the true motivations of Lincoln for sending reinforcements to Ft. Sumter, or of South Carolina for seceding in the first place, or for the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, or for Chief Justice Taney's middle finger directed at the previous spate of Compromises, you have to acknowledge this -- chattel slavery existed in this great land prior to 1861, and it did not exist here beyond 1865.

Another point that seems worth acknowledging is that no person owned by another person and deprived of all basic rights -- to include freedom of expression and the right to be educated -- is going to reach his or her true potential in life.

A system of intergenerational slavery based on skin color never allows your society to have a Charles Drew, a Garrett Morgan, or a George Washington Carver, and so on. It also means no Lena Horne, no Paul Robeson, and no Jackie Robinson...which means none of THEIR forebears, or the myriad ways they enrich the world we live in. And so on. I'd like to think the tall guy in the funny hat might have been getting at this when he said, in November 1863:

"It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom."

Yes, as was noted Wednesday, it took ANOTHER 100 years for all of our nation to live up to the promise of these words, but I don't there's any question that the violent cataclysm that preceded them played a huge role. I also don't think slavery "would've just died out," if allowed to do so over time, as there are STILL some people nostalgic for the system who'd have the means to exploit it if they could. I *get* that an Irish immigrant laborer requires an almost-infinitely smaller initial fixed cost than a chattel slave, so it would be better to use Irish immigrants for imminently-dangerous activities like building bridges (or digging canals!). That said, people could still find uses for slaves, and the motivations might not be strictly economic, dollars-and-cents, seemingly rational sorts of calculations. If people buy completely-impractical luxuries to show wealth and satisfy ego, might they buy people if they could?

The second point I'll hit on is something that was raised by Mrs. Sonia Skillman concerning the war's inevitability. I can't remember exactly how she phrased it but she brought up the idea that the violence that mars our history is as much a part of our American character as are things like industriousness (yes, we work the longest) and our famously forward-looking mindset (check out David Brooks' 'On Paradise Drive' for modern implications of that).

Anyway, her point had me running back to my bookshelf to check out the inscription to Paul Johnson's epic "A History of the American People." It reads:

This book is dedicated to the people of America -- strong, outspoken, intense in their convictions, sometimes wrong-headed but always generous and brave, with a passion for justice no nation has ever matched.

Those words come from a Briton who sees us from the outside looking in, but to me that only makes them all the more meaningful. Added up, they help give credence to Sonia's point.

I'd also note that we had already fought a war whose origins traced back to this contentious issue. In the 1820s, when Anglo settlers first made their way into what was then Mexico in large numbers, the first serious dispute that arose was over the question of whether people could own slaves -- more proof that it tugs at the emotions in ways that more mundane things like local meals taxes and Headmaster searches don't tend to do.

Two last bullets:

* The recently-restored Abraham Lincoln photo above, like that of the Tewksbury-based benefactor below, was a highlight of the "halftime tour" led by Ms. Rosemary Noon in between segments of the discussion.

* This ought to be done again. Obviously, there's a strong selection bias in a crowd of people willing to go to the library to learn about Abraham Lincoln on a Wednesday night, but one of my initial takeaways was that the participation level was more than double that of any discussion section I can remember from college.

LDNA Summary, 5/24/10

On Monday night, CM Bernie Lynch spoke to a packed house at Caffe Paradiso about the proposal to bring Inspectional Services and Permits under one roof (that of the Deputy Director of the Dept. of Planning and Development).

The proposal, he said, would bring more effective code enforcement, more accountability, and better "across-the-board communication."

Several questions arose about how this would affect the License Commission. Because the License Commission stands apart statutorily, it would not be affected by the proposed merger.

Some very spirited debate about the License Commission followed. A near-universal sentiment was expressed that the LC's meeting time (3 p.m. on Thursdays, with an agenda put out mid-Morning) made attendance near-impossible for most residents with commitments during the traditional workday.

CM Lynch talked about the need for the LC to more aggressively move against rule violators, which drew CC Bud Caulfield to draw on personal anecdotes about noise and other infractions and to emphasize the point that, "If the law is in place, damn it all, enforce it!"

The most innovative proposal came from LDNA President Kathleen Marcin, who suggested half-jokingly (okay, quarter-jokingly) that if the bars could just stay open until 6 a.m., there would be no "last call rush" and therefore fewer issues of excessive noise and disorderliness in the streets around 2 a.m.

A Cartoon for June

Thank You, Mr. President

I'm here at work late-ish (hey, I start early) getting ready for a teleconference with some folks in Washington State and just caught a headline that had me breaking into a grin: President Obama announces National Guard troop deployment to US-Mexico border.

I'm smiling not just because I think it's *good for business* (I'm gainfully employed through mid-2012, thank you very much) but because I think it's the right thing on many levels.

First of all, if we have a porous border, it opens us up to tons of legitimate national security threats that have the potential to make 9/11 and Pearl Harbor seem small by comparison. That's way more of a threat, in any sense of the word, than are the droves of undocumented immigrants who enter the country each year.

That said, undocumented immigration IS a problem that needs to be addressed, for the strain it creates on the social services and communities it affects most.

As for the millions already here, they ought to be placed on a path towards permanent residency, and, potentially, citizenship.

Yes, it's been done before, and it's been successful in many respects; it has not, however, been accompanied with real, truly serious measures to start securing our borders.

To try to think we can somehow deport, let alone identify, let alone find, even a meaningful percentage of the millions who live here now "without papers" is preposterous. From any point of view, it makes way more sense to bring them INTO the fold -- doing that is pretty much a win-win for both the tax man and the society writ large.

But that's not the whole answer. As John McCain said today, the President's move today is a great start but it's not enough...most likely, we'll need even more National Guardsmen to accomplish this mission.

Whether you think that makes me a bed-wetting liberal, or a rifle-toting conservative, I have no idea.

But if I could pick, I'd opt for "big-hearted pragmatist."