Category Archives: Deep Thoughts

I think…therefore I’m dangerous.

A Day of Silence at the Aerie

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I just can’t listen to any more of it.

I’m home today, catching up on paperwork, yard work, and home construction chores that I’ve been putting off for too long. When I’m home — unless I’m writing — I almost always have the radio on with NPR (specifically NWPR) tuned in. I get the news from Morning Edition; listen to news analysis and opinions and learn about new books on The Diane Rehm Show; get more of the same from On Point, Here & Now, PRI’s The World, Fresh Air, All Things Considered, and Marketplace; and learn interesting scientific things on Science Friday. If I’m up early enough, I hear BBC World Service, which offers an interesting perspective on current events throughout the world and if I’m still tuned in late in the evening (at home or in my car), I listen to q from CBC. On weekends, if I’m tuned in, I really enjoy Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! and a bunch of other entertaining and/or humorous shows, many of which I also listen to on podcasts so I don’t miss them. (I actually listen to quite a few NPR podcasts, but that’s a whole different blog post.)

NPR, which they say leans left politically, gives me a solid basis of information for me to form my own opinions. Because yes: I am one of the few Americans who can tell the difference between fact and opinion. And I’m among the group of even fewer Americans who actually cares.

But today things are different.

The Orlando shooting happened early yesterday morning, and it’s all over the news today. It’s the same old collection of politician and religious leader “thoughts and prayers,” ultra liberals demanding all guns be banned, ultra conservatives trying to place blame on Muslims, crazy Christians praising the killer for murdering gays, et cetera, ad nauseam. There’s a constant rehashing of what’s known and what’s suspected as the media and public try to figure out whether it should be labeled as terrorism or a hate crime.

As if it really matters.

50 innocent people were killed on Sunday morning and many others seriously injured by a man who apparently had only two guns on him. How does that even happen? How is it that we’re legally allowed to buy guns capable of killing that many people in that short a time?

And who cares whether this was jihad or he was Muslim or white or a citizen or hated to see men kissing. Who fucking cares?

The fact is, he was on an FBI watch list but because our laws don’t prohibit possible terrorists from buying guns, he was able to do so. That’s a fact. There’s no opinion there. He was on a watch list. Period. He was able to legally buy guns that he then used to kill 50 people. Period.

Am I the only person who sees a problem with this?

And the American people are powerless to make the killings stop. Why? Because the NRA buys more politicians than we can ever hope to. And those politicians kill any bill that would limit firearms sales.

Because back in 1791, after fighting a war to get our independence — a war that depended, in great part, on a citizen militia — the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution was adopted and it said:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Apparently, many people seem to think these 27 words mean that any American has the right to own any kind of weapon for any reason.

I don’t think automatic assault rifles used to kill 50 people in a bar is what our founding fathers had in mind.

But it doesn’t really matter what I think. I don’t have enough money to buy members of the Congress and Senate. The NRA does. And it gets that money from people who apparently think it’s okay to arm anyone with any weapon they like.

Because Second Amendment.

So the radio is off at the Flying M Aerie today. I simply can’t bear to listen to the news I’m powerless to do anything about.

It didn’t start that way. I listened to about 10 minutes of Morning Edition before I’d had enough and turned it off. I’ve got my aviation radio on instead. I can hear the few planes and helicopters call in as they land or take off from the airport 3 miles from my home.

Otherwise, silence.

Silence for the 50 people who will never speak again.

And the thousands of people killed in senseless gun violence in this country before them.

The Bathroom Debate

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Are you kidding me?

Let me start with a story.

About four years ago, I met a fellow helicopter pilot who had just finished up her training. I’ll call her Alice. Alice was slender, kind of pretty, and friendly, with an upbeat personality and a positive outlook — the kind of person I like to help when I can. Like most new pilots, she needed to build flight time. When it came time for me to fly my helicopter from my old home in Wickenburg, AZ to my new home in the Wenatchee area of Washington, I invited her to come along for the 8-10 hour flight. Although she wanted to come, a logistical misunderstanding prevented it and I made the flight alone.

Not long afterwards, Alice and I became friends on Facebook. That’s when I noticed that she shared a lot of links to LGBT-related articles. I assumed she was a lesbian — I know quite a few! — and was very surprised when I realized from her Facebook posts that she had been born male.

We had a conversation going in Facebook Messaging and even though that was back in 2013, it’s still there for me to consult. Here’s a pared down part of that conversation:

Me: Honestly, I didn’t even know you were transgender until you started mentioning it on Facebook. While I know it’s important to you that everyone accept transgender people as just regular people, I had already accepted you as a regular person — a woman.

Alice: First let me say thank you! You have just given me an amazing compliment (probably without realizing it). To be recognized and accepted as a woman is really a huge compliment to me and means so much that it’s really hard to explain. I have worked incredibly hard towards the goal of being accepted as a woman and the journey has been the most difficult and challenged thing I’ve ever encountered.

There’s more to the conversation, including me urging her to just be a woman and not identify as transgender and her concerns about bathroom use. I guess I was displaying my naivety when I said:

Me: In your public persona, be the woman you are. I can’t imagine anyone challenging you if you use a ladies restroom. Why worry about it?

Her response was chilling:

Alice: It’s been a problem for me in the past, and being arrested as a sex offender for using a restroom is very high on my list of nightmares. Especially in Maricopa County where Sheriff Joe’s reputation for treating Trans* people in his jails is abysmal. I’ve been told by an employer that I have to leave their property to find a unisex bathroom. I’ve been asked to leave the bathroom in a restaurant. I’ve been physically blocked from using a bathroom in a restaurant with the owner threatening to call the police on me if I entered the women’s room. To this day, even though I feel that I generally ‘pass’ as a woman, I’m still scared to use a public restroom without first having a friend ‘check it out’ to see if it’s empty. The ‘bathroom’ issue is actually one of the most prominent in my everyday life. Statistically speaking, it’s also one of the most dangerous activities a trans* person does in any given day. Again, I ‘pass’ pretty well so it’s not that much of a safety concern for me, but the anxiety from when I didn’t ‘pass’ is still very much present in my mind.

I have the entire conversation saved and if I thought it wouldn’t be violating her privacy, I’d share it here to help people understand more about what transgender people are dealing with. But I’ll stick to the issue at hand: bathrooms.

First let me sum this up. Here’s a person who looks like a woman, talks like a woman, acts like a woman, and is thrilled when she’s recognized as a woman. (I honestly had no idea she wasn’t born a woman.) Clearly, she identifies as a woman. Why on earth wouldn’t she use a woman’s bathroom?

I can’t even imagine her using a men’s room.

The Conservative Sex Problem

The problem is this: Conservatives in America have a problem with sex.

They’re completely hung up on it. They think they’re supposed to believe that sex is for one purpose: making babies. They think they’re supposed to believe that sex for enjoyment or to feel closer to their mate or because it’s a natural part of being alive is bad and dirty.

So it follows that any kind of sex that isn’t to make a baby is bad.

Premarital sex? Can’t have a baby without being married. Bad! (This also explains why they rely so heavily on abstinence sex education rather than teaching kids about condoms and safe sex. Shouldn’t be doing it at all because it’s bad!)

Gays or lesbians having sex with someone of the same gender? No way to make a baby there so it’s bad!

Boy feeling more like a girl than a boy? How can he make babies if he turns into a girl? Bad!

Girl feeling more like a boy than a girl? How can she make babies he she turns into a boy? Bad!

So rather than try to understand these things and recognize the fact that there are all kinds of natural differences in sexuality, conservatives fall back on what they think they’re supposed to believe and they act (or react) accordingly.

It’s ironic to me that the political party that whines the most about government interference in our lives is the same party that unceasingly tries to enact laws governing sex and gender related issues. But I digress.

Not Everyone is as Creepy as Mike Huckabee

Back in February 2015, then presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, in a speech to fellow conservatives, made the following comment:

Now I wish that someone told me that when I was in high school that I could have felt like a woman when it came time to take showers in PE,” Huckabee continued. “I’m pretty sure that I would have found my feminine side and said, ‘Coach, I think I’d rather shower with the girls today.’

Apparently, he made a similar comment back in 2013.

You see, in the small, closed minds of conservatives, the only reason a male might want to go into a woman’s bathroom or locker room is to peep at (or do worse to) a woman. They can’t imagine a person who honestly identifies as a member of the opposite gender just wanting to do what’s natural: use the restroom for the gender he or she identifies with.

Conservatives hung up on this issue seem to think that gender identity is something that a person can switch on or off based on convenience or motives. Teenage Mike Huckabee wants to peep at girls so he finds his feminine side for the day. (I guess looking at porn isn’t enough.)

To them, it’s all about sex and ulterior motives and creepy guys wanting to do something nasty in a ladies room.

Funny how they’re never worried about women who identify as men wanting to use the men’s room, huh?

I don’t profess to know all the answers, but I do know this: I’m a woman who identifies as a woman and can use a women’s restroom. If Alice walked in, I probably wouldn’t look twice at her. If someone who was not quite as feminine looking as Alice but who clearly identified as a woman walked in, I would try not to stare and would certainly not challenge her. She has enough crap to deal with; why add more?

But if Mike Huckabee walked in, I’d scream “Rape!” at the top of my lungs. You have to keep creeps like that out of the ladies room.

What’s the Solution?

The solution is to do away with gender-specific restrooms.

Ladies

I heard a great story on an NPR program, PRI’s The World, yesterday that explains how gender-specific bathrooms came into being in the United States. Called “Why a 1920s legal move is responsible for the gender-segregated bathrooms we have today,” it discussed the cultural ideology of women’s place in the home and, later, in the workforce.

Terry S. Kogan, a University of Utah law professor explains it this way:

“American regulators began figuring out ways of trying to, in effect, protect women in the public, since they could not be forced back into the home,” Kogan says. “So you find a range of architectural solutions, all of which was, in a way, an attempt to create a private haven and protective space for women in the public realm.”

But the idea of protecting women has often been used as an excuse to advance other agendas. For example, many lawmakers argue that strict abortion laws will help keep women safe, but advocates point out that putting barriers in front of reproductive services actually make things more dangerous for women. Additionally, those that favored bathroom segregation laws that discriminated against black Americans during the Jim Crow era also claimed such laws were designed to protect white women and children.

Nevertheless, gender-segregated bathrooms were written into the fabric of American society in the 1920s with the rise the uniform building code.

“It was a movement aimed at various building officials — engineers, architects, contractors, building material dealers,” Kogan says. “[They were] coming together, trying to adopt a code that could be enacted hook, line, and sinker by cities around the country and ensure adequate public safety, health, and welfare in new construction. Hidden in the midsts of the first uniform building code from 1927 is a provision that says, ‘Where there are public restrooms in buildings, they shall be separated by sex.’”

With those words, Kogan says, the “Separate Spheres Ideology” was written into law and carried into the 20th century. Today, many advocates of HB2 argue that women and children must be “protected” from transgender people in public bathrooms.

Listen to the story. There’s a lot more.

Another thing I heard on NPR yesterday — although I can’t seem to track down a link to it — is a discussion of possible alternatives. For example, why not have a urinal room that would obviously be used by people capable of using a urinal? And then have a restroom for every other bathroom use by either gender? If privacy is a concern, make the bathroom stalls fully enclosed with lockable doors — like they already are in many high-end hotels and conference centers. (And apparently in the U.K., according to one friend who was appalled by the metal bathroom stalls to be found in U.S. restrooms.)

It seems to me that multi-person restrooms have two parts: the toilet part where you do the business you likely came in for and probably want privacy for and the sink/mirror part where you’re hopefully washing your hands and possibly fixing your face or hair or maybe adjusting your slip (do people still wear those?) or bra strap. I’ve never seen a woman expose herself in the sink/mirror part of a ladies room. So who cares if there are men in there?

Oh, that’s right. Conservatives. So worried about creepy men.

I’ve got news for conservatives: I’ve seen more creepy men out in the open — including a guy in a business suit masturbating on 40th Street near the corner of 6th Avenue in Manhattan at 4:30 in the afternoon — than I ever will in a ladies room. And I’m not even counting the last time I saw Mike Huckabee on television.

But I guess this problem won’t be resolved until the close-minded sex-obsessed conservatives lose this battle, too. Like the one for gay marriage.

If only they’d learn to mind their own fucking business. (No pun intended.)

On Camping and Generators

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Makes you wonder why some people go “camping” at all.

For the past few days, my friends and I have had the displeasure of camping across a small inlet from a man in an RV almost the size of my Mobile Mansion who runs his generator from about 10 AM to about 10 PM every day.

Nonstop.

His rig is what’s known as a “toy hauler” — a fifth wheel with space in the back and a ramp for one or more motor vehicles such as motorcycles, ATVs, or, in his case, a sand rail. He’s got the fifth wheel and sand rail parked in a very large camping spot overlooking the Colorado River and some backwaters. Of course, it’s not actually facing this peaceful view, but I guess that doesn’t matter to him. Outside, he has a table and a few chairs and a barbecue grill. But none of that matters since he spends virtually all of his time inside his RV doing something that obviously requires a generator. We think he’s watching television.

All day.

Every day.

When I asked him, after listening to his generator for most of Thursday, whether he was going to run it all weekend, he replied, “Just during the day.” And if you don’t count the five to ten minutes between 5 AM and 6 AM that he runs it — likely to make coffee — and the time between sunset and 10 PM that it continues to run past what a normal person would call daylight hours, I guess he was telling the truth. Or his version of it.

Generator Man
Generator Man, as we call him, is camped directly across the inlet from us. We seldom see him outside. I guess he’d rather be inside watching television.

Of course, we’re camped here — and we did get here first, if that matters — and we don’t spend all of our time indoors, as he does. Sadly, inside my Mobile Mansion is the only place I don’t hear the damn thing. We’ve listened to it day in and day out. The only thing that’s prevented it from ruining our evening campfires is the fact that we’ve been playing music to drown it out. But I know that we’d all rather be listening to nature’s sounds — crickets, night birds, coyotes — than the never-ending drone of this inconsiderate asshole’s fucking generator.

We do get some silence in the morning, after his coffee is made and we’ve come out for our breakfast chat around the campfire. Yesterday, we enjoyed watching — and hearing — a variety of water birds as they fished and dove in the backwaters. That time was longer than usual, since he drove off in the morning, leaving the generator turned off. We think he went to church. I wonder if he asked God for forgiveness for disturbing the peace and quiet.

And that makes me wonder why someone would drive a truck, RV, and desert toy out to a wonderfully peaceful part of the desert, set it all up in a prime campsite, and then spend the entire time indoors, watching TV. He could have left it all parked in his driveway. Or a truck stop.

At least then the noise he was making wouldn’t really bother anyone else.

He obviously isn’t here to enjoy the scenery, let alone the silence or wildlife. He isn’t even here to play with his sand rail. He’s here to spend time inside a smaller box than his home, probably doing the same thing he’d be doing at home.

I know what you’re thinking right now. Don’t you have a generator, Maria? Don’t you run it?

If you’ve been reading about my Snowbirding adventure, you know I do. I wrote about it when I first wrote about the backwaters. It’s a 2KW Honda, known for its low sound level. I paid more than I needed to for a generator that would be as quiet as possible. And no, I don’t run it every day — especially now that the weather is warming up. I was running it for about an hour or two in the evenings to top off the charge on the RV’s battery so my heat would work throughout the night. But I don’t even need to do that anymore. I think I’ve run it twice in the past week — and once was to work a soldering iron.

I don’t even run it to make coffee — and I have two electric coffee makers on board the Mobile Mansion. I can boil water and drip a nice, strong cup without a fucking generator.

My friends each have generators. One couple runs theirs once a day — yes, to make coffee that they reheats on the stove in the morning; go figure — and the other hasn’t run theirs at all. Even when the battery on their RV died.

We all have solar panels that keep our batteries (mostly) charged. After all, we’re in the Arizona desert. There’s nothing but sun here every day. Why would we burn gas and make noise to get power when the sun is providing pretty much all the power we need?

And what do we really need power for when we’re outdoors, camping?

My friends, although annoyed by the generator sound, have been trying to be understanding about it. “We don’t know his story,” Karen said.

Wow. I’ve heard that a lot lately. It seems like a standard excuse for people to be inconsiderate of others.

But it’s true: we don’t know his story. He could have an invalid wife inside the box who needs electricity for her life support system. (That’s Karen’s suggestion, not mine.)

But is that an excuse for him ruining the peace and quiet of a beautiful place that other people are trying to enjoy?

Hell, it’s not like he’s even spending time outside, enjoying it himself. He’s inside the box all day. He could do that anywhere.

Are you like this when you camp? If so, you’re not camping.

As for me, well, I just have one more day here before I move on. I’ll spend some time with friends, then hit the road on a long-awaited photo trip to Valley of Fire and Death Valley. I’ve already been warned about the generator people at Death Valley.

It’s too bad that these people just don’t get it.

On the Misinformed

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When lies make us stupid.

Mark Twain Quote

This morning, a typical quote + image meme appeared in my Twitter stream, shared by @Phillipdpl1974. The illustrious person in the photograph who was being quoted was none other than my favorite author of all time, Mark Twain.

The quote hit hard, primarily because of the events of the night before, which I’ll get to in a moment. It said:

It’s easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled.

Later in the day, while surfing Facebook, my friend Stewart shared a link to an article on Five Thirty Eight titled “Trump Supporters Appear To Be Misinformed, Not Uninformed.” It also hit hard because of the previous night’s events.

What Happened Last Night

It started innocently enough. I’d mentioned to my two companions — we’ll call them Sally and Joe — that I’d talked to guy at the concealed weapons permit booth at Quartzite. They were both familiar with him and both seemed to agree that the guy was a jerk. I told them that in the course of our discussion, he’d insinuated that California was not part of the United States. He apparently thought that was funny. But with all the NRA signage around his booth and his obvious close-minded, anti-liberal attitude, I didn’t think it was funny at all and let him know before turning my back on him and walking away. (In all honesty, the NRA signage was enough to prevent me from spending any money at all at his booth.)

My discussion last night with my friends naturally segued to the topic of the President’s recent executive orders related to gun controls, specifically those new rules for background checks. Joe immediately got testy. He said he didn’t understand why the president was making laws that already existed. When Sally and I asked him what he meant, he told us that background checks were already required for all gun purchases.

Sally reminded him that he’d bought a gun in Arizona at a gunshow and no background check had been required. I told them my wasband had done the same thing.

“When was that?” Joe demanded? “Twenty years ago?”

We admitted that it had been quite a while ago but that we didn’t think the laws had changed. Joe insisted that background checks were required in all states for all gun purchases. The discussion elevated to shouting, which really surprised me. Already yelled at by Joe for interrupting him “all the time,” I shut up.

While Sally and Joe continued arguing, I pulled out my phone and Googled, “In which states can I buy a gun without a background check?” Then, when there was a gap in the shouting match, I began to read:

Eight states require background checks at the point of sale for all —

Joe cut me off. “Where does it say that?”

“Wikipedia,” I replied.

“Oh, Wikipedia,” Joe responded in a tone of voice that made it clear he thought I was an idiot for relying on anything I read there.

I clicked another link. This one displayed the Gun Show background Checks State Laws page on Governing.com. I mistakenly identified it as “a government website,” but I still believe the information there is accurate. I read:

Known as the “gun show loophole,” most states do not require background checks for firearms purchased at guns shows from private individuals — federal law only requires licensed dealers to conduct checks.

I held up the phone to show him a map with states colored depending on whether they required background checks for all gun purchases, including gun shows and private sales.

“It’s on the Internet,” Joe said sarcastically. “It must be true.” He then started a rant about how you couldn’t believe anything you read in the media.

I told him that some sources were definitely better than others.

He asked me where I got my information from.

“NPR, PBS, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post. These are all pretty reliable as far as facts go.” (If asked again today, I’d add the Economist, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, BBC World News, and the Guardian.) I know better than to trust far right or far left media sources like FoxNews or Mother Jones.

He then went off on another tangent related to whether it was legal for felons to buy guns. Sally and I said no.

“So in these states where there’s no background check required, it’s legal for felons to buy guns?”

“No,” we both repeated.

“But can they buy guns?”

“Yes,” I said. “Because they can lie because there’s no background check. That’s the point. The background check would help prevent people who shouldn’t buy guns from buying guns. That’s why Obama made the executive order.”

Joe responded by telling us that he didn’t trust the president. That shocked the hell out of Sally and me. While Sally continued arguing with Joe, I took a huge step back, out of the conversation. I knew then that Joe was a lost cause.

Life’s just too short to argue wait people who can’t form their own opinions based on facts.

Oh, and I should mention that what I reported above is only part of a much longer, very angry conversation about laws, guns, truth, the media, and the president. Honestly, it went on a lot longer than it should have.

The Misinformed

This morning, after reading the Five Thirty Eight piece Stew shared, I realized that my friend Joe had become one of the misinformed.

We all get crap shared by our Facebook friends — crap pushing one opinion or another, often through the use of misleading or inaccurate data, charts, quotes, or statements. A lot of it is hateful or even racist. I’ve seen some pretty bad stuff and, in most cases, I simply stop following or even “unfriend” the person who shared it. I’ve blocked more than a handful of friends of friends who share inappropriate comments on my public posts. I have zero tolerance for hate.

Some of us get angry when we get crap we don’t agree with but cling to the crap we do agree with. Others disregard the obviously misleading crap — “Obama is a Muslim” or “Syrian refugees are part of a terrorist sleeper cell” — and spend time researching the crap that might just be true. Nine times out of ten, that “might be true” crap turns out to be just as wrong as the rest of it. But that one time it isn’t — well, then we can learn from it.

My friend Joe was from the first camp. He got a lot of crap from people who thought like he did — Sally confirmed this suspicion later that night — and he believed it. Yet ironically, he claimed that you couldn’t believe anything on the Internet.

How could you argue with someone like that?

The Five Thirty Eight piece discusses the differences between uniformed and misinformed people:

Uninformed citizens don’t have any information at all, while those who are misinformed have information that conflicts with the best evidence and expert opinion…. In the U.S., the most misinformed citizens tend to be the most confident in their views and are also the strongest partisans. These folks fill the gaps in their knowledge base by using their existing belief systems. Once these inferences are stored into memory, they become “indistinguishable from hard data”…

… When misinformed citizens are told that their facts are wrong, they often cling to their opinions even more strongly with what is known as defensive processing, or the “backfire effect.”

The article goes on to discuss various studies and actual examples of the use of misinformation as a way to more firmly connect with supporters. It’s not a very long piece, but it’s a fascinating look at psychology. I highly recommend it.

How Lies Make Us Do Stupid Things

If we believe things that aren’t true, we form opinions based on that misinformation. Those opinions can guide actions. If we follow a course of action based on bad information, we run the risk of following a bad course of action.

There’s a pretty good example of this from my own life. My wasband somehow got the idea that he had a legal claim to everything I owned, despite the fact that I’d acquired most of it before marriage and through my own efforts. He firmly believed that he was entitled to half of everything and, for the life of me, I can’t understand why his lawyers didn’t set him straight. Or maybe they tried and he refused to believe them. His misinformed belief caused him to launch a lengthy and expensive divorce battle that he eventually lost. Still believing he was right, he couldn’t accept that loss and appealed the judge’s decision, thus launching another lengthy and expensive court battle that he also lost. Clearly, his belief in incorrect information cost him a lot of money that would have been better spent rebuilding his life with the woman who likely misinformed him and goaded him to going after my money in the first place. (Talk about irony.)

In 1998, Andrew Wakefield, who was then a medical doctor in the U.K., published a fraudulent research paper that linked the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism. It was later discovered that the patients in his study were recruited by lawyers suing MMR vaccine makers and that those lawyers had paid both Wakefield and the hospital he worked for large sums of money. Further, Wakefield had applied for a patent on a measles vaccine to be used instead of the MMR vaccine; discrediting that vaccine would certainly benefit him financially. All of these situations were a huge conflict of interest for his research paper and probably explain his motivations for committing the fraud. The report was formally withdrawn in 2010 but the damage of his misinformation was already done: a huge group of people believed — and continue to believe — the now debunked results of his research. Although there is no link between the MMR vaccine — or any other vaccine — and autism, an alarming percentage of parents around the world refuse to vaccinate their children. The result: thousands of deaths and illnesses that could have been prevented by vaccines.

Nowadays, we’re seeing opinions based on misinformation dividing Americans and filling them with hate. These people are voters and many support candidates such as Donald Trump who, in the words of the Five Thirty Eight piece’s author, Anne Pluta, “has a consistently loose relationship with the truth.” This is a man who has made many public derogatory remarks about women, wants to discriminate against people based on their religion, and claims he’ll get a foreign government to pay for the cost of a border wall that is impossible to build. He’s a narcissist with a crass personality who makes the American people look like idiots in the eyes of the world every time he opens his mouth. Very little this man says is true, but the misinformed believe him and eat up every word he utters. I think it’s safe to say that the action they might take — actually voting for this man to be our president — is a foolish one.

My friend Joe’s concerns about trusting the media aren’t outrageous. There are many, many media sources that I can’t trust to present facts that are not tainted by opinion. I already mentioned two of them — FoxNews on the far right and Mother Jones on the far left. These two media outlets present opinions supported by cherry-picked “facts” and quotes often taken out of context. But they’re only two of the thousands of sources people — including voters trying to stay informed — trust every day.

What’s the solution? If you can’t find a truly objective source of factual information, there isn’t one.

I’ve got to think that it’s better to be uninformed than misinformed.

Why I Say “Happy Holidays”

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It’s more inclusive.

Every year a certain group of people proclaim that there’s a “war on Christmas” because people say “happy holidays” rather than “merry Christmas.” These people need to get a hobby.

This time of year, there are many holidays, some of which have religious or cultural significance and some of which don’t:

  • Christmas. December 25 every year. Celebrated by Christians and many non-Christians.
  • Hanukkah. Eight days starting in late November or or sometime in December based on the Hebrew calendar. Celebrated by Jews.
  • Kwanzaa. December 26 through January 1. A pan-African festival celebrated in the U.S.

That’s just three of the 35 December holidays listed on Wikipedia.

I personally celebrate the winter Solstice as a holiday. It usually occurs on December 21, but is sometimes December 22. It’s the shortest night of the year. I celebrate it because it’s heralds the return of the sun; days start getting longer the very next day. For that reason, Solstice is like New Year’s Eve with the next day the first day of my year. Happy New Year!

So I say “happy holidays” to my friends and other people I meet.

It’s not because I have anything against Christmas. I like Christmas. I put up a tree and decorate my home. I bake cookies that I share with neighbors and friends. And I exchange gifts with family members.

It’s not because I have anything against Christians. I think people should have the right to believe (or not believe) anything they like — as long as they don’t force that belief on others.

And that’s where it gets sticky. Being required or expected to say “merry Christmas” — just because some Christians are offended when I don’t use the standard greeting for their specific December holiday — is a little unreasonable. How do I know the person I’m greeting celebrates Christmas? Should I ask? Isn’t that awkward?

By saying “happy holidays,” I’m offering up my sincere best wishes for whatever December holiday you celebrate. I’m including any holiday — religious or otherwise. Isn’t that better than wishing people who might not celebrate Christmas a “merry Christmas”?

Happy Holidays!

And, for the record, I’m not offended when someone wishes me “merry Christmas.” Why would anyone be offended when wished “happy holidays”?