The Emphasis Balance

It’s the triple team, the full-court press.  This week, all three blogs (mine, Madame’s, and ours) get the same theme, a theme as old as, well, time: You reap what you sow.

We don’t finish what we start.  We let ourselves be led astray by diversions.  Other societies don’t.  And they are walloping the bejeezus out of us.

We reap what we emphasize.  If we value a 20 foot jump shot or a touchdown pass more than we value the ability to use math and engineering to construct and maintain our infrastructure, we lose.  The fact that the average person knows WAY more about sports or various forms of entertainment in general than that person knows about science, math, or engineering, says volumes about how out of balance we are.

Time to get back in balance.  That’s all.

Starting today, not tomorrow.

The Hidden

There is an unseen cost to Americans getting what they want, at prices they want. 

As one American professor paraphrased to me a Chinese manager of Apple production in China: “We have a safety net so when our 6 year old Chinese employees leap from their job buildings, we don’t incur the expense or publicity of their deaths.”

Mother Example

My mother died Friday.

I was flying back from a work trip and arrived at her side 45 minutes after she died.

Yes, I know, there’s no sense in anguishing over that.  Things of this mortal life, and mortal life itself, should not be excessively focused on.  And lots of people’s mothers die every day, one could tell oneself.  But those reminders do little good, for all pain is personal, not comparative.

   

Because she was MY mother, and I will miss her terribly every day, and wonder if I could have been a better son.

 

She was a brave woman as she struggled to preserve dignity during her increasingly debilitating, frightening, and suffocating disease.  I watched her take the news of her death sentence last year with a stoicism that would have made a Buddhist monk proud.

She chose to remain at home throughout the ordeal.  Yes, it required hospice, some out-of-pocket caregiving services, and us, her family, for the last several weeks to make that work.  And yes, my mother still fretted, worried, and stressed about things at times.  But resource-wise, she used little.  Apart from oxygen, some morphine, and some sleeping pills, she did not cost “the system” very much.

I never asked her to do that.  As far as I know, she didn’t even know the viewpoint I’ve expressed here and on the Professor and Housewife page about how the elderly in America get a grossly disproportionate share of the resources compared to the resource-deprived young.

Knowing her, she might not have even bothered with cataract and glaucoma surgery a while back if she’d known her timeline more exactly.

She was much like her husband during his similarly degenerative disease progression, and maybe she saw how things should go because of that, because she herself was front and center in that caregiving until the very end.  There could be irony, even bitter irony, in that, but there could also be the example of dignity in the end and to the end.

My mother was in many respects a simple woman, and always much kinder to me than I ever deserved.  But then again, she was kind to most everyone.  Two hours before she died, she thanked, through gasping breaths, the hospice nurse who had come to take her vitals.

Yes, she and my dad had faults.  But the examples of their lives, and the goodness of their characters, meant far more to me than their faults.

 

I hope I can live my own life to be worthy of you, Joe and Darlene.