Unanticipated fallout from having children

Tonight my lovely wife took me out to dinner for my birthday. It turned out that the manager of the restaurant was a friend of my son's from way back. He'd been in our house back in the day and recognized us despite our advancing age, and it was great to see and just chat with him again. Obviously, he was doing a great job because our experience there justified my choice to celebrate there. Seeing him provided an unexpected bonus for my birthday celebration - having an intimate dinner with my bride was great, so this was the cherry on top of the sundae.

But that's not what prompted me to write this, tonight. This delightful experience got me to thinking about how many of our friends have come into our lives as a direct result of the things our kids did during their formative years: the school and extracurricular activities of our children expanded our circle of friends to include a large number of very special friends. Not only did our children bring joy into our lives in their own right, but they put us in contact with a much wider circle of friends than we otherwise would have had. Many of those friends we acquired through being involved with our children have been and continue to be a great blessing in our lives.

For those of you who have not had children, I understand there are many things to be worried about when making the choice to be nor not to be parents ... the expense and trouble of being a parent: childhood illnesses, sibling rivalries, smart-ass teenagers, whiney behavior, etc. I won't deny that being a parent carries with it a heavy burden of responsibility and asks of us some things that we love to gripe about with our colleagues in parenthood - but which people with no children can't possibly understand.

Nevertheless, in addition to the many wonderful moments that children offer to you that (in my experience) more than compensated for the challenges our children presented us ... they will give you the opportunity to develop relationships with other adults that can enrich your lives far beyond your expectations. I never knew that such important contacts might flow from the apparently simple choice to have children. I never imagined that my life would be so vastly blessed with new friends and relationships that have become profoundly important to us.

I owe a great debt of gratitude to my children ... both of them ... for everything they've added to my life. I'm only now beginning to appreciate how much I would have missed had we not chosen to bring them into the world. It was the right choice for us. I can't thank you enough, Chad and Heather.

It's a checkerboard world

Of late, I've been reading postings by people I know in various places around the Internet. I have this odd feeling we seem to live on different planets. A number of my friends are about as different from me in certain terms as it's possible to be. I consider myself to be a "liberal" in some ways and "conservative" in other ways - hence, I prefer not to pigeonhole myself.

I found the GW Bush years to be a time when I was ashamed to be an American - he was virtually the perfect antithesis of everything I believe in. Eight years under that smirking, arrogant sonofabitch was about all I could take.

But I don't find Barack Obama to be the light at the end of that tunnel. Contrary to the rantings of my right-wing friends, I think the new President has erred by compromising his liberal principles too many times, already. He concedes to the Christian Reconstructionist Party (the Republicans) and receives absolutely nothing in return - that's not compromise. It's capitulation.

Despite my friends' very evident paranoia over his "liberal fascist" policies, I believe he's not anywhere near liberal enough. He seems determined to pretend that our economy can actually recover to become what it was before the recent catastrophes, triggered by stock market crashes, and by the criminal mismanagement of the credit business by greedy capitalists who've devastated millions of people and barely received a slap on the wrist. If it becomes what it was before, it's only doomed to more criminal manipulation and the inevitable credit busts.

We continue to live in a dream world, where everyone seems blissfully unaware of how the price of energy is a sword of Damocles over our heads. We continue to fight a war for control for middle East oil. That war itself consumes vast quantities of oil every year, keeping warships, warplanes, and tanks in the fray, to say nothing of the American lives it consumes. We squander hundreds of billions on this war when we should be investing in alternative energy sources, doing something to develop a transportation infrastructure that doesn't rely on the automobile, and reducing our consumption of fossil fuel. How can the politicians continue to stumble down the same tired pathways, ignoring the problems that await us around the corner?

As our nation slides into scientific and technological illiteracy, we continue to become more and more convinced (as a nation) that religion offers a more meaningful understanding of biology, climate, astronomy, and geology than what science provides. We Americans have built our position as a superpower largely by being creators and innovators in science and engineering - but our national ethic seems to be turning its back on all that in favor of teaching our children to prefer religious dogma to pragmatic science.

I find it particularly disturbing that my right-wing friends seem to think that Obama is some sort of Anti-figure to the reign of the GWB Crime, Inc. admininstration, leading our nation to ruin. If he's leading our nation to ruin, it's because he's not moving our nation down pathways sufficiently different from those of his predecessor in the Oval Office! He hasn't pulled our military out of the Iraq fiasco. He hasn't pushed for hard controls on the abuses that led to the credit swap default fiasco. He hasn't lead us toward decreasing dependence on fossil fuels and toward support of alternative energy sources. He hasn't taken serious action to respond to the threat of global warming. He has yet to repeal the Patriot Act, which is the most serious threat to American civil liberties since WWII with its associated nullification of habeas corpus. He has yet to deal with the abuses of torture in the military. He just isn't doing what I believe he was elected to do.

My right-wing friends and I will never agree on any of the political and religious issues that divide us. We can only continue to be friends by agreeing not to talk about these points. The world is fractionating into a checkerboard, where it seems the alternatives are only black or white. You're either with me, or against me - to paraphrase Christ and GW Bush. Sad, sad, sad ...

A vulgar display of American horsepower

I recently (25-27 September 2009) attended the O'Reilly/Castrol Fall Nationals drag races at Ennis, TX with my friend, Al Moller. It had been quite some time since either of us had been to a professional-caliber drag racing event - we both came away wondering why we stayed away for so long. It was a fantastic experience, despite the heat and the burning sun we had to endure in the grandstands. We had terrific seats on the north side of the track, very close to the starting line, so we could see the launches right out of the hole. And we wandered about in the pits during breaks in the action, as well, seeing some of the racers up close and in person.

Drag racing is a truly American extreme sport. You can read about it at the National Hod Rod Association site. Its origins lie with the love affair Americans have with their cars and the natural competitive nature of Americans: who has the quickest car? Since street racing is dangerous, as well as illegal, and not recommended, the NHRA (in particular, its founder, the late Wally Parks) came up with an idea - to take the "hot rods" to a track where the racing could be done under safe conditions without danger to non-participants, to see who could cross the finish line first in a straight line race (rather than a roundy-round thing that goes on for an extended time). In a quarter mile, you could settle the issue in a few seconds, once and for all.

With time and typical American mechanical innovation and creativity, the sport evolved from heads-up, "run what ya brung" hot rods all mixed together into various classes of cars, with the ultimate classes being the top fuel dragsters and fuel "funny cars". These are the most extreme cars in motorsports, with large, purpose-built engines running on a mixture of nitromethane and methanol. Their sole purpose is to accelerate as fast as possible and in their current incarnation use 8000 horsepower engines in the lightest allowable car (there are rules that govern the details of what is a legal car to run, mostly seeking to provide some measure of safety). The engines are always on the ragged edge of blowing up under the strain.

Top fuel dragsters begin from a standing start and reach speeds approaching 300 mph in about 4 seconds flat (or less) over a distance of 1000 ft - the distance in the top fuel categories was reduced from 1320 to 1000 ft for safety purposes. When dragsters were first developed, they used engines originally built for street vehicles, but were modified by the racers in various ways to provide more horspower. The cars gradually became lighter and lighter as the technology of dragsters evolved, even as the engines increased in power - the result? More and more speed, shorter and shorter elapsed times (ETs) to get down the track. In today's world, the specially-built drag racing engines have their origins in Mopar hemispherical head designs dating from the 1950s, but the real top fuel engines today are engineered and built from the start to be racing engines. They're no longer modified regular car engines. They're a V-8 design, producing around 1000 horsepower per cylinder! For comparison purposes, the typical passenger car engine produces about 125 horsepower from 4 or 6 cylinders.

Some simple calculations show that going from 0 to 300 mph in 4 seconds represents an average acceleration over that 1000 ft distance of around 3.5 x the force of gravity (g). At the start, the cars accelerate at around 6 x g - the acceleration decreases with time down the track because of the increasing air drag on the vehicle (which goes up as vehicle's speed increases). When a top fuel dragster launches from the starting line (the "hole"), the engine is producing a deafening bellow at a sound level of about 120 decibels - enough to damage your ears. Therefore, the racers and most spectators either cover their ears or wear earplugs. But the sound isn't limited to what you can hear - the sound can be felt in your whole body as the car goes by. When it passes, you can smell the nitromethane ("nitro") fumes in the air - a sweet, acrid smell that's unmistakable for anything else. I love the smell of nitro in the morning - it smells like ... victory! (my apologies to Robert Duvall and Apocalypse Now)

This sport is as uniquely American as jazz, the blues, apple pie, chili, tobacco, potatoes, musicals, and tomatoes. It's caught on in England and Australia to some extent, but it's not popular in continental Europe or Asia, which are homes to sophisticated motorsports fans. Unlike Formula-1 or sports car racing, drag racing is brutally simple: put the most horsepower you can into the lightest possible car allowed by the rules, race it down a straight line for a quarter mile (1320 ft or about 2 city blocks) - or 1000 ft - and see who crosses the finish line first. The race is decided in a few seconds. You can see the entire race - start to finish - from your seat in the stands. And one race follows the other in rapid succession, as hundreds of hopefuls try to qualify for and survive the eliminations to win a championship in their class.

What you see on TV is but a pale imitation of the sights, sounds, and smells of the actual experience. If you ever go see a real NHRA drag race, you'll likely either love it or hate it. A friend we met for the first time at this year's races took his father to the Fall Nationals last year. His father's reaction? "It's a vulgar display of American horsepower." Al and I agreed with our new friend - yes, that's true, and the more vulgar, the better!

For myself, I think my love affair with drag racing likely is connected to my love affair with supercells and tornadoes (the most extreme storms on the planet!). The beginning of my interest in drag racing was due to my cousins in Illinois, who were older than I and into hot rodding and drag racing. Since my cousins were my role models of the time, I followed their interests and got hooked on drag racing myself. I saw my first big-time, professional drag racing event at the World Series of Drag Racing at Cordova, Illinois, sometime in the early 1960s (I think, when I was in high school). And my best friend from high school, Tom Schifler, and I became regulars at Cordova for a while - we even went to the US Nationals in Indianapolis a couple of times in the late 1960s.

My first interest began earlier though, in the late 1950s, when "Big Daddy" Don Garlits was bursting onto the drag racing scene. Don Garlits became a favorite of mine (like John Force is today). I looked forward to seeing him race and if Garlits showed up, I was really pleased. I liked the brute force of drag racing and the technical side, as well. I liked the creativity and ingenuity of the racers in all the classes, especially in the "sportsman" and "stock" classes.

I learned a lot about automotive engines without ever becoming a mechanic. My interest in the sport has suffered from other, higher priorities at times, but has never been forgotten. This year's event may get me back to attending more regularly. Al and I are already planning to be back in Ennis for next year's event! Maybe we'll see you there?

Global Warming and Evolution as Political and Religious Topics

In my last post about civil discourse, I talked about having an open mind and its importance to the character of a discussion/argument. When it comes to science, however, there are some limits on what an open mind must consider as pertinent. In particular, arguments predicated on someone's beliefs rather than on evidence or logic is beyond the boundaries of what I consider to be worthy of consideration in the discussion.

For example, many people I know, including some folks who wear the label "meteorologist" find it easy to discard the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and say they just don't buy into the notion that humans are responsible for a significant part of the observed increase in global temperature. [I'm not going to touch on the notions of those who go still further, to deny that the global temperature is rising - they're already well beyond the pale of science.] The IPCC report was created by a large number of specialists in climate research and the content of that report contained essentially no minority opinions because they were more or less unanimous regarding the main conclusion that the evidence supports the hypothesis that anthropogenic climate change is real and significant. Most of the disbelievers like to point out that not all climate change scientists agree on this point. Surprise, surprise! There are very few aspects of science to which all scientists agree. So there are some scientists out there who don't accept the consensus view of the IPCC report. On that basis, the disbelievers among the folks I know are willing to discredit the consensus without actually understanding the scientific issues. I'm a meteorologist, but I'm not a global climate change researcher. I believe it would be rather arrogant for me to reject that consensus simply because I heard of some scientists who don't believe in that consensus or because it violates my personal beliefs.

What gives those who are not global climate change scientists the idea that they can reject the consensus without having any direct evidence of their own? That idea, in my opinion, stems from the fact that global climate change has been transformed into a political issue. In politics, one opinion is pretty much at the same level as any other. You can embrace or reject political opinions at will and you need not muster a shred of evidence or logic to support that stance. Your beliefs are sufficient. In science, some interpretations are at a higher level than others because they're based on stronger evidence and/or more compelling logic. Scientific issues aren't decided on rhetoric alone. Not all scientific opinions are equal.

Why has global climate change become politicized? Because if we are to respond to the potential threats posed by global warming, it will have considerable economic and social impact! Mitigation of anthropogenic climate change requires decisions to be made in the political sphere. The people in a democratic nation would have to show their support for any decision to be made by electing politicians they believe would vote on those political issues the way the voters want. The majority rules, so the politicians want to read the pulse of the voters to know in which camp to throw their support. After all, the primary motive for a politician is to get into and stay in public office. Anything else is optional, at best.

Which way should the citizens lean on a politicized scientific issue? Is consensus science always right? No, of course not, but would it be sensible to base a decision that has far-reaching societal impact on the opinions of some maverick scientist well outside of the consensus? Only if that maverick was correct. But how does a non-participant in the science know who's right and who's wrong? The IPCC consensus has emerged from the best evidence that a large cross-section of the world's climate change scientists can muster. The IPCC was formed with the explicit purpose of informing political decision-makers which way to lean on the issue of anthropogenic climate change. Some politicians don't like the IPCC consensus because it threatens their political agenda.

Does it make sense to reject that consensus without knowing much of anything about the global climate change science that has formed that consensus? Most voters won't ever be able to make informed decisions about most scientific issues because most voters aren't specialists in those scientific areas. Does it make any sense, then, to decide to reject the IPCC consensus on the basis of what amounts to political opinions? I think not. Although I know more about meteorology than most voters, I have no evidence of my own to deny the validity of the IPCC report. I know some of the participants and I trust their science. That trust doesn't make them infallible, but it's not based on a personal whim, either. I don't comprehend how people who know less than I about atmospheric science can take a position opposed to that consensus, except because of either a purely political opinion, or an innate mistrust of any authority (so a maverick appeals to them despite having no basis for deciding the validity of that maverick viewpoint).

Note that most of meteorological debate on scientific issues stays within the scientific community. There's no political fall-out from the ongoing argument about using vertical wind shear or storm-relative helicity to understand supercells and tornadoes. So the media aren't covering that topic, and the political parties haven't got a shear versus helicity plank in their platforms. It's not something that can or should be settled in the media. The argument goes on between the advocates without any press conferences, intergovernmental panels, etc. The issue eventually may be settled in some fashion but those participating in the argument won't be appearing in media interviews to attack their scientific colleagues, or to respond to attacks in the media by their colleagues. In other words, without the attention of the media and the politicians, science will go on as usual - issues will be decided on the basis of evidence and logic, not opinion. The consensus isn't dogma - it changes all the time, but on a rational basis - not according to personal whims and beliefs.

It's a real shame that societally important scientific issues apparently can't be decided in the proper way - I refuse to participate in an argument where my opponent in the discussion has a closed mind about the inadmissability of his/her beliefs in the discourse.

It's much the same about the apparently widespread belief in the religious dogma about a supernatural origin for life. It's not an open mind that rejects the position of consensus science regarding the overwhelming evidence in favor of evolution as opposed to religious creationism. Rather, it's a thoroughly closed mind - closed to the logic and evidence that supports evolutionary biology. Supernatural explanations can have no place in science regardless of their possible validity in other magisteria. Someone who embraces the notion that supernatural causes are a scientifically valid "explanation" for life is dogmatic in the extreme.

Why is there creationist biology, but no theist severe storms meteorology? Because the sacred texts of the world's deist religions have virtually nothing to say about storm dynamics! If these sacred texts offered an extensive description of how their deity creates tornadoes, then perhaps we'd be having theists calling for alternative explanations in scientific textbooks, and radical theists disrupting school board meetings to impose creationist tornadogenesis theory in schools. Since no such text appears, the theists feel no threat to their beliefs from severe storm science.

Anyone who believes in their religious version of creation in preference to evolutionary biological science is outside the domain of a reasonable discourse. Science rejects dogma in favor of evidence and logic. If you dispute scientific consensus, then you must present extraordinarily good evidence to support such an argument. If you have none of your own, then you really have nothing to offer in a rational discourse. I don't have to open my mind to your nonscientific belief system. My mind isn't closed to rational argument, but you have nothing of the sort to present. Further discourse is impossible, and the best we can hope to do is to agree to disagree.

And just what is civil discourse?

The notion of what constitutes "civil discourse" is certainly arguable. I'm offering the following thoughts on the topic.

1. For a discourse to have value, both members must have open minds. If one member in a conversation has a closed mind regarding the topic, then it's quite likely that the course of the conversation will slide into incivility. What constitutes an open mind can be debated, as well, naturally. Generally speaking, I think having an open mind means a willingness to be convinced by careful logical arguments and/or evidence. A closed mind is one unwilling to consider any possibility, however remote, of changing one's position on a subject.

Most debates over religion or politics include at least one closed mind, and often two (or more). These aren't often civil discourse - they simply represent opposing position statements. You can continue to offer position statements back and forth indefinitely, and that might be a civil discourse of a sort. Without anyone being willing to consider changing their minds, it's at best an information exchange. For the most part, such conversations descend well outside the range of civil discourse.

For the most part, I dislike such conversations intensely and avoid them as much as possible.

2. A civil discourse avoids using provocative language, which inevitably obscures the point being made. Imagine a conversation you're having with an acquaintance on some topic. You've just voiced an opinion and the response is "You piece of shit! You're an absolutely stupid fucking asshole for thinking that!" You might, of course, actually be a stupid fucking asshole (or not - but that's not the point, is it?), but I doubt if the conversation's going to remain on point from that instant on. Your likely response is either to (a) terminate the conversation immediately or (b) come back in kind, with verbal guns blazing.

Now, rewind the tape, and consider your reaction to the following response. "That's an interesting viewpoint, but have you considered what it might look like from a different perspective?" I hope it's clear from this gedanken experiment that it's a rule of civil conversation that foul language, insults, name-calling, and such simply precludes the possibility of civil discourse.

Another variation: "That's an interesting goddamned viewpoint, but have you fucking considered what it might look like from a different perspective?" Same theme, but a very different sort of reaction is likely.

This is not about being "politically correct" (hereafter, PC) at all! Being PC is to use euphemisms and deliberately not using certain words to avoid offending someone. I was recently watching a re-run of "Blazing Saddles" on a commercial station, and the word "nigger" had been blanked out of the soundtrack wherever it was used. This PC version of "Blazing Saddles" was a grotesque mockery of the original movie - the excision of the "N-word" completely missed the whole point of the story, which was done in a comical mode but had some deeper content than farts around a campfire.

But - as another gedanken experiment - suppose I'm having a discussion with a black man and at some point, I call him a nigger. Yes, I know blacks call each other niggers all the time. Why can't I? Well, of course, no one can tell me what I can or can't do, but one of the nearly inevitable consequences of injecting that word into what had been a civil discourse between a white man and a black man is that it almost certainly changes the whole nature of the conversation. Is it reasonable that black folks can use that word among themselves and I can't? No. Of course not - it's stupid, and constitutes a form of racism. In the Army, of all places, I had a friend who was a black man - he called me a honky and I called him a nigger and we got along just fine. We chose not to be offended by mere words.

But the rules of civil discourse generally preclude using provocative words - not because of some slavish adherence to the rules of PCness, not because of some concern for being offensive (you don't need provocative language to offend someone, of course), but simply because it immediately throws the conversation off point. I'm not particularly worried about offending people. I've done it many times simply by being honest - without cursing, name-calling, or vulgarity. If someone wants to be offended, I can't prevent that. But if the goal is an exchange of ideas in order to convince the other party to think seriously about your point of view, you simply can't descend into language you know is likely to be offensive. It's not an arbitrary rule imposed by some authority figure - it's a fact of life.

Sometimes, people choose to become offended by something you say that has no obvious offensive connotation. They come back at you with invective and name-calling. Not much point to continuing such discourse, unless you want to try to talk them down off their high horse.

Most of us know most the words that are likely to offend. George Carlin enjoyed using them for their shock effect (so do I, occasionally) and even developed a famous list of 7 such words that couldn't be used on television:

• Shit
• Piss
• Fuck
• Cunt
• Cocksucker
• Motherfucker
• Tits

[Curious, by the way, that shit is #1 and piss is #2 - I always thought it was the other way around] Without straining oneself, I'm sure that this list could be expanded upon considerably, to include, inter alia, a whole litany of racial epithets and slurs: spick, nigger, wop, kike, chink, gook, etc.; as well as slang names for body parts: dick, pussy, asshole, etc.; and various forms of sexual topics: faggot, blowjob, jerking off, rim job, buttfuck, etc.

Words are just words. We probably shouldn't be offended by them, ever, but most of us are, at least occasionally. The fact is that when you use such language, the response is almost inevitably to shift the discourse away from civility. Using them can become a signal to your partner(s) in the conversation that you're not really interested in changing their minds or having a civil conversation. You likely just want to vent your contempt or impress them with your willingness to defy convention. It's an in-your-face way to assert your position on some topic. You're free to do that as much as you wish, naturally, but don't be surprised or offended that someone responds in a way that signals their disrespect for your part in the discourse.

3. If you want your opinion to be respected, you must respect the opinion of other participants in a civil discourse. Rewind the tape once again in my gedanken experiment - now imagine a response to voicing your opinion about something to be "That opinion simply illustrates that your stupidity is monumental." Note that no typical curse words are involved. [And it's a logical possibility is that you are monumentally stupid. Or, as is often the case, it might be that the speaker is confusing ignorance for stupidity.] This is manifestly a disrespectful statement, nevertheless. I've voiced comparable statements in conversations with friends and acquaintances, but only in two quite different circumstances - (i) in jest, or (ii) in absolute sincerity when I have, in fact, lost respect for the opinion of the other party in the conversation. At that point, I know the conversation is pointless and I have no wish to carry on with it.

4. About the so-called Golden Rule: some recent conversations have suggested to me that this isn't the cure-all I once thought it to be. In its basic form, it says one should treat others as one wishes to be treated. This sounds all well and good, but what if I'm a masochist, and I want others to beat me up? Does that mean I'm obligated by the Golden Rule to reciprocate and beat on everyone? I'm not really allowed to impose my wishes on anyone with the expectation that they'll respond the way I want. People are notoriously different in their responses within a conversation. In general, rather than imposing my wishes on them, I'm going to take the position that how I treat you isn't necessarily how I wish to be treated, nor is it simply a response to the way you treat me ("tit for tat"). Rather, when I engage in discourse, I enjoy having a bit of fun, and I thrive on having people challenge me. So long as the conversation is stimulating, I want to continue.

I'm not necessarily hoping to change your mind, although I hope to see at least some evidence that I might be able to do so. We can agree to disagree in many cases, but what I want to obtain from a conversation is: stimulation for additional thought, new insight, new information, new points of view I hadn't considered, new ideas. If you choose to ignore or dismiss everything I say without offering any coherent argument, then further conversation is pointless, and I'm going to terminate it, if you haven't. Should you choose to lace your conversation with pointlessly provocative words all the time, I can handle it, but it's a distraction I could do without, for the most part. It's not that I'm offended by it - it's just an annoyance if it dominates the discourse. The occasional expletive here and there isn't any problem for me - only when the talk reminds me of conversations in a military barracks does it become an issue for me.

So you want me to spoon feed you?

Today, in the midst of a conversation with a colleague who shall remain nameless, I had a realization. We were discussing a topic we had talked about a few days ago. In that previous conversation, I'd indicated that this colleague could learn a lot more about what I was doing by reading the publications I'd co-authored on the topic and by reviewing the essays on my Webpage. When I asked him today if he'd read those papers, he said he hadn't. He then wanted the URL to my website, so I asked him if he'd bookmarked it. "Yes, " he said, "but I have so many bookmarks I can't find anything." Apparently, going to read about my latest research isn't a continuing high priority. I typed in the URL for him, and even showed him the precise locations of the content I'd wanted him to review.

Years ago, I became excited about the enormous potential for information sharing represented by the Internet and the World-Wide-Web. Because of that excitement, I've taken some considerable pains to put out as much information about my work and my opinions about various topics on the Web. Maintaining my websites is not a trivial task, but I felt that providing my colleagues with easy access to my work was distinctly worthwhile.

Instead, it seems, that only a few people ever bother to take advantage of the by-now considerable amount of information that resides on my website. "Oh, I can't possibly keep up with all the stuff you put out there." is a common refrain. "Yeah, I went there about 6 months ago but haven't been back." is another. "I can't find anything there!" is another complaint. My experience today has been repeated many times in the last several years with others - it's not just the one person. Oh, no.

At times, and today was one of those times, I get frustrated with the apparent lack of interest in the content I've worked hard (to say nothing of time the time spent) to make available. It seems that making it easier to access has encouraged a kind of laziness, rather than stimulating the process of searching for information. There's a host of Web tools for assisting in that search, but I find that many people seem to want it handed to them on a silver platter. "Oh, can't you just email me the PDF?" So you want me to spoon feed you? Why am I going to the trouble to make things available on my Website, when so few seem willing to search it for content that's of potential interest to them?

Hopefully, I'll feel better tomorrow, but this is a continuing aggravation ...

America's national shame ...

My friend Max, a friend I met in Vietnam with whom I have stayed in touch ever since, brought this news story to my attention. Former Army Lt. William Calley (who took the fall for the My Lai massacre in Vietnam 40 years ago) made a public apology on 21 August of this year for his actions in that event, admitting he feels considerable remorse for what happened. This is a bit late, of course, but it's to his credit that he's done so. As the saying goes, better late than never. Lt. Calley was the sole person prosecuted for this crime against humanity. He was a scapegoat for the crime, which was clearly a reflection of the horrors of war. No such act can ever be considered the sole responsibility of one man.

Long after the war, I thought long and hard about my experiences in Vietnam. I was blessed with a time and duty station where I was exposed to none of the ugliness that combat troops participating in field operations had to deal with. Although I cannot condone the unlawful actions of my brothers-in-arms, I realized it wasn't possible for me to judge them. Had I been in their boots, what would I have done had I been there at My Lai? It's comforting for me to think I would have resisted shooting unarmed civilians ... but I have to accept that I have no evidence to believe I would have done anything different from what my fellow American soldiers did at My Lai.

What do you think you would have done, had you been there? How can you know the answer? I do know that if you haven't been there and experienced what the soldiers in that situation experienced, you also have no right to judge them.

They, like Lt. Calley, have to live with their choices on that day. Part of the agony of returning combat soldiers is to deal with the horrors that combat brought to them. People back home can't ever truly understand what it was like and so it's mostly pointless even to try. I was in Vietnam, and saw some part of the realities of that war, but by not being in combat, I can't ever truly understand what they experienced. So the returning combat veteran tends to keep it inside because it's obvious that friends and family who weren't there are not going to understand. But kept inside, these experiences can fester, and may become a cancer on the veteran's soul. I never had to deal with that, thank my lucky stars. But I know enough to have some appreciation for what my fellow soldiers may have gone through.

My government "asked" me to participate in that terrible war. I went, and I did what was asked of me, however reluctantly. Since it never involved shooting at another human being, and no one ever shot at me, I have no horrible memories or nightmares with which to try to cope. Lt. Calley, 40 years on, has admitted he was wrong and apologized for his misdeeds. When will our government do the same for its misdeeds during that time? William Calley is far from the only person responsible for war crimes during our long national disaster in Vietnam. When will our government face up to its responsibilities for that terrible time of our history? When will our government apologize to Vietnam, to the American public, and to the American war fighters for their actions in leading us into and continuing that awful, unjust war? If William Calley has the courage, however long after the event, to feel remorse and apologize for his actions, why can't our government show similar courage by owning up to its share of the responsibility for what happened in My Lai (and elsewhere during that long national agony)? Why should William Calley remain the lone repository of our national disgrace?

Many Americans, including me, are upset that the Japanese have never apologized for their war crimes during WWII, arguably with considerable justification. But if our own government is unwilling to admit its culpability in the horrors we perpetrated in Vietnam, can our government be justified in expecting Japan to own up to the war crimes it perpetrated in WWII?