I used to cringe every time a couple referred to their dogs as "our children." I had small children at the time, and I knew the difference.
When our children grew older and moved out of the house, we got a dog. I didn't have anything against dogs. I grew up with dogs, which were never allowed in the house. Dogs were my playmates on the 26 acres of rural land where my parents had moved to in 1940. I loved our dogs, but they never went inside and probably never had a bath or a flea treatment. Only once can I recall taking a dog to the vet, and that was a stray Chihuahua whose hair was falling out.
My relationship with dogs was not hands-off. I wrestled with dogs, ran with dogs, cuddled with dogs and loved those dogs. But even then, I knew they were not my children — or my parents' children (they already had five bipedal children).
Nevertheless, the past three nights, without a child in the house, I felt like I was caring for infants again. Each night, I was awakened between midnight and 1 a.m. to the sound of a bark or a scratching on the hardwood floor accompanied by peals of thunder or the roar of heavy rain. Those sounds drove our old rescue dog (of indeterminate age) into panting anxiety as he searched for the source of the noise, sought safety from it or tried to protect us from it — who knows what he was thinking?
What worried me more than his anxiety was his "solution" to the problem — he would urinate on the dining room floor, apparently in the belief that would make the annoyance stop, and someone would have to clean up the pungent puddle.
So for three mornings in a a row, I got up from a comfortable bed, went downstairs (the old dog can no longer climb the stairs), opened the back door so he could urinate in a better place, let him back in and spent an hour or two trying to calm him down so he'd go back to sleep and, hence, I could go back to sleep.
Sometime during those nightly sojourns it occurred to me that I had been through that sort of thing before. It was 40 or more years ago, but the memories are sharp. An infant's cry or a toddler's frightened shriek would arouse us from our own sleep, and we'd spend an hour or so calming down our child and getting him/her back to sleep so that we could sleep too. My wife was usually more attuned to babies' crying sounds, so she was usually the "first responder" in these frequent incidents.
My recent care-giving for our dog reminded me of those long-ago nights. In 40 years, we have graduated from a distraught, crying baby to a distraught, anxious dog. I could pick up our babies and cuddle them, whispering softly to calm them, but all I can do with the dog is pet him and recommend good spots to go to sleep. The last two nights, I have grabbed a book I had been reading, turned on a light and sat on the stairs within reach of the dog's ears and read for as long as it took for him to calm down and close his eyes.
Although my recent experiences have been similar to those sleepless nights many years ago, I'm still not going to call our dog our "child." Like a child, a dog can be expensive, but the child is exponentially more expensive. And, I would add, more rewarding, loving, stimulating, caring, satisfying.
So I'm not my dog's "daddy," as some pet owners would say, but he does get me out of bed in the middle of the night, just as our children did.
It's not often that the word "treason" is spoken in U.S. political conversations, but it happened yesterday in response to President Donald Trump's boot-licking press conference with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Trump's admiration and adulation of Putin is well known. He thinks the guy is a great leader and a swell friend. Others, including the intelligence agencies and most public officials of western democracies, think he's a corrupt, murderous, empire-seeking, authoritarian, violent dictator focused on destroying western democracy and re-establishing the old Soviet empire, for which he used to toil.
Asked point-blank whether he believed the U.S. intelligence agencies, which all agree that Russia, at the direction of Putin, attempted to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Trump chose his best buddy Putin, who assured him the U.S. intelligence community was mistaken. It's his word against theirs. Who you gonna trust?
That exchange, and Putin's admission that, yes, he wanted Trump to win the 2016 presidential election, led some people to use the T-word: Treason. Putin said he was pulling for Trump because he wanted a better relationship with Russia. That ignores the widely publicized effort of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to "reset" relations with Russia to a more peaceful, cooperative relationship. Putin's government immediately rejected that overture. Both 2016 candidates claimed to want better relations with Russia.
Is "treason" or "treasonous" justified? The 115th chapter of 18 U.S. Code defines treason this way: "Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them
or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the
United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death,
or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this
title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any
office under the United States." It would be up to a court (or Congress, in the case of impeachment) to decide whether Trump's obsequious cozying up to Putin amounts to adhering to enemies or giving aid and comfort to enemies. (Note that actress Jane Fonda was accused of treason during the Vietnam War for her siding with North Vietnam, but nothing ever came of it.)
In Trump's case, the issue is not so much whether he was guilty of treason but whether anything can be done about it. The candidate who bragged that he could shoot someone dead in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue and not lose any support will be difficult to impeach or convict of treason. Most pollsters find Trump has a pretty solid base of 40% or so unflinching supporters. An impeachment trial would send that base into hysterics.
Here's a worst-case scenario of how an impeachment effort might unfold: An impeachment resolution is introduced in the House of Representatives. Committee hearings reveal numerous lies told by the president, numerous contacts between his campaign and Russians, money laundering schemes involving Trump and Russian oligarchs, secret deals in Syria and Crimea to leave Russia in charge, continued Russian efforts, through Trump, to break up NATO and the European Union. The committee passes the impeachment resolution, based on the president giving "aid and comfort" to enemies, but it fails on the House floor as Trump goes on tirade after tirade complaining about conspiracies against him, the "deep state" influence, the FBI, CIA and other institutions that have accused him of wrongdoing.
The mostly party-line vote in the House ends impeachment proceedings, but Trump is not through. Most members of Congress are afraid of crossing him. In retaliation for the impeachment hearings, he lends his heavy weight and unsettled anger to the effort for a Constitutional Convention. Such a convention (never held since the Constitution was adopted in 1787) has been a darling of right-wing groups for years, with an aim of banning abortion, requiring a balanced federal budget, or limiting federal powers.
The Constitution (Article V) provides that two-thirds of the states may call for a convention to adopt amendments. There is no limit on the topic of amendments, which could, conceivably, rewrite the entire Constitution. Such a convention could, for example, abolish Congress, eliminate federal courts, including the Supreme Court, and give the president absolute power to pass laws, interpret laws, enforce laws and eliminate elections at the president's will.
Treason is a "high crime," but its invocation will be meaningless unless a substantial majority of Americans agree that the offense has been committed.
I've been reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals" about the selection of President Lincoln's Cabinet and the brilliance Lincoln displayed in bravely selecting his rivals for the Republican nomination to fill his Cabinet. This excellent, readable history has taught me much about Lincoln and the larger-than-life personalities who made up his Cabinet.
Many things about the rough-and-tumble fighting for the presidential nomination and the whole political system of the mid-1800s, when two political parties (Whigs and Know Nothings) expired and a new party (Republicans) was formed, are similar to today's sharp-edged politics. The difference is that men and women of the 19th century were unfailingly polite, self-effacing, deferential, and considerate. (Of course, sometimes they took grave offense and fought duels.) Americans of 150 years ago were also far better writers and more articulate than today's Americans. They wrote formal letters. They took the time to explain their positions in calm, rational language. There were no Twitter outbursts, no uncomfortable veiled insults in candidate debates, and no accusations of dishonesty or avarice among political rivals.
By 19th century standards, today's Americans are coarse, unsympathetic, uncaring, angry, dismissive of other views, dishonest in describing viewpoints they disagree with, and willing to upend government institutions and the entire political system in order to win a few political points.
President Trump's behavior on his recent European trip would have appalled his forebears of 150 years ago. Calling out allies over their payments to NATO, casting doubt on long-established, essential institutions, confronting other leaders in a belligerent way, publicly telling an Ally's head of state that she is doing her job all wrong, threatening trade restrictions on nations whose leaders disagree with him, cozying up to the leader of an autocratic, expansive traditional enemy are exactly the opposite of 19th century diplomacy and rectitude.
Diplomatic formality has been in decline for decades, but Trump's approach has sent the gradual decline spiraling into a black hole. Sadly, once good manners are trampled, they are nearly impossible to recover. The belligerent appeals to an angry voter base will almost certainly survive Trump's departure from the political spotlight, whenever that might be. Even without Trump, America in the next decade will be meaner, less sympathetic, less considerate, less reasoned, less decent than before.
I don't look forward to future elections or legislating.
Humans were not made, I'm convinced, for frequent, rapid travel, but it's what most of us do on a regular basis.
Most people are familiar with "jet lag," the difficulty one's brain and body have in adjusting to changes in time zones. You might be in Hawaii or France, but your body and brain are still on Eastern Standard Time. The "Jet Age" (a term that seems quaint more than a half century since it was coined) is not the only cause for human problems with travel.
I recently returned from four days and nights in the North Carolina mountains. I love the mountains and take vacations and short trips there regularly, but I realized as I returned home (some 300 miles away from our mountain rental) that I was a little discombobulated. I had spent four days getting accustomed to the layout of the rental house, the light switches, the path to the bathroom and the kitchen, the deck with the long view of mountain peaks, the furniture, the companions (my wife, daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren) with whom I shared that space. I had to shake my head briskly to remind myself that I was no longer in that mountain cottage but back in the eastern North Carolina home where I've lived for 15 years.
Adjusting and readjusting is no crisis, but it does affect one's equilibrium and sense of place. On trips, we get accustomed to going out to eat more frequently than we do at home. There is no pressure to clean the house or do yard work when you're hundreds of miles away in a rental house that belongs to someone else. Going home is a return to reality, a reality we had ignored for several days. Getting back onto the reality path takes a little adjusting.
Air travel has its own set of adjustments to be made, from packing to meet the stringent TSA security requirements to sitting for hours in a tightly packed seat in an aluminum tube filled with strangers. But car travel affects one's body and mind, too.
There are few things more exhausting than driving for several hours in heavy traffic at 60 or 70 mph. The tension builds as cars and trucks jam the travel lanes, and, as driver, you are required to pay close attention to your speed, the vehicles on your left and right, as well as far ahead of you. You also have to be cognizant of your next stop or your next turn. When you're going 70 mph (103 feet per second!), you need advance warning of maneuvers that need to be made to reach your destination. All of this effort and tension is draining on the driver's mind and body.
If your itinerary includes several overnight stops over a several-day period, expect all the roads, all the restaurants and all the motels to run together into a confusing soup of flavors, sights and places.
Tension and stress limit the endurance of drivers. Long-haul truckers have regulatory limits on the number of hours they can drive. I have my own limits. I'm good for about four hours on the highway; then, I'm ready for a rest. I might make it five hours if I have to, but when we plan long trips, we try to break up the trip into digestible four-hour (or less) portions.
These portions do not eliminate travel's discombobulation and need for solid rest, but it does make the long-distance travel our prehistoric ancestors were never designed for more achievable.
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