When Reality Knocks

Greetings folks Steve here. I don’t normally post other peopel’s things, but this was just too good not to pass on. For all you Law And Order fans.

Hello all, Henry here. I saw recently on TV Heather Mills McCartney had been giving Paul the gears. According to The Associated Press out of NY she:

“Continues her attack on Paul McCartney and the tabloid press for not stopping articles that she says have resulted in death threats against her.

‘All I can say is when we first split, I said to Paul, ‘I’m going to be crucified…you know why we split. You know the truth. They don’t need to know the details, but you need to stand up and say, `I’m responsible for the breakdown of this marriage.’”

How bizarre. It is not his fault. I know nothing personal about either one of them, but unless he is seriously mentally ill, abusive or is addicted to something terrible, it is not his fault. It takes two people to make a marriage work, or fail.

Generally speaking it takes two people to make a marriage work and two people to make a marriage fail. I remember a wedding of a young couple who promised each other that they would stay married as long “as their love did last.”

This is a variation of that silly movie “Love Story” where we are told that
“Love is never having to say you’re sorry.” On the contrary folks, love is often having to have to say you are sorry. Love is not some kind of static thing like the front step. Love is an emotion and people need to be willing to work at it to make love last.

This connects in to the modern fantasy that living together is the same as marriage. It isn’t even close. The old marriage ceremony that I used to use ran: “I, Whoever, take thee, Whatsherface, to be my lawfully wedded wife/husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until death us do part.”

You don’t commit to any of this if you can go out the door at the first disagreement, or the first conflict in plans, or conflicting visions of the future. Marriage works because we are committed to grow up, to grow in this relationship.

When I was a boy on the farm I would harness a team of horses together and they worked side by side for the rest of the day. Often when the load was heavy for one horse, because of the nature of the harness the other would take the load. They supported each other through the day.

Marriage is no different. We are entering into a harness together and need not to bail out but to support each other during the hard times. It is a big step to go from living with someone to committing oneself in marriage.

Living together may help us discover that this person is mentally ill, a psychopath, abusive, or addicted, and those discoveries are not to be sneezed at. If the person has a problem like that that they are unwilling or unable to fix, the other person needs to get out while they still can. But this first experience of a person is only the first step into a relationship which may be marriage.

We fall in love with someone because they are magical. They are the magical other. They open doors for us that we didn’t know existed. Then of course when we live with them we try to change them so they will be more like us.

What we need to do is discover what our personality type is and that of our partner. It takes years to finally understand all the dimensions of these differences. This is part of our journey together. It is not always smooth, but can usually if not always be creative and enriching.

People make a serious mistake about the nature of love and marriage if they confuse living together with marriage or are determined that with the first friction in the relationship, they are out of there.

Heath Ledger, April 4, 1979 – January 22, 2008

Hello folks, Henry here. We have turned marriage into “The Brides Day.” By that we mean that on this day everything will be perfect. All the little details which go into making a large social occasion work smoothly are looked after, the groom is handsome, and the bride beyond beautiful in her new dress which she had to go to another city to purchase. All the stores had locally were rags. It is an incredible number of expectations, reinforced by bridal magazines and excitable friends. All we need is a little bit of magic. Sorry to burst anyone’s bubble, but something almost always goes off the rails and my experience has been that that is the part of the wedding that you remember years afterwards with a chuckle. Having said all this, I don’t know what to say about the wedding announced in this morning’s paper.

Datelined New Delhi the paper announces: “A man in southern India married a female dog in a traditional Hindu ceremony as an attempt to atone for stoning two other dogs to death…. After the stoning he became paralyzed in his hands and legs and lost hearing in one ear. An astrologer said the wedding was the only way he could cure the malaises. The paper did not say if his situation had improved.”

Notice the western cynicism in the last line of the quote. India has some great spiritual giants functioning as leaders in their communities. I question if this man’s astrologer is one of these.

The reason this sounds strange to our western ears is I think because we do not consciously believe in magic. We think that went out with the Middle Ages, yet we can have great healing faith in MRI’S, scans, injections of all kinds, our medical personnel, hospitals, and our western medical scientific industry. Our magic is simply of a different kind. So we can look down our noses at people who embrace a more “primitive” magic than ours. For myself I would like to know how he made out – if the magic worked for him.

Happy New Year, Henry here, hoping everybody had a great Christmas, New Years and so on.

Retirement is supposed to be easy and stress free. Any large financial institution worth its salt advertises non-stop that if you invest with them, embrace their trading platform and follow their advice, then you can retire happily and worry free.

This is a lovely image, often followed up with gorgeous pictures of older people relaxing on some tropical island. It is lovely, but for many it is a pack of lies. As someone who is doing their own investing, it is clear to me that those huge financial institutions are not playing square with people, ordinary people like us.

The latest clipping I cut from the paper is datelined NY. It tells us what we all know by now that Charles Prince has been let go as the executive officer of Citygroup. Only a week before Stanley O’Neal was forced out at Merrill Lynch and Co.

You may well ask what has that to do with me. It has a lot to do with all of us, because these executives have had to announce several billion dollars in write downs over the past few weeks. Since they departed, a half a dozen other huge financial institutions have had to make similar announcements. Estimates differ but I have heard that the write downs will total to from one to two trillion dollars. That is a lot of cash in anybody’s book!

So what specifically does this have to do with you and I? What it has to do with us is that many of the funds, bonds and other financial instruments in which our retirement money is housed are compromised, and no body knows by how much. And with the incredible volatility in the stock market, apparently largely brought on by these same banks, nobody really knows how much your retirement funds have shrunk or where they will end up. Some people, thankfully not myself, those poor folks who lost millions in the collapse of Enron.

I guess the best one can say about you and your investments is: “May the Force be with you.”

Hello all Henry here. I grew up with guns. My father gave me my first one when I was about 12 years old. I was the most feared hunter of posts, trees and the odd crow bothering our corn. Guns were a part of life for everyone. Care with guns was essential if no one was going to get hurt…but people do strange things.

The Globe And Mail recently had a brief article in which we are told that in Big Surprise Texas (really), a very big surprise awaited a Texan.

“An unnamed man working at an insurance company shot himself in both legs when his gun accidentally went off. The local police chief told the Star-Telegram the man ‘just felt the need to carry it in the office and hadn’t brought the handgun for any particular purpose.’ The bullet passed through the man’s left leg and then his right leg and through the corner of a bookcase before lodging in the wall of a cubicle occupied by a startled female co-worker.”

A man shot himself. In both legs. In an office. Well, now he can testify to the importance of insurance. Now do guns kill people or do people kill people? I think this story shows that the long and the short of it is that some people should not have access to guns. On the farm, guns can be used to deal with pests, or unwanted predators. But this carrying a pistol to an insurance company office is bizarre in the extreme and I expect he deserved what he got.

Long guns are a needed tool on the farm or in other rural areas, but something needs to be done about the huge number of guns in circulation. Americans have the fantasy that everyone has the right to have a pistol
But thousands are killed yearly, needlessly, because of a misreading of the American Constitution. Charlton Heston will not tell us, but it is people with guns that kill people. Really.

Benazir Bhutto 21 June 1953 – 27 December 2007

Henry here. When I was in cadets there wasn’t much training but I chose to train as a medic. I thought that was the most civilized role. I especially was not eager to kill people.

I had an old supervisor, long since dead, who made the same choice. At 15, he lied about his age to get into the British army and became a stretcher bearer. Going through the horror of trench warfare in WWI, he eventually had a breakdown and was returned to Britain to recover. He said that stretcher bearers were the toughest of the tough and eventually it broke him. They made fun of, and distanced themselves in every way to try to keep the pain of what they were doing and seeing daily out of their minds.

These thoughts along with that of the futility and foolishness of war tumble through my mind as I read about the 90th anniversary of the battle for Paschendaele, Belgium. Some 500,000 allied soldiers were killed there and, I think, about an equal no of German troops.

The newspaper article highlights that about 100,000 still remain unaccounted for 90 years after this bloody and senseless battle. Apparently the only spoils of the battle was the capture of a small village church.

So the search goes on for the lost 100,000 bodies. Every year the curator says some 40 or 50 are found.

That was supposed to be the war to end all wars. Somehow that determination did not last long in our collective hearts. If such carnage could not change us perhaps, as Dr. James Hillman says in his latest book: “War is normal.” If he is right, then the question is, how then do we deal with this natural tendency, and reduce its barbarism?