Is food worth dying for?

Posted on May 5, 2008 by venagozar

I doubt everyone has done some soul searching over this, but I know I did. I had to decide for myself what was the right thing for myself and my family. People who study our behaviors have come to a few interesting conclusions. Only two have any relevance to this post. The first is that most of us spend too much time dwelling on our faults and not enough time celebrating our successes. The second behavior we share as humans is we are great at blocking out negative factors in our lives we choose not to think about. For us, it seems if we do not think about them, they do not exist.

The reality is they do not exist until they come to pass, then if we are still around to reflect, we chastise ourselves for not seeing this extreme risk, and taking steps to prevent it. A great example is smoking. Growing up in my generation more adults were smoking than not, or so it seemed. There was a major not smoking campaign throughout my school years, and of course like well brainwashed children I was convinced about the evils of smoking and would harangue my parents about their smoking.

After I was out of school a few years, I found myself buying cigarettes for my own pleasure. Over those few years from leaving school to that point, I managed to dull down the dangers of smoking, and turn it into something real men did, so I should be smoking too. There is nothing like a group of men all standing around smoking and joking to make a young man think about how fun it would be tpart of that small social club.

After some years passed, and I went to some funerals of friends and family members who all seemed to have died too early, smoking started to lose its appeal. The biggest factor in changing my mind about smoking was my children. I did not want them being exposed to smoking so they would be less likely to become smokers themselves. It didn’t happen overnight, but one night I smoked my (almost) last cigarette and started down a new life path.

Time marches on I arrived at forty, and a new set of challenges were waiting for me. Mostly about what and how I ate. All men see and hear of other men who were fine one second and dead the next. Men that fell over from massive heart attacks. At first it just seemed like it was the destiny of men to fall over dead form heart attacks. After all heart attacks caused the demise of several male members of my family. That’s just the way life was. Of course other men came out of the woodwork, and we now know that is not the way life is at all.

We have access to more and better information regarding our health and welfare than we ever had before. In just a few hours of serious net searching, we can become familiar with just about any health subject. One area we still lack in is denial though. There is no medical breakthrough to stop us from living in a state of denial. If there was, I doubt as free adults we would subject ourselves to that particular cure either.

The biggest health concern I see for us is the foods we choose to eat. We are surviving on some really poor food choices. Most of us pretend poor food choices are okay. If eating fast or fried food had the ‘side effects’ of smoking, many people would not be eating those foods. Because the major health problems poor food choices have on our bodies are not visible we go on pretending that eating how most of eat is okay. It is okay, until you find yourself falling over from your heart having exploded in your chest, then it is too late. Company advertising is not going to tell how deadly these foods are either….

I am urging everyone who finds that a major part of their diet is fast food, or fried food to really think about how good that food is, both in health and in taste. Are those food choices really so good that they are worth the risk hidden in those foods? If anyone has children, is eating fast food and feeding it to your children worth dying for and leaving your children to grow up without you around, and facing the same health problems? We can ignore a lot of bad things in our lives and usually it is okay, but poor eating choices have no warning signs until it is too late. Make aware food choices, and be there for your kids. Don’t allow them to grow up eating the poor food choices you are making.

George S Patton, American hero and troubled man

Posted on May 1, 2008 by venagozar

I watched the movie Patton starring George C. Scott today. George C Scott takes on the role of General George S. Patton and makes it very believable. This is not the first time I have watched the movie which came out in 1970 and I doubt it will be the last time I watch this movie. The movie revolves around General George S Patton and his remarkable achievements during World War II as a predominant commanding general of American allied participation during the war.

Of course most of my uncles were veterans of either World War II or the Korean war and opinion usually flowed freely about WWII field commanders and who was the best. Of course as it turned out, all the men present served under different commanders. Naturally each man thought his commander was the best of the bunch and the others were second rate wanna be’s. This conflict is present in the movie also. The Allied forces had some pretty large ego’s involved in their efforts and those ego’s come through pretty well.

The reason I bring up the movie is because of the feelings that Patton invoked in his time and the feelings the movie invokes. Patton is portrayed as a troubled hero who has no political savvy in a time when the world was changing. Patton is portrayed as a hero and and a man in the the movie. General Patton also lived and breathed war. Per the movie he believes he has lived many life times and fought in most great recorded battles found across Europe.

The movie portrays General George S. Patton as a hero who has his faults. General Patton as the movie portrays him is only a hero in his realm which is war. When General Patton is not in the feild commanding his army, his lack of political skill brings him trouble. He is shown as having problems with everyone from Presidents to fellow generals and enlisted men. General Patton on the field with his army was in his element and his men did not have any love for him, respected him, and did what many considered impossible for him.

Which brings me to the idea of a hero such as General Patton. The man is brilliant, talented, and a master at his craft which was war. What General Patton accomplished was heroism at its finest by America and its allies. General patton did what had to be done, and he did it as well or better than most other men alive. There may be some argument between the men of this caliber who marshaled WWII as to who was the best of the best, but none of them were there for reasons other than they earned the right to be there.

Any job is open to anyone who is willing to do it. For example, everyone has the opportunity to arrive at whatever station their personal drive propels them too. It is all a matter of how hard one is willing to work and how much one is willing to sacrifice for some elusive ever changing goal.

Unfortunately the more prestigious the position, or the more weight it carries, there are fewer possibilities that any one individual will hold such a position. For every one that makes it to that lofty perch, there are hundreds if not thousands who do not. For every General Pattton there are hundreds of thousands of foot soldiers. Individuals such as General Patton did not fall into their positions. They spent their lifetime getting ready for a chance at these positions.

We all have the opportunity to become bigger than life if we want it. For most of us the drive to make the sacrifices needed just for the opportunity are too great and it is a road most of choose not to go down. For those that do, they sacrifice most of everything we consider a normal part of day to day living.

Death and the choices we make getting there

Posted on April 9, 2008 by venagozar

For the first time in over a month I feel really alive and healthy, mostly the spring weather. I had been thinking while I was feeling poorly about a few people I knew who ran their race, and have passed on. Three of them in particular stand out in my mind as unique.

What stands out about their dying is something they each said near the end of their time. I do not think they thought what they said was anything profound, but their comments have become a sort of life jacket for me. The first person had more wrong with them than right. Their doctor on one of their last visits was surprised to see them and expressed awe that they were still alive? It was not the Doctors greatest moment, and I am sure the Doctor would play that scene over if they could. When the doctor blurted this out to them, they simply said, “What am I supposed to do, fall over dead?”

The second person in my thoughts spent most of their life trying to kill themselves smoking cigarettes. After fifty plus years they got their wish. As they lay on the last bed they would ever lay on, they were very scared, and kept saying over and over as if it would make a difference, “I can’t breathe, I can’t catch my breath.” While I felt their pain, and I could see and feel their fear, a part of me couldn’t help but wonder what they thought two packs of cigarettes a day was supposed to do for them, except this end?

The third person was crippled from a stroke, and also suffered other serious health problems. One day towards the end of his time on a warm sunny July day, he asked me to take him to a lake where the young women would be out sunbathing. I complied and pulled him in his wheel chair through the deep sand as he was ogling the young girl’s working on their tans as we passed by. Eventually he had enough, and motioned we could go back to the car. I asked him why he wanted to see the young girls out sun bathing? He had a vocabulary of about one hundred words, but he made me understand that inside the crippled, tired body, was a man, and for him there was nothing in the world more beautiful on that day than a woman, or in this case a number of women out sunbathing.

I never thought much about what they had to say as their end happened. In fact I never thought about it much at all until many years later when I started to realize that I was mortal too. Two of them met their end knowing they had lived their lives as full and completely as they were able to. The third person met their end in fear, and perhaps shock in their final moments, wondering how they ever arrived at that point, and what they did to deserve it.

I choose carefully about my life, and I think everyone should choose to live life as it comes. This is our one way ticket in this life, and we need to take the ride with our eyes open, and our brains turned on. We have our one body, whether it is healthy or sickly, beautiful or plain, it is all we have. It seems apparent that we are here for a reason, and we have to see our time here through to the end.

What I learned from two of these people is life is worth living – every breath of it. Their is no tragedy, or health problem that can stop us until our bodies quit that should be allowed to keep us from wringing every joy and happiness out of our lives while we still can. From the third person I learned the value of making responsible decisions with my health. Doing something stupid, but taking no responsibility for my actions is not a life choice I make. What a shame to end life that way – terrified and incredulous, looking for something else to blame, looking for anything to blame except us, and not accepting we created this end our self, and we alone are responsible for it.

Enrich your life by helping another

Posted on April 8, 2008 by venagozar

When we pause long enough to look back over our life, we like to assess how we think we are doing. We look at our accomplishments and satisfy ourselves that we are somebody because we have completed some number of trials and tribulations successfully over the years, while others we choose to compare ourselves to have not.

We like to prim ourselves, fluff up our feathers, push out our chest, and strut around hoping someone will notice. If no one notices that is all right too, because we at least know how good we are. We know how well we have done in the face of adversity, overcoming obstacles and proving ourselves while other watched. It really does not matter though except to us and what we think of ourselves.

I stumbled upon a good analogy of our true worth some years ago. We have all heard about how we can stick our hand in a bucket of sand or water and splash it or move it around and shape it to our liking. Of course we know when we are all done and we remove our hand, it is like we were never there to start with. My observation is from a different perspective

I was watching an ant hill a number of years ago and I saw what our real importance is through the ant colony. If you have ever watched and ant colony at work, you know they have there set trails they follow initially when leaving the ant hill. In the morning as the sun warms up the colony hundreds of ants follow trails out to some end where once upon a time a lucky ant found a food or water source.

Usually the food source has long been forgotten and once the ants reach the end of the trail they start foraging in what appears to be a wandering pattern. If they have particular destinations in mind, I have not deciphered how they work. So out away from the hill there are all these ants working away, walking all over trying to find food for the colony.

At the nest there are other ants whose job it appears to excavate new tunnels. You see them walking out one of the tunnels to somewhere at the edge of the ant hill with a tiny pebbles in their pincers, or maybe a clump of dirt. They walk out near the edge, drop whatever they are carrying, and walk back in to do it over again.

I am sure there are many more ants who each have individual jobs in the colony of which I am unaware. As the day progresses, all the ants go about their tasks and the whole colony enjoys the benefits of the communal work. As I watched the ants working away, it dawned on me that even though they were working towards a common goal, they were not in any apparent way attached to each other.

When I removed an ant from its task whether the ant was foraging, hauling tiny pebbles from far below, or smoothing the ant hill and possibly reshaping it, the loss of a single ant was not noticed, or so it seemed. In fact unless I disturbed the ground there was no notice of an ant disappearing from its appointed task.

In reality so it is with us. If something appeared and took one of us from where we were sitting reading this, not too many people would notice that we were missing. After a few hours, it would become noticeable to those close to us we were not around at that time, but for the majority of the community, the loss of a single person is really a non event.

So when we are looking back over our accomplishments, and puffing ourselves up and feeling important, we also need to take a few moments and reflect on the truth. Are our accomplishments something that really make a difference to our community, and improve the quality of life for everyone, or are our accomplishments of a singular nature, in that they only benefit us?

Hopefully by the end of our lives we will accomplished many things that stand out in our mind as something that was really worth doing, and not a something that was important only to us. If we spend our lives doing those things that are only for us, we are like the single ant I removed from the ant hill. Nobody will really notice the difference, and our feeling of self worth will feel a little hollow to us.

On the other hand, if we some memories of how we made life better for the community or someone in it, we have fueled fires that will continue to burn in peoples memory’s long after we are removed. These changes need not be something that changes the very foundation of civilization, but may be something more humble and simple. Generally the more humble and simple whatever it is we do, the more it is appreciated by those people we do it for. Making life better for others, has a bonus of enriching our own life.

Fear no more, there is no payoff

Posted on April 6, 2008 by venagozar

Usually I enjoy talking to people. I talk to people in line at the grocery store. I talk to the people that check me out at the cash register. I talk to the people who are making my lunch if I can. I talk with the people out walking if I walk up to them, I like to share a few minutes with them chatting about the walk, and what else they do for exercise.

It is getting harder though. We are so wrapped up in fear of another human being, it amazes me sometimes how scared some people get from the idea of talking to a stranger! When I was a kid, it was Nakita Khrushchev, and the nuclear bomb or missile dropping on our home or school. They used to show him at commercial time during the family hours television. The commercial would be a upper body shot with Mr. Khrushchev telling me, he was going to bury us. It certainly caused me to have some worries, and I took the drills at school more serious when we went to the gym, or took cover under our desks.

I remember most of the grownups were worried too. Adults took the threat seriously too. I felt a little safer because we lived close to an Air Base, and they were tied into the early warning system of the time, and they had planes to help defend us. Some people had bomb shelters built on their property. Other people remodeled their root cellars to take on a more shelter like function. I could not imagine spending more than a day or two in one, but at the time they thought they may be in their shelter for weeks to months. I am not sure what they thought they would climb into when they left their shelter, but there were some definite concerns that it could happen.

Later the threat changed to communism in Vietnam. The older people were very concerned that the communists would be right in our town if we didn’t stop them in Vietnam like we did in Korea. More fear, but it was a distant fear of something we at home could not really quantify. We knew it was out there, but our individual lives had changed little.

Somewhere along the proceeding years, thanks in part to technology, our fear shifted once again. This is our biggest and vaguest fear. We have this now almost ingrained fear of anyone we do not know. We find it hard to talk to neighbors, and other people we interact with only occasionally. Once we get outside our group of friends, our world becomes a cold, hostile, dangerous place.

Our world has become filled with sexual deviants of a criminal nature. Many women walking by a strange man alone somewhere almost have panic attacks on the spot. Men and too a lesser extent women are extremely cautious even about dating because the person who has an interest in us is probably a stalker, or a psychopath waiting to enter our lives and wait for us to let our guard down. It is not uncommon these days for a paid search to be ran on a perspective date before committing to a cup of coffee at a local coffee house.

Now, on top of that we have the fear of terrorist activity happening in our town. I have heard people from a few very small town express fear that they feel too vulnerable. Too many people in general are scared to talk to strangers any more. If they aren’t a sexual deviant they may be a terrorist. If they are not a deviant, or a terrorist, they are probably looking for someone to stalk. Now Global warming has appeared on the horizon, if our current fears are not enough.

This individual isolationism needs to stop. We are growing a second generation of children who do not have the tool required to make their way in a world of face to face interaction and communication. The new generation is so hardwired into electronic communication, some can not carry on simple conversations in a face to face meeting of two people. How can we, with our children so isolated expect them to some day, leave home, go out and find a job, and be successful when they have been told all their lives not to talk to strangers?

Heroic acts by non heroes

Posted on March 3, 2008 by venagozar

My heroes have always been a little tarnished. I published a past post about Marion Jones and the opportunity for her to become a hero now that she is making herself even with the world – or at least with herself, which is more important. I still believe what I wrote, and I think Marion Jones has started the process of rising above her current self. If Marion Jones continues there is no reason she will not be a hero to young people, and older people alike.

It is my belief our future is never written in stone. We each have our own obstacles to overcome and conquer. I believe there is a potential hero hiding in Marion Jones, and it will shine sooner than later. Unlike other current athletes who prefer to lie and hide, Marion Jones has nothing left to hide. Only opportunity for better things can enter her life, the worst will soon be behind her. Soon she will have paid her debt, and she will be able to wipe her slate clean. Then the real Marion Jones will step out, and start doing great things she may not even have dreamt of. Things we may never know about, and perhaps have no need to know about, but great things all the same.

There is an opinion that heroes do not come from tarnished lives. Some folks may rightly believe that to be a true hero, one has to be heroic in all aspects of their lives. What this does I think, is separate a few heroes from someone doing a heroic act. It is easy to be on the throne and do a great thing, it is much harder when one is struggling to be, and finding themselves in a position of contemplating a heroic act, and following through with it. It is even harder, yet greater when that act goes unseen and unnoticed.

If there are such people in the world who are heroes in the second sense, where their whole life is shiny and polished without a mark against it, and doing great things, I am all for them getting the recognition they deserve, and I applaud them. In my more mundane world, I have yet to meet any people who could pass this type of hero test. The everyday heroes I see in my world are more like the desperate thief Dustin Hoffman played some years ago where he was not a person anyone would look up to, but did something above and beyond him, quite by accident, and for selfish reasons. He became a hero all the same for a short time.

Most of the heroes I have seen are people who are in the right place at the right time, and do something above themselves and the people around them, when they did not have to. They were not looking for the chance to do something special. They did what they did without thinking. One heroic person I have seen had been drinking, another was trying to escape his life, and a third person was coasting along through life trying to be invisible.

What these three had people done with their lives up until that point was nothing special, and after the notoriety wore off they went back to what they were before, ordinary people getting through the day. In the space of those seconds when they acted heroically, they were above and beyond themselves. They saw something wrong that needed righting in an instant, and before they even thought about what they were doing, the heroic action had took place. I am sure when they realized what they had done, they were as shocked as everyone around them.

It may be thought of as less than stellar, but those heroes I have seen in action were ordinary people who had a moment of heroism, and then faded back into the ordinary life they were living before the act. I do think these are the best types of heroes though. These are the heroes that you, I and anyone else can be, if we happen to find ourselves in the right place at the right time.

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