My Youth: Geography and Current Events

I remember hearing my father saying in 1960 that there were two new states on "the other side of the world." He was reading from the headlines that stated a 50th star was added to the US flag on July 4, 1960 in honor of Hawaii which attained statehood in 1959. My father was not an active newspaper reader and rarely listened to anything but music on the radio when he had one that actually worked so in hindsight it does not surprise me that he may not have known that for one year the us had a 49 star flag after the inclusion of Alaska. I do remember that I was almost 4 years old and that we had recently moved to the Brooklyn Homes low income housing project in the Brooklyn Park neighborhood of Baltimore. I must have been a real pain on my parents to find out where the two new states of Alaska and Hawaii were because I believe it was for the 4th birthday I received a 50-piece puzzle map of the United States. This was not a cardboard map like they make today. This was a heavy, wooden map. I loved it. I got to know where every state was in relation to every other state. My interest in maps and geography was ignited then and there. To this day I prefer a real map over a computerized gadget. There is nothing like opening a map and examining it in detail. I still like to know how where I have been and where I am going looks on a map.

This interest in cartographic geography also spawned my interest in current events. The first real news items I recall hearing about in detail was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963. This happened at a time when we actually had a working television set. Usually my father had several of them disassembled around the house. It was rare when one actually worked. I remember watching JFK's funeral procession through the streets of Washington, DC. Until then I had no idea what a president was. I became interested in what was happening in the world. I remember the air raid drills in school and expecting the Russians to come over and bomb Baltimore any day. Even at a young age I knew that ducking under our crappy desks wasn't going to give anyone much protection especially against a nuclear attack, but I played along and ducked under the desks anyway. Then I heard of Vietnam and asked where it was. Adults back then simply told kids, "It's on the other side of the world," as if that was supposed to make us feel safe or less threatened. I never accepted that answer. I always wanted to know exactly where a place was and why was a war being fought there. Vietnam, I was told, was being fought to "prevent the Russians from taking over the world." Why would the Russians want to take over the world? I was told to spread the evil of communism. Of course I learned later that it was a struggle of ideals that made it the Cold War. To this day I am still very anti-communist.

When I was 10 I started reading the US News & World Report every week. I would ask my grandmother question after question about what I was reading. When I was 14 she got me a subscription to the magazine. During my senior year of high school I started reading Time since it was the textbook of my POTC (Problems of the Twentieth Century) class.

POTC. That class taught me a lot. The entire first half of the school year was a lesson in civics and the US Constitution. The second half of the year involved reading Time Magazine. We were tested ever week on the hard news content of the magazine. We also had to know our "place geography," something that I excelled at. At one time the teacher, James Walsh, asked about the Danube River. Most people in the class knew that it is a major waterway in Eastern Europe. I stated that it's delta was in the Dobrudja, a coastal area of Romania and Bulgaria on the Black Sea. I had had Mr. Walsh the previous year for European history and he drilled that into our heads. There were two or three of us from that class taking POTC as seniors and I think he was surprised that any of us remembered that geologic fact.

Since then I have maintained a strong interest in maps, current events and place geography. I think it is very important to be geographically literate in this day and age. To be lost in a rapidly changing world is not something I would be comfortable in.

I have been contemplating...

I have had several requests that I begin including some of my life's story in my blogs. That is something I have been giving some serious thought to, but have not yet made up my mind as to just how much to share with the world. My basic info is out there for the world to see. To wit: Widowed. Male. Born and raised in the Baltimore/Washington, DC area. A member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints since 1978. Presently living outside of Hurlock, Maryland. Just looking at this tells me that I have a lot that I can fill in. But how? In what format? Chronological or random topic? I need to make certain decisions before becoming too wrapped up in this. What do you think? I do know this: That anything I write will not be a juicy "tell-all." It may not always be G rated, but I doubt that it would ever be worse than PG. I grew up in Baltimore. As a child we lived in several different neighborhoods of which I remember certain ones very well and others not at all. I remember instances when as a two year old I got my tricycle stuck on a curb and couldn't get it off. I remember looking at that curb as a 13 year old and being amazed that it was so difficult. I remember being bullied in school to the point that I would walk several miles out of my way so I would not have to ride the transit bus with my schoolmates. I walked several miles to a parallel route instead. I remember leaving home when I was 14 and living at the Baptist Home for Children in Bethesda, Maryland, until I graduated high school in 1975. I remember the summer of 1975 when I was suffering at Fort Dix, New Jersey for 10 weeks. That had a lot of good and bad memories. It also helped to toughen me up (as I discovered later in life.) Yes, there is a lot I can write about in my life. I could easily continue the outline I started here. I will be elaborate on those things, and others as time goes by. Very few people know more than a sketchy outline of who I am. maybe it is time to open up and share some of the things that have helped mold me into the person I am today.

IRS, NSA, and the Stasi

The recent revelations about the IRS targeting groups that do not agree with the politics of the Obama Administration was bad enough. Now we learn that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been targeting all telephone records and internet usage metadata above and beyond what the Patriot Act was intended. To me this is a bit reminiscent of the old East German Stasi, a secret police network that relied on almost everyone spying on everyone else. Not even the mail was safe. Possibly the best film on the Stasi and their methods was Das Leben der Anderen aka The Lives of Others. It is an excellent film from 2006. It shows very realistically the intrusion of government into the personal lives of its citizens. Their thoughts and activities are monitored. Is this what we want in this country? I should hope not. The NSA has a specific charge to collect intelligence from our enemies. Much as the CIA it has, or should have, ZERO domestic surveillance activity. The IRS also needs to be monitored and procedures put into place so that all applications for anything are to be processed within 30 days. Only on rare exceptions should an application take longer than 30 days to be acted upon. I believe strongly that if there are not enough employees to do the job then managers and even executives should roll up their sleeves and assist. Cancel meetings. Eliminate layers of management. Just think of the savings of tax dollars if the federal bureaucracy eliminated even one third of its management. That is a possible theme of another blog. Back to my point. We do not need a stasi (a collection of secretive government intelligence agencies) snooping on what we do on the internet, who we email, and with whom we communicate with on the phone. Hopefully Senator Rand Paul's idea of a class action suit against the NSA and Obama Administration will take root and the Supreme Court will eventually decide that the NSA has exceeded its bounds and order the illegally obtained records to be destroyed.