The Small Totalitarian Futile Idiosyncracies of the Nanny State

As I was driving around Los Angeles yesterday, I noticed a storefront with a big Plus Sign + and the newly ubiquitous photo advertising the "medical" services.
 This sighting put me in mind of the five small-ish intrusive things that have been thrust on individuals and are part of the creeping eradication of our basic liberties.

I believe in reasonable restrictions for the good of a society, so I wasn't particularly upset when cigarettes were banned in small closed in spaces, like airplanes. I wasn't even horribly upset when they were banned inside of a restaurant. But leave it to our keepers (nameless, faceless, all too frequently) to go that extra step--ban it everywhere, outside and, inside (there are those who would forbid you to smoke in your own apartment or house). And anything that even substitutes for a cigarette, like e-cigs, which emit only vapor are forbidden now, and includes e-cigs that have NO tobacco or nicotine, but simply look like cigarettes. Why? Because "we" the ever present "we" who always know better and can impress their will, fear that even the fakes will encourage smoking by the young. It doesn't stop them smoking of course. I see many a youngster taking drags on old fashioned cigarettes. I see many a cool cat tossing out his or her butt from a car. I recently purchased bubblegum cigarettes as kind of a joke. They look pretty real. I have thought about going into a restaurant and putting the "pack" on the table and waving one around. Guaranteed, I would not be permitted to have it. It isn't a cigarette. Isn't that free speech?

Meanwhile, smoking the weed is not only becoming permissible, but, we have the storefronts like the one I saw on virtually every block these days. And while supposedly one must prove that one needs it medically (and I am for a doctor prescribed use with the item provided by a regular pharmacy) the folks on the news crowding for their share are not I am guessing necessarily providing the documentation. Or, as we know, a lot of doctors will say something is medically necessary when it isn't. ("Hey, doc, could you write a note saying I'm laid up?"  Never happens right?)

So now, if you go to a Hollywood Bowl to see someone as rad as Kristin Chenowith, somebody is there smoking a joint freely but you can't be seen with a fake cigarette of the traditional type. No one worries about my experience of second hand smoke here. Why? Because the society has accepted the idiocy that marijuana is "good" but the tobacco cigarette is "bad".  In that advanced Brave New World, probably after  (I hope) I'm dead, the movie "Now, Voyager" will have an approved edit. You know that scene where Bette Davis and Paul Henried are parting ways after a kind of forbidden romance, he puts two tobacco filled (and unfiltered omg!) cigarettes into his mouth and lights them and says, "Shall we have a cigarette on it?" and gives Bette one? That lovely romantic scene will now be Paul putting two joints into his mouth and he'll be dubbed saying, "Shall we have a toke on it?"

As Joan Rivers has many times said in her bits, "Don't get me started!"  The world is going to hell on a hand basket, but here in California we are waging a major war--against plastic shopping bags. They are banned. Well, sort of. The tale is that the plastic bags were hurting the environment so they had to go in favor of these fabric like things or amalgam who knows what which you buy and forget to bring every time you go to a supermarket and have to buy more so that your car is a junk heap, or, for ten cents a piece you can buy a paper one. Oh, but wait a minute?! Didn't we get the plastic bags all those years ago because we were killing too many trees? I guess we have so many more trees now than we did then. But is deforestation no longer a problem. I thought it was.

The re-useable bags are wonderful, are they not?   As long as you make sure that you separate the food stuffs to avoid contamination, and you don't want to put the Comet with the meat. And of course we will all wash our bags will we not? But wait a minute!  I notice in Ralph's one of the largest grocery chains that you can still get a plastic bag.  Oh, it is thicker than the old ones, and, of course, you have to pay that 10 cents for it. And who is benefiting?  The stores charging the ten cents to those of us who always forget the ones that can be reused.

Shall we move on to the light bulb? I am a hoarder of the incandescent. Unless I die before I run out, I shall use no or very few of those twisty things that hurt the eyes, and if they break, require a hazmat team to clear the mercury. Now, they are covering the twisty things with what looks like the old incandescent. See it is just the same!  "Buy me!"  Oh, you'll have to because soon it will be illegal for stores to sell the incandescents. "What are you in for?"  asks the guy in a cell in a local jail.  "I sold black market incandescents", answers the newbie evildoer.

The red light camera, another brilliant move. First, we see that when someone comes up to one of those cameras, they either speed up or they slow down. Either way, they increase accidents. So a few have been removed from major intersections. And, guess what, we found out that a lot of those tickets, the money wasn't always going to the cities, but to some company--making a killing, if the lights didn't kill the drivers trying to figure out whether to speed up or slow up.

And now, we have a new species on the road to add to the traffic and danger, all in the name of ecology and community good feeling. The bicyclist. "Share the road."  I have written about this inanity on these pages before. My sense of the foolishness of the idea of car and bicycle co-existing in Los Angeles or any major city in the United States (I saw how it goes in England, with a bus right on the tail of a bicyclist and tough if the bicyclist isn't moving fast enough!).  Just the other day on Fountain Avenue, a crowded thoroughfare in West Hollywood, a guy with a backpack and ear buds was tooling happily along the road. None of us could pass him at the required three feet, well at any feet, and so the traffic was purely backed up until there was a space in the left lane and we could get out of the right lane.  Our feel good politicians are setting drivers up for accidents, and not doing the bicyclists any good thereby.

These are the little totalitarian moments.  And the big ones are already here or on their way. And who among us will stand up and say, "Stop the insanity!"

Into the Archives

I was doing some stuff shifting. Amazing that I have only been in this apartment for just under two years, but I have managed already to forget where I have things, or I notice a box, and wonder what I put in it.  I found in one box a reflection from November 1982. The wondering was about why I ever became a lawyer in New York and why having moved to California I was working to take the California Bar and be admitted on the West Coast as well.  Lots of things hadn't happened for me yet. I hadn't returned to the Catholic Church yet. I was by then 12 years lapsed. I hadn't found a niche for myself, as an attorney in New York and a potential one in Los Angeles, and I was then pining and vaguely working (clearly not hard enough) to become a television writer. I was working in a very small law office as a secretary pending passage of the Bar, and doing some research and lots of client handholding. I had already discovered both in New York and in California that the pontifications about THE LAW writ large, just like the pontifications about pretty much any institution or activity, just did not accord with the reality. I was looking for the pure--which would become a large subject of therapy when I began it in 1990--and in not finding it, I was becoming very anxious. Or should I say, I was becoming more anxious than usual. 

So here were my thoughts at the tender age of 28.


(My boss) asked me today why I had decided to become an attorney.  It's a question which I have never liked because I've honestly had no answer--not even one for myself.  It probably had something to do with my parents egging me on (my mother really) to things educational, philosophical, analytical, and linguistic.  While the reason was never articulable, it was always a definite unswerving goal.  Even unswerving when I thought I might also like to be in the entertainment industry. 

(The boss) went on to confirm verbally what I've come to know and be disturbed about--that to survive in this law business, it is necessary to "stretch" one's ethics.  A disquieting reality which is more disquieting once reiterated by yet another long practicing attorney.

It jolts me, makes me afraid, and insecure, and guilty.  In my soul I know I cannot continue in this field.  Intellectually, and once again, realistically, I also know I may have no real choice.  This, as they say, is all that I am prepared for.  The finding of options is never easy.  The taking of options even less so.  Poor Pollyanna!  I'm not really a Pollyana but I cannot deny my gut feeling that if I pursue what I feel is wrong it will wither me early on.  It would be a case of not being true to oneself and a defiance of Polonius' best advice.

My father believes me to be a fool to spend so much time to become something and then have the desire to give it up. Wasn't that something I should have investigated before I invested time? You cannot investigate in advance what the practice of law will be like.  College does not prepare you for it.  Law school is strictly, in my opinion, an academic exercise that minimizes what it should maximize, the clinical, the stark reality of day to day paperwork, filing, nasty clients, nastier adversaries, deadlines, lies, delays.  The law in any substantive sense takes a back seat.

Given my background and attitudes I could not know this before I began the pursuit.  I've said it before.  I don't regret the decision to study the law.  It will always be a part of my make up, my intellectuality, if you will, and I probably can use it somewhere, but I might regret staying with its official practice.  Becoming an integral member of this club might cost me dearly. A denial of myself.  A denial of what I have believed in.

And what do I believe in?  Pinning that down itself becomes less easy as the years pass and as the incongruities loom large and answers are nowhere to be found--or worse, when the answers are there but I have no time to look for them.

I was raised, at least nominally, a Catholic.  I went to Catholic School.  I was drilled in dogma.  I tried to go to Church.  And I believed in a basic morality.  There were good things to do.  And bad things you didn't do.  You didn't cheat.  You didn't lie.  You didn't steal.  You listened to the teachers. And you believed in God. The Catholic God.

I've been out of Catholic school a long time.  My parents had no specific religious conviction so there was no pressure for me to follow the institutional line once I left high school.  I cannot really remember the dogma, other than "Who created me?"  God created me.  I still have the residual influence though, a strong residual influence, that peculiarly I don't want to fade. There are good things to do. And bad things that you don't do. You don't cheat. You don't Either lose yourself in a rigid, artificially constructed institutional religion, waiting for the world to destroy itself and taking no responsibility for events and people, or you reject God, man, right, wrong, anything, and act according to worst possible instincts.  I don't want to float. I don't want to be controlled.  Leaving another question.  What do I want?

People are so willing to disprove the existence of God.  I still want to find Him.  The Bible, say every religious group in every shape and variety and translation and interpretation--He's in there somewhere.  Looking to places, religions and words--these to not seem to be where God would bother to be.

I wanted and still want to believe that the law allows for morality.  But I've read much that says morality has no place in the law.  I have never agreed with this.  The law ostensibly protects rights.  Rights cannot exist without reason, in a vacuum.  A person has rights because of some basic premise.  Protection of a society is a reason, but hardly the reason to defend one man unto death, or through every court.  It's a basic sense of a Must.  A feeling of THIS MUST BE. 

What upsets me about myself is that while I have beliefs, I don't have conviction.  I can be swayed.  By fear. By pressure of opinion.  My father often say that I was raised wrong, that I should have been taught to play poker. He means that literal and in a way to deal with people, to be able to play hard ball. Tough minded in the ways of the world.  Understanding how to wheel and deal.

I respect my father.  And I understand his thought.  After all I'm in a profession where these attitudes go without saying.  On the other hand I recall that he behaved I less than nasty ways when he dealt wit others.  It's just not built into either of us.  He's not happy about it.  I am.  I just wish I could follow through.  Wanting to be ethical is not a weakness.  It's just looked upon as one. 

I'm not quite ethical.  I want to be more ethical.  And I certainly don't want to be less so.  And as I travel the path that I have thus far, I fear the chances for maintaining ethics lessen daily.  It disturbs me.  Saps my strength.


I started to write more after this, but something must have interrupted me, and I did not complete the further thought.

I began to investigate my faith again, not long afterward.  I have changed perspectives on what is and is not the fullness of faith and I believe that Catholicism has it.  I struggle still to separate the Message from the messengers.  And I have the same tendency with everyone else to throw away the Message because the messenger is sometimes so foul in behavior.  But I have also learned that being foul in behavior is something we all share from time to time, the result of our still fallen natures. Redemption restored a relationship, not our natures. And we must fight our natures daily. I must fight my nature daily. And it seems that God is giving me the Graces I need, sometimes despite my resistance and petulance.

I found a few years later the only thing I could do as an attorney, working for the State Bar as, you might have guessed or knew if you know me, as an ethics attorney. There are no accidents with God. On balance its lesser moments were much outweighed by the good work my colleagues and I did, but like everything else, it was tinged, tainted let's say, with egos abounding and a failure sometimes to do what was best in favor of doing what the voice du jour demanded. Or pretending to.  When I was fired from that job, along with a number of other managers, in a "change of direction" I knew I would never practice law again. I keep the licenses active but only because I worked so darn hard to get them. An ethics attorney was what I was cut out to be if I were to remain an attorney, as I did.  Been there. Done that.

I still don't know why I became an attorney, exactly.  But it was meant to be, I am sure. What I will be henceforward is still in development. But attorney at law for me now is a past activity with a present nostalgic title.

Lubie was Loved

It is hard to find people to serve Mass on a weekday. Those devoted parishioners who help the priest in his celebration of the Mass on weekends are mostly working from Monday to Friday. Several of them make time for evening services, adoration, Novena Masses and the like, but most cannot be at St. Victor during a weekday.

My status as officially no longer part of the work force makes me available for morning or afternoon funerals, in addition to daily Mass, as one of the helpers at services.  It is, as often I may have said here, an honor, both material and spiritual, to be present as a soul is lovingly committed to the Hands of Our mutual Maker.  It might be a little odd indeed to say it, but I love funerals. More pointedly, I love the Catholic funeral service. In some ways, in the reflection of a life lived and now returned to the Creator, the experience is profoundly life giving, despite, maybe in a sense, because, of the loss.  In that service is the manifestation of the connection, a gossamer one at that, between here and the Source of our very being. Our presider, Monsignor Murphy, said something again I have heard him say before, that Lubie's loved ones can talk to her, sit in silent meditation and talk to her in our minds, because she is in a place with no barriers. When my own father died, he said that our dead family and friends can be intercessors with Our Lord, because after all, they are in Eternity close to Him.

Lubie was a long time parishioner of St. Victor, as I have been. But as too often is the case, I did not know her. In this case, I don't think I ever saw her, though I am not sure, because while I attend the 12:15 on Sundays, I heard that she attended the 5:30 on Saturday, or the 5:15 on Sundays. But we were fellow sojourners at the same lovely spiritually nourishing place and so, in that I think of her as a friend. 

What a blessing it seems to have known her!  The place was packed with her many relatives. They so clearly loved her. And she was no passive aunt. She was active in the lives of her nieces and nephews and a bevy of friends. She was from Croatia originally from that place where one day a new apparition of Our Lady would become famous, Medjugorjie.  But she had lived here in Los Angeles for many years. She was an animated person--the words used were personable and vivacious. Sounds like she said what she meant and meant what she said. You can tell all that from her photographs.

 

 

A light like that does not go out.

 

As the casket was led outside, candle bearers and cross at the fore, white doves were released. I have never seen that before except on television, and it did seem as if the Spirit were present and guiding Lubie to her next destination. 

 

I know.  Lots of folks reading this may well feel that this faith is so much blather. But as a character in one of my favorite movies, "The Keys of the Kingdom" (and book by AJ Cronin) says to his dying atheist friend who still cannot believe,  "Wouldn't it be nice, if by chance, we were to meet in heaven?"