This is my first diary/essay, so expect it to be disorganized, rambling and long-winded. I'm a complicated, long-winded person (500-word email replies, lol) and some(most) of what I'll layout here won't bear on the microcosm of today's events. But I feel energized enough to add my voice to this forum and share my perspectives accumulated along the way.

"Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from indomitable will." - Jawaharlal Nehru

Read that again because these two themes are the body of my thoughts, and have been throughout my life.

But first, Please Allow Me To Introduce Myself.

I've been a life-long Leftie, life-long Unrepentant Hippie, and perforce, a life-long Democrat. It truly pains me to see the Democratic party drift further and further to the right as the decades have unrolled before me despite my now-and-again fervent attempts to slow or reverse the process.

I'm an immigrant who was kidnapped by my parents and brought to this country at a very early age. As such, I experienced the constant and visceral feeling of "otherness" at the onset of my formative years. Not only was I a simple, single "other", but my parents played hopscotch across the Atlantic and then across America, and I got to experience "otherness" from multiple perspectives - first, as the American kid at a French school, then the French kid at the first of many American schools. This was followed by becoming the French kid/"Irish" school; "Irish" kid/"Italian" school; Goy kid/"Jewish" school; Public School kid/Private Country Day school; PCD school kid/ Public HS. "Naturally," (a rationalization), this produced a profound sense of alienation which culminated in becoming something new in my Junior year of HS -- a high school dropout -- though I did get my GED at the ripe old age of 35 to qualify for an apprenticeship in the local Union Ironworkers' union. (Once again "otherness" came to the fore and I didn't get accepted. Not enough crony connections.)

Having excellent hand-to-eye coordination and years of experience building model planes, slot cars, zip guns, hash pipes, and a nifty little machine to re-tab acid tabs, I began a long and storied "career" in the building trades; first as an itinerant carpenter's apprentice, onward to become a surveyor at 20, eventually to become a field engineer (sans lettres). Several federal buildings, including parts of the Phila. airport and the Federal Reserve Building in Philly are standing where they because I said that's where they belonged. [buffs knuckles, lol]

But even here "otherness" again reared its ugly head, the heavy construction industry lost its luster since I couldn't get paid what the numskull Ironworkers around me were making, and paychecks were sporadic. Talk about stupid and disconnected, I didn't know until after several months of near-starvation that I could collect unemployment.

I taught myself to make jewelry. I taught myself enough about stone-cutting (lapidary), silversmithing, and goldsmithing to feed myself. But barely more than that.

Along the path from then to now I've hung sheetrock, house-painted, driven a cab, and driven a 16-wheeler, until finally, due to losing an anti-age-discrimination lawsuit and having developed some connections in the Local, I was accepted into the Apprenticeship Program. We worked days, went to school nights and Saturdays. By the time I graduated in 2000, (Yippie Kay Yea, Motherfucker!), I'd been "running work" as a foreman with my "own" truck for almost two years. I retired in 2013, in part due to injuries, but mostly due to exhaustion.

Strength does not come from physical capacity.

And it's a good thing too because along the way I've accumulated:
1 broken leg
2 broken toes
3 sprained ankles
3 torn rotator cuffs
3 inguinal hernias
4 heart attacks
skin cancers
heart disease
diabetes
and enough burns from welding to roast a suckling pig
(probably shit I can't even remember anymore)

Physical capacity be damned, that's not where strength comes from.

It comes from the soul. No, not the "how many Easter Bunnies can dance on the head of a pin" soul -- it's that portion of yourself that can't be taken away from you; that piece of you that you take to bed with you when you close your eyes; that piece of you that you wake up with before you start thinking. You We have to become, or continue to be, the revolution we want to see that will improve the lot for humanity throughout our entire lives.

This where Indomitable Will comes into play.

Everyone comes from different places, born into different circumstances. Some are lucky enough to grow up in loved and wholesome families, most, sadly, don't appear to be. (I certainly wasn't.) Nonetheless I have become the person holding those values I hold dear to this day by persevering at trying to not contribute to humanity's stress. I'm not one of the ones who are/will become a leading light in humanity's struggle to improve itself. But I don't let that stop me from thinking "Am I having a net positive or a net negative effect on humanity?" I hope it's the former. I'll be happy if I can lay down for the last time and decide it was the former without kidding myself.

I am the product of those I read a long time ago; Rachel Carson, Paul Erhlich and others. (Sorry I'm terrible with remembering names.) Due no doubt in part because of my own miserable childhood, but also because I took Erhlich's book to heart, I've never added more people to the population clock. That's what I believe. That's my contribution. Hopefully not just that but it's a profound contribution, in my opinion.

And Now For Something Completely Different

How I perceive Time...

Time scales. The smaller an organism is, the shorter its life tends to be. (For the purposes of my metaphor, I'll ignore the outliers.)
This applies to organic organisms and inorganic organisms or entities. And the younger/older they are tends to influence their perception of what a finite amount if time is. To an insect that only lives a few days, a few days is a lifetime. To a 6-year old kid in June, Christmas is 1/12 of a lifetime away -- a very substantial number. To a 60-year old person, in June, Christmas is right around the corner... again.

To organisms such as countries, time scales are even larger. We have countries that are a thousand years old. I think of those as mature countries. That doesn't necessarily mean they're wiser. Sometimes they go off their meds. SEE:Godwin.
Ours is nowhere that old. We're more of a "teenager" country. So we (our country) do the stupid things teenagers tend to do; kill things because they don't even understand what "alive" means and don't appreciate the inter-connectedness of all things alive. (I too was a stupid teenager who killed beings -not people, thankfully- before I evolved to appreciate life.) (I'd even become a vegetarian but I'm not prepared to become a divorced-person.) Mea culpa. We destroy things/people/places not because we're too stupid to know better, but because we're not old enough to appreciate life itself.

But little by little we're getting there. In my lifetime our teenage country has begun evolving into more thoughtful young adult country. It's going through a tantrum right now. We've been through them before. I've no doubt we'll have them again from time to time... either in your personal time, reader, or our evolving country's lifetime.

In my lifetime we've brought more and more people under the umbrella of equally-shared humanity. We're not at the epitome of enlightenment by a long shot. But improving humanity's lot is the labor of a lifetime. Each of us will improve the outcome, the evolution of our shared humanity, with our lifelong commitment to our idealism.

I'm not endorsing incrementalism, or the-lesser-of-two-evils.

But in the grand scheme we're little insects with a short stay to add our efforts to the struggle. Bear up under the heartbreaks and set-backs. Keep struggling. We, the species, will get there eventually.

It's all about Indomitable Will.