“Ceremonies are important. But our gratitude has to be more than visits to the troops, and once-a-year Memorial Day ceremonies. We honor the dead best by treating the living well.” Jennifer M. Granholm

I was going to write about how we honor our 1,237,000 war dead on Memorial Day and often forget our incapacitated Veterans. By incapacitated, I mean those Veterans who were sent into the meat grinder and came out alive but were trashed, either physically, emotionally, or mentally – or all three – by the experience. The problem, as I see it, is that we honor our war dead much more than we honor our Veterans who are still alive.

Here are a couple of numbers that bother me. Of our 1,237,000 war dead, 7,057 were killed in the so-called War on Terror, and 30,177 came home from their tour of duty and ended up committing suicide. We honor the 7,057 and pretty much ignore the 30,177. Another disturbing number is that 70% of the homeless people in California are Veterans. Seventy percent!

I’ve been writing and rewriting this for several days, getting nowhere, so I’m just going to skip to the bottom line. An excellent way to celebrate Memorial Day is to forget the dead Veterans and support the alive but damaged vets. Here are some ideas: Wounded Warrior Project, the USO, Paralyzed Veterans, and Hope for the Warriors.

Of key importance, private lands are subject to taxation. Now consider the state of Nevada. It is a public land state. According to the Legislative Counsel Bureau, 85.9 percent of Nevada is owned and controlled by various federal entities. State Bar of Nevada.

Today, Nevada contains forty-eight million acres of public land, amounting to 63 percent of the state, managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). From the BLM Website

Nevada is big and mostly, empty. Well, quasi-empty anyway. A lot of it is closed airspace where the Top Gun guys and their Air Force equivalents can play. Those are No Fly Zones, and private planes are not allowed. In some of those spaces, other things are hidden by the No Fly Zones and Nevada’s vastness. They are not on most maps, and the government sort of pretends they are not there. I once flew over one of those non-sites.

 When I first discovered Utah as a backpacking wonderland, I was doing a lot of backpacking with a guy who had a plane. We started flying to Utah for long weekend trips. The plane was a Mooney, which was sort of a sports car of aircraft, a little like the airplane equivalent of a Lotus; very light, cramped, noisy, and fast. We could get to Escalante, a more than 600-mile trip, in around four hours. We would start at Sealevel, fly across the Great Central Valley, slowly climbing to 16,000 feet, to safely go over the Sierras, and then coast downhill across Nevada to a landing at 5 828 feet at the Escalante Airport in Utah.

I usually ended up doing most of the grunt work of flying over Nevada. It was an easy flight, and I loved it, but most people got drowsy at 16,000 feet and slept off and on during the trip across Nevada. On this particular flight, we had crossed the Sierras just north of Bishop and headed east on a compass heading determined by the highest mountain we could barely see on the horizon, which we thought was probably Mt. Dutton in Utah at a little over 10,000 feet.

It was a relaxing flight, when, in the distance, through the haze, I could see some strange shapes which morphed into a small airport as we got closer. We were flying around 12,000 feet, and the ground level below us was about 5,000 to 6,000 feet, so we were about 6,000 to 7,000 above the ground. I woke up the plane owner, and just as he was stretching across me to see the airport below us on our right, two planes took off and disappeared under our plane. In what was way less than 30 seconds, one plane showed up right next to us. I think – I was in shock and focused on the pilot, so think was as close as I can get – the plane was a Navy F-14 Tomcat, and we were close enough for me to see the pilot was wearing sunglasses and his visor was up. He didn’t look pleased.

We were flying east, and the jet pilot looked at me and pointed north. The plane owner stopped trying to find the right radio frequency to make contact and made a hard left to due north. We got the hell out of there, and the Tomcat rolled to his right and disappeared. The whole encounter couldn’t have taken as long as a minute except for the worrying that they would pull the pilot’s license of our pilot, which went on for a couple of weeks. (The FAA didn’t pull his license, but they did send him a letter saying not to do that again.)

Over the years, I’ve begun to think that I had probably shrunk the time frame of the whole incident and that it had taken much longer. However, now that I am reading about F-16s, because some will soon be sent to Ukraine, I’m going back to the whole thing that took less than a minute theory. An F-16 Viper is fast and can climb at a rate of 50,000 per minute. The F-14 Tomcat is slower at only 30,000 per minute, which translates into the Tomcat getting up to us in around 15 seconds plus takeoff.

And that’s it, that’s my shaggy dog story¹, I’m still looking for a payoff and I don’t have one except, maybe, Don’t trust your memory; it only tells you what you want to hear.

1. In its original sense, a shaggy dog story or yarn is an extremely long-winded anecdote characterized by extensive narration of typically irrelevant incidents and terminated by an anticlimax. Wikipedia.

There is a fun article in The Washington Post about a – and my terminology may be way off here – Tik Toc Star, Taryn Delanie Smith, whose bit is that she is the Receptionist for Heaven. If you got a minute this Sunday, you couldn’t do any better than listening to a couple of her bits.

Breaking news: Jury in civil trial finds that Trump sexually abused and defamed E. Jean Carroll, awards $5 million in damages. https://wapo.st/42m6sFC Tweet from The Washington Post @washingtonpost Democracy Dies in Darkness Washington, DC.

Looking at it in the most simplistic way, the Body Politic is similar to any other body. It wants to protect itself. Essentially, bodies defend themselves by releasing antibodies. In the case of The United States Government, the antibodies have been The Courts, and that seems to be what is happening now.

Former President Donald Trump has been convicted for battery and defamation of Jean Carroll. As an aside, convicted is the wrong word, as this was a civil trial, better wording is that Jean Carroll won a judgment against Donald Trump for five million dollars. End aside. Congressperson George Santos has been charged with Fraud, Money Laundering, Theft of Public Funds, and False Statements. Over 1,000 people have been indicted for various offenses in relation to the January 6th insurrection. So far, out of that 1,000, 351 people have been to court and had their cases heard, and 192 people have been sent to jail.

It seems that the antibodies are kicking in and the country feels a little safer for it.

I read a short article about our Senator, Dianne Feinstein, recently. It was about how Feinstein is hanging on to her Senate seat even though she is 89, and it was not very complimentary. Feinstein just got out of the hospital after spending the last two months incapacitated because of shingles. That is sad.

I last saw Feinstein on TV on January 4, 2019, and it was back-to-back with AOC’s arrival in Washington. There were a group of Children – organized by the Sunrise Movement – picketing House Minority Leader, soon to become the first woman Majority Leader, Nancy Pelosi’s office and newly minted Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, soon to be almost universally known as AOC, had joined the picket line. The contrast with Feinstein was striking; the picketers were in front of Feinstein’s office when she returned from somewhere, and she had no idea what the Green New Deal or the Sunrise Movement was. After a minute or two of explanation, Feinstein said something like, “You are all children; you’re too young to vote. Why should I care.” she waded through the crowd and entered her office.

Even if I were a pro-destroying the Earth guy, I would still have disapproved. The optics were terrible. Feinstein seemed to have no idea what was happening, and it never occurred to her that the smartphones pointed at her were filming everything. Children coming to the Capitol to see how government works being blown off still shocks me. It’s sad, especially when I reflect on all the good things Dianne Feinstein did for the environment. I’m sorry for her, and I am sorry for the environment. I’m greatly bothered by the number of Democrats who want to die in office, shutting out the next generation rather than seeing them as the asset we desperately need.