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Life Lessons

North East West South

Copyright 2011 Ben S. Pollock

When teaching (it’s been awhile) or just yakking, I find greater utility in broad definitions. News, for example, “is whatever is new, whatever is different.” Meaning front-page, top-of-the-hour news. That’s where are found recountings of heroism, and more often tragedy.

Print and broadcast are front-loaded mainly with bad news, which I’d argue is because catastrophe is unlikely. Gazillions of us go about our days and just a handful get robbed or wreck on the highway.

It’s amazing how often that people do not die.

That U.S. Rep Gabrielle Giffords has started to recover from a bullet that went “through-and-through” her brain is positive news. That a confused fellow is in custody and charged with shooting her and killing six people, wounding 13 others, is tragic news. Doesn’t happen every week or year.

The Arizona mayhem remains news, will be a topic in the presidential election campaign next year, and will be recorded in history books, simply because it is unusual, different, in a word, new.

Hate language, targeted insults, dispersed as far as the technology of the time allows, is not new. Abe Lincoln faced vehemence and threats yet was re-elected. Gen. Washington got more abuse the longer he remained president. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, their allies and the newspapers that supported them spewed venom on one another that makes this generation’s rabble-rousers, progressives and populists look like insufficiently educated gasbags.

Commentators such as these are not harmless, but the current crop are neither inciting violence nor treason. Certainly not with the scale or effectiveness of a Hitler. What’s certainly harmful, though, is that these shouters enthusiastically color policies, proposals and history enough to confuse or mislead voters who these days are in no hurry to confirm facts.

If these gatekeepers were effective hatemongers, a congressman or judge would be blown away every few weeks, not every few decades.

For a couple of days after the Jan. 8 shooting outside that Tucson Safeway, those of us who resent inflammatory rants blamed the gasbags. Then blame shifted (according to stories and feedback on mass-audience websites) to why a troubled young adult was not spotted and “helped” during years of behavior that raised concern among peers and elders.

Millions of people live out their lives not quite all here. Thousands of Americans have irrational, dangerous anger but vent it in relatively legal ways, drinking or speeding or phoning talk shows.

The nation’s mental health system has huge gaps in care, but it’s a far sight better than 50 years ago when anybody could be committed — incarcerated — on little more than a whim, with the care not very effective.

Some kooky teens, the loners and eccentrics, grow up to be John Hinckley and others Bill Gates. Or Jared Loughner. Or Mark Zuckerberg. Or usually turn out to live down the street from you, work a few desks away, maybe unpleasant or moody but otherwise ordinary.

Now or back then, a few of the many odd eggs commit heinous acts. Or enrich the world.

An analogy. Two years ago about this time, the Fayetteville area had a multiday ice storm so devastating emergency declarations were declared high and low. Our 1960s house got the brunt of limbs splintering off half-century and older oaks. Insurance paid us thousands of dollars to remove the broken and uprooted trees as well as to repair property damage.

We’d been in the house for 10 years at that point and earlier had lost huge branches, using a good local tree service for cleanup. I’d gotten to know the firm’s owner and asked him about which of our old trees was vulnerable to age or disease, wind or winter.

I called State Farm and asked if I could file a pre-emptive claim on one teetering tree that he pointed out. My reasoning was it would be far cheaper for my homeowner’s insurance policy to pay a just few hundred dollars for the chain-saw crew now, than when that tree fell on the house, fence, shed or neighbors’ property. The agent knew the tree service and therefore trust its owner’s recommendation. It’d be a favor to all concerned.

No, State Farm said. Logical claims like mine, based on “precognition” perhaps, would zero out the pool of homeowner premiums quickly. That’s not how insurance works, I was told. A claim is filed on damage that has occurred, not what might or even very likely will happen. Resigned, my wife and I paid to have the leaning tree removed, rather than risk damage or injury.

That surely helped come the winter 2009 ice storm, which still wrecked healthy trees though left others alone. I had the tree service out six months later, late summer 2009, to inspect. The crew then trimmed out some damage on a smaller oak that became apparent where it didn’t leaf out. That was it.

Who knows how the rest of the winter will hit? We have to admit that after some point of human skills there’s just no predicting.

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