No easy answers

 No easy answers

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve been listening to so many people that I’m beginning to lose things I used to understand. (“The more I know, the less I understand / All the things I thought I knew, I'm learning again.”)  I don’t know what rights are anymore for example.  We talk about rights to healthcare, rights to cable to tv, rights not to wear a facemask during a time of global pandemic.  

I think I know what goods are, so let me think on paper about that.  A good is something that is, well, good.  We can be concrete and talk about canned goods, like pork and beans or whole kernel corn.  These are things that can keep you alive.

In the context I am thinking about, it is meant more abstractly.  Health is a good. Education is a good. Having a means of transportation is a good.  

I am healthy; that is a good I have. I’ve been privileged to go to school; that is a good I have.  I’ve got a car; this is a good I have.

Those were all statements of my own personal goods.  But I drive my car on roads that were built by various states sometimes with the aid of the federal government.  I attended schools that were paid for by the government.  I am healthy because I go to physicians who have to meet standards laid down by their associations and who are licensed to practice medicine by the government.

I have my own personal goods, but so many--and perhaps all--are supported by institutions that were created for the Common Good.  I come from plain people who have been plain all the way back as far as we have knowledge. I have an interest in supporting the Common Good.  Supporting the Common Good supports my personal interest.  It is a very seductive idea, but as beautiful as it is we got to be careful.

Suppose there are three people who are going to die shortly:  a person who needs a heart, another who needs a liver, and another who needs lungs.  To make it interesting, say they are important people who contribute to the Common Good in some way.  Now suppose there is a vagrant who steals and makes messes in the public square but nevertheless has a healthy heart, a healthy liver, and a sound pair of lungs and happens to be a tissue match--the ONLY tissue match--to the three worthy individuals mentioned before.

Do you use his parts to save them?

If you say, no, he has a right to live.  Don’t the three individuals also have a right to live?  Why does his right to live override their rights to live? There are three of them and they are better people.  Not only do they match him in rights, keeping them alive supports the Common Good.

I know my answer. We don’t kill people for such things because it is just...wrong.  But how do I justify that in absence of my personal religious beliefs. I don’t want to be ramming my religion down someone else’s throat, right? (“I am so sorry you are being vivisected, but it is wrong for me to impose my religious beliefs on others.”)

This started out to be a column in support of the Common Good, but I got lost along the way by thinking too much.  Sorry, I will try not to let that happen again.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )

 Pee Mud

By Bobby Neal Winters

I am back from my cousin Karen’s funeral.  Strictly speaking, she wasn’t my cousin; she was my cousin’s wife.  But there are some relationships that are so long standing time erases the difference between blood and non blood.

Suffice it to say that I never didn’t know Karen.  She was there in my earliest memories.  I look now at the relationship between my youngest daughter and my grandsons and say, yes, it was like this.

She gave me one of the best gifts I’ve ever received.  It is an image of myself--I tried to type that as “my self” but my grammar corrector wouldn’t let me; damned machines.  So often people who’ve known us a long time will remember scenes that we have forgotten because we were so young when they happened.  This I remember myself.

It was a hot summer day in Oklahoma.  I was sitting in a part of our yard where the grass was dead because it was on a path between our house and my grandparent’s house.  It had been dry for so long that the ground was dusty.  I was three years old.

Karen came up to me and asked, “What are you doing?”

“I’m making mud pies!” I replied with glee.

“Making mud pies?” she asked with some confusion. “How can you make mud pies? There’s no mud!”

Whereupon, I stood, peed in the dust as little boys in the country are wont to do, and made mud from the dust.  Thence I began to make mud pies.

Any gift someone gives you is a mixture of them and you.  It is a reflection of you in them.  Sometimes it is more of them; sometimes it is more clearly of you.  To me, this is one of the most accurate reflections of myself that I have seen.

I could attempt to elevate this, and talk about Jesus curing the man from blindness.  He spat in dirt to make mud and rubbed it in the blind man’s eyes.  In this, he used the mystical elements of water and earth along with his own divine essence to give the gift of sight.

I didn’t do any of that.

This is a strange self-image for someone who has gotten a PhD in mathematics, who’s been an academic for more than thirty years, who has traveled the world to London, Moscow, and Sao Paulo.

Karen repeated the story to me many times at transitions in my life when there may have been a danger of me forgetting who I really was: graduations, marriage, jobs.

In some sense, the story serves the same function as God telling Adam, you were made from dust and to dust you shall return.  I am, and always will be, that little Okie boy in the dust, wanting to make mud pies.

Remember your origins.  Remember the people who’ve always been around you.  Never forget who you are.

I can always make my own fun.  I can always make do with what I have.

There are times that, when I am making do, I make other people shudder.  That is their problem.

Thank you, Karen, for helping me remember who I am. Because of this I will never forget you.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )

  Is Cat Physics Broken?

By Bobby Neal Winters

You may recall that I have developed an intricate theory of cat physics.  There are more details to it than this, but it developed out of the phenomenon that my family always has three cats.  If one of our cats passed away, another cat would turn up from nowhere to take its place to maintain the number three.  If an extra cat turned up when we already had three, then something untoward would happen to one of the three we already had.

This phenomenon was stable for years.  It did require a little fudging from time to time.  We would have an extra cat around for a while, but would then discover that it belonged to the Lady Violist who lived on the corner.  

This caused me to discover cat-sharing and the cat-e-cule wherein a number of houses can share cats amongst them, and the movement of cats from house to house would allow a greater total number of cats to be supported than could be supported by the houses individually.

Last summer, this theory appeared to be shattered.  It was like James Taylor’s Flying Machine, in pieces on the ground.

This disaster was presaged by the appearance of Goldie.  Goldie at the time was a female kitten no larger than a brick, brick covered with nettles as it were.  It was clear from the first that she would be an outdoor cat.  (Her later tendency towards weapon-zed flatulence confirmed this.)  While her battles at the beginning with our outdoor Tom’s were uncertain, nevertheless she persisted.  

I thought we should’ve named her Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but by then she had already been Christened. 

By my theory of cat physics, one of my cats should have died or disappeared. For a while, we thought it would be Mischief because she began to shed fur and throw up a lot.  Indeed, if she had continued to throw up on my stuff (always MY stuff), cat physics may have received a little artificial help.  Thank goodness, her health rallied, but cat physics remained shattered.

I couldn’t call upon the cat-e-cule to save cat physics, because the dear Lady Violist had passed-away.  What could be done?

I had no answer until last night. 

Last night a racoon roughly the size and shape of a bean bag chair turned up eating cat food at our kitchen door.  The creature was of such size that all of our outdoor cats--even the ferocious Golden--yielded their food without complaint or even remark.

Seeing this creature, I could find no explanation for its existence.  Then in the night, it came to me.  I had an explanation that covered everything.

Last summer, shortly before Goldie arrived, our dog Charlie had passed away.  Typically, conservation laws of the dog world and cat world do not interact, but our region was in an odd state.  The loss of our cat-e-cule had weakened the barrier between the dog-o-sphere and the cat-o-sphere.  This weakened barrier had allowed for the decreasing number of dogs to be compensated for an increased number of cats.

I had thought this at the time, but I couldn’t account for the extra mass.  The theory of such cross-space interactions requires the conservation of both number and mass.  The extra mass was poured out into the rotund racoon because racoons span the void between the cat-o-sphere and the dog-o-sphere.

So my fear of cat physics being broken was unfounded.  Indeed, it has emerged from the crisis stronger than ever.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )

A Whole New World

 A Whole New World

By Bobby Neal Winters

It’s spring and flowers are popping out.  The State of Kansas has opened up the COVID vaccine to everyone.  We are primed to begin again, to build a New World for ourselves.

God created the world from nothing and then he began moving things around to put it into shape.

Each of us makes a world for ourselves, but we don’t get to start from nothing. We have to use whatever there is around us. Knowing what there is to work with is the problem. We spend our lives looking around the world’s cupboard, the world’s workshop, the world’s potting shed trying to figure out what ingredients there are.

Ever since I turned 25, I’ve been looking back and thinking what an idiot I was five years before.  All of the things I know now that I didn’t know then.

After a certain point it becomes ridiculous. You finally figure out that you are a fool and beat yourself up for that.  Then that gets ridiculous as you forgive yourself.

There’s not a rewind button, but you can take notes.

How do you build a world?  What is a world?

A world is the people you know and the things you do.

The first step in building a world by meeting people and getting to know them. 

I am not good at this part.  For the most part, I don’t like to force myself on people, and I think this is because I don’t like people to force themselves upon me.  I like to spend a lot of time in my head.  My way of reaching out to connect is writing.  I can’t force my writing on you.  If you don’t like it, you can put it down at any time.

The second step in building a world is by doing things. 

Get up in the morning; shower-shave-shoot your breakfast. Do some Bible study; learn a language; go to work and do the best job you can.  If your job is cleaning toilets, make those toilets shine.  If you work with people, treat each person you meet as if that person were Christ.  Do this even with jerks; do this especially with jerks.

You can combine steps one and two. You can do stuff with people; you can do stuff for people; you can combine these two.  

The last of these is the best.  The people you work with who want to help others inevitably make you better.  They aren’t perfect, but their imperfections are in places where you might be pretty good already. If you concentrate on where they are good, you can pick that up from them.

And, here’s the thing, you can always find people who want and need to be helped.  Jesus said this.  He said, “The poor will always be with you.”  He didn’t lay that out for you to use as an excuse not to help. He was simply stating the fact that there will always be people that you can build your world by helping.

So to build a good world for yourself, join something where you can help others: a church, a Rotary Club, or even...the Kiwanis.

Build yourself a New World, a good one, one that is full of love.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )