Warmongering

I’m not among those clapping their hands that the United States has taken the leading role in bombing Libya in an effort to keep neutralize Muammar Gaddafi in his battle against rebel forces.

Certainly Gaddafi is a nasty dictator. But what is the vital interest of Americans intervening in an African civil war? Leaders in the rest of the free world have enough sense to let the United States take the lead, both in military planning and in spending millions on the bombing effort.

President Obama has followed the pattern of George W. Bush before him in meddling in the affairs of a Middle Eastern nation. As we’ve seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, extricating ourselves after years of involvement isn’t easy.

Such wars are costly in many ways. There are the billions spent on military equipment and command posts. There are the thousands of lives lost. And we’re not winning any friends around the globe by intervening, for the third time in a decade, in the midst of a conflict between Muslim factions.

The United States cannot spread its military so thin as to police the world. There are plenty of dictators worthy of being deposed. But how about someone else doing it?

What, Me Obese?

At a recent gathering of the hundreds of employees where I work, a Wellness team reported that 70 percent of the company’s workers are obese, compared to 40 percent of Americans overall. I wasn’t surprised. The evidence is apparent to the eye.

The good news is that the workplace is taking real steps to get people to try to exercise and eat better. Monetary rewards and extra time off can be great incentives. But a lot of us have a ways to go.

For years, Christians have turned a blind eye to the problem of overeating. We like to quote the Scripture that the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. That obviously means avoiding those wicked sins of alcohol and nicotine, right? We conveniently neglect gluttony, which has shortened as many lives as Jim Beam and Camel cigarettes.

But the jig is up. Stop passing the buckets of chicken wings and 128-ounce container of Mountain Dew. It’s time to take a holistic approach to health.

Hitchcock on Screen

I had the pleasure Saturday of watching my first Alfred Hitchcock motion picture in a movie theater. I’ve seen most all of Hitchcock’s movies on television, and even own a dozen or so on DVD.

But there is something about the theater experience that made watching North By Northwest special. The film is 52 years old, so obviously society has changed. Cars looked ancient, we no longer go into phone booths to make calls, and hotel clerks don’t give out room numbers of guests any more. But Hitchcock’s techniques are timeless: his camera angles, crackling dialogue, crisp color cinematography, on-location shooting, attention to set details, Bernard Hermann’s wonderful score, Cary Grant in his prime and the insight into the human psyche. Particularly apt was the callous attitude of a CIA authority figure regarding the potential loss of life of innocent bystander Cary Grant caught in the middle of Cold War espionage.

North By Northwest is one of the few movies I can enjoy viewing again and again. A local non-profit theater is showing a Hitchcock film every Saturday this month. I don’t think I’ll go back, though. They are charging 2011 prices for admission.

Not Looking Forward to Old Age

A new book by Susan Jacoby confirms what I’ve been thinking lately: old age isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. For the past generation, scientists, doctors and other sages have told us we can maintain healthy living way beyond retirement years if we just eat right and exercise. That’s a lot of bunk. At 52 I’m already starting to deteriorate, although I walk every morning and avoid junk food.

“We need to face reality and base both our individual planning and our social policy on the assumption that by the time men and women reach their eighties and nineties, not the best but the worst years of their lives generally lie ahead,” Jacoby writes in Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age. Ninety really isn’t the new eighty.

Not that we don’t buy into the fantasy. A recent HarrisInteractive poll showed only 12 percent of Americans didn’t want to live until age 80. Fully one in four said they wanted to last until sometime in their 90s. Amazingly, an additional 37 percent want to live to be 100 or older.

I certainly don’t want to join the centennial club. There won’t be technological advances enough to keep my mind and body sharp. Those who make it to 85 these days have an almost one-in-two shot of landing in a nursing home as well as developing dementia.

The reason I’ve been thinking about this lately is because of the condition of my almost 93-year-old mother. She was spry at 89, able to drive a car and manage her checkbook. Then she broke her hip. Rehab didn’t go well. She began using a walker and still got around OK, but the short-term memory began to go. The situation worsened last summer when she fell three times, then had to move into a nursing home, with a wheelchair as her new mode of transportation. She has been in hospice care since last fall, after losing 15 pounds in four months. Most of her day now is spent in bed, no longer capable of writing letters, dialing the phone or controlling bodily functions. I imagine the end will bring a further loss of memory and more physical ailments.

It’s painful to see my mother so frail and helpless. I don’t want my children to have to remember me that way a few years down the road.