Death of an Unknown Cousin

I found out from my Uncle Harold last week that my 60-year-old first cousin, Diane Kennedy Bulger, died April 1 after a 17-day stay in a hospital intensive care unit. She had entered the hospital for minor surgery, but complications ensued.

Unfortunately, I didn’t know Diane; we never even met. I knew her parents, my Uncle Frank — a retired law professor — and Aunt Patricia, when they were alive. We saw each other several times at family reunions of my dad and his four brothers. But Frank and Patricia’s four children never attended, and I don’t know any of them.

From the obituary it sounds as though we would have enjoyed each other. She worked as a broadcast reporter in Atlanta, Tulsa, Washington, D.C., and Lansing, Mich. She interviewed everyone from Gerald Ford to John Wayne.

“She was very knowledgeable about a wide range of issues and popular culture,” her husband of 34 years, Bill Bulger, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “She put people at ease; that was her best talent as a reporter.”

Just today I realized that only two years ago I spent a day reporting an event in Roswell, Ga., the very city in which she lived. I wish I had known.

No Thanks to Baseball

The 162-game baseball season is a week old already. Only 156 more games left on the schedule. I, for one, won’t be watching as many contests on TV this season. And not just because the St. Louis Cardinals won’t be as good as last year, when they were expected to win their division but underwhelmed their followers.

Time is the key factor. Our lives only have so many hours to pursue leisure activities, especially if we work full time, are engaged in church activities and are in school, all of which I do. So it’s hard for me to justify sitting in front of a screen for three hours a night to watch men trying to pitch, hit and catch a ball.

The other reason is that I wrote a paper for seminary on sports addiction last month. I’ve researched how sports can not only consume a fan’s time but also impact his personality. A team’s loss truly can depress a person who has an undue reliance on baseball (or football, basketball, hockey, etc.) as a component of his life.

Another factor is whether I really want to express such devotion to athletes who — for all intents and purposes — are mercenaries. While “love of the game” isn’t going to pay a player’s bills, I’m really turned off by Albert Pujols rejecting a reported seven-year, $20 million contract offer as insufficient. I think I’ll be doing more reading and less baseball watching this summer.

Ignorant Americans?

I found the results of last week’s Newsweek citizenship quiz troubling. The magazine administered the 25-question test to 1,000 Americans and 38 percent failed to get even six responses correct.

I’m a history buff, so I managed to figure out all but one of the answers (I didn’t remember that the United States had 27 constitutional amendments.) But even people such as my wife, who has little interest in the workings of the government, answered nearly every question correctly.

The vague wording of some of the questions left a lot to be desired. For example, “What happened at the Constitutional Convention,” “During the Cold War, what was the main concern of the United States” and “What is the economic system in the United States” should have been more specific.

But the lack of knowledge on some of the basic questions is astounding. Just one in five remembers who was president during World War I. Only 14 percent know how many members are in the U.S. House of Representatives. A mere 12 percent could identify one of the writers of the Federalist Papers.

If you want to test your knowledge, see:
http://www.newsweek.com/2011/03/20/take-the-quiz-what-we-don-t-know.html

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.