Old age

A book I recommend is "In the Company of Strangers" by Mary Meigs. It's a companion to the "semi-documentary" movie "Strangers in Good Company", which I also recommend. Seven old women, and one young one, played themselves in a fictional situation. Both the movie and the book are meditations on old age. I've been looking for something realistic on the subject, and the movie was the first thing I found. Amazon has both. Netflix has the movie.

Voting against the taxes

I'm voting against both the city & county taxes. The city tax has been discussed so much that I don't need to.

The county tax will fund more jail beds, and I'm against that. People who typically end up in jail are my people, working-class and poor. The city uses some of those jail beds to lock up homeless people who are camping. The Eugene Police Dept. refuses to stop harassing homeless people.

Jails are where we put the mentally ill, most of the time.

Jails are used for the so-called war on drugs, which I'm against. Legalize drugs and treat their use as a public health issue. If that isn't politically possible, stop enforcing the laws.

The U.S., I believe, is now second to China in the percentage of our population we lock up. I won't support this. When local governments find their policies enraging both the left and the right it's time to change, because the inert middle-class no longer has the votes.

From Wikipedia's article on Philip Wylie: "The Disappearance (1951) - An unexplained cosmic "blink" splits humanity along gender lines into two divergent timelines: from the men's perspective, all the women disappear and from the women's, all men vanish. The novel explores issues of gender role and sexual identity. It depicts an empowered condition for liberated women and a dystopia of an all male world."

For maybe half of us, that has happened. Unable to create or maintain marriages, men and women have gone their separate ways. In most cases, I've read, when couples split up it's the woman who leaves. Whatever women expected men to be, apparently we aren't. Millions of us are headed into old age alone, the leading edge of the post WWII baby boom. A quiet social tragedy, with no end in sight.

I think this trend has been greatly pushed by the growing inability of men, particularly working-class men, to make a living. We've lost the main function we had for women and children. Women are having children alone rather than depend on men who can't support them. We tend to look at the long-standing "war between the sexes" as being about gender roles, which we imagine are changeable, but economics are probably more important.

Men are wild creatures, designed by evolution to hunt, and are no more suited to domestication than a cougar. Women need domesticity to raise their children, which depends on getting men to fall in line. Women really, really want men to do what they want us to do, and will argue with us if we don’t. Women’s reproductive success depends on getting men to do things we don’t want to do.

Men don’t like women arguing with them. It’s an irritating waste of our energy, since we’re going to do whatever we can get away with, regardless. Women have the thankless job of persuading us that we can’t get away with it. Frankly, this only works if we’re getting something from the woman that makes it worth it.

Men are not suited to civilization and spend our lives, consciously or unconsciously, pining for the wild. It’s true that we live longer domesticated, but would you like to live in a zoo? We hate spending most of our lives doing what other people tell us to do. I think this is the source of much of the irreconcilable conflict between men and women: we have different needs. Men need adventure; women need routine.

I suggest to women, if they want to get along with us, to not argue with us unless it’s really important to their personal welfare, or that of their children. Often I think they argue simply to prove that they’re still in control, not the man. It seems to be the principle of the thing.