On May 4^th Bangladesh’s Finance Minister commented on the Rana Plaza collapse, saying it wasn’t “really serious.”  Walmart, which sells clothing manufactured in Third World countries including Bangladesh, has stopped doing business with the most blatantly unsafe factories (though work is often subcontracted to these places anyway).  But retailers like the Gap, Old Navy and Banana Republic have refused to take any action to improve working conditions, saying they “did not want to pay factories more money to help with safety upgrades.”

Garment workers in Bangladesh make a whopping $38 per month.  Low wages and an abject disregard for worker safety have allowed large corporations to make a lot of money selling clothing manufactured in countries like Bangladesh.  Many corporations today tout their social responsibility programs, yet despite claims they are working to prevent more disasters, these tragedies keep happening.

But that’s to be expected in the Third World.  America is different; after the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist fire in 1911, where the exits were blocked and 146 young women died, worker safety has been a government concern, and workplace safety – as well as programs that help workers who are injured on the job – have made the American worker one of the safest in the world.

But these programs impose regulations.  And in a deeply divided country where many see regulations as yet another sign of a broken government, some states – especially Texas – have done their best to skirt them.

Texas, which has no state occupational safety program, has an occupational fatality rate twice that of California.  Worker compensation programs are voluntary, which leaves many workers without insurance in the case of an injury.  But Texas isn’t just morally opposed to worker safety; zoning laws are so limited that schools, apartments and nursing homes can be built near dangerous industrial sites.

Texas has experienced some of the worst industrial accidents in history, including the 1947 Texas City fertilizer explosion that killed over 500 people.  When a fertilizer plant in West, Texas, exploded on April 17^th it killed 14 residents – mostly first responders – injured more than 150 and leveled scores of homes. Yet an assistant Fire Marshall dismissed it as an “act of God” – something that couldn’t have been foreseen or prevented.  This despite the fact that the fertilizer plant hadn’t been inspected since 1985, was guilty of numerous safety violations and was improperly storing huge amounts of explosive ammonium nitrate.

“It’s not anything that anybody thought could happen,” said an official of the adjacent – and now demolished — school.  But that isn’t true.  Texas, like Bangladesh, has profited by lax safety regulations – despite repeated examples of why regulations are necessary.  Everybody knew something like this could happen – they just didn’t care.

Though regulations can be a pain, to ignore safety measures for the sake of profit is deplorable.  Yet some continue to see it as “good business.”  Until humanity evolves beyond valuing profit over lives, the need for strong safety regulations will remain vital.

So how did he come so close in his profile of the bombers?  He says it was easy – it’s always young, middle-class white males who commit massacres.  Young, middle-class white males have been responsible for many such crimes, including just recently the Sandy Hook massacre, the Aurora, Colorado, theatre massacre as well as the shooting of congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 18 of her constituents.

Though Thomas didn’t know it, Charlotte and Harriet Childress recently wrote about this in The Washington Post, observing that “month after month, year after year” it is white men and teenagers who go on mass killing sprees.  These authors note that while these males make up 30% of our population, they commit at least 70% of mass killings.

In their article these women note that the National Rifle Association blames massacres on the mentally ill and indeed, these killers may be insane.  But mental illness is not confined to white males.  These authors point out that mentally ill females “are not picking up semiautomatic weapons and shooting schoolchildren.”

The authors note that white males are the main players of violent video games and ask, “Why do white males buy guns in far larger numbers than other groups, and why are so many of them bitterly opposed to even reasonable gun-control proposals?” The authors go on to say that while society is loath to discuss it, white males are the cause of a violent social pathology.

I don’t mean to suggest that all white males are pathological, and clearly gun violence is a problem among minority groups, especially in the inner city.  Many – in fact most – white male gun owners never harm another person.  But with incredibly lethal semiautomatic weapons with high capacity magazines available to anyone who wants them, a handful of white males have turned American schools and shopping malls into their own perverse shooting gallery (remember the Von Maur shootings in Omaha?).

Males of any race can be violent, and women kill people too.  But this violence is generally targeted at rival gang members or an abusive spouse.  There is something different about people who set out to kill as many strangers as possible, and sadly, Charlotte and Harriet Childress are correct that this difference – whatever it may be — is particularly evident in white males.  To call it a “social pathology” may seem extreme, yet maybe we have to see it this way before we can finally do something about it.

Guns don’t kill people, after all – people do.  And while we’ve all heard about the racial profiling of minorities, when it comes to racial profiling for potential mass murderers, all one need look for is, as my 14-year-old son has already figured out, “young, middle-class white males.”

What makes young, middle-class white males so prone to violence?  Are they victims of what some call America’s “gun culture” – a culture that glorifies violence and gun ownership?  If so, how did such a culture evolve?  Who has benefited from a culture of violence?  Hollywood?  Gun manufacturers?  Have these industries profited by appealing to what’s worst in us?

There’s much more behind mass killings than movies and marketing.  However, looking at the white male fascination with violence in terms of preventing it — rather than exploiting it — could do much to help stem this crimson tide of blood and pain.

Charlie did so well in the railroad mail service that he was appointed by President McKinley as Director General of Posts in the newly-conquered Philippine Islands (which had passed into American hands as a result of the Spanish-American War).  His term was to be two years, but Charlie and Zet decided to stay, maintaining a home here in Albion, though, so they could return periodically for decades to “thicken their blood.”  And with them would come exotic gifts from the Orient, some of which are on display in the museum’s Van Morehead collection.

Charlie started a shoe store in Manila that grew into a department store that grew into a variety of holdings, including a mine and an acetylene company.  He held the longest term as American director of the Philippine National Bank and served as a delegate to the Republican National Convention in both 1924 and 1940.  He was an influential voice in Philippine affairs and did his best to prevent the islands from gaining their independence

With war clouds looming, the Cottermans held a family meeting in the Fall of ’41 to decide whether to stay or to return to the United States.  Uncle Charlie was convinced the Japanese were our (or at least his) friends and there was nothing to fear.  He therefore would not leave, and his family would not leave without him.

This proved a fateful decision.  No sooner did the Japanese arrive in January of 1942 than thousands of “enemy non-combatants” – including all of the Cotterman clan – were imprisoned on the grounds of the Santo Tomas University (about four city blocks in size).

Life in the prison camp was a nightmare.  Early on, a few young bucks escaped, only to be recaptured and ineptly executed.  It was then announced that if anyone escaped, ten prisoners – including women and children – would be shot.

Rations were cut again and again as the Japanese lost more and more battles in the Pacific. Towards the end prisoners were trying to exist on black market rat meat.  On average, adult prisoners lost 50 pounds each during their interment, and although the Japanese vaccinated them against some diseases, many prisoners died from tuberculosis, measles and asthma.

Santo Thomas was liberated in February of 1945.  But since the battle for Manila was far from over, the prisoners remained in the camp.  The Japanese began shelling it, and Uncle Charlie was struck in the head by falling debris.  Though he did not die immediately, he never recovered from the wound and passed away just before a hospital ship arrived to bring survivors back to America.

The family lost everything in the war, but managed to rebuild.  Tragedy struck again in 1971 when a child was kidnapped for ransom and her mother shot in the back with a shotgun (miraculously, she survived).  Then in the 1980s the husband of Charlie and Zet’s granddaughter was assassinated by communist rebels for refusing their extortion demands.

The Cotterman’s newsy Christmas letters stopped coming in the 90s, but the descendents of two Boone County pioneer families no doubt remain prosperous and influential in that exotic tropical nation half a world away.

The Life of Pi is a cinematic masterpiece with incredible special effects.  It tells the story of a 14-year-old boy – the son of zoo keepers — who loses his family in a ship wreck.  Pi is, in fact, the only human survivor.  Several animals that were being shipped by Pi’s family end up in his lifeboat, though, and an incredible story of multi-species survival ensues.

I was enthralled by the story.  Until, that is, the end, when an alternative story was offered by Pi to two men investigating the cause of the sinking.  This second story was filled with human savagery and loss – so much so that the investigators choose to accept Pi’s impossible but uplifting original story instead.

An underlying theme in the movie was Pi’s quest to find God.  Being an Indian, he began his life as a Hindu.  But while still a child he embraced both Christianity and Islam, practicing all three religions at once.  His father disapproved, telling him not to be fooled by the promises of any religion.  To Pi’s father all religions were dark forces and dispassionate reason mankind’s only salvation.

To me the message of the movie was that we need fantasies such as Pi’s – a clear example of psychological dissociation and denial – in order to survive the harsh realities of life.  And the movie seems to be saying that the ultimate fantasy – our greatest escape — is religion.

I won’t pretend to know if this is true or not (though I personally believe in something greater than ourselves).  But the movie is certainly food for thought (where there is no questioning, after all, there can be no faith).  The movie seems to be exploring Voltaire’s contention that if God did not exist man would have invented him.  It also seems to explore Karl Marx’s assertion that religion is “the opiate of the masses,” that it provides ordinary people with an escape to an imaginary world (which prevents them from improving conditions in the real world).

Is objective reality so bleak that we humans have to invent myths in order to cope?  Do we deliberately turn a blind eye to objective truth, inventing more palatable alternatives in our minds and infusing them into our culture?  And have we, as a result, come to see the world in an arse-backward way?

Recently we’ve been told that universal healthcare will literally kill us while providing unrestricted access to assault weapons makes us safer.  We’re told climate change is a myth, though the weather gets more extreme all the time.  We’re told the federal budget can only be balanced by cutting Social Security and Medicare but that tax rates cannot possibly be raised above 1950s levels.  We’re even told that a quarter-inch-thick high-pressure pipeline that will transport the world’s most environmentally toxic petroleum across thousands of Americans’ private property – primarily for the benefit of foreign shareholderes — is somehow vital to our nation’s interests.

Such inversions of reality no doubt make some people feel better by reshaping the world to fit their beliefs, saving them from having to reshape their beliefs to fit the world.  But as comforting as this may be, it would be wise to remember that even when knowledge is pain, ignorance is never really bliss…

Vulcan, before becoming the mythical home planet of Spock, was the name of the Roman god of the forge and the root of our word “volcano” – volcanoes were thought to be forges where Vulcan crafted Jupiter’s thunderbolts.  Though few seem to know it, in between the time of ancient Rome and the debut of Star Trek in the 1960s, Vulcan was the name of a planet in our own solar system, a planet located between Mercury and the Sun.

As telescopes proliferated during the early 19^th century a number of observers began reporting a dark spot move across the face of the Sun.  Dark spots on the Sun were already recognized as sunspots, but unlike actual sunspots, this spot moved.  The most reliable observation was made by a French country doctor named Lescarbault in 1859.  His description was so detailed that he managed to convince an initially hostile Urbain Jean Joseph Leverrier, France’s leading astronomer and the discoverer of the planet Neptune, that his observation was accurate.  Leverrier had used disturbances in the orbit of Uranus to find Neptune, and was already on the trail of a small planet that would explain slight variations in Mercury’s orbit.  Lescarbault’s observation fit the characteristics Leverrier was seeking, and Leverrier for the second time in his career had the honor of naming a new planet.  He chose “Vulcan.”

The only problem was that while some astronomers did continue to spot Vulcan from time to time, others couldn’t.  This perplexed the scientific community and a concerted effort was made in 1878 to look for Vulcan during a total eclipse of the sun.  Because this eclipse would be visible longest in the Wyoming badlands, scientists flocked to the now-vanished town of Separation where today a pair of stone telescope piers still bear testament to this event.

Among the assembled astronomers was James Watson from Ann Arbor University in Michigan.  About halfway into the eclipse he spotted not one but two objects close to the sun that weren’t shown on any star atlas.  A similar sighting was also reported by Dr. Lewis Swift observing from Denver.

The problem was: no one else saw Vulcan that day, and though the search continued for decades, it remained elusive.  Finally, in 1915 Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity which explained the anomaly in Mercury’s orbit.  There was now no longer any need for a Vulcan.

Yet evidence for Vulcan resurfaced during eclipses in 1966 and 1970 when Dr. Henry C. Courten identified a number of small objects between Mercury and the Sun.  This led some to speculate that Vulcan did once exist but for unknown reasons had broken apart sometime after 1878.  Since then satellites have searched for an asteroid belt close to the Sun but so far without success.

So was Vulcan once there?  Most astronomers doubt it.  But it does hold a place in the annals of astronomy, and to reallocate its name to another celestial object seems misguided.  Fortunately, votes from Trekkies alone aren’t enough to decide this matter.  The International Astronomical Union has the final say, and it will be interesting to see if they consider the obscure history of the planet Vulcan significant enough to preserve its traditional place in the heavens.

Yet though we all seek it, happiness isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  Happiness too often comes at the expense of not leading a meaningful life.

According to Emily Esfahani Smith, writing in The Atlantic Magazine, we are happiest when our desires are being fulfilled.  Thus the hallowed “pursuit of happiness” that is thought by Americans to be a God-given right predisposes us to be “takers.”  We take what we need to satisfy ourselves and thus the happiest people are also the most selfish.

Smith contrasts the pursuit of happiness with the pursuit of meaning and cites the work of psychiatrist and concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl who wrote what has been ranked as one of the 10 most influential books in the United States, Man’s Search for Meaning.  Frankl, who lost his entire family in the camps, observed that the prisoners most likely to survive were the ones who had a meaningful reason to go on living.  And usually this reason had to do with the well-being of someone else.

Smith says that people with a strong sense of meaning in their lives tend to be “givers” who have invested in something bigger than themselves.  Having a sense of purpose Smith writes, allows one to both “transcend the self” and “transcend the present moment.”  Happiness is momentary; no matter how much we eat, for example, we’ll always grow hungry again.  If we can understand this we can move beyond the present moment and this in turn helps us connect to both the past and the future.  Thinking about the past and the future helps us see life more broadly and teaches us that the most meaningful things are the things that last.  To both Smith and Frankl, leading a meaningful life is better than simply pursing momentary happiness.

Buddhism, though, takes a very different view.  Buddhism (which is more a way of thinking than a religion) maintains that human unhappiness is caused by seeing meaning where there really isn’t any.  Life, to the Buddhist, is a giant Rorschach pattern where we project imagined meanings onto purely random smatterings of cosmic ink.  Thus the Buddhist strives to live only in the moment, only in the here and now.

Buddhism is not a hedonistic or uncaring path – compassion for the suffering caused by the illusion of meaning is its central theme.  And Buddhism understands the pain we cause ourselves by worrying about the future and regretting the past.  Smith agrees that people who lead meaningful lives aren’t as happy as those who live only for the moment.  But she maintains that both they and everyone else are richer when meaning – what matters now and in the future – takes the place of only focusing on the moment.

Happiness and pleasure aren’t bad things – everyone deserves both.  What’s important is to balance our needs with the needs of others, balance the needs of today with those of tomorrow.  When we embrace a meaningful life, a life that balances the good of others against our own passing contentment, we are not only increasing humankind’s collective happiness, we are honoring our own intrinsic nature.  For as Frankl observed, the more one gives “himself to a cause to serve or another person to love – the more human he is.”

He looked and looked but couldn’t find an owl anywhere.  Finally he sat down on a rock to think about it.  Owls are scary birds that fly around at night.  So are bats, but bats are a lot smaller than owls.  Willyopolis decided bats must be baby owls so he found a cave and filled his pockets full of bats.  After that – just like the time Willyopolis mistook onions for apples when helping bake a pie — things just went from bad to worse.

Willyopolis’ bumblings have more than once led to his untimely demise.  But sooner or later he’s messed things up in Hades so badly that they’ve sent back to this world.  He’s been to Mt. Olympus too — he once delivered a pizza there by mistake.

While you won’t find mention of Willyopolis in Greek mythology, he’s been a part of our family mythology for close to 20 years now.  Inspired by Disney’s fanciful retelling of the myth of Hercules, Willyopolis became our son William’s alter ego (to convert a modern name into ancient Greek one need only add the suffix “opolis” to it).  Soon every night at the supper table we would collectively step back in time to remember the bizarre exploits of Daddyopolis, Mommyopolis, Angieopolis, Tommyopolis and a host of other ancient Greeks whose resemblance to people today was “purely coincidental.”

Telling these stories was a great way to carve out meaningful family time.  And it gave us a way to illustrate the (often preposterous) consequences of poor decision making.  Lori and I even managed to impart a little knowledge of history along the way.  Yet it wasn’t just us telling stories to the kids – they have always participated fully in devising ridiculous plot twists for these ad lib epics.

I don’t know how many other families regularly tell stories like this (I do know of one in Omaha), but for me it was natural because that’s how I grew up.  Some of my earliest memories involve hearing about the exploits of that fabled local insect, Albert Augustus Ant, who since at least the time of my great-grandfather has been remembered for both his incredible strength and his love of specially-blended ant coffee.  Albert Augustus loved ant coffee so much that he would stop the train with his mighty strength rather than wait for it to unload a new can of ant coffee at the depot.

And then there was Adrian Hoggmeister and his friends Beasley Ortwingle, Queesly Grodget, Otho Twiggly, and Lancelot Fiddlehooper — the supposed childhood companions of my father. My brother and I learned not just some interesting things about life but also a good deal about the Depression from these nightly stories.  The eternal bane of their elderly neighbor Elvina Crumbeagle, this gang of feral miscreants did better at living by their wits than poor Willyopolis.

Willyopolis has been part of our evenings for so many years that we still tell stories about him.  Daddyopolis is content to spend his days sleeping in the meadow while “watching” the sheep.  Angieopolis is shrewd and ambitious while little brother Tommyopolis is prone to taking advantage of people.  Almost every night they manage to have a misadventure, and I hope that this who-knows-how-old family tradition of evening stories continues for many generations to come.

Traditionally, social mores imposed regulations on this market, but increasingly that’s no longer the case.  And marriage is not competing well as a result.

Though their numbers appear to be shrinking, there are still many people who see gay couples as the biggest threat to marriage.  They say the very institution of marriage is threatened when there is no possibility of procreation.  And indeed, procreation is becoming a concern.  In 2011 the U.S. birthrate was the lowest ever recorded – there were only 63 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age.  This contrasts to a whopping 122 at the height of the baby boom.

Yet procreation has less and less to do with marriage; today 40.8% of babies are born out-of-wedlock.  Where once marriage was seen as essential to providing children with a stable home and a good start in life, many people are now embracing alternatives.

Marriage, of course, is an ancient custom.  So ancient, in fact, that when people traditionally promised to love, honor, and obey until death did them part, they were only committing themselves for a few years to a few decades.  Experts believe that at the time of Christ most people died around the age of 20.  In the following 1,900 years life expectancy doubled to over 40, but by then most people were marrying in their twenties instead of in their teens.  For most of our history marriages on average haven’t lasted nearly as long as they can today, and one politician in Germany has suggested that marriage licenses should come with an expiration date.

While marriage is under assault from many directions, many sociologists believe the biggest threat is from the Internet.  With so many choices now available through online dating, how can a person pick the best partner?  Research has shown that the more choices people have the more difficulty they have choosing.  But with so many potential dates available why should anyone have to choose at all?   More and more people – males especially – are simply going from partner to partner without any thought to forming a long-term relationship.

It’s even worse, though, in Japan.  There many young men have opted out of the dating pool completely.  These young men have found real live women to be nothing like the ones appearing on Internet porn sites, and have come to prefer the latter (what does this bode for Japanese procreation?).

Today young American women are overtaking their male counterparts in everything from college graduation rates to automobile ownership.  Where once marriage was about the only way for a woman to be financially secure, that’s no longer the case.  Women don’t need a husband to support them and that’s causing many to question what they need a husband for at all.  What’s good for the gander is good for the goose; many young women are as comfortable in a series of short relationships begun online as young men are.

For a number of reasons marriage has traditionally been the goal of people in love.  But now that love and sex are so easily found outside marriage — and women are comfortable raising children on their own – modern “market forces” are rendering marriage obsolete.

Another account, in a memoir written by a man who had been a boy living in a sod house south of Gordon, said that the wind blew so hard that his family awoke the next morning under a thin layer of snow, snow blown right through sod walls 18 inches thick.

But this same writer cautioned that many of the tales of school teachers perishing with their young charges were just that – tall tales.  He said that far fewer people perished in the blizzard than popular legends claim.  But while I’ve yet to find any information supporting the story of the school kids in the haystack east of town, there’s no question that a lot of people did die in that fabled storm.

The storm struck without warning on an unusually warm day.  The spring-like warmth of the day added to its toll; many people were out enjoying the warm weather and weren’t prepared for the drastic changes that followed.  It moved all the way to the east coast, and until this past October when Hurricane Sandy hit, was the only storm to have ever shut down the New York Stock Exchange.

My family still remembers the Blizzard of ’88.  The Hosfords were still using a sod barn to house their horses.  This barn had no glass in the windows, so the family stuffed the openings full of hay in an attempt to keep the snow and cold out.  The storm was so bad that by the time the family got back to the barn, the horses had eaten the hay from the windows and frozen to death as a result.  This was a terrible disaster; not only were the horses their only transportation, they were also the family’s only means of farming the land.

Two and half miles to the west my great grandparents, Frank and Helen Mansfield, had just welcomed their first baby, Ada, into this world.   Because the day had started out so nice a neighbor lady had come over to visit.  When the storm struck, Frank headed out to tend the livestock.  He took the precaution of tying a rope to the house so he could find his way back.  Yet as the afternoon wore on Frank did not return.  Finally Helen bundled up and set out to look for him.  As she left, the neighbor asked if she could have Ada since it seemed unlikely either Frank or Helen would ever return.

Fortunately, they both returned safely and went on to have three more daughters, including my grandmother, Etta.  Yet had in not been for those twisted strands of hemp Frank Mansfield had the presence of mind to tie to his little house on the prairie – a house that had unmortered bricks stacked inside the north wall to try to keep the winter wind at bay – I might not be here today…

That, of course, is not the first time someone has likened culture to nourishment – indeed, we’ve long been told that “man does not live by bread alone.”  When I was about eleven I started listening to jazz because the passion and expressive freedom this largely-improvised music conveys made me feel good.  To me it was a lot like eating a really nice meal.

And indeed, jazz has come to be seen as a “gourmet” music, fancied for decades now by the intellectually “hip” and those pretending to be.

But it wasn’t always that way.  Jazz was once the “heartbeat of America.”  This was hammered home recently when I dug out my father’s collection of old 78 rpm records, a collection chronicling some of the best music of the Swing Era.  With my youngest son, Thomas, now taking up jazz vibraphone, I wanted to familiarize us both with past greats like Lionel Hampton, Milt Jackson and Red Norvo.

I was expecting technical virtuosity – that has long been part and parcel to jazz.  But what I wasn’t expecting was the energy, the pile-driver swing that served as the soundtrack as the “Greatest Generation” came of age.  It’s no wonder the Nazi’s and Japanese could not defeat us – we were too filled with life.

But it’s more than just the beat that gives this music its power; born from the degradation of Jim Crow and the destitution of the Depression, this music wasn’t just entertainment — it was art.  Like all true art, there’s a depth of expression to these recordings that nourishes the soul, a musical quality rejected long ago by the ever-pandering mass entertainment industry.

In a defense of the advertising industry’s influence on modern life, David Ogilvy, the “Father of Advertising,” noted that people only began using deodorant because of marketing.  And that may be true, but it wasn’t long before the wizards of Madison Avenue figured out that in order to keep making sales products must satisfy consumer needs for only a little while.

And so not only does our deodorant need to be reapplied regularly, we’re bombarded by a panoply of slick-packaged junk that satisfies only for a moment.  A junk food diet leads ironically to both obesity and malnutrition – no matter how much we eat it doesn’t satisfy our needs.  And it isn’t just food.  Our consumer society is kept going by never fulfilling us, thus making sure we always come back for more.

Marketers get away with this by promoting products so aggressively that we think we can’t live without them.  Drug companies, for example, spend a fortune marketing drugs that treat trivial complaints like hang nails, drugs we rush to buy even when the list of possible side effects includes death.

Morrison extols the “pursuit of life, liberty, meaningfulness, integrity, and truth.”  Nothing exemplifies this better than the music preserved in those scratchy shellac platters.  This is a meaningful music created by men and women of high artistic integrity asserting their liberty in the face of poverty and discrimination.  Whether you like jazz or not, their recordings are a stark reminder of how we as a society have abandoned substance in favor of marketing hype, and how our very souls have become malnourished as a result.