Posted on by Jo Gent · 2 Comments

Bon Voyage to New England

As many of you know, we received our visas yesterday and are cleared to move to Spain. Late this afternoon we found that our furniture is scheduled to sail on October 7, which means it could arrive five weeks after that. We are finally starting to feel that the next chapter of our lives is close to beginning.

So here we are in New England, where I spend 35 years of my adult life and my husband spent 32 of his, staying in Brookline, where our kids grew up. What a great time we are having!

Day 1: Feasting at the home of former neighbors which included their new neighbors, the young Quaker couple to whom we sold our Brookline house, one of the best decisions we ever made.

Day 2: Drinking some of the freshest beer we’ve ever at that the successful taproom of one of our friends who gave up high tech to follow his dream and persevered. After that we went dancing, contras at the Concord Scout House, where we met in early 1988, while we both sought warmth by the stove.

Day 3: Hearing the BSO led by Andris Nelsons perform Mahler 4 and Debussey’s Nocturnes in Symphony Hall twelve days before the 125th anniversary of its opening. We treated our lovely hosts, then the four of us went to an amazing dinner at the newest location of Row 34 in Kenmore Square. In-between we viewed the latest art installation in Boston Common, a 20′ x 40′ (H x L) sculpture tribute to MLK and his wife called Embrace.

Today is Day 3.

Tomorrow, Day 4: Walking in the vicinity of Forest Hills with a good friend who is a former work colleague, then catching up at “home” (current edition) with our hosts’ son, who was our younger son’s close friend since they were both in Kindergarten.

Day 5: Meeting the aforementioned brewmeister and his wife at another brewpub, The Notch in Brighton, then visiting a couple who are both former work colleagues at their Seaport neighborhood home, followed by dinner at the nearby trending restaurant Yankee Lobster.

Day 6: Visiting yet another close friend/Brookline neighbor at home, then driving to Lee, MA to have lunch with friends we bonded with in Santa Cruz who now live in western MA. Then on to NJ and beyond–more on that next week…maybe.

We are honestly having trouble finding anything wrong with our lives right now other than wearing the same clothes repeatedly (most of our clothes are on the ship) and having a key ring with no keys on it. Not having an apartment in Barcelona yet is a bit of a nit, but we’ve got some gals working on it, plus one application in play.

We even dodged a bullet? The picture below, of our former California condo, was taken on the morning of Oct. 2; the cleaners left the driveway in their car the afternoon of Sept. 30, while we were flying to Boston. Happily for the new owner, this is an HOA problem.

Posted on by Jo Gent · 3 Comments

Why We Might Move

My husband and I are in the process of considering a permanent move to Spain. It is complicated and somewhat expensive, and we have not committed to doing it, but we are seriously investigating our options. We’ve already worked with an immigration lawyer to determine that there is a visa for which we would qualify and received quotes for medical insurance. We have a couple of tax consultations scheduled.

We like the lives we led here during the last nine years, but we don’t think there is a possibility of those lives continuing. Some people are startled that we would consider this, perhaps because they think United States is the best country. We realize it is somewhat craven to abandon our country, but we’re not sure it still exists.

No one can predict the future, but we have some ideas about what may happen. I decided to list them in a blog post because I get the Why? question a lot, and I would like to be able to answer it thoroughly. Here are some of our expectations based on our observations of the current situation, not in any particular order.

  • If the government takes $2 trillion-or-so out of the US economy, it will collapse, leading to a depression here or even worldwide.
  • Now that the US is not tracking disease factors either at home or abroad, and both vaccine development and vaccine usage are at historic lows, the next contagious epidemic disease will be much worse than the last one. Local outbreaks have already begun.
  • Mass firing of working scientist as well as elimination of grant programs has already virtually stopped medical research by the government, so we may lose ground quickly in medical science.
  • Reversal of environmental protections will lead to disruptive extractive industry activities and reduced air and water quality.
  • Reversal of gun control laws will increase–is it even possible?–our level of everyday, anywhere gun violence.
  • Gutting of agencies that maintain safety in areas like food supply and air traffic will result in more foodborne diseases and airplane crashes.
  • Gutting of agencies involved in emergency response will increase loss of life and property for future hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, and wildfires.
  • Gutting of agencies that gather data on natural phenomena such as weather will reduce our ability to predict extreme events as well as the efficacy of our weather-based industries such as agriculture.
  • Deporting all of our “illegal” immigrants, which seems to include many non-criminals with paperwork in progress, will drastically reduce both the amount of crops we can get from farm to table and the amount of construction we can complete anywhere, exacerbating the food and housing problems we already have.
  • The states that removed women’s reproductive rights already have increased numbers of babies with birth defects as well as increased infant and maternal death rates. This will expand throughout the country should these laws become federal.
  • As far as we can tell, rule of law has been replaced by fealty as the basis of our justice and legislative systems, meaning that even routine services such as passport issuance could be decided based on envelopes of cash or how deeply one’s head is bowed.
  • With unqualified, unvetted personnel leading our security services and even our military, we will lose access to global security intel, making us more vulnerable to terrorist attacks.
  • The rise of the white male patriarchy systematically dismantling equal rights for people of all religions, ethnicities, and genders threatens most of the population–all women, for example–and is disturbing to us specifically.
  • The elevation of the concept of transferring the country’s wealth from poor and middle-class people to extremely wealthy people is virtually codified already, and seems to be accepted by most. We believe this will degrade the lives of ordinary Americans.
  • We find some of our country’s current policies morally wrong, including abandoning Ukraine, abandoning NATO, eliminating all of our health- and nutrition-based charitable efforts worldwide (USAID), aligning with Russia, seizing assets of other sovereign countries, and trying to force the European Union to be as mean-spirited and anti-citizen as our leadership is.

Any parent reading this will realize that the worst aspect of moving would be being even farther from our adult children, although being far from our friends will be a very close second. I have been trying to encourage the kids to move to another country for several years now, because at their ages they have many more options than we do.

So far they do not agree with me, and perhaps you do not either. Maybe you understand it a little better now, or maybe you just think we’re crazy. Maybe we will move, and maybe it won’t work out. Life was always a bit like a roulette wheel, but it seems to be spinning faster now.

Posted on by Jo Gent

One-Half Nation, Demoralized

Roughly half of our nation, namely the Maga supporters, are super psyched, for a variety of reasons. The anti-DEIs are happy about getting white heterosexual males back in charge of everyone else. The anti-abortion side plus some incels are excited about moving toward a Handmaid’s Tale-style society. The Dominionists are ready to re-create an Amerika that follows the teachings of the Vengeful Christ, whoever that is. A group recently released from (and a subset already returned to) incarceration are busily exercising their right to carry guns, chant, and intimidate average citizens on the nation’s average streets. A small but prominent minority, the Gazillionaires, are thrilled to find that for a few million dollars and utter abandonment of all moral principles plus everything they were taught as children, they may soon become gazillion-illionaires.

Then there’s President Musk, a man of action, who is continuing to live the values he learned as a child in South Africa, as he always has. He isn’t messing around; he’s taking over every government system of the United States and systematically destroying it from inside. He currently has complete control of federal spending and has gutted USAID, a pretty impressive effort for two weeks. He is being helped by executive orders and non-meritocrat Cabinet nominations by shadow president Trump. Did I get those backward?

Whatever. The other half are astounded by how easy it is for a small number of persons to bring our country to a near total halt just because they want to. It turns out that for the past 249 years the reason systems kept working is only because people didn’t try to break them. That is demoralizing.

I wouldn’t say there’s no resistance, but it’s feeble. A lot of this stuff is illegal, but if the enforcement branch is the one breaking the laws, the “normal” way to stop them is through the judicial system, which works pretty slowly, and is riddled with sycophants and capped by a nine-person bench of which six are cultists/corrupts.

There are some protests, and various interest groups trying to get attention, and lots of people and groups asking for money to help, but no person or group has a plan of action that appears to me will be in the slightest bit effective against the combination of power and norm-flouting currently practiced by the scofflaw co-presidents.

The Democrats and their supporting media organizations spend a lot of time being aghast or shrieking about the latest travesty, seemingly feeling that if they show Trump is “bad” we will all immediately conclude Democrats are what we need. Isn’t that the strategy that just lost them the election?

That’s bad, but even worse are the ones who are trying to find a way to compromise with our new administration. As we saw during the campaign when they couldn’t stop consulting their billionaire doners, denounce genocide in Gaza, stem government corruption, break up predatory conglomerates, or take one concrete step to reduce grocery prices, many Democrats are so enamored by hanging out with the cool kids that they’re going to drink the Kool-Aid.

Leaders of our nations universities are very much in this last category. Their organizations are reeling under new DEI strictures, but every single one is carefully tempering comments on the topic, fearful of retaliation.

In other words, it turns out that those of us who should be leading the resistance are either craven or ineffectual. Bernie Sanders would be the exception; he does not appear afraid of retaliation in the slightest. However, he is still focusing on using our nation’s process, spending his considerable energy and influence on finding truly progressive and perhaps bold leaders to run for office in 2026.

I think it is perhaps optimistic to think we will have an election in 2026. Even we do, we need to do something before then. This last election was at least in part decided by gerrymandered precincts and reduced voter rolls, and those sorts of activities will only increase between now and then.

My husband and I are thinking we should leave. That also seems craven, but as two retired people, we are in no position to turn any aircraft carriers around, especially without a strong organization spearheading a viable plan. As people depending on Social Security as part of our retirement plan, we are very vulnerable to impoverishment. We are angry; we’ve spent nine years building a new life in California, and we will have to start over again at this older age. However, that is something we at least can figure out how to do.

Honestly, it’s not clear that we will be able to get out in time. The US has now officially stopped tracking/reporting bird flu, and if it transitions to human-human transmission, which seems inevitable, we may not even find out until it has spread halfway across the country.

Season 2 of Trump v Pandemic could be more of a killer than Season 1.

Posted on by Jo Gent

Fascism v Liberalism

The ideas in this blog are derived from the “Naples” essay written by Walter Benjamin of the Frankfort school with help from proletariat Asja Lacis. As you may know, the Frankfurt School refers to a group of thinkers dissatisfied with all then-current forms of government who coalesced during the interwar period in Europe. What struck me about the essay was the comparison of fascism and liberalism, which I found it very enlightening and still useful.

Fascism divides the world into “the vital and the decadent, the essential and the discardable, the us and the them.” All the dichotomies are false of course, similar to the old joke, There are two types of people: Those who love cats and those who love dogs. Extreme simplification works in a joke, but were it to be applied in reality, it would exclude people who hate both, who love both, who eat both, and who prefer fish.

The other problem with two types thinking is that it usually concludes one of the types is wrong.

Fascism encourages follower to “worship a concocted, false social whole,” like the three decades in America during which Caucasian white- and blue-collar workers were able to support a non-working wife and kids with a single job, usually while owning a late-model car and a TV, and maybe even a dwelling.

These conditions never existed either before or after that time period in the US, but they do survive in the living memory of many Americans today, even though that memory maybe misremembered, remembered from someone else’s life, or gleaned from watching or reading fiction.

Obviously those conditions don’t seem ideal to many today, though I can only speak for women like me, who are much happier wielding a soldering iron and getting paid than wielding a mop and getting ignored.

Liberalism “emphasizes the individual at the expense of the network of relations in which they are embedded.” This definition speaks to me, but seems vaguely worded. One example might be assuming a gay person would politically prioritize gay issues over issues relating to that person being a daughter, aunt, employer, PTO member, football fan, dancer, diabetic, or whale lover. This might be referred to as one type thinking, as in, people have one characteristic that matters, at least in terms of politics, to which all their other webs are subordinate.

That obviously doesn’t work. I can’t even choose between Scottish dancing and line dancing.

Liberalism “encourages followers to banish the idea of any social whole in favor of abstractions like the economy as if they were entities existing independently of human life.” Two things about this. Firstly, it reminds one painfully of all the election exhortations by liberals about the US economy being the envy of the world, when citizens just weren’t experiencing it that way. When you are reduced to living on disability insurance and your kid has to join the service because all the well-paying jobs with benefits have been shipped overseas to create more billionaires, you really don’t care what the numbers say.

Secondly, the economy is most assuredly an abstraction, something created out of the imaginations of people, for which there are no natural laws. There are plenty of historical societies and even some modern ones that maintain their members’ health and happiness throughout all the stages of their lives, without impoverishing–or over-enriching–anyone. The ideal that “making any challenge to [capitalism is] as pointless as challenging the laws of motion” is also fiction, a way of forcing all people to identify with “the power which beats them.”

In modern America, both fascism and liberalism encourage us to embrace capitalism in a simplistic, unthinking sort of way. We don’t have to, though.

Faced with the incursions of industrialization in the 1920s, “Nealpolitans stubbornly resisted modernization, and refused to be overwhelmed and remade by industrial commodities that flooded their city.” They preferred to fix their own cars, even if they had to stop every mile to do so, and often re-purposed modern inventions to be actually useful. Everyone not only had hands-on knowledge but also believed it was important in order to avoid reliance on outsiders or elites.

It still is. How deftly capitalism conceals its dark side! We all can purchase an industrial good without thinking of “the late-night labor, the unattended children, the workplace injuries,” or the laborers who are slaves, prisoners, or children. How empowered could we be with the ability to get our goals accomplished without kowtowing to a system designed to endlessly syphon more wealth to the wealthy?

Posted on by Jo Gent · 1 Comment

Sagrada Familia

The name of this consecrated, minor Roman Catholic basilica is translated as “the holy family” in English, so I’m going to refer to it herein as HF, since SF means San Francisco to me. HF is a little overwhelming, and I’m not really even going to try to do it justice.

The pictures will tell most of the story as far as architecture is concerned. HF is not complete, even though construction started in the 1800s, and its main architect, Gaudi, died in 1926. The basic plan is a very unconventional-looking cathedral surrounded by 18 towers, honoring the twelve apostles, the four authors of the Gospels, Mary, and Jesus. All have been constructed but only six are currently erected. There are also three facades, nativity, passion, and glory, though only the first two are complete.

The exterior is covered with reliefs, particularly around the nativity entrance, where they depict events associated with the birth of Christ. The passion entrance is more austere, displaying events associated with His death. I am guessing the glory entrance decor will relate to Christ’s ascension.

The level of detail cannot be exaggerated, and can hardly be comprehended in person. I would not be surprised if every mention of Christ in the Bible and other texts is represented somewhere in this edifice. There are also other references, perhaps designed to appeal to the global community, such as lists of sacred sites all over the world and messages in many different languages.

Although extraordinarily religious, Gaudi was also inspired by nature, and believed that man’s work should not exceed God’s. For that reason the apex of HF will be slightly lower than the height of nearby Montjuic.

The cathedral includes a nave transected by an apse, cloisters and choirs, an altar and a crypt (where Gaudi lies), yet is not obviously comparable to any other cathedral in most respects. The major supporting columns, composed of various woods based on the weight each must bear, reach straight up toward the ceiling then branch into a tree-like canopy on reaching it, leading the audioguide to refer to the nave as “the forest.” Below is a closeup of the branching, followed by a longer view toward the altar.

You may feel the tour is just getting started, and if you were there that would be true, but this is about as much as I can handle. We purposely chose our tour for an afternoon time so we could see the western windows aglow, so I’m including a picture of those, and the eastern ones as well, because they look great, too. You will easily be able to identify them by the associated coloring.

I’ve tried to be respectful here in terms of capitalization of religious terms, but also not to go overboard with that. While I was in the moment, the audioguide murmuring in my ear, I was mesmerized, hardly aware of those nearby or any physical reality outside of HF, but eventually the trance was broken. While I have great appreciation for beautiful religious monuments and inspiring classical masses, HF is a whole new level. Should we expend this sort of effort and labor and human genius for more than a century toward metaphysical ends?

Sometimes I feel we could it be living like the Jetsons if we were a little more interested in improving humanity’s physical well-being and enjoyment. Better yet, we could try to achieve peace on earth, good will toward men, not performatively as at a church service, but daily, at every level of society, for every category of employment, and as our most sacred, admired, and rewarded measure of merit.