A Day in the Life of Chaos

Alfredo (L) Me on (R) Today is the last day at work for one of my best friends.   He is not so old, 53 I think.  Despite his relative youth, in the world of special agents and law enforcement personnel, a special deal is made.  They are allowed to retire with only 20 years of service.   This is largely because the years of long hours and professional stress are expected to take their toll on the body and cause many to die younger.   Being a civil service person but not an agent I need to have 30 years of service and be nearly 57 years of age before I can walk away.  In the overall scheme of things it is still a great deal.  This in a world where many people today wonder if they will ever be able to retire.  I think about this every time I see an elderly woman serving fast food at Chick-fila or an elderly man bagging groceries at the Publix. When you think about it, we spend most of our lives working.  Over the years many of us spend more time with our co-workers than we ever do w

I have been having an ongoing conversation with my father about the Occupy Wall Street protests going on around the nation and how they compare to the protests of the 60's.  I was born in the 60's, 1967 to be exact and less then a year later Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were both dead.  I wish I could say I remember it but I believe I was likely more concerned with the flavor of my creamed spinach.  As a result in order to gain perspective I have turned to someone that was much more cognizant of the changes going on in the nation.  In an odd way, we tend to remember the period with some nostalgia yet my father reminds me that it was the seeming hopelessness of it all that drove both him and my mother independently of each other to migrate to Alaska. Bloody Sunday, Selma AL I wanted to know if the protests of the 60's as undefined and counter culture as they were, had an impact on public policy.  My father's conclusions were that they did and he listed a

One of the problems of being cognoscente of history and of the world around us is that  leads to self questioning.  What would I have done?  What would I do? They are questions that can be postulated but never really answered.  The truth lies only in the resolution of the moment as it confronts you, nothing more, nothing less. Of course there are the radical questions of true moral sincerity.  For instance if you lived in Germany during the war would you have sheltered a Jewish friend?  What if the decision came at risk to you and the lives of your family?  I like to think that I would have helped but only the moment could have really shed light on the true answer.  It is always easy to find reasons and make excuses for not doing something.  The people I truly admire are the ones that don't.  The ones that have convictions so strong they set aside the implications on their own lives.  I know a woman who gave up a life in America based on her political convictions during the Rea

Today I received a sad piece of news.  No, no one is sick and no one has died.  The news was simply that a certain place has now been officially filed away as a memory because it will soon no longer exist.   Photo by Steve Marcus In a previous blog sometime back I recalled this place in Las Vegas, Nevada.  Las Vegas is an ever changing monster.  Little is ever permanent yet what vanishes often leaves nostalgia in its wake.  The city is like the shifting sands of the desert that surrounds it and if they don't figure out a way to get more water there the whole damn thing might disappear.   Las Vegas is fascinating on so many levels but one of the things I find the most interesting is the fusion of local degeneracy and poverty with visitors from around the world and at times opulent wealth.  Both coexist almost as if battle lines have been drawn around the city separating one from the other.  There is a kind of invisible Berlin Wall.  The old core of the city on Fremont stree

In America we have largely forgotten where Veterans Day came from.  On the 11th of November we put out flags and remember our Veterans.  Well that is what we do if we are not hitting a Veterans Day sale or planning a barbecue.  With each passing day the memory of why we celebrate the 11th day of the 11th month grows fainter.  Scarcely a person alive today aside from a historian remembers the 11th hour.  The Eleventh hour was when the guns fell silent.  Guns that in four year rattled the very foundations of humanity an changed the world forever, shaping the world that we know today.  Once known simply as Armistice Day it was the moment that World War One came to an end.  To be more precise, the moment it ended on the battle field. Kaiser Franz Josef I You see, the repercussions of this conflict still echo imperceptibly in the world we live today.  While the thunderous clap of cannons is no more, everything about our technology, government, economy and social systems can be directly

Within the Bauer family there seems to be some kind of right of male passage established by my father and now being continued with my son.  I am sure every family has their own "requirements for membership."  For my father it was learning from his father who was a machinist building complex parts for Hughes Aircraft.  While his exacting father was often disapproving in his ability, my father's striving to please my grandfather taught my father many skills.  In my case, as I reached junior high school and continuing into high school, it was a directive by my father to take Shop.  I resisted and I complained.  I was an actor, a thespian.  I was a debater, an intellectual.  How could I be expected to take shop?  My father insisted and usually when this was the case it was a battle I would ultimately lose. In junior high school it was the "Industrial Arts."  I learned the names of tools and made boxes out of tin.  I spent a semester continuing an unfinished shop p