SOPHIE'S TEETH

It’s strange how a word or a random coincidence can trip memory’s trigger. One’s mental plate is only so big and when it’s full, everything else gets put in a folder and filed away somewhere. Then something shakes loose and comes to the top like a bubble rising and it leaves me standing on top of the world. 

In 1972 I lived with my family on the west slope of Colorado. My little brother Wes lived with his family in south central Missouri. We were both teachers and it was summer. He was working toward a commercial pilot’s license and needed as many hours in the air as he could manage. His father in law was a commercial pilot and bought a Cessna 152 for him to fly, accumulate hours in his log book. The 152 is a two place, high wing plane with tricycle landing gear, designed as a student-trainer for low altitudes. We hatched a plan. They would bring only a change of clothes in a grocery sack and their two girls, 6 & 2 and fly from Missouri to Pueblo, Colorado, on the east slope. Heavily loaded, the little 152 didn’t have enough power to clear the mountains in the summer heat so I would drive over, pick them up, drive back . We would reverse the shuttle service when it was time for them to go home. 

I had a 1953 Willys Jeep station wagon that was powered by a Chevy V8, plenty of room for everyone. On our side we had 3 boys, 5, 1 & 1 (twins). It was a great vacation. One day in particular stands out. We packed for a picnic, put a small play pen in the back, loaded kids and drove 40 minutes to Ouray, Colorado, gateway to the San Juan Mountains. We were headed to a high meadow, west and several thousand feet vertical from Ouray. The first few miles were carved out of solid rock. Ore trucks from the Camp Bird mine drove that part regularly. After that it was a 4 WD two-track with switch-backs and steep grades. Slow going, the terrane opened up into an open basin, surrounded by high peaks. Yankee Boy Basin was a popular destination for tourists. Heavily mined in the late 1800’s, old portals with tailing dumps dotted every hillside, gully and outcropping. Wild flowers were everywhere, blue columbine, red and yellow Indian paintbrush, where springs bubbled up and spilled down everywhere. We stopped frequently, the kids played in the meadow and we took our lunch there. 

Rather than calling it a day we decided to take the road up the south mountainside to a smaller basin, higher elevation, Governor Basin. Above Governor Basin, St. Sophia Ridge stretches south from Mt. Ema to Chicago Peak. Above us maybe 500 feet vertical and a quarter mile distant, the ridge was eroded, leaving columns of black rock with narrow gaps between them, known as “Sophie’s Teeth”. 

We had run out of road but you can climb up to Sophie’s Teeth and look down on the town of Telluride on the other side. Wes and I left our families to entertain themselves and we set about to climb. At first it was a walk across loose, unsettled rock but the grade went steep. The loose rock gave way to boulders. We were climbing over rocks, up the steep face to the gaps between Sophie’s teeth. It took longer than we thought it would. I was better acclimated to the altitude than Wes but I had to stop often to catch my breath as well. The view was spectacular, literally on top of the world. You could see a hundred miles in 3 directions. We both felt awe and wonder, how insignificant we must be. It was time to head back.

The climb down was surprisingly difficult. It required you look carefully at each foot placement and hand hold. You had to test each move before letting go and shifting weight. An easy stretch put us out of sight from below but much closer to the jeep. When they came into view we were still above them, maybe 300 feet away. We waved and they waved back. We shouted but had no way to know if they could hear us. I had a great idea. Let’s sing them a song. Everything there made me think of the movie, “The Sound Of Music”, the mountains, the sky-so-close, the wives and little kids below. 

I coached him on the lyrics, ‘The hills are alive with the sound of music, with songs they have sung, for a thousand years.’ And, we sang, actually more like screaming with a thin hint of melody. When we got to the end we started over. Thin air, screaming out the song, we soon winded and had to catch our breath. We were laughing, ‘One more time!’ “To laugh like a brook when it trips and falls over stones on its way, to sing through the night like a lark who is learning to pray.” Stop again for a gulp of air but we knew the song had to finish at the end. “My heart will be blessed with the sound of music, and I’ll sing once more.” The heard us, couldn’t make out the words but recognized the melody. 

The ride home was interrupted by a stop for ice cream in Ouray. I can’t remember another outing with 9 people that nobody complained about anything, everybody slept well that night. Here it is 2019, all of the kids have grown up, moved on. I am on the cusp of turning 80. A friend in my coffee group once asked a hypothetical question, can you remember a time when you had a great experience with one of your siblings, as if it would be a difficult task. Without a thought I defaulted to Sophie’s Teeth and The Sound of Music. 

I love Google Earth. As I began this journal entry I went to my computer, booted up the satellite image, zoomed in and plotted our outing that day in 1972. I clicked on the spot as best I could remember, dropped a marker for the coordinates. (37.966671  -107.779853) You can see the shadows of Sophie’s Teeth. 

FALLING OUT OF FAVOR

Last night my smart phone died, or at least it’s playing dead. Don’t get me wrong, I am not a luddite. Remember the Luddites, workers back in England during the industrial revolution, (early 1800’s) who lost their jobs to machines. They organized, marched, protesting in the streets. It took roots in London, in the textile factories but it spread like a disease through the manufacturing industry. Since then, the trend has been for more efficient, more reliable machines and fewer temperamental, unreliable people. Since 1811 the name Luddite has referred to anyone who pushes back against loss of hands-on jobs to machines. Two hundred years up the line (2019), anyone who dislikes, fears or avoids advanced technology (technophobes), they are yesteryear’s Luddites with 21st Century updates. I’m not one of them.  

So my I-Phone is dead. Last night I made a call and left a message. Shortly, my ringer setting (ahuuuga) snapped me back to the reason for my call but when I went to tap the button, there was no button to tap. It was ringing but the wrong screen was up, the one to enter a pass code. As it continued, ‘ahuuuga’ after ‘ahuuuga’ I kept pushing buttons and tapping the screen to no avail. Nothing worked so I resorted to curse words I reserve for frustrating situations. The phone defaulted to its recorded message and the screen went dark, all was silent.

I’ve been in conversations where smart phones have been scorned and maligned but those critics haven’t abandoned their Twitter or FaceBook feed yet. By now the smart phone is literally a pocket computer. You can do anything on the phone you can do on a tablet or laptop. I haven’t succumbed to smart phone addiction but I use several of its apps more than I thought I would. I check doppler radar to see where rain clouds are and I use the calculator in the grocery store to compare prices per ounce or pound, use the calendar and clock functions. In a pinch, I take pictures and send text messages not to mention several other apps that I fall back on. But I can go to town without it and shut it off when I don’t want to deal with it. I know people who can’t wait until they implant computer chips in their foreheads. Then they can up and download data by just thinking about it. I’m not one of them either.

This kind of internal dialogue, if you let it keep unfolding results in big, loaded questions. How would we fare without our smart phones? I leapfrog that scenario to an even bigger dilemma; what if electricity goes away? A year on the planet without electricity, how about that? There would be a myriad of short range solutions but in the end (1 year) no transportation, no batteries, no ATMs, no fresh water;I don’t even want to think about it. 

This kind of navel gazing is good mental exercise but it doesn’t fix my I-Phone. I have an appointment with my Apple mechanic in a few hours and I go there with great expectations. I understand that my device is just a short lived machine. Whether it became obsolete or died of a hacked motherboard, I will be reaching for my check book. But the check book is outdated, or nearly so. Even my credit card is falling out of favor. Yesterday I was in a carry out restaurant, waiting for my lentil soup and falafel. A dude at the register passed his smart phone over the scanner and transacted business. I can’t do that, don’t know if I want to. I may have to cough up a ton of money this afternoon for a new smart phone. How about a phone app that gives you 20/20 vision. Being able to read text on a 4” screen would be so cool. 

WITHOUT A HOOK

I play with words, have been for so long I can’t put my finger on when it began. I play with words like my kids used to play with matchbox cars. One car was not enough, they needed a tool box full of little toy cars, trucks, busses, ambulances, tractors and wagons that fit their little hands. They needed them all. It if wasn’t in hand it was parked strategically in a special spot on the carpet or the hard wood floor. On the floor between beds in the twins room I put down roads with masking tape, used wooden blocks for houses and barns. In the kitchen you could hear motors and highway sounds coming down the hall from upstairs. Then there was a cookie tin full of matchbox cars for outside in the dirt. The standard posture for playing their game was lying on your side, one arm propping up your head leaving the other to move the cars. Those motor sounds were wonderful. It meant they were not drawing on the walls with magic markers or any number of other cute but dire diversions. 

I don’t have to keep my toys in a cookie tin. They are part of my operating system, inside my head. My vocabulary isn’t all that grand but as a writer, it is adequate for my need and I default to the thesaurus when the cupboard is bare. Therein; my vocabulary has grown slowly over half a century. But: . . . always the ‘But’. I read once that ‘But’ is not the conjunction as we’ve been led to believe, rather it is an acronym. The letters B, U & T stand for, “Behold the Underlying Truth”. So if you ask to borrow money and I say, “I would like to, but: (behold the underlying truth) you won’t get any money from me.” But with age, cutting straight to the truth, comes memory issues. The inability to come up with the right word or expression compounds with age. Sooner or later the words or phrase they do come to you but just the same, if you can’t have the word you want, the word you own, when you want it, it’s like fishing without a hook and it certainly does make one feel like you’re losing your edge.

I have a word today I want to play with. I like to think I own it but frequently have trouble pulling it up. Can you imagine Roy Rogers reaching for his six-shooter but it gets stuck in the holster and the bad guys wait for him to finish his draw before they open fire. Right! Maybe I don’t own it after all. Today’s word is ‘Anecdotal’. Great word, maybe even necessary when weighing in on someone’s argument. Anecdotal is an adjective that refers to evidence or the weight of an example with its role in a cause/effect situation. It is what you remember or heard someone say but it only has a frequency of 1. An example would be; someone’s grandmother drank whiskey and smoked cigarettes every day, all of her adult life and lived to be 103. It questions the harmful effects of smoke and drink as they relate to long life. That example is ‘anecdotal’.  Even if the story is true, a single occurrence that has not been tested cannot substantiate a universal truth. I hang out with a small group of pretty heady characters who meet regularly. We watch documentaries and educational programs that deal with history, philosophy, economics and human behavior then discuss the issues that have been stirred up. My unofficial role in the process is the “Gong-master”. When someone defaults to an anecdotal argument; “I am the way I am because I ate worms when I was little . . . .” I raise my hand and everybody knows I’m about to “Gong” the violating anecdote. 

Anecdotes can be simple examples intended to entertain or clarify through story and not as evidence. Retelling how Uncle Al dropped his drawers at Christmas dinner; that’s an entertaining anecdote. Sometimes when I summon one word I get another. I’m reaching for the word, ’anecdotal,’ and what does my brain send down to my mouth; ’coincidental’. I don’t know how that works. Other times I just hit a dead end, like fishing without a hook. I hope this writing exercise will help imprint ‘anecdotal’ in my recall. 

As I’ve been typing, another word came to mind. I didn’t need it, had no use for it, sort of like when the cat brings a dead snake in the house for your approval.  The word is ‘Vroum’. In past years an auto maker, car company used ‘Vroum’ as their buzz word in their advertising campaign. It suggests excitement and high performance, makes sporty cars even more appealing. It was good marketing but I like other cars sounds better. Back in the 1970’s my kids taught me ‘Rrrr-mmm’ and ‘Uummmmmm’ and they were as good as it gets. The underlying truth here is, that I am being anecdotal and it doesn’t prove anything. Still, the other underlying truth is that it's for the sake of story. My 4 year-old twins are in their 40’s now but they would agree; Rrrr-mmm-Rrrr-mmm, Uummmmmm.

SWEET SPOT

         Edna St. Vincent Millay was quoted, “It’s not true that life is one damn thing after another, it is one damn thing over and over.” It’s a great quote, not only because it takes the familiar axiom and turns it inside out but also her sense of irony redefines a journey most of us take for granted. Are we plunging ahead with our own muscle or being dragged along like puppies on a leash? What appears as a myriad of  vexing problems may be no more than human nature’s tendency to lose its way in the moment.

         If you live long enough you grow old, it doesn’t matter how many years it takes. You can deny and pretend but when you can no longer leap from the back of your pickup truck and hit the ground running, you know. When you accept the world as it is, broken and you're not the one that broke it, and that nobody can fix it, when you accept that you know. Still, there is an up-side. If you get lucky and things go well there is a sweet spot between Edna’s “That Damn thing” and senility. I’m in that sweet spot now. 

         I don’t go to many funerals. I know that people need closure, whatever that is, maybe just more human nature for me to push back against. We function simultaneously on two different levels. First is the shallow, self aware, “I think I think.” This is where you decide to spoon your soup up to your mouth rather than sup it through a straw or choose not to jump off the cliff even though you know someone who did, or you buy a new car, sell the old house. The other is deep, reckless, free flowing, “I feel. . .” In one mode you are the archer’s bow, in the other you are the arrow. If you mellow with age, pray that you do, the feeling of one’s own trajectory surpasses the power rush through the bow. That thoughtless moment, no longer outbound but inbound, if it’s sweet you be grateful and think less of closure. 

        I don’t know a great deal about Edna St. Vincent Millay, a Pulitzer Prize winning writer. Seventy years after her death we still find her name in print, her poetry is timeless. She was a beauty, red hair in trail, always pushing the envelope, breaking rules, wrestling with that “One damn thing.” she died at age 58. I doubt she ever got to the sweet spot. Again, I don’t know; so many things I care about but don’t know, I don’t know why but I want to put Edna St. Vincent in league with Georgia O’Keeffe, both ahead of their time, both outrageous feminists. One crafted words on a page, the other with pigment and a brush. I am more familiar with the latter, always stop to see her in museums and galleries, visited her home in Abiquiu, New Mexico a few years back. I feel confident she found the sweet spot. At 98 she was still painting, still feeling magic that dwells only in the moment. I don’t think she cared one way or the other about Edna’s, One damn thing. I began this with an Edna quote and I’ll end with Georgia. She said, “When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.”

HERO

“I write to understand as much as to be understood” - Elie Wiesel (1928-2016). I think most are familiar with Wiesel and his story; a Jewish, Romanian teenager survives Nazi death camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald to become a great scholar and humanitarian. The written record serves posterity but the act of framing the language and getting it down, it archives that story in the writer’s understanding. I think that’s what Wiesel meant with “I write to understand. . .” and his story never lost its way. 

I identify as a writer, not that I’m accomplished but the mere fact that I frame language and get it down. That process, just doing it, it etches meaning onto my own understanding. So the connection with my hero is made real in his quote, “I write to understand . . .” Always in need of a metaphor: standing in a downpour, under a big umbrella so you only get wet from the knees down. But to live the story and to own that story, you need to be soaked from head to toe. Words are clear enough but visuals and feelings are in there too, somewhere between the lines. 

Elie Wiesel is one of my heroes, and in my experience the whole idea of heroes gives way to imagery of the tide’s ebb and flow rather than caricatures on pedestals. Being one of my heroes depends largely on me and my process so their ebb and flow is to be expected. Some days it’s Mark Twain with his razor edge sense of secular morality and other days it is Kurt Vonnegut’s rejection of national narcissism. MLK Jr. is a hero for his Christ like sense of duty, knowing they would kill him and other times it is secular humanist Jane Addams rising with the tide. I love them all and of them all, none jog my conscience more often than Ellie Wiesel. Who had more cause to hate and take revenge than Elie Wiesel? But he lived a life that spoke of reconciliation, awarded the Noble Peace Prize in 1986. His heroics were parceled out consistently over a lifetime, in the best interests of oppressed people he had never met. So it’s not just about our connection as writers but also about both humanity and inhumanity and which side of that line you want to place your feet. 

I do not idolize or exalt sports stars, not for stardom and certainly not for the sake of sport. Neither do I glorify celebrities who use that status to advance an ideology. I never cared much for John Wayne. He was cast in heroic roles where he could simply be himself and he rode that character into legend. When he used that leverage to advance conservative politics it validated my apathy there in. Even though I understood and agreed in principle, in my view, Jane Fonda was no better.

Leaders in government have an incredibly difficult row to hoe. Some come to it with heads and hearts in the right place but politics is blood sport. At the onset, winning elections is the means to a noble end but in the end, those means become the new end. When public service morphs into a career, slide of hand with smoke and mirrors seems unavoidable. I don’t think here are any heroes in government, just performers with personal agendas. With both sorrow and conviction I concede to the axiom, “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” As appealing as the opportunity is, no need to beat up on the President. He is the product of his environment and he can’t help himself. The great flaw in the democratic process is that a vulnerable electorate can and often does elect terrible leaders, even demagogues. I’m afraid everything he does is purposed to increase the value of his brand and, like Saddam Hussein, he wants to be President for life. I think the public at large is turning to human nature’s darker side, believing his self righteous hyperbole. The appeal of crushing your enemies is too much to resist. You don’t have to move your feet, just let inertia do the work. If it hadn’t been DT it would have been some other wannabe god. 

I tend to be a harsh critic of human kind but sometimes a personality surfaces with a breath of fresh air. When that happens I take courage, hope for something I can take to heart, take to the bank, make my own. Today, Eli Wiesel’s, “I write to understand. . .” Tomorrow, Helen Keller, Mother Theresa or Nelson Mandela; who knows, maybe George Carlin. 

WHAT THE #%@! - 4

     Starting trouble does not figure into my game plan, neither does waging arguments with conspiracy theorists or ideological extremists. I take comfort in the wisdom of, “It takes all kinds.” Writing a collection of arguable assertions under the cover of, “What The #%@!” seemed like a way to broach controversy without stirring up angst. It simply is what it is. I don’t want to wear it out with my hang ups but then again I would like to share story that might challenge someone’s thinking. That would be a good thing.

     Yuval Harari, author of “Sapiens” and “Homo Deus”, both best sellers, is a scholar in the area of Human History, from The Stone Age to the present. In “Sapiens” he explores how an insignificant species, of no more consequence than any other mammal, how they could advance so rapidly and take over the planet. That’s exactly what we’ve done in roughly the last 10,000 years. 

     He tells the story of how bees exist in a tight social construct. They cooperate in very large numbers which makes them unique. Thousands of bees function for a common purpose, say making honey. But in a split second they can redirect their collective effort to a different task, defending the hive or break off into smaller groups to nurture larva in the bee nursery or fan air to cool the hive. The way they go about each task is literally, carved in stone. No new ideas in the bee hive. E.O. Wilson (world authority on social insects) calls this ‘Super-socialism’. There are only a dozen or so super-social species. A small contingent of ants can not go off exploring and start a new ant colony like the Pilgrims on the Mayflower. In super-social communities the entire community succeeds or dies as a group. All but one Super-social species are insects: Homo sapiens is the other. What sets people apart from bees and ants is that we certainly do cooperate in very large numbers, (voting in elections, holiday shopping, driving cars at rush hour) but we do so with flexibility (new ideas). Voters can write in a name that is not on the ballot, shoppers can change their mind and switch gifts at the check out and drivers can disregard the GPS and exit sooner rather than later to avoid traffic. Some mammals are flexible but only in small groups. Dolphins cooperate in herding fish up into shallows, creating a bow wave that pushes fish onto the bank where they are gobbled up. But it only happens in family groups. One chimpanzee pulls a limb down so another can collect low hanging fruit and then they share. But those examples only happen with small numbers. Tens of thousands of soldiers stormed French beaches on D-Day with a single purpose. Still, small groups changed tactics as situations required, either advance or dig in, return enemy fire with machine guns or throw hand grenades, etc. Humans are the only species that cooperate both flexibly and in large numbers.  

     At first, his accent and frail appearance belie his story telling skill. Harari was speaking to a group in Stockholm, Sweden. The story went like this: Only a few hours earlier, he was at a hotel in New York, didn’t know a soul there. A bellhop took his bags down on the service elevator and loaded them into a taxi, driven by another stranger. He checked out at the desk, returned his key, again to someone he had never met. Of all the places in NY the cabbie could have gone, he takes Harari to the airport where another stranger takes his luggage and checks it in through security. He shows his identification, answers key questions and proceeds to his gate where another stranger scans his ticket. He boards a plane where another stranger seats him beside yet another stranger. A new, different attendant provides food and drink during the flight and people wait patiently as those seated nearer the door deplane first. His luggage is taken to a hotel by someone from the university while another stranger drives him to the auditorium. Then, standing in the spotlight on an unfamiliar stage, he shares a story about Human History with hundreds of strangers. 

     Harari stops to sip water from a bottle, surveys the audience and stretches the pause to emphasize the moment. “I want you to know,” he said, “never, ever, will an African chimpanzee leave his familiar troop of 20 to 30, mostly relatives, leave his territorial patch of rain forest, ride in a taxi driven by an outsider to the air port, board a jet with a crew of alien chimps, fly halfway around the world, surrender his possessions to another unfamiliar chimp to take to his hotel and walk onto a strange stage by himself, in front of hundreds of Swedish chimpanzees to share with them a story about bananas.” 

     The audience loved the story. As if it needed a second verse he begged the question: “What do you think you would get if you put several thousand chimpanzees in an a basketball arena for the Chimpanzee World Championship? How would they organize, who would put on players uniforms, who would be referees; how would food vendors take orders and make change, what about ushers, spectators? People could connect the dots and make it happen. Chimpanzees can cooperate creatively but only in small, family groups.  It would be chaos.” They got it. Humans are not only able to cooperate by the millions (religion, nationalism, war, sports events, etc.) We are both creative and flexible in the ways we transition from one role to another, sports fan to religious devotee, situation to situation. Add language which facilitates story and dexterity to make and use tools, we have evolved from paleo-humans who functioned very much like troops of primates to civilized cultures and ideological sects. We send people to the moon and bring them back but also dictate, all across the world, when the Faithful pray and how they go about it. Cooperating in very large numbers, flexibly, that’s how we came to dominate planet Earth. 

    Consider this, one highly visible, nationally known celebrity chooses to kneel in protest rather than stand for the national anthem and the reverberations are, years later, still making news. Nearly every American got the news within a few hours and judged the situation according to their own moral compass. Opinions ranged from one extreme to the other. He should be banished for his treachery or he should be revered for his courage. I don’t care much about flags, don’t value programmed, manipulated, wanna-be patriotism. I think he showed courage to put himself in harms way for an unpopular but noble principle. But What the #%@!, the point is, a chimpanzee could not have made that choice.

WHAT THE #%@! - 3

Most years by this time I’ve had to mow the yard but the weather has been up and down so much we’re late on that part. I am yet to mow. Some of the weeds are going to seed already and outside my kitchen window in the grass by the patio, a solitary red tulip is in bloom. I’ve never noticed it before, probably because I mowed before it could shoot its flower. I have a run-away imagination that won’t let me leave things alone. So seeing something that seems out of sync with the rest of my experience, it sends me off on a tangent where imagination and possibility go off their leash. The tulip’s leaves are not pretty at all but the blossom is. It started me thinking which usually spins off into a story.

So I start an anthropomorphic conversation with the tulip: “What are you doing there? You are supposed to be out front with the other tulips.” There is no flower bed, just a spot in the grass where former residents planted bulbs for curb appeal. No mulch, no border, just something the realtor told them to do. They bloom early and when they are finished I mow it over and forget about them again until the next spring. They are blooming now but then I was expecting them. The red tulip in the back yard is an anomaly. I wonder if it feels out of place, all by itself, reaching up above the clumps of rye and blue grass like a homeless sapling in the middle of Nebraska. I’ll leave you alone until your petals fall. Then I’ll treat you like a weed and John Deere will bring you down to 3” along with the grass.” 

But I identify with the rogue tulip. It was Kermit the frog who said, “It ain’t easy being green.” Being different isn’t bad necessarily but too much different or off in the wrong direction, someone will notice and take you to task. I will default to some of my own, self inspired wisdom in that ‘Pushing back against you own culture is incredibly difficult.’ Nobody had to explain, I did the math myself. ‘Birds of a feather. . .’ that axiom holds up under fire, it is natural for us to feel comfortable, to prefer people who look, act and believe the same as we do. But what the #%@!, when your tribe adopts an attitude where Muslims = terrorists, African Americans = lazy & dishonest, where we need a wall to keep Mexicans out of the country; I can’t resist pushing back. I’m not a big protester, maybe passive aggressive but I get the message; I’m not good enough either. In my own terms, I’m a doubting unbeliever but religious  citizens would say I’m a Godless reprobate. I love my country but obviously, not enough. Americans I see in everyday places remind me of my son when he was learning to assert himself, behaving badly in the process. I don’t go places where I have to stand for the national anthem before they can begin; not so much an issue about the anthem or the flag but I don’t want to identify with narrow bigots, with their hands over their hearts, believing conformity makes them patriots. They would say it’s not about conformity but I know better. Patriotic hyperbole is all about conforming to a desirable stereotype.  

I don’t hide my feelings but I don’t flaunt them either. One’s position on moral values and beliefs, they stem from feelings, (and we don’t get to chose how we feel) not logic or reason, certainly not intelligence. We are driven to action by well established emotion long before reason, reason has to begin at the beginning before it can connect the dots, emotion is preprogrammed. Intelligence after the fact lets us feel like we’re in control. People take pride in moral decisions with righteous certainty but in fact it’s like taking pride in a sneeze, not a decision at all. The greater the moral element, the bigger the sneeze. Anthropomorphizing again, a self driving car has a human behind the wheel who thinks he is in control. As long as the car makes the same decisions the human does, the driver doesn’t know the difference. But when the car stops unexpectedly to avoid a crash, the driver’s only explanation is, it’s a timely malfunction.

I’m no smarter than anybody else. What makes me different is that my emotional compass isn’t calibrated to my culture and I know it. I act on emotions just like everybody else. Believing one can over ride emotions in favor of a rational response is ‘iffy’ at best. The morality caveat just compounds emotional influence in the process and I have already touched that base. Being an American right now is not comfortable by my experience. My pushback is only a bandaid so I can feel maybe, not so bad. I’m too old to expatriate to Canada or New Zealand and my family is close by. So here I am, trying to appear as if I belong, like a red tulip in the grass. But if I sound too much like a Godless heretic or less than patriotic, John Deere may mulch me like an unauthorized weed.