Eyes on the dizzy button

By Ed Wall

The flu is getting the headlines. Maybe that’s why nobody seems to have noticed my new disease.

It attached itself to my long-time neurological ailment, which gives me a three-martini dizziness without the calories. As one who lives alone, except for a darting trip-triggering cat with feet fetish, I was recently persuaded to sign up with Rescue Alert. I was given a button to press in case of a bone-jarring fall or any other emergency. This button is attached to a cord, which I’m supposed to wear around my neck at all times.

Yes, it is waterproof.

Now I have developed two new psychiatric disorders, which are so new they are not even listed yet in the famous directory of mental diseases.

The first one is Bosom Anxiety. Will the next hug squeeze my button and set off a false alarm chain of commotion? It is almost impossible to talk to an Episcopalian without an embrace, and I worry about that even though I live among Catholics. If I were younger than 84 I might be anxious about other bosomy button pitfalls.

The second disease is Button Envy. When I’m out and around I try not to get scowled at, or maybe arrested, as I scan the chests of strangers. I’m looking for alarm buttons, of course, and when I find them there’s a compulsion to compare. Is the stranger’s button bigger than mine? And, although I have no bias, I note its color.

I’ve played enough Solitaire. My game now is Button, Button, Who’s Got the Button?

Killed in action, 1944

One of my favorite radio shows in the 1940s was a quiz show spoof called It Pays to be Ignorant. A zany panel of “experts” attempted to answer the questions, such as “Who is buried in Grant’s tomb?” That show comes to mind today because I was just too dumb to stop looking.

For a long time I’ve been trying to track down relatives of my best pal in elementary and junior high school. I’ve visited the house he once lived in on Celoron’s Gifford Avenue, talked to our teachers and rummaged around in Ancestry files. No luck.

Harold Elof Lind was born in Jamestown, N.Y., on July 12, 1923. We lived a few blocks apart in the village of Celoron, population about 700. On frigid January days we shivered together at the top of the bridge over the railroad tracks, wearing belts and badges that marked us as official agents of the school safety patrol.

Harold had gone off to college in Albany after making a perfect score on the New York State Regents exams, and even after Pearl Harbor he was given a draft deferment. Then the European theater needed more men. Harold was drafted and quickly taught whatever he needed to know about tanks. On what turned out to be his last leave, Harold’s parents drove the two of us to nearby Westfield, where we boarded a New York Central train for Albany so we could visit Harold’s fiance. After that we continued to New York City, where we spent a couple of days just poking around. We saw “You Can’t Take It With You” on Broadway and laughed a lot.

Harold was killed in action during the Battle of the Bulge on December 14, 1944.

Each year around Memorial Day I’m especially reminded of Harold, along with others who did not come home from World War II. I had turned to the Internet to try
to connect with anybody in his family, but I found nobody. Today I tried again, because the Internet keeps getting more useful and Ancestry.com widens its reach. Today I found a connection and hope to be in touch with a cousin or a friend of a cousin.

It is amazing what you can find when you’re too dumb to stop looking. The main thing is that Harold Lind did not die at the age of 21 and disappear from memory after that.

Defensive walking avoids bumps in the night

Defensive driving has kept a good many car radiators from losing their cool. It makes motorists something like Boy Scouts, whose famous motto is Be Prepared.

Defensive walking can save hips and lives when it is practiced by people who rely on canes, walkers, rollators and grab bars. Defensive drivers are alert to themselves and others. Defensive walkers are attentive mostly to themselves. Inattention can be the enabler that lets a slip, trip or tumble threaten hips, teeth and skulls.

Neurological ailments sometimes take over in a rush, and sometimes gradually. I was around 50 when I began bumping into things now and then, accumulating bruises and acquiring a walking stick. Like others who worked for a living, I tried not to make a big deal of it. My doctor had no idea what it meant. I was in my 70s before advanced medical knowledge, including new testing possibilities, brought a diagnosis of olivopontocerebellar atrophy, which my neurologist described as a form of Parkinsonism. It is known as OPCA.

By that time I was walking like Charlie Chaplin and learned to use a walker and a rollator, which is a sturdy version of a walker that’s designed for outdoor use, for walking around the block or to a neighbor’s house. I stopped driving when I was 81. It was my huge blessing that my daughter, son-in-law and five of my six grandchildren live a mile away.

Mine, like other neurological disorders, is progressive and does not yet have a cure. It manifests in some oddball ways, such as encouraging me to type hte instead of the. Dizziness and a gait with a mind of its own are constant companions.

Although it is not recognized as a sickness by psychiatrists, compulsive writing infected me long ago. This causes people to become journalists, and to continue telling stories even after they retire. This story is about defensive walking for folks who use canes. Some of the concerns are similar to defensive driving. Here are some lapses:

1. Inattention/distraction/fatigue while walking, whether at home where the terrain is familiar or someplace else. Don’t try to walk around while talking on the phone, or while chatting with somebody nearby but out of sight.

2. Poor lighting. Low-watt night lights make it cheap and easy to help guard against missteps at home. Moving around the house in the dark makes it too easy to trip over an animal or to slip on something the animal has done, or to trip over a misplaced object, maybe a broom or a chair or a shoe. I have night lights in bedrooms, bathrooms, even my living room in case I need to answer the front door or to get outside expeditiously.

3. Not bothering with gadgets. Some head for the bathroom in the middle of the night without reaching for a cane or walker. That’s not smart. After the fall it is too late to remember.

4. Hurrying. Take it easy. If it is an important phone call they’ll leave a message or call back. Don’t rush to the phone, day or night. There have to be speed limits for canes and walkers.

Accidents happen. But there’s no need to cooperate with them, to make it easy for them. They often can be avoided, and there’s only one person who can do it.

Respect life--and the Presidency

Joseph Cardinal Bernardin accepted the presidential medal of freedom from President Bill Clinton in a September 1996 ceremony. He and the liberal President did not agree on the divisive question of abortion, but each respected the office held by the other.

His successor as cardinal archbishop of Chicago, and as president of the Catholic bishops’ national organization, does not see things that way. Francis Cardinal George, a learned and holy man, has nevertheless denounced the University of Notre Dame’s offer of an honorary degree to the current President of the United States .

Cardinal Bernardin chose not to step onto the political stage. He tried to persuade non-Catholic Americans to agree that abortion is always wrong. He would have been unlikely to show disrespect for the presidential office or to insist that the president’s judgments must conform to Catholic teaching.

Other Americans who are committed to secular government are not enthusiastic about making decisions of the Second Vatican Council, whether concerning abortion or other matters, binding on secular elected officials. In its Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Vatican II listed abortion and torture among “infamies” and declared that “abortion and infanticide are abominable crimes.”

As a lifelong advocate of protecting the unborn, I hope the Church will become more effective in persuading Catholics and non-Catholics. There is a major political dimension to this effort, and that requires cardinals and others in the Church to avoid the appearance of engaging in partisan politics.

The Church’s challenge to the President and Notre Dame suggests that although he has some reservations about abortion, that’s not a sufficient starting point. It demands total submission to Catholic beliefs.

The absurdity of this is evident in the fact that Catholics are nowhere near total acceptance of church requirements about humility, abortion, the real presence, contraception, the death penalty, just wars, racism, celibacy and the like.

Hard to ID an entire race

One of several reasons to enjoy Newsweek is the back-of-the-book column called The Last Word. In recent times it has been the product of George Will and Anna Quindlen, alternating their commentaries like a pendulum swinging from one side to the other, clever observers of what’s right about the world, and what’s left.

Anna Quindlen, who said she was eight years old when John F. Kennedy gave his inaugural address, has announced that she will no longer write her column. I was thirty-six when JFK delivered that address, and understand the values of retirement. But I’m sorry that the next issues of Newsweek will not include the Quindlen touch.

An admirer might, even so, pause over her comment that “America’s opinionators are too white and too gray. They do not reflect our diversity of ethnicity and race, gender and generation.” Journalists are not alone in sometimes seeing “white” as an all-purpose definition, but it is not. “White” racists viciously opposed the civil rights movement, even as “white” legislators and judges enforced civil rights and affirmative action. Some “whites” are Republicans and adore George Will. Some are Democrats and favor Anna Quindlen. There are “white” atheists, “white” Catholics, “white” Protestants. It makes little sense to speak of “white” as though it were a political, social and moral definition.

Old-fashioned shorthand is quick, but it doesn’t always make good journalism.

The innocence of atheists

There’s something breathtaking about the innocence of atheists, who claim that because they aren’t aware of God, God doesn’t exist.

A severe hearing impairment might cause someone to deny music, and to poke fun at orchestras going through an apparently silent liturgy of puffing, poking and pounding on instruments.

A faith impairment is a greater loss. Some accept it. Some are bothered that others get so much satisfaction from faith. They deny that believers have anything to believe in, because they themselves don’t.

Babies do not understand their parents, whose movements, if considered at all, are blurred in mystery. There’s the matter of diapers, middle-of-the-night burpings and making sure the baby doesn’t get tossed out with the bath water. The folks responsible for the baby’s life are there to help, whether the little squirmer understands it or not.

Some children are turned off by their parents, and some parents are humbled by their offspring. Some are turned off by God, never feeling the warm breath of divine parenthood. Some hate the God they do not know and get cranky about people who do know and love God.

For the faith impaired, the loss my cause nothing more than shoulder shrugs. Or it may cause a bitter fight against something imaginary, the imaginary God of the atheist. Atheism, like other forms of religious belief, can stimulate intolerance.

Even some who have the gift of faith will put it aside, like an unwanted birthday present from a zany aunt, and not think about it again. Like the deniers, they are loners in God’s community. The most aggressive among them want to make everyone a loner, to reshape believers into their own image and likeness.

It took millions of years for people to know about gravity. Happily, they did not float off Earth’s surface just because they hadn’t thought about gravity yet.

Maybe someday physical and spiritual impairments will just be footnotes in the textbooks of science.

—Ed

Confused columnist

They are the opening words of a Chicago Sun-Times column:

“Help me here, because I’m confused.”

Neil Steinberg confirms his confusion by linking his criticism of a statement by Cardinal Francis George to the Inquisition. The infamous Spanish Inquisition was launched by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1478, dredged up as a columnist’s news peg 531 years later.

This is like attacking a speech by President Barack Obama by regurgitating the infamous American inquisition known as the Salem Witch Trials, or denouncing a contemporary Supreme Court decision by citing the court’s infamous Dred Scott decision, which helped fire up the Civil War.

To cite grand errors committed by American democracy centuries ago to justify a disagreement with President Obama is absurd. So is citing painful excesses by religious fanatics of the past, whether they are Catholic, Protestant, Muslim or Jewish.

In my opinion Cardinal George is wrong in declaring that Notre Dame University should not have invited the president of the United States as commencement speaker because of a political disagreement. President Obama is not a Catholic and is not subject to Catholic directives. Abortion is a moral issue, and it is also indisputably a political issue. Cardinal George is right to state the Catholic teaching and to try to persuade others to accept it, but shutting off communication with the world’s most effective public official would have been described by my grandma as biting off your nose to spite your face.

But writers are behind the times if they think this has anything to do with the Inquisition, Salem Witch Trials or Dred Scott case.

The Church has failed to make the case for defending life. Where is there a consistent, ongoing, popular and effective pro-life teaching program in a Catholic diocese? There are dedicated lay, clerical and religious workers in the pro-life field who need wider, more enthusiastic support.

The church has lost much of its authority on issues relating to human sexuality. That's because of the pedophile issue, which has been exploited by people who do not like the Church. Too many bishops deal with abortion as though it is dealt with in Church law and therefore does not require explanation or a consistent teaching and public relations program. Everybody would still be puffing on cigarettes if the bishops had been in charge of the program to combat lung cancer and other tobacco ailments. In 1965 the bishops would have issued an edict against smoking. They would have excommunicated smokers. They would have refused to vote for a smoking politician. Ordinary people would continue to smoke, because edicts do not work as well as education--call it public relations--does.

Obama is not to blame for abortion. Cardinals and others in authority have failed to convince enough people. Even cardinals rely on edicts while failing to teach the sacred value of life for the unborn,for prisoners, bombed-out civilians, the untreated sick and the unfed hungry.