THE SCUNTHORPE PROBLEM: UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

by Kenneth Harper Finton ©2015

 “Give me land, lots of land with the sunny skies above, Don’t fence me in.” – Cole Porter

   Riding in the car on Route 287, the lead elk jumped a fence leaving the others struggling alone on the other side. Fences isolate and entrap while they pretend to protect and defend.

   “Good fences make good neighbors,” Robert Frost has said, as though building a wall around yourself is desirable and morally essential.

   It brought to mind the day I returned to the country from New York City and took my old dog for a walk in the woods. We came to a fence and I lifted  Lassie up over the fence, but she had gained weight and was heavier than I remembered. She struggled free, caught her back leg in the wire and hung there upside down and yelping. I ran off to the nearest neighbor to borrow some wire cutters, but while I was cutting the leg free, the frightened old girl bit me several times. They were painful punctures on the hand that later swelled and ached like a bad tooth.

   Until the last one hundred and years life ran free upon the Earth. Then we built the fences and the roads and divided the herds as though we had the inalienable right to do so. After all, are we not the cream of living things, the tamers of nature, the universe itself come to intelligence and great power. Does not ancient and misguided scripture give us power and dominion over all the living things? “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” Genesis 1:27.

   Our freeways have separated the species. They are giant fences that imprison and subdue the beasts of the wild and halt their natural evolution. Our fences are created to provide us with a food supply and keep the victims we choose safe for tomorrow’s meals.

Unintended Consequences

Our world is full of unintended consequences. The Scunthorpe problem is named from an attempt to protect people from exposure to the obscene by filtering out strings of letters that spelled what the censors considered to be key strings of letters. As a result, people on Scunthorpe, England could not use the web of look up a local business because the wordcunt was in the town’s name. We can solve our Scunthorpe problems, but it costs money that people would rather use for other things.

   Little can be done on the lonely byways where fencing is mandatory and the animals are left to their own devices. Not even Vegan ideas can solve such problems, as wild herds are not used for our primary food supplies. Outdated, obsolete moral codes are responsible for many problems that could easily be solved if only people used reason instead of faith and knowledge instead of dogma.

   The prohibition era in the United States was intended to control the liquor traffic and protect the public against alcoholism, but it drove the trade underground and the profits into the hands of mobsters. The same has occurred with the war on drugs.

   Abstinence-only sex education has been shown to increase teenage pregnancy rates, rather than reduce them. Compared to either comprehensive sex education or no sex education at all, it has been shown to be ineffective. [Kohler, Pamela; Manhart, Lisa; Lafferty, William (April 2008). “Abstinence-Only and Comprehensive Sex Education and the Initiation of Sexual Activity and Teen Pregnancy”, Journal of Adolescent Health.]

   It seems reasonable to require that children be constrained by car seats to prevent injury in case of accidents, but air bags killed many kids. So we decide that moving children to the back seats in rear-facing seats was a solution, but there was a great increase in children being forgotten and left to suffer in overheated cars as a result. Robert K. Merton listed five possible causes of unanticipated consequences in 1996. [Merton, Robert K (1996). “On Social Structure and Science”. The University of Chicago Press.]

1. Ignorance, making it impossible to anticipate everything, thereby leading to incomplete analysis
2. Errors in analysis of the problem or following habits that worked in the past but may not apply to the current situation
3. Immediate interests overriding long-term interests
4. Basic values which may require or prohibit certain actions even if the long-term result might be unfavorable (these long-term consequences may eventually cause changes in basic values)
5. Self-defeating prophecy, or, the fear of some consequence which drives people to find solutions before the problem occurs, thus the non-occurrence of the problem is not anticipated.

Unintended consequences write the stories of our lives. The world about us is immensely complex. Solving problems create other problems that take their place. The best we can do is be willing to change the basic values that prevent us from creating and maintaining a better world for all.

DEPRRESSION

by Kenneth Harper Finton ©2014

                     

Depression is a chemical change that originates in the brain. When depression arrives, a certain heaviness is felt in the head, almost like an invasion from a foreign substance. It is palpable, like the clouds flowing across the sun. The light is replaced with a much heavier shadow that blocks the warm rays of the sunlight.

I am not a chronic depressive, yet like most of us, the cloud comes over me when I feel exceptionally neglected or misunderstood. Most mild depressions are a simple case of getting the blues.

It helps to remember that we only feel emotionally good because we know about feeling emotionally bad.

Severe or mild, depression is caused by brain chemistry. When our chemical neurotransmitters are out of balance, we fall into depressive symptoms. Hormones, disease, inherited traits and life events all play a part in depression.

Some claim that women are more susceptible to depression than men, but that could be because women seek treatment for depression more than men do.

Severe depression often requires medical treatment. Because the causes are chemical changes, chemicals are often used for treatment. Some can have very serious consequences. Many people do not believe in chemical treatments, or feel the primary purpose of these treatments is to enrich pharmaceutical companies.

See: 
http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depression/basics/treatment/con-20032977 

Medications Many types of antidepressant medications are available to treat depression, including those below. Discuss possible major side effects with your doctor or pharmacist.

• Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). Doctors often start by prescribing an SSRI. These medications are safer and generally cause fewer bothersome side effects than do other types of antidepressants. SSRIs include fluoxetine (Prozac), paroxetine (Paxil), sertraline (Zoloft), citalopram (Celexa) and escitalopram (Lexapro).
• Serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs). Examples of SNRI medications include duloxetine (Cymbalta), venlafaxine (Effexor XR) and desvenlafaxine (Pristiq).
• Norepinephrine and dopamine reuptake inhibitors (NDRIs). Bupropion (Wellbutrin) falls into this category. It's one of the few antidepressants not frequently associated with sexual side effects.
• Atypical antidepressants. These medications don't fit neatly into any of the other antidepressant categories. They include trazodone and mirtazapine (Remeron). Both are sedating and usually taken in the evening. A newer medication called vilazodone (Viibryd) is thought to have a low risk of sexual side effects.
• Tricyclic antidepressants. Tricyclic antidepressants — such as imipramine (Tofranil) and nortriptyline (Pamelor) — tend to cause more severe side effects than do newer antidepressants. So tricyclics generally aren't prescribed unless you've tried an SSRI first without improvement.
• Monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs). MAOIs — such as tranylcypromine (Parnate) and phenelzine (Nardil) — may be prescribed, typically when other medications haven't worked, because they can have serious side effects. Using MAOIs requires a strict diet because of dangerous (or even deadly) interactions with foods ― such as certain cheeses, pickles and wines ― and some medications including birth control pills, decongestants and certain herbal supplements. Selegiline (Emsam), a newer MAOI that you stick on your skin as a patch, may cause fewer side effects than other MAOIs do. These medications can't be combined with SSRIs.
• Other medications. Other medications may be added to an antidepressant to enhance antidepressant effects. Your doctor may recommend combining two antidepressants or medications such as mood stabilizers or antipsychotics. Anti-anxiety and stimulant medications might also be added for short-term use.

St. John’s wort is a popular means of treating depression in Europe, though it is not approved in the United States. This herbal remedy can interfere with quite a few medications, so a doctor’s advice is recommended to make certain that there is no interaction with other prescriptions.

Another European drug not approved in the US is called SAMe (pronounced ‘sam-E’) is the synthetic version of a naturally occurring chemical that the body manufactures.

Some people believe that diets high on Omega-3 fatty acids – found in cold water fish, walnuts, and flaxseed and oil – also helps to relieve mild depressions.

My depressions, I find, are most often caused by taking myself too seriously. I can often cure them by doing something else and not thinking about myself so much. Enlarging one’s self identification is always a good idea when the blues pay us a visit.

Helping others often rewards us as well. It is another method of bringing us out of ourselves and into a practical world where people can care about one another.

Taking our consciousness away from our limited definitions of ourselves and is a step toward expanding mental pictures of ourselves to include the rest of nature and humanity. For this we rely on many things, from mediation to music, exercise to entertainment.

Depression is a curse that falls on all of us. Looking from the top of the hill, we can see the valleys below, but from the valley itself, the mountain often looks insurmountable.

Thanks for reading.

Follow me at heliosliterature.com

                 

MISSED OPPORTUNITY

                     

   MIssed Opportunity by Kenneth Harper Finton ©2014

“We often miss opportunity because it's dressed in overalls and looks like work.” 
— Thomas A. Edison

Does opportunity only knock once? Leon Spinks said it was so. He said that “opportunity knocks only once. You never know if you’ll get another opportunity.” Leon knows about knocking. He was the boxer that defeated Mohammad Ali in February of 1978 in a fifteen round decision fight. 

Nonetheless, opportunity presents itself often. Opportunity is a set of circumstances that makes it possible to do something.  Hopefully, this action is a creative act, but it could just as easily be destructive.

Opportunities are time sensitive. We have all missed many opportunities. Sometimes they slide by unrecognized. Sometimes we are not ready for them. Sometimes we choose to ignore them. 

Whatever your secret desires, there are always ways to make them ripen. 

“Make it so,” was the mantra of Captain Picard in Star Trek: the New Generation. Making it so is the secret to getting the task done.

We have opportunities today that people did not have in the past. We can develop relationships with brilliant and creative people all over the world through our new information technology. Highly creative people tend not only to recognize opportunity, but have placed themselves in a position to make something of it.

Almost every problem has a solution. It is creativity that solves these problems. We are all creative. Creativity is the hallmark of humanity.

The mind is constantly occupied and thoughts appear constantly, seemingly from nowhere. Since these ideas and observations are easily lost, it is wise to archive then in some fashion. Carry a notebook and write them down. Have a digital camera to document the out-of-the ordinary and use the video on your cell phone to make audio/visual notes that you can sort and transcribe at a later time.

It is that same mind that prevents is from taking advantage of opportunities. Exceptional creativity comes from an open mind that is not afraid of the unorthodox. Prejudice, uninformed religious beliefs and dogmas, political pressures and peer uniformity are all enemies of the open mind.

We need to be ready for opportunity. Rita Coolidge said, “Too often opportunity knocks, but by the time you push back the chain, push back the bolt, unhook the two locks and shut off the burglar alarm, it is too late.”

Being thankful for our limited talents and grateful in accepting our weaknesses helps us to clear out minds and look at things from different perspectives. Both resentment and complacency run amuck in today’s society. Dwelling on these things can put us in an unproductive mind set that can stymy our ability to recognize opportunity.

I LOST MY PENIS TODAY

I lost my penis today. Somewhere in Penisylvania, I think. I must have bent over and it fell out. Frankly, I am lost without it. I am a writer and I use it all the time. It was a very special penis or I would simply go replace it. I have tried using a peniscil instead, but I can't keep it sharp like my fountain penis.

What to do? I could write on my laptop, I guess, but something is wrong with my spell check. Every time I press a 'p', then an 'e', then an 'n' it adds an 'is'. 

This will not do. It is especially disconcerting when writing to my penis pal. If I write much more, I might be sent to a penisal colony of a penisitentiary. Further words from me will be penisding on solving this problem.

Thanks for reading.

Folow me at:

kennethharperfinton.com

IS THERE A VALUE TO PRAYER?

Those who believe that a personal God has a special will – a will greater than our own – think that God can hear their prayers and possibly be made to care enough about the situation enough to give them an answer. 

Those who see no evidence at all that prayers are answered say, “No, the only people who care are those in your individual circle. God, if there is such a thing, has nothing to do with it.”

Then there are those in the middle who are not positive deep within that there is a divine being with a will for humanity. Just in case there is, they subscribe to a moral code written by some religion of combination of religions.

Prayer is interpreted differently by all the above. 

Some see prayer as kneeling down beside the bed or before some vivid image. They fold and clasp their hands and give thanks or asking for blessings. Some make a habit of holding hands around the table as reciting some rote blessing that passes through us like an ineffective TV commercial. 

But it this really prayer?

prayer definition

prayer

pre(ə)r/

noun

noun: prayer; plural noun: prayers

1. a solemn request for help or expression of thanks addressed to God or an object of worship."I'll say a prayer for him"

synonyms:

invocation, intercession, devotion; archaicorison "the priest's murmured prayers"

4.

• a religious service, especially a regular one, at which people gather in order to pray together."500 people were detained as they attended Friday prayers"
  
• an earnest hope or wish."it is our prayer that the current progress on human rights will be sustained"

Of all those definitions, I like the third the best: an earnest hope or wish. There is something about hope that foretells and defines the future. There is something about thanks that defines and appreciates the present.

Appreciating the present is the key ingredient of happiness. 

The way be can do this is to take a small break in our routine and consciously be thankful for those good things that brought us to this moment and respectful to the bad things that also brought us to this moment. 

Our present contains all the good things that have happened as well as the bad. Nature provides the bad things to keep us moving and progressing. What matters is the nature of the movement forward. Focusing on the good we want to accomplish will keep us on a chipper and more productive path.

These efforts need not public, as they are in essence a private thing. Prayer does not even have to be called prayer to be effective. Call it meditation ... Call is a cigarette break ... Call it a pause to reflect ... Call it re-evaluation. It is all the same thing if the objective is to bring good will and happiness into the future.

SHORT STORIES

I love a great short story. Problem is, there are too few of them.

How many great short stories can you name out of the blue? Make a short list of them in the comments below.

Perhaps you are better read than I, because I can only think of three.

“A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens. Scrooge is an icon. Dickens was paid by the word to run his work serialized in the newspapers. That is why so many of his works are tediously long.

“The Old Man and the Sea” by Ernest Hemingway (more a novella than a short story). Even though I forget the Old Man’s Spanish name, I still smell the sea and the fish and feel the sting of rope on my hands as the big fish fight.

I cannot remember the name of the great O’Henry story about the man who sold his watch to buy a fine hair brush for a his love who cut off her hair and sold it to but him a watch. Maybe that was not the story exactly, I do not remember, but that’s a decently good one the way I described it.

Short stories are easy to read. 

They take more time than a blog or a post, so they require more time and effort from the reader. But when they are good, they are outstanding. 

Many great television mini-series are really enacted series of short stories that follow the same characters. This allows for character development. Come up with a great character and anyone will want to know them – love them or hate them. TV dramas are simply short stories with added visual action. The script does come first.

Written short stories are often better than TV stories.

We get to visualize our own image of the character and the setting. We get the added sense of smell from compelling descriptions. 

I believe that most novels could really be told in the time is takes to read a short story. I believe that every chapter of a novel could be – and perhaps should be – a stand alone tale that either leaves you wanting more or thinking about the implications of what that story means to you.

I think that a writer can serve themselves best by writing smaller works that can later be entwined and stitched together to make a larger work.

PAYING FOR SEX

In the Old West, the first thing the dusty lone stranger did when he got to the muddy streets of the town was clean up a bit and go the saloon. He wanted a drink and companionship. There among the spittoons below the brass railed bar, he could look in the mirror behind the bar and view the buxom ladies who were quite willing to take him upstairs and make love for a reasonable fee.

Prostitution has been recognized and controlled by law for thousands of years. Sumerian records from 2400 BC speaks of kar, the term for a prostitute as a bona fide profession. The code of Hammurabi, in 1780 B.C. Specifically refers to the rights of prostitutes. “179. If a "sister of a god," or a prostitute, receive a gift from her father, and a deed in which it has been explicitly stated that she may dispose of it as she pleases, and give her complete disposition thereof: if then her father die, then she may leave her property to whomsoever she pleases. Her brothers can raise no claim thereto.”

Theodora, the wife of Justinian, was co-ruler of the Eastern Roman Empire. It is said that she took to harlotry like a duck takes to water. Procopius said that she gave her youth to anyone she me in utter abandonment,” then went on to describe her sexual exploits in detail.

Newsweek published an article in 2011 called “The Growing Demand for Prostitution.” It stated that “Surprisingly little is known about the age-old practice of buying sex, long assumed to be inevitable. No one even knows what proportion of the male population does it; estimates range from 16 percent to 80 percent.”

There are studies and statistics, however, In Cambodia, a whopping 60 to 80% of the men pay for sex. In the United States it falls to 15 to 20%. In Holland, where prostitution is legal and licensed by the government, the percentage is just a little higher that in the United States. In Japan, it is tacitly understood that a business man has the right to join with his associates in a visit to the red light district.

Many Muslims the practice Muta, a temporary marriage contract where the man pays a woman for sexual favors.

There are almost as many reasons for paying for sex as there are occurrences. Many women think that the only reason men pay is because they are too homely or anti-social to strike up a sexual relationship with another.

Some men point to the cost effectiveness of hiring a woman. They bring no emotional baggage to the table, they say. Others seek out what they cannot get at home in their married relationships. For obvious reasons, men in higher income groups spend more on sex than those who struggle to make ends meet.

My own experience, being a part of that 100% that make the male population, is quite limited. I will not go into it now, but I will write a story about this unforgettable experience in the future.

That being said, the energy expended sexual release must have some psychic value and bring some type of change to the life of the participants. One cannot expend energy without changing something. Whether that energy is released for pay or for free, something in nature changes.

Is anything free in nature? Since everything has a value in the human experience, then everything has a price. Even the act of breathing is a form of using energy, but we need to breath if we are to continue living. Breathing is the price of living for us and the cost of breathing is measured in aging.