Monday, May 3, 2010

Return to Blog Writing: A winding essay

When we were young and foolish and filled with optimism and promise, we bought a run-down Queen Anne house in Joliet, built in 1892, also filled with promise.

We subscribed to Old House Journal, and tried not to 'remuddle' it, but I'm sure that despite insulating walls and ceilings, removing paint from all woodwork in the downstairs, refinishing the maple floor in the kitchen, adding electric circuits, re-surfacing all the upstairs ceilings, and all good thing like that. Despite all that, I suspect we really botched a lot of it.

It was an interesting house, huge, with seven bedrooms and three large living rooms all on arches. We moved after living there eleven years because we wanted our son to go to a safe high school, and we didn't have a lot of confidence in Joliet Central. Nor were we willing to pay for parochial school, me being a good public school teacher and all.

The house was filled with surprises. We found drawings under the wall paper, for instance. In the crawl space under the front part of the house we found ancient beer bottles left by the builders. On the dirt floor in the cellar I tried to pick up a pipe in the corner and found it was a tree root. And in the attached shed we found samples of things the second family to own the structure had created.

The inventor (of a spot remover of some sort, as I recall) Manhoog Seron bought the the house about 1910. Levon Seron bought it from his father and lived there until he died in 1975, when we bought it from the estate. Levon's brother Seron Seron (SEER uhn sir ON) invented the strap that holds athletes glasses on while they play sports before we bought the house.

The attic held one of the most interesting surprises in the house, which was remodeled in 1924. Because of the remodeling, the stairs to the attic were eliminated and I was able to climb into it through a scuttle, a hole in the ceiling of a closet, which is what most houses built today have.

In the attic I found a picket sign, too large to lower through the scuttle, protesting the 1911 massacre of Armenians by the Turks, the Armenian Genocide.

A friend on facebook brought all this back to mind the other day when she posted a notice about the Congressional Resolution on the Armenian Genocide. This is a very political issue which has to do more with our current relations with Turkey and other Muslim countries than with what is good and right.

I personally don't understand the necessity for a resolution calling the massacre a genocide. It happened almost 100 years ago, and while recent history to most people remains my current events, even I was not around at the time.

I have a good friend whose Armenian-born father led a group of people orphaned by the massacre out of Armenia, which is east of Turkey. Some members of the family ended up in the United States and other ended up in South America. They went where countries would accept refugees.

Back to the resolution, however. It seems to me that the Congress has enough to do - not that they could get together and order pizza at this point - about current issues in the United States.
Unfortunately, members of Congress, both the House and Senate, seem to spend about five hours a day fund raising. That means that they, the people we elected, accomplish very little that doesn't pass ideological party muster. And that doesn't mean it's good for the United States, only that it's good for the political party. Frankly, that sucks.

Worse, however, is that lobbyists end up writing legislation. These are people paid by special interest groups, some of which are good and some of which are bad. Unfortunately, they ALL end up being bad because they insert into our laws their own biases.

That's why my insurance company can tell my doctor which medications he can prescribe.

That's why the bridge to nowhere was funded in Alaska.

That's why in Illinois, the legislature gutted pensions for public employees and have never funded them in the first place.

Our senators and representatives, both federal and state, need to start being responsible to the people who VOTE for them, not the back room wheeler dealers, not the lobbyists who donate heavily to their campaigns, not the corrupters of officials.

This essay is a long, winding road from the old house in Joliet. But the resolution on Armenian Genocide is an irrelevant issue one hundred years later. Congress keeps trying to get things right somehow, despite being totally out of date and close to irrelevant.

No wonder the Tea Party-ers are fomenting a grass roots revolution.

3 comments:

Carl G said...

So, wait a minute ... you're saying that our leaders and legislators need to be responsible to people? But they are; the SCOTUS just told us that corporations (you know, the ones who buy [strike that] I mean pay for [likewise gone] monetarily support, as a form of free speech, our politicians) are, in fact, persons. 'Cause voting is nice and all, for the 50% or so of us who bother, but the bottom line rules all. Only when enough of us vote, at the ballot boxes and with our wallets, in sufficient numbers to actually make a difference beyond what the corporate "persons" can buy, will things truly start to change.

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