A Stutterer's Confession: No, My Mom Didn't Cause It!

                                                         A. Daniel Bodine

desertmountaintimes.com

Hee, hee! I knew science would someday vindicate me. Now apparently it has. That special moment (when I could mentally tell John, my old speech therapist back in Dallas that, yep, I was right) occurred last weekend. CNN moved the story “Stuttering linked to genetics, motor control.” Proof for me, it was, it wasn't “all in my head.” And that the complexities underlying stuttering can't all be lumped together in, say, a '56 Chevy Bel Air coupe; and then put on some interstate roadway and expected to perform like a wingnut '63 Ford Thunderbird. It's not going to happen. Or science is saying that partially now, it appears.

And that's a big admission, folks. The trendy psychology of the 60's-80's was “passing the ancestral behavioral buck.” For every earlier traumatic action, there were these modern-day reactions. And the key to inner peace (turning negative into positive, say; frustrations and sadness into a successful life of wealth and happiness) lay in being able to go deep into one's self; to that point of Ground Zero, a convergence of where, when and how the Original Sin happened, and float it up out of your system on waves of deep emotions. Cry, Baby, Cry! Hurl Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath at it if needed! See what you did to me!? Cleanse yourself, Jethro! Don't be a pent-up hillbilly; cough the damn thing up!

My own crusade “up the mountain” began before I got out of the Navy in '71. If I was going back to Dallas and to my job at Texas Instruments (and not, indeed, to see all the naked women down at Rio de Janeiro), I'd decided, then I was going to look into what was causing me to stutter so much. I wadn't no freak, I'd found myself saying. By golly! So when I walked into a Dallas psychologist's office 7-8 months later, I was wired for a purpose: Get to the root of my bumbling talk!

John Gladfelter with his tall, towering presence and gray, waving hair was disarmingly friendly. He explained I could be best counseled in a “group” format; the system he used was transactional analysis, or TA; and he'd find a group for me and advise when to come. Seamlessly moving right on in this initial interview, he handed me a simple questionnaire to fill out. One of the questions was: What's the first thing you can remember? And just like that, a scene came up. My therapy had started.

Transactional analysis, it needs to be said, was considered the golden key to one's inner sanctum back in those Dallas days. Games People Play, I'm Ok--You're Ok, were all huge best-sellers. Just drift along with it long enough (don't fight it!), and “eventually you'll get back there where you can confront the damn thing”--wherever and whatever that inhibiting tape is, the argument went. If something's got you blocked, preventing you from being “an ordinary human being” and all...Well, just get it out! Get the damn thing out!

And TA worked fine for millions, it did. To a large extent, it worked well for me. You talk about loosening old bolts and nuts...NOTHING is more personal than speech! You could hang a year's worth of dirty skivvies on the line, and the frightening embarrassment would be piddly stacked up to when it comes time for a stutterer to open his/her mouth to speak. TA became to the mind what WD-40 has become to rusty, squeaky gates and hinges—a penetrating oil to loosen it up! And the emotional rewards one gets in its Freedom—the exhilaration—is indescribable. But it didn't improve my speech. Why?

There's a photo that was around in my family for years I was never too excited about. I was teased about it for one thing. I was less than two years old, standing with my sister, Claudia, two years older. One of my hands was stuck deep in a front pocket; the other hand, Claudia was holding. Mom sent the photo to dad overseas in the war with a message on back. Something like “Dad (my grandfather Carter, e.g.) wanted me to send this to you. It shows Danny playing 'pocket pool.' Hee, hee!”

Yeah, I was doing “it,” I guess. Feeling athletically skilled at an early age (aren't we all?), probably I was. Thinking about it now, I may have felt, indeed, I had a clean bank shot into the right pocket. But my parents, grandparents, etc., all being freshly removed “from the soil,” the farm, where things like this are more humorous, thought this little innocent habit was enormously funny. For a while. And then Mom drew the line. No more!

The scene that jumped in my mind in the Dallas office some 29 years later (is that even possible?), and that I described on the questionnaire, was our family all together in a car going somewhere down a highway. Dad is driving; Mom's in the passenger seat; I'm standing in the middle of the back seat (oh, if'n we'd only had child safety seats then!), shooting a little pool, I was; and Claudia is standing on the floor behind dad's seat. By this time she's noticed me doing that no-no; and lovable, older sisters being what they are, she just can't wait to tell everyone about it.

“Danny's playing with himself! Danny's playing with himself!” she shouts.

And in half an instant—half, mind you; yes, some mothers can be that fast when you get them angry—Mom had spun around on my face and “slapped fire out of me” for it. For playing my innocuous pocket-pool game. Didn't rearrange my face, mind you. But it definitely stung.

“I told you don't ever do that anymore, didn't I?” she said.

Thus, at age18-20 months or so (my memory probably wasn't a whole helluva lot better then than it is now, admittedly), to the best of my recollection, that was the last time I ever played pocket pool.

And that scene—real or imagined—niggled me for years. In some therapy sessions I'd get down to the very quick of this alleged assault (wanting to project my anger), but I never could go completely thru with it. And always I told myself, I'm uncomfortable because I think there's more to it. And, too, My Mama didn't cause me to stutter!

There were other problems, yes. Maybe some, I was too sensitive to how I was using other group members' time, and thus called off the dogs too early. In group therapies, in 1-hr. strictly limited sessions, you were obligated to walk the walk--e.g., you were expected to keep going deeper and deeper into your problem and not waste other members' time on peripheral wall décor--until, at last, you found and confronted that 3,000 lb. gorilla. And then tearfully gave it the boot.

This pressure to succeed in your self-discovery had an uncomfortable back-slice to it-- the need to produce, to Get On With It! Stop this dilly-dallying around and Free the Beast from the East! An introvert and naturally slow worker, too, that bothered me some—that need to rush it. The chicken-egg question. Which was it? So after two years, still stuttering, I left the group. I felt like I needed to move on to more pressing issues.

And, too, not all things could be unlocked by TA, I'd truly come to believe by then. Things like this didn't run in families? Dad? He didn't stutter, true, but didn't he have that same awkward manner of talking in short, simple and jerky sentences? Clearly a riddle, I was in; so I left it hanging. For all those years.

The CNN story last weekend, which reported on findings released at a recent American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Washington, D. C., comes at a time when the movie “The King's Speech” is almost certain to be a big winner in the upcoming Academy Awards show. It's based on England's reluctant, stuttering and stammering King George VI, who had to deliver an emboldened radio speech in 1939 to enlist his citizens into a war against Hitler's Germany. Based on some old documents recently discovered, the film has been nominated for 12 Oscars.

Indeed, it appears stars in the heavens are finally aligning themselves to spread more light on what many families once considered a taboo topic—the dumb one in the family who came up one brick short of a load in terms of verbal expression ability. There's so much being written now about just “functional magnetic resonance imaging” of the brain, for instance, to make one think truly we're on the doorstep to another of Huxley's “brave new world” discoveries; and that eventually this mystery, too, will be uncovered.

I'll certainly be saying my prayers for it. In today's political temper, especially, enlightenment needs all the help we can give it.

--- 30 ---

Gadflies losing some of their luster?

By A. Daniel Bodine

desertmountaintimes.com

EL PASO, TX—The mayor getting caught out of town during the worst ice storm in decades isn't the best of political situations. But it certainly doesn't deserve a dunce cap. Not unless you're one of the angry residents inconvenienced by power losses and water disruptions--and needing in your historic soul a scapegoat to pin it on. There weren't too many of those at last week's City Council meeting. Why? Has being a gadfly lost some of its luster? Or is just more difficult now?

El Paso Mayor John Cook felt, indeed, it was his time in the hot seat during the City Council's Feb. 8 session. But he wasn't about to be a whipping post, and he expressed that. A couple of citizens had taken him to task for his feeble explanation for not rushing back from Austin to join in the freezing fun. To be at the helm of the ship that was making emergency repairs for citizens.

“I'm not a plumber,” he'd told one television station.

Hee, hee. Probably'd been better if he'd said he wasn't sure the city's insurance covered fools rushing back into town on icy roads and runways. With roads closed or bottle-necked in patches during those days of single-digit temperatures, and airports canceling many flights, such logic might've stood a better chance in a public float test.

Political gadflies, of course, historically are part of the inherent checks and balances against such things as corpocracies and oligarchies in a democratic government. Some of our nation's best razzle-dazzle, political curveballs have come from gadfly pitchers.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead, in a story entitled Should we be compliant lambs or nonviolent gadflies?--written Feb. 4, 2010 for the ezine, RiverCitiesReader.com—recalls what Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in his April, 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” about the necessity for “nonviolent tension.” “We must see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood,” King wrote.

And Thomas Jefferson himself, Whitehead quotes, once was such a figurative rebel. In underscoring the importance of corrective political action, he once wrote,“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

But in teeming urban areas now, political gadflies are working at a disadvantage, too, compared to their cousins in rural towns, it seems. Complex technology; needs by overlapping jurisdictions to share common costs, knowledge and talent; and vertical integration in our society as a whole have all brought us Centralization. It's felt more directly by folks in large cities. It's harder to pigeon-hole individual responsibility. And the pace of living is quicker, too. Oncoming new problems are hard enough to keep up with themselves; spending extra time on old ones can really drain you.

Indeed, it's created repeated situations where regardless of who voters put in office, they confront the same seemingly invincible dragons; and, frustratingly, little public progress is made on slaying them. So save 'em 'til next election, it becomes. And slowly the critic's stinger loses some of its sting. As people become tired of the theatrics after all the years. Emotions hurled without specifics can wear you out chasing them, yes.

So gadflies are finding themselves often playing to an empty house these days. I couldn't find any mention of last week's specific comments by those two citizens in the local newspaper. And few El Paso council members (their eyes mostly perusing their notes about upcoming agenda items to follow), ever even paused to look up at the critics as they spoke. They were criticizing the city for being unprepared with its utilities when the frigid cold hit. “...You can't figure this out, that water freezes at 32 degrees!?” one of them asked Cook.

The Council, in its apparent collective indifference, might just as well have answered, Hey, face it, we've spent enough time going over this (in the city manager's report); the points have more than been noted; corrections will be made and followed up on, we assure you; and, by the way, we've still got very important business ahead of us on the agenda, please.

Maybe that's why you see remnants of this old “hands-on” democracy at its finest now in the smaller communities. It's certainly where serving as an elective official can be its most frustrating, I'd wager.

Remember some years back, for instance, the owner of some area insurance company interrupting a Presidio City Council meeting, apparently just mad at the world in general. He walked directly up to the council table and singled out each member, looking directly at the face.

“You're a crook!” he said to all but one, making his way down the table.

Only one member, Alfred Muniz, longtime Presidio Auto Parts manager, was spared the humiliation. “You're not a crook,” he was told. But the insurance guy had to think long and hard before he ever made such a determination. And yes, he later got mentioned on a legal ledger. Seems like law enforcement officers jailed him for interrupting a public proceeding.

Later I ran across Alfred and asked him why he was so damn special—not being a crook and all. Alfred just rolled his eyes and grinned. “Not a word, Bodine, not a word.” I always took that to mean he was paying protection money to the ol' insurance boy or sumpthin'. Maybe even had a 3^rd degree cousin employed down at the guy's office. But small towns--'ya gotta love 'em! Full of gadflies. The valued tormentors' last stand, they just might be.

Many years earlier, when I was in newspapers, I remember a little old maiden lady in Cleburne, TX, named Ponder Lee Brown. Ponder's father had been the first public works superintendent in Cleburne, way-y-y back. In some cryptic, leveraging manner right out of a “Martians have landed” scenario, Ponder, bless her heart, was convinced the City of Cleburne, when it took over control of the local cemeteries from the funeral homes, had cheated her out of a family plot. And hell had no fury to match Ponder Lee when she felt she'd been cheated out of something. Amen.

For years her letters (several a week), castigating the city, were the best entertainment in the Times-Review. When I came aboard in '77, seems once a week she'd wander into the newsroom with a stack of documents—investigative “proof”--for me to chase down. Lloyd Moss, the city manager, got so tired of me checking on a “Ponder” story at city hall supposedly he had an escape hatch built from his office over to the men's restroom where he could go and hide. Never saw it, but my source was one of his top dogs who we let into our pack on Wednesday's “dart night” games. Whiskey's good for your memory, of course..

Later, when I was promoted to managing editor at the paper, the first rule I made was Ponder would get no more than one letter a week. Damn if she didn't go eventually to Fort Smith, Ark., corporate headquarters for the group that owned the paper, and demand I be fired, I was told. For violating her “Free Press” rights. Can you imagine this group of corporate brass with white shirts and ties ( who worried about little but advertising), and some little ol' lady in a loud gingham dress wearing cowboy boots (with a stack of papers this high in her hands) tromping in and making waves? Hee, hee.

But you gotta love 'em, too, these gadflies. In many ways they're our hearts and souls. Going all the way back to the Boston Tea Party. Now beginning his second term, El Paso's mayor no doubt is aware of this uniqueness in the political tradition he inherited. And Cook's building on it obviously.

Having just the Texas Department of Transportation, for instance, recognize him last month for helping set up the Camino Real Regional Mobility Authority, the 2008 El Paso Comprehensive Mobility Plan, the first Transportation Reinvestment Zone for the city, as well as for his continuous leadership to further develop the El Paso Rapid Transit System, are some tremendous feats, folks. Kinda stuff that really makes one want to feel heady and a little lackadaisical at times.

Hee, hee. Not to worry folks. From the tone of the Big Freeze critics last week, that's one luxury he'll not be able to afford. Not in El Paso. You can bet the next time he leaves town he'll at least check the weather forecast.

--- 30 ---

GETTING GOOD ADVICE: A small Liberty tree growing in an El Paso Enchanted Forest. (DMT Art Illustration by Maiya)

Presidio's food stamps a triumph of Corpocracy

                                                          DMT photo creation by Maiya

 

by A. Daniel Bodine

desertmountaintimes.com

PRESIDIO, TX—This is an awful thing to say, true, but let's say it: You can lead a horse to water but you can't make the damn thing drink. And you can give billions in food stamps to people via handy transaction cards, but it's not all going toward food. Some of it is going to buy new pickups; and some of it—a lot, it seems—is going to pay rich bankers to run the handy plastic card program that passes out the money.

Ain't that great?! Thru the wise use of tax dollars, legislators have created additional streams of income “out of thin air”--not just for the giants of agribusiness and food producers, but for the corporate owners of almost everything from liquor stores (Oh, that's so nice of you, Bro!) to illegal drug traffickers. It's enough to remind you that the great law of physics applies to economics, too—for every good deed laid out (an action), you'd better be prepared for an adverse one (a reaction) to come back at you.

Hee, hee. Down in Presidio (on slow days, of course!) all you had to do in recent years sometimes to gauge the national economy was to go to a grocery store parking lot; and watch who filled the new pickup trucks setting there, the people coming out from shopping. If it's some large woman stringin' 5-6 kids and 3-4 grocery carts stuffed full of food (to put all into a new, shiny family-cab pickup), you know you can sleep peacefully all the rest of that month. Money's flowing in from somewhere in the country where times are good, it is. And that makes it good in Presidio, too.

But you gotta know your history a bit here to fully appreciate this phenomenon, Jethro. Presidio is like El Paso, Del Rio, Laredo, Brownsville, all border towns enriched by President Reagan's Amnesty Act of 1986. They saw a sudden and sharp increase in population. Border towns are an ideal place for many migrant workers (resident aliens) and their families to maintain a permanent home; it gives them much quicker access to their “extended” families across the Rio Grande, in Mexico.

What this means, for some of you naïve gringos wondering where all the money finally went to some seasonal worker hired to pick your orchards, mow your yards, or help build your skyscrapers, begin by looking first at these enriched border towns like Presidio. It's a good chance that's where the worker has his family and his permanent home. Either on “this side or that side” of the river; it makes no difference—no le hace!! This is where the money flows to, out of America's heartland. And from where, in turn, bills are paid. The outgo. The littl' ol' (large) lady and the brood, got it?.

For the border region is where these people permanently live—not in some temporary apartment or RV park somewhere where the jobs are. Consider these people commuters, too. Even though sometimes they may be gone 6-9 months out of the year at some large construction site (new power plants, for instance). They and their families live honorably, and thru hard work. And in too many cases, yes, it's work local workers just don't want or refuse to do. Especially when unemployment and food stamps are available as an alternative.

Now this is a sore point to some, but let's get over it by simply saying people are people—regardless of their race, color or religion. You want strict compliance, then laws need to be ever changing 'cause times and people's situations are ever changing. The original intent of some law must be protected by constant vigilance and amending. On multiple levels.

If there's a fracture or leak anywhere (like water going out a bucket hole), people will find it; and someday one of their shady genes (we all carry some) will get the best of 'em; and they'll find a way to benefit from that weakness. Especially if they feel society's already trying denigrating them in some way. It's only natural.

Especially, too, you can add to that, when there's such a status that goes with, say, pickup trucks. Out here in the mountainous Chihuahuan Desert? Whooeee! You kidding, man?! You wouldn't turn on a little weakness in the law for that? Yeesh! Blow your nose right quick! What happens is the temptation we in society have placed on that status symbol is too great. And thus you hear a voice in your head say, You don't have to report all your money to the government come tax time, Jethro!

For example, one can easily reason, some of that hard income made from fixing some damn old woman's sink or commode somewhere, or mowing her lawn; planting and maintaining her yard... You can get by without reporting it! If she's willing to pay you cash for it. Or in some other trade currency that can't be documented. (And of course you're going to prefer cash, especially if she wants it done yesterday!)

It's stupid to report it, man! Not reporting it means you can collect more food stamps. Lower wages increases your eligibility amounts. To cover your family's higher grocery costs, of course! But what it really means is that the money you send your little ol' (large?) lady normally to spend on groceries each month, can instead (if indeed, she's gotten the increase in her food stamp allotment) be spent on something else, to ease the family's life. Hee, hee. Like a monthly payment on a new pickup truck! 'Ya with me?

...No? Aw, come on; you really balking here? What amounts to taking a kickback from Big Brother Sam (He's no uncle no more; our big family's been shrunk by Corpocracy!), for all the hard work and having to spend so much time away from your family as you do? For being the go-to person for all the nation's grunt work? Doing work local employers can't get locals to come out and do! Huh? You wouldn't do that?!

You're lying thru your teeth, man! You certainly would! You know you would! It's only natural! You may be religious and stuck in a 12^th Night scene somewhere with someone, but you're not stupid! It just makes  



sense. If the government wants to give you money, take it. Call them a fool; not yourself! And get over it!

Now there are millions of cases no doubt—especially in this Great Recession—where food stamps have performed miracles for people; have assumed a respectful position right up there with God the Almighty's most decorated angels. I ain't arguing that. And in no way do I want to take from that.

But Life now is learning how to be more esoteric. Yesterday's call to join hands is gone with the wind, or at least has been bumped down several notches; and if I want to single out a bane to our country's great liberalism tradition, I'll use food stamps, I will. And none can be more dear than those used in dearly beloved Presidio, TX, in the desolate, mountainous land of Far West Texas' great Chihuahuan Desert! Umph! For they've helped illustrate, indeed, how far our nation has slid into the bowels of Corpocracy's irrelevancy.

Now America's food stamp program—the best I can remember, in its most recent Great Reincarnation--

was part of President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society effort. In theory, it was a 10: Lift the economy thru charity. Help the poor with food subsidies thru the purchase of surplus food products from farmers and growers. One fair deal complements another.

Politicians wore headiness like a rose at the time. In a mostly Christian nation, in politics, it's good to walk and talk like a Christian. And Christ's command, to roll up your sleeves and get busy with helping the poor—indeed, your brothers and sisters—thru meaningful, charitable acts (and not slither away somewhere into La-La land where you neither see nor feel their pain), is a hard act to follow, dude. I mean, it's

heavy! You got a real job to do.

So adding foot stamps to the welfare menu—more throwing sterile, public tax dollars at a humanity problem-- is a way we can, first, act like Christians to help feed and shelter the poor; and, two, by golly it's also a way we neither have to sacrifice any of our valuable time nor dirty any of our hands with direct involvement, down at that level. Hee, hee. We're free and clear, these folks thought. Dear God, job accomplished. Ain't that a kick!

So a large governmental agency was created to do just that—Wash their hands of it! And the liberal elites--on their proud way to church on Sunday mornings--could sidestep with ease a new, rising crop of homeless people on the sidewalk (that seemed to emerge from nowhere in the program's wake), simply because the money to help them had already been put in the federal kitty.

I gave at the office! Ignore them! If they can't make it with all that help we gave 'em, it's their own damn fault!

And monkey see, monkey do. Along with other perfidious, bureaucratic Great Society welfare programs, what food stamps did to members of America's great middle class was weaken its core. Rather than encourage bulwark citizens to embrace liberalism's egalitarian principles (Shake hands with your neighbor, Jethro!), it prompted them instead to move further away from minorities. Massive white flight to the suburbs for decades. And it simply postponed true integration--reflecting the moral chicanery at the highest levels of government.

And huge corporations, such as JP Morgan, the nation's largest processor of food stamp benefits, saw this end-run by Congress as a tag-team match, of course. And they have benefited from it handsomely. Which means they'll be paying millions and millions more in the future to keep the program in place, or grow it even more. They pay thru lobbying and campaign spending, Jethro.

Exponentially increasing this practice really says something. In 2007, there were 26 million Americans on food stamps. Gulp! And the Great Recession saw that figure soar to 43 million by the end of 2010. Truly, the more difficult it is for the poor, the more JP Morgan is raking in money hand over fist, it seems.

And liberalism (society's traditional brakes on oligarchies) being clearly in a declining state, that means there is very little short of violence to stop the continuation of the trend now.

The already baneful Gimme my cadillac cry of the 60's became the even more baneful Gimme my pickup truck of the Ought's. From the way it's viewed by the public, liberalism it seems has completed the spectrum. As an ethos to follow God's commandments, it's ended up now in this caricatured sewer deluge of putative symbolism doing no more, ultimately, than marking man's further retreat from the humanities. Will it be stopped?

One way or another, history says. But we may have to learn to live on a lot less beans and potatoes, and more watered-down gravy in the meanwhile. Unless, for instance, something like a new Smart Growth urban design plan, now catching on with large cities, can stop the slide. If not,  America's political scenario in a few years could get real ugly.

But that's us, isn't? It's not real healthy, yes, but that's the way we are. Creatures that we be--Infinitely creative; children infinitely wanting more, too. So pass the popcorn, Jethro. Running low? Hee, hee. May have to use my food stamps to go get some more. Andele, andele!

                                                                 –

                                               Bumper sticker sign on a new Presidio pickup, circa 2004:

                                                                    If you don't think money

                                                                    can buy you happiness,

                                                                    you're not using it correctly.

                                                                – 30 --

Hurry my beer! World's ending; don't wanna miss it!

By A. Daniel Bodine

desertmountaintimes.com

It makes you proud to be an American, it does! Someone who had a vision has changed the world. So in a small way, consider life now better for a great sector of the population. It's worthy of a toast.

Among all the items to come out of Big Media's most recent news carnage—world's going to hell in a handbasket, again, with deficit spending off charts; riots threatening Egypt's government and Mid-East stability; foreclosures skyrocketing—one item about a high-speed beer dispenser, off most people's radars I'm guessing, was particularly noteworthy. It captured the essence of America's entrepreneur spirit and optimism. Beginning this baseball season we will now have faster draft beer lines at the ball parks! Yeaaa!!

Never mind all the sky is falling gloom, folks, for the free enterprise is still very much alive and kickin'! An old on-line Libertarian badger I read regularly (both enjoy him/despise him at times), David Galland, editor, Casey's Report–the piece found at (http://www.caseyresearch.com/displayCdd.php?id=640)--)--perked me up some. He touched on the essence of perhaps the majority of Americans' preoccupations this past week (e.g., President Obama's challenge to climb outta this!), when he wrote Jan. 28 in Casey's Daily Dispatch about a new, helpful invention. It's an upside-down bartender that can draw up to 56 tap beers a minute—without waiting on the foam to clear, from one glass to another.

“...(T)he surest way to make a lot of money is to identify problems in everyday life, then find the solutions,” Galland wrote toward the bottom of a news recap piece lamenting all the woes going on now. He cited a CBC News online consumer life story entitled, “High-speed beer tap shortens lineups,” which claims the dispenser can fill a pint cup up to nine times faster than traditional beer taps. And it works from the bottoms up, cutting back on foam and waste spillage.

“The system uses cups with holes in the bottom,” the CBC story stated. “The holes are covered with a magnet, which is pushed up as the beer spews up from the (pressured) device. Once full, the cup is pulled up off the tap and the magnet comes back down to cover the hole, allowing the customer to grab the pint and get back to the game”

Josh Springer, 28, the inventor of the “Bottoms Up” dispensing system, further explained to the Huffington Post ( http://www.openforum.com/idea-hub/topics/innovation/article/the-beer-industrys-mad-inventor-darren-dahl) that he came up with the idea after a “vision” in 2009 while at a Mexican restaurant in a city near Olympia, WA. It came to him while finishing off a pitcher of margaritas. (Sigh)

A sign company production manager at the time, Springer was there with other well-wishers for his father's birthday. Almost immediately after the vision he “stood up and exclaimed...he was going to make a pitcher you could fill up from the bottom,” according to the Post story. And “...after returning home from dinner that night, he headed into his own garage and got to work.”

And the rest is history. After recruiting help from a friend, they came up with a one-glass prototype. Marketing it with repeated phone calls was impossible. An “angel” investor helped them expand the prototype. And then they went viral with a YouTube video he and team of more friends made, demonstrating how the new product works. It was seen 3.3 million times last year.

And now GrinOn Industries, the Montesano, WA, startup company Springer created to build and market the system, is sky high with worldwide sales. Already Bottoms Up is in about 30 stadiums and arenas across North America. It was launched at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia last week. And for the upcoming baseball season, Springer said he hopes fans can get their beer and “get back to their seats without missing a single pitch.”

Stories like these—which have literally made this country in the past--can't be overlooked if, indeed, we the American people are going to climb out of our present “mess.” Lamenting is one thing; drowning all hope out of yourself with anger and bitterness, to the point of immobility, is another.

Many are making the case now of an America in decline, for instance, pointing to a political system and an economy more or less ordered by a corpocracy. And yes it can be depressing. In a review of Barry C. Lynn's Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction, (http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Books.php/2010/03/04/cornered-the-new-monopoly-capitalism-and), for instance, Stephen Lendman calls these big global, corporate powers “predatory giants.”

'They control governments, the courts, war and peace, dominant information sources, and essential services, including health care, air and water, what we eat and drink, where we live, what we wear, and school curricula to the highest levels. They own genetic code patents, basic human life elements to be commodified the same as toothpaste, tomatoes or toilet paper.

“Omnipotent, they plunder recklessly, ruthlessly at our expense. They're private tyrannies, endangering humanity, basic freedoms, environmental sustainability, and planetary survival. Without exaggeration, they're unaccountable, unchecked 'weapons of mass destruction.'”

But we're Americans, too, let us not forget, and that means there's a little bit of rebel in each of us. “They” don't control our core laws we live under, our Constitution, not yet. Democracy has always been the hardest of all political systems to maintain, and you can simply look at the dwindling numbers of apathetic voters at local levels for the past 30-40 years to see who the real culprits are in the deterioration in our system we are seeing now.

We've gone to sleep in our luxuries and uppity lifestyles, folks! We've met the enemy and he/she is us, in our uneducated, unenlightened selves, we should be saying. Not shooting point blank at the corporate scud fish that's come up in our idleness now. And we should be saying it in increasingly greater participation in local politics—as problem solvers, not problem makers. Anybody can go to a council meeting and shout. What took 30-40 years to develop in our backwaters certainly isn't going to be swept back out to sea with tomorrow's tide.

But just as the young man focusing on one simple idea for improvement above, we, too, can lower our horizons and began searching inside ourselves for a better way to make life more comfortable for those around us. Larger things always have, and always will, grow out of those small first ones. If we keep our eyes on the road ahead. We're Americans.

So get with it. And bottoms up!

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