The Tooth Hurts

ItsMrLucky — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 02:52:05 GMT

Friday July 4th, 2008 - Lake Villa, IL
OWWWEEE. I woke up with an excruciating pain in my mouth this morning and it’s a flashback to the dental hell I went through last year around this time. I don’t know what it is but it REALLY hurts and I can barely get out of bed. I was invited to several barbecues today but I turned them all down. I haven’t had pain like this in a while and it‘s intense.

Of course Mr. Lucky’s luck would have all this happen on a three day holiday weekend. I have no idea who to call but I am going to have to find someone ASAP. This is a pain of Marathon Man proportions and I don’t know what to do to make it stop. I didn’t leave the house all day but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t still torture. This is exactly what I dreaded.

Money is really tight right now and of course I have no insurance. With all the trouble I am having with my cars and the sports cards I bought and the people who owe me money I am tapped out at the moment. The last thing I need to be popping for is a root canal. It’s killing me though and I’ll have to do something about it or I’ll go totally crazy. I’m stuck.

I took some aspirin but that barely made a dent in my wall of pain. I tried to watch some TV to take my mind off of it and happened to come across the Maury Povich show. If that evil bastard isn’t rotting in hell someday with my father there is NO justice in this world.

I’m not usually a watcher of that stuff because it totally makes me puke. I do a major bit about these mopes in my act and that’s enough. I guess people like to feel better by seeing others doing worse than they are but this particular show held my interest so I watched it.

The guest was a 22 year old southern kid with a mullet and tattoos who had never had a chance to meet his father. He was crying on the set and they had someone backstage that kind of looked like the kid and had known his mother at just about the correct time so the chance was there that he was the kid’s real father. I could totally relate so I waited to see.

They didn’t tell the kid or the possible father what the test results were and tortured that poor sap and made him find out on live television. It turned out the older guy was not his father and the kid collapsed in agony. I felt like driving to wherever Maury tapes the show and grabbing him by his pencil neck until his bug eyes get even buggier. What an ass bag.

It’s very easy to sit and watch someone agonize when he or she hasn’t experienced a bit of the pain that kid was going through. I could see it in his face and when he described his childhood of what it was like to have no father of any kind I related on a level thankfully most people can’t. I felt the same way about my mother and still do. It still hurts me now.

The kid was weeping bitterly and they just rolled credits and went to a commercial. His feelings were just tossed aside and I bet he didn’t even get paid for it. After I saw that it’s a tossup which pain was worse - my tooth or watching that kid get his emotions crushed. I totally hope Maury Lowvich has to feel that kind of pain in his life and if he did he’d stop exploiting desperate people. I’m still steamed about the show and my tooth still hurts too.

Fourth of July - Reflection and Renewal

aicyr — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 21:06:56 GMT

“Fourth of July – Reflection and Renewal”

by Arthur I. Cyr

The Fourth of July celebrates community, local as well as national. Parades featuring people in uniform - scouts, firefighters and police as well as the military and others – traditionally are a fixture. Military uniforms remind us of the role of war in our history – and our present.

From ancient times, parades have been vital to the reintegration of warriors into society. War is profoundly disruptive and disturbing as well as dangerous. Even the rare man who finds combat invigorating and rewarding is in severe need of an honoring welcome after the killing ends.

Homer, chronicler of the Trojan War, is extremely sensitive to this. The great classic is presented in two parts. ‘The Iliad’ focuses on the fighting and related interplay involving Greeks and Trojans; ‘The Odyssey’ describes the very long voyage home of Greek leader Ulysses and his men. They traverse allegorical geography, struggling to put the horrors of killing, and the dangers of being killed, behind them.

Gen. George S. Patton Jr., a very great American combat leader, was extremely mindful of this dimension. He and Gen. James Doolittle, who led the first air raid on Tokyo, were featured in a special ceremony in the Los Angeles Coliseum after the surrender of Nazi Germany.

Patton celebrated the accomplishments of the U.S. Third Army in the victorious drive across Europe. In honoring his troops, he stressed in particular the 40,000 who lost their lives in that final year of the war. Patton made such statements regularly in the few months remaining until his own death.

Such confirmation is particularly important for warriors representing modern democracies. Our egalitarian ethos and efforts to abide by the rule of law contrast starkly with the traditional martial spirit.

In the Second World War, Allied troops were often welcomed warmly by peoples liberated from Axis occupation. Understandably, our media gave special emphasis to this dimension. The Korean War created very strong bonds between the U.S. and the people as well as very effective military of South Korea. The first Gulf War liberated an oppressed population.

The Vietnam and Iraq wars have been different. During Vietnam, military personnel were often discouraged from discussing the subject with civilians. Opposition to the war became hostility to our own military. There was no collective welcome home. Many middle aged vets of that war suffer without a Ulysses, troubled – and troublesome.

The Iraq War has evolved differently, without this problem. A recent trip to Washington provided a reminder of the visibility of the uniformed military, especially on public transportation. Pres. Richard M. Nixon’s end of the military draft has been crucial in the change.

However, constant rotation of active duty personnel back to Iraq has been unfair as well as counterproductive. Enormous psychological strains have been added to physical dangers, and families suffer heavily. Too often, military personnel needs have been sacrificed to domestic political considerations and calculations.

July 4 is not a day best suited for specific foreign policy discussion but is particularly appropriate for recognizing and honoring veterans, individually as well as collectively, wherever and whenever you find them.

Please also encourage them to run for public office. We won the Cold War in part because members of Tom Brokaw’s ‘Greatest Generation’ who served in the military also served in government. Every U.S. President from Harry Truman through George H.W. .H.HHBush was a veteran.

What Washington needs above all is the sort of sensible realism such men and women often bring to policy.

Arthur I. Cyr is Clausen Distinguished Professor at Carthage College and author of ‘After the Cold War’ (NYU Press and Palgrave/Macmillan). He can be reached at acyr@carthage.edu

Community blog entries

The Tooth Hurts

Fourth of July - Reflection and Renewal