Wednesday, October 22, 2025
Monday, October 13, 2025
Subsidiarity Economics 2025. The Times more or less locally, Part 10. The killing the messenger edition.
Eight months into the year, and our 10th edition for 2025.
Uff.
Mad King Donald fired Dr. Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as he was upset by the Bureau's negative job report, which he stated was rigged.
It was rigged, of course, because facts in Trumpland are rigged if they aren't universally pro Trump.
This is likely to get a lot worse as the fact is that a lot of things Trump has set in motion are going to start having pretty negative consequences. Likewise, some firmly held GOP beliefs on economics and science aren't going to hold up to reality.
Speaking of reality and the news, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is closing its doors due to the budget rescission. The CPB, NPR and PBS are separate entities, but this is not a good development.
Republicans, who don't actually seem to realize the three entities are separate from each other, are rejoicing that public funding is ending for "left wing" media, by which they largely mean media that reports reality and the truth, as opposed to propaganda.
August 3, 2025
Three Kentucky distilleries, all small ones, have filed for bankruptcy within the past eight months, with the lastest coming last week.
While I haven't seen any analysis on it, distilleries were particularly worried about the Trump tariffs and, surprise surprise, booze can be made anywhere. Canadians have pretty much sworn off of US alcohol and were actually a major market. They make their own anyway. Seems like Europeans might be doing so also.
And part of this is probably the impact of an artisanal whiskey boom of the last decade fading.
August 5, 2025
Proposal to address ‘nation’s worst workforce exodus’ fails to get support from Wyoming lawmakers: The Wyoming Business Council says it has more policy ideas forthcoming to address "vicious" shrinking workforce conundrum.
August 10, 2025
Some really interesting things are going on that are definitely Wyoming centric that we haven't noted, or haven't noted much, and should.
The first might be that a proposal to put in a nuclear generator construction facility in Natrona County north of the town of Bar Nunn has really turned out to be controversial. This comes on the heels of a nuclear power plant in Kemmerer that is also controversial.
The ins and outs of the controversy are a little difficult to really discern, but at some level, quite a few people just don't like the idea of something nuclear. It's not coal, and its not oil. Chuck Gray, for example, has come out against this and wind energy. Chuck hasn't worked a day in his life in a blue collar job and he's just tapping into the "no sir, we don't like it" sort of thought here.
What's going to happen? We'll have to see.
Another local controversy is the approval of a 30 lot subdivision on Casper Mountain. This has drawn the ire of a lot people who live on Casper Mountain, and most of it is posed in conservation or even environmental terms.
The irony there, of course, is that people who have already built a house on the mountain are somewhat compromised in these arguments. I get it, however, as I really don't think we need more rural subdivisions in the county, at all.
On the mountain, I'd note that one of the really aggravating things that has happened recently is that last year a joint Federal/State project paved the dirt road on the backside of the mountain to the top of Muddy Mountain. It didn't need to be done and it just encourages land rapist to built houses on the backside of Casper Mountain.
Natrona County Bans Big Trucks On 26 Roads Amid Gravel Mine Controversy
I understand the opposition here, but in context, things seem to lack consistency.
Which gets back to this, I suppose. If a person just doesn't want development, they can say that.
What you can't do, however, is pretend that some major pillars of the state's economy are going to be here forever. The extractive industries are basically on their way out right now.
One of the amusing things about all of this is that the MAGA hat wearers locally who are opposed to nuclear energy are facing it in part due to the current administration.
August 13, 2025
Longtime Wyoming newspaper executives to buy, reopen eight shuttered newspapers: Overjoyed newsroom staff in communities across Wyoming are back on the job with pay after corporate closure laid off 30 employees.
Trump greenlights 14.5 million-ton coal expansion in Wyoming: The newly accessible tract represents a little more than half of the Antelope mine's annual production but signals more coal mining actions to come.
August 15, 2025
Headline in the CST:
US producer prices surge
And the tariff chickens come home to roost.
One Of Wyoming's First Combo Agriculture-Solar Farm Can’t Find A Buyer For Its Power
Trouble north of the border, where unions remain much stronger than they do here:
Air Canada cancels flights (August 15) due to labor trouble.
Air Canada is facing a flight attendants strike and is basically starting to shut down.
Cynthia Lummis on a comment from the Treasury Secretary saying the US needs to explore ways to buy more Bitcoin:
America needs the BITCOIN Act.
No, it doesn't. Focus on Wyoming issues and pay attention to them Senator.
August 17, 2025
Social Security Benefits Are an Estimated 8 Years Away From Being Slashed -- and the Cuts Are Even Bigger Than Initially Forecast
August 19, 2025
Federal mineral taxes are being reduced from16.67% to 12.5%.
They had been raised during the Biden Administration.
August 20, 2025
August 23, 2025
Employees at Laramie's Mountain Cement voted to unionize. They will be joining the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers.
August 30, 2025
Well, there's absolutely no surprise. Trump's illegal tariffs were affirmed to be illegal.
D'uh.
The Court's decision starts:
The Government appeals a decision of the Court of International Trade setting aside five Executive Orders that imposed tariffs of unlimited duration on nearly all goods from nearly every country in the world, holding that the tariffs were not authorized by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), 50 U.S.C. § 1701 et seq. Because we agree that IEEPA’s grant of presidential authority to “regulate” imports does not authorize the tariffs imposed by the Executive Orders, we affirm.
Even here, however, the Court granted a stay of thirty days on the implementation of its order, which a private litigant would be unlikely to have received, and the government shouldn't have received here. The order should have gone into effect immediately absent the government posting a bond to cover the damages, which would be all the tariffs collected while the matter was on appeal, and all that it has already collected, which should need to be fully refunded.
But a refund won't happen and the implementation of the ruling is delayed by 30 days, so the government can appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which doesn't actually have to take the appeal.
Whether the S.Ct upholds it, or proves to be a pure political arm of the government, is another matter.
There were three dissents in the en banc decision.
September 7, 2025
Postal traffic into the United States dropped by more than 80% after the Trump administration ended a tariff exemption for low-cost imports.
September 9, 2025
Wyoming’s massive new federal coal tract not likely to draw high bids: State and coal industry officials want a new 440 million ton coal tract offered for sale, but opponents warn lease won't benefit public coffers like years past.
Like Star Athletes, WyoTech Grads Recruited For Jobs All Over The Country
Wyoming Wool Initiative seeks lamb donations for student program
September 13, 2025
Headline from the Trib:
Local board pulls $25M grant application to develop Radiant Nuclear site
And
Feds fast-track coal mining expansion in southwest Wyoming
And
Court sides with Wyoming utility, rules state should have allowed higher rate increase
Related threads:
The Union Pacific is laying off carmen in Green River and may be closing the shop there.
September 24, 2025
Apparently US immigration raids have caused Michelob Ultra, which is gross, to become the most popular beer in the U.S., displacing Corona, which is gross, for the last 12 months.
September 25, 2025
From the Trib:
Wyoming unemployment falls to 3.2% in August 2025
And the Cowboy State Daily:
The General Services Administration is attempting to rehire hundreds of employees laid off by Elon Musk's moronic Dipshit DOGE.
September 26, 2025
More tariffs. 100% tariff pharmaceuticals, 30% tariff on upholstered furniture, 50% tariff on kitchen cabinets and bathroom vanities, and a 30% tariff on heavy trucks.
September 30, 2025
The Trump administration plans to open more than 13 million acres of federal land for leasing for coal and provide $625 million in funds to expand power generation from coal, the latter a blatantly socialist move, but apparently Republicans are okay with Socialism now.
In Wyoming, The West Antelope III coal lease will go to competitive auction on Oct. 8.
These will prove to be carbon laden farts in a windstorm as coal will continue to decline, but the action will be damaging to long term power generation and the climate.
Cattle prices are reported to be at a record high.
October 1, 2025
Powell Valley Healthcare is shutting down its oncology services and its internal medicine clinic in Cody as a way to remain economically sustainable.
Casper air travel should continue during federal shutdown, but ripple effects loom
October 3, 2025
October 6, 2025
(LETTER) Bob Ide personally benefits from his property tax cuts
October 9, 2025
Hard liquor exports to Canada are down 85% this year.
October 11, 2025
The master negotiator got the big middle finger salute from China over his trade policies and now Trump is threatening 100% tariffs on the country.
Markets are reacting badly.
October 13, 2025
China indicated it wasn't backing down on the tariff matter.
Last edition:
Subsidiarity Economics 2025. The Times more or less locally, Part 9. Waist Deep in the Big Muddy. It's Donald Trump's economy now.
Thursday, October 2, 2025
Wednesday, September 24, 2025
Monday, September 24, 1945. Hirohito threw Tojo under the bus for Pearl Harbor. Elevator operators on strike.
Hirohito threw Tojo under the bus for Pearl Harbor.
Manhattan elevator operators went on strike.
It's odd to think of them going on strike. They were common at the time, and were into the 1960s. Now, of course, they're so rare that most people have never encountered one.
Related threads:
Mid Week At Work. Elevator Operators
Last edition:
Sunday, September 23, 1945. A call to arms.
Wednesday, September 3, 2025
Thursday, August 21, 2025
Mid Week at Work. Three Mirrors.
This blog, as we occasionally note has the intent . . . to try to explore and learn a few things about the practice of law prior to the current era. That is, prior to the internet, prior to easy roads, and the like. How did it work, how regional was it, how did lawyers perceive their roles, and how were they perceived?
Well, okay, clearly its strayed way beyond that, but it's retained that purpose and is focused on the period from around 1900 until around 1920, which makes a lot other things, indeed most things, off topic.
But this past week there were a collection of things we ran across that really do sort of focus in on that a bit, and given us an example of how things have changed.
Taking them in no particular order, we have the story of baseball player Tommy Brown, about whom we noted:
Tommy "Buckshot" Brown as born on December 6, 1927 and January 15, 2025, and gives us a really good glimpse of the world of the late 1930s and 1940s. He'd dropped out of school at age 12 in 1939 and went to work with his uncle as a dockworker. Being a longshoreman is a notoriously dangerous job and frankly the occupation was heavily influenced by the mob at the time. There's no earthly way that you could be hired as a longshoreman at age 12 now, nor should there be. But life was like that then. My father's father, who was born in 1907, I think, went to work at age 13.
People did that.
If you are a longshoreman at age 12, you are a 12 year old adult.
He must have been a good baseball player to be hired on in the Majors at age 16. If that happened now, you'd have to be one of the greatest players alive in the game. But this was during World War Two, and baseball was scraping.
It was scraping as the military was. The service had taken pretty much all the able bodied men who weren't in a critical war industry. We don't like to think this about "the Greatest Generation" now, but by 1944 and 1945, the Army was inducting me who were only marginally capable of being soldiers in normal times. Men who were legally blind in one eye and who were psychotic were being taken in, and I'm not exaggerating. The recent incident we reported here of a soldier going mad and killing Japanese POWs makes sense in this context. It's relatively hard to get into the Army now. After World War Two men inducted were in good physical and mental shape. By the last days of the Second World War not all were and we knew it.
Brown's story also tells us a lot about what economic life was like mid century. Obviously, baseball didn't make Brown rich, and there was no post baseball career associated with sports. He went to work in a factory.
Going to work in a factory, in the 50s, was a pretty solid American job, and another story we touched on relates to this.
Americans of our age, and indeed since the 1950s, have really convinced themselves that American Ingenuity and native smartness caused us to have the best economy in the world in the third quarter of the 20th Century, and that if only we returned to the conditions of the 50s, we would again.
Well, the conditions of the 1950s were a lot like the conditions of the post war 1940s. Every major city in the world, save for American and Canadian ones, had been damaged, and many had been bombed flat. It's not as if Stuttgart, Stalingrad, or Osaka were in good shape. We would have had to nearly intentionally mess up not to be the world's dominant economy and that went on all the way into the 1970s. The UK did not really recover from World War Two, in part due to bad economic decisions, until the 1960s. West Germany, ironically, recovered much quicker, but in no small part due to the return of refugee German economists who intentionally ignored American economic advice. Japan emerged from the devastation in the 70s. Italy really started to in the 60s.
Many of these countries, when they did, emerged with brand new economies as things were brand new. Japan is a good example, but then so is Italy, which had been a shockingly backwater dump until the mid 50s.
Russia, arguably, has never recovered, helping to explain its national paranoia.
The thing is, however, that the myth as been hugely damaging to Americans, who imagine that if we were only whiter and had "less regulation", etc., we'd be back in 1955. It's not going to happen, and we can't tariff our way back to the Eisenhower Era.
Of course, a lot of that post war era wasn't all that nifty. We had the Cold War, for example, and we often dealt with significant inflation, in no small part to inflate our way out of enormous Cold War defense budgets. . .which is probably a warning of what's to come when we realize we have to do something about the national debt.
Finally, we had posted on women and careers. Well, sort of. Anyhow, right after that we saw a Twitter post in which a young woman who posted on TikTok was being discussed for say:
I'm just so tired of living and working and doing this every single day, and having nothing — I don't know how I'm gonna get childcare when I have to work 40 hours a week because I can't even afford to feed my family as is. I'm having medical problems. I can't even get into the doctor because X rays and MRIs are 500, let alone a colonoscopy and endoscopy that I need. Like, I can't afford anything. My doctors cancel my appointments.
This world is just not meant to be like this, we need to make change for us, for each other. Please.
She's right.
This was under the heading, on her post, of "This world is a scam".
The world? Well, that's a little too broad. But the modernized industrialized Protestant work ethic world of the West? You bet.
Interestingly, one of the things she took flak for was buying some sort of baby bottle washer. It's been a long time since there were infants here, but when there were, I recall we tended to use sort of a disposable system, not real bottles. Having said that, I looked bottles up, and I can recall that we had some of the ones that are still offered, so I'm likely wrong. Anyhow, washing bottles is no doubt a pain.
The irate people, who are probably generally irate simply because she had children, and therefore is not fully lashed to the deck of the economic fraud everyone is participating in, seemed to think that this therefore meant she was rich. Not hardly.
FWIW, I looked up baby bottle washers too, and they really aren't that expensive. They no doubt probably save time. Time is money and of course we need to get those wimmen's out in the workplace where they can serve the machine.
Women only entered the workplace at this level in the first place after domestic machinery freed, or seperated, their labor from the house, where it had previously been necessary. You don't see women being criticized because their house contains a vacuum cleaner, or a dishwasher, even though this is not intrinsically different.
Indeed, this tends to be the one area where the right and the left are in agreement, and will yell about how society needs more baby warehouses, um daycares. The left, of course, goes further and discourages having children at all, and would indeed expand infanticide if it could, one of the issues that gave rise to the culture was and the populist revolve that we're still in.
At any rate, she's right. The world is not meant to be like this. We made this horror, and others. We can fix it.
Sunday, August 17, 2025
Roads not taken.
I've noted here before that I'm highly introspective. Given that, I can't help but look at the road not taken, particularly when I'm oddly reminded of it.
Brian Nesvik was just confirmed as the Trump administrations head of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.
I'm not sure when most people start contemplating a career. I sometimes hear people say the most unlikely things, such as "I always wanted to be a lawyer" or "I always wanted to be an actuary". When I hear those things, I don't believe them unless the person is downright weird.
Existential occupations, however, are different, and I can imagine a person always wanting to occupy one of them. I've defined existential occupations in this way:
Being a soldier is, I think, an existential occupation, but only for men. I'm not sure what to say about being a policeman of any kind, but I think that's likely the case for that occupation as well.
Growing up as a boy, one of the occupations I really wanted to do was to be a soldier. It wasn't the only one I contemplated. As noted here, I've always been really strongly attracted to agriculture. Most days find me at my office practicing law, but that was never a childhood dream and it didn't occur to me at all until I was in college. Law is the great middle class reserve occupation, truth be known.
At some point I began to struggle with my childhood desire to be a soldier. It'd take me away from the state, which I didn't like the idea of. I knew then, when I was more realistic about life choices than I am now, that I really couldn't hope for a career in agriculture, which is what I'd have done if I could have. And the days of Wolfers and other professional hunters were long over, of course. So around about that time, probably 13, 14 or 15 years old, I started thinking about becoming a Wyoming Game Warden.
I didn't give up the soldiering idea right away. But it occured to me that I could become a National Guardsman, and stay here in the state. So I hit upon the idea of going to university, then doing a hit in the Army as an officer, and then coming back out and becoming a Game Warden while staying in the National Guard. This idea was so formulated in my mind at the time that I imagined myself entering the Air Cavalry, which at the time was a really cool branch of the Army, and the serving with the Army National Guard Air Cav Scout Troop in Cheyenne.
I was still on this track when as a junior in high school my father and I spoke about my career plans. By "spoke" I mean a conversation that probably had three or four sentences in it. My father wasn't big on career advice for reasons I understand now, but didn't really grasp then. My mother was much more likely to voice an opinion about education and what I should do than my father, but I tended to flat out ignore my mother, particularly as her mental status declined with illness. She'd have had me enter one of the hard sciences, which I in fact did (I guess I listened to her some) and go to a school like Notre Dame.
Anyhow, I told my father that I was going to study wildlife management. He only mentioned that "there are a lot of guys around here with wildlife management degrees that can't find jobs". That was enough to deter me from pursuing that degree right then and there, so rare was his advice in this area.
As it happened, I pursued another field of science but I did join the National Guard, doing so right out of high school as soon as I turned 18 years old. One of the reasons I did that was that I also was contemplating being a writer, and I thought I'd probably write on history topics. As a lot of history involves armed conflict, being in the Army in some fashion seemed like a good thing to do in order to understand the background.
I was right.
Indeed, joining the Guard was the last really smart career decision I made. I'm clearly not very good at career decisions.
To play the story out, I was a geology major. I graduated with a degree in geology, and couldn't find work as the oilfield and coal industries collapsed (sound familiar, Wyoming?). While at Casper College law was suggested to me by a history professor (I have so many credits in history that I coudl have picked up a BA in it with little effort) and it seemed like a good idea as I didn't know any lawyers and had no idea what they did.
Lots of people become lawyers that way. Indeed, I know one other lawyer who became one due to the exact same advice from the exact same fellow.
But even at that, when I knew that I wasn't going to get a job as a geologist, I entertained picking up a BS in wildlife management. By that point, my father was supporting me in the goal. Evan so, his advance five years prior stuck with me, and I didn't do it. I ended up going to law school, and I ended up letting myself ETS out of the Guard, as I thought, in error, that law school is hard.
Law school, as an aside, isn't hard. Any idiot can graduate with a JD and pass the bar. And while I only have experience with one law school, I dare say that this is true of any law school Harvard JD? So fucking what?
Still, the idea resurfaced one more time. A friend of mine and I went down to the Game Warden exam and I was offered a temporary summer job, the usual introductory way into the Wyoming Game and Fish Department at the time. At that time, usually those who picked up summer work did it for a few years before being offered a full time job. My wife and I had just gotten engaged, so I ended up declining the job.
Yes, I'm an idiot.
Well, not really. But as noted, I'm not good at career decisions.
Brian Nesvik is a Casper native. He decided to become a Game Warden when he was fourteen years old and met a game warden on his first big game hunting trip as a licensed hunter.
He's 55 years of age now. He's a graduate of the University of Wyoming where he received a bachelor's degree. He was a member of the Wyoming Army National Guard from 1986 to 2021 and rose to the rank of Brigadier General. Sources say he graduated high school from Cheyenne East in 1988, but I can't make that make sense. I can accept it was 1987 and he was definitely in the Guard in 1986, the year I got out. He's a 1994 graduate of the University of Wyoming, which would suggest that he did something else for awhile as even with the late 1988 date, that would have been six years after graduating high school. I somewhat wonder if he had military service prior to going to university, but I don't know that. He wears a 1st Cavalry Division DI as a combat patch, as noted, which is interesting.
His career as a game warden was very notable, and he became the state's chief game warden, the pinnacle of the game warden chain of command. His military career is also impressive, noting the following:
Apr 18 Dec 21 Assistant Adjutant General, Cheyenne, WY
Jan 16 Mar 18 J3/7, Joint Fore Headquarters, Cheyenne, Wyoming
Sep 15 Jan 16 G1, Joint Force Headquarters, Cheyenne, Wyoming
Feb 15 Sep 15 Chief Facilities Maintenance Officer, Joint Force Headquarters, Cheyenne, Wyoming
Jun 10 Feb 15 Commander, 115th Fires Brigade
Apr 09 Jun 10 Commander, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Camp Virginia, Kuwait
May 07 Apr 09 Commander, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming
Oct 06 May 07 S-3, Headquarters, 115th Field Artillery Brigade, Cheyenne, Wyoming
Oct 05 Oct 06 Operations Officer, Headquarters, 115th Field Artillery Brigade, Cheyenne, Wyoming
Feb 04 Oct 05 Commander, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery (FWD), Baghdad, Iraq
Oct 03 Feb 04 Executive Officer, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming
Jul 02 Oct 03 S-3, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming
Aug 01 Jul 02 S-4, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming
Jun 00 Aug 01 Operations Officer, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming
Oct 97 Jun 00 Commander, Battery C, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Worland, Wyoming
Jul 97 Oct 97 Fire Direction Officer, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming
Oct 96 Jul 97 Platoon Leader, Battery A, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Gillette, Wyoming
Jul 94 Oct 96 Executive Officer, Battery A, 3rd Battalion, 49th Field Artillery, Lander, Wyoming
Jul 93 Jul 94 Fire Support Officer, Headquarters Battery, 3rd Battalion, 49th Field Artillery, Laramie, Wyoming
Jul 90 Jul 93 Fire Direction Officer, Battery A, 3rd Battalion, 49th Field Artillery, Lander, Wyoming
Dec 86 Jul 90 Flight Operations Specialist, 920th Medical Company (Air Ambulance), Cheyenne, Wyoming
This is an interesting article:
Catholic Parents: Free the Hearts of Your Daughters
The author of it, Leila Miller, had to know that she was really swimming against the tide with this one.
Indeed, I'm reluctant to even post on this, as there are a lot of pronatalist nutjobs out there right now that immediately latch on to such things. But, here goes anyone.
Almost every Sunday I go to Mass at the same Catholic Church. The celebrant there is an absolutely excellent homilist. Probably most Priests give homilies that are good from time to time, but his are consistently great, which is rare in the extreme. So much so, really, that I'd put him alone in this particular class in regard to those which I've personally experienced.
He's very orthodox, which doesn't keep a wide number of parishioners to attending his Masses. In fact, for the first time last week, I could barely find a place to sit. I was attending with my daughter, who is about to go back to grad school.
Lots of weeks this parish features a fair number of young women wearing mantillas. Not every week, however. It's interesting . Some weeks they're all missing. I don't know for sure, but I suspect that those are the weeks the Byzantine Catholic Church has Divine Liturgy in town. The Byzantine Catholic service is conservative by default.
These are not the only young women there. There are quite a few, but most dress like young women in this region do, if a little nicer. My daughter, for instance, would never consider wearing a mantilla. I know a few of them, but only a few. There's the recently married nurse, whom I've known for a long time. There's the young lawyer and her family. And there's the girl working in the sporting goods shop.
The latter is particularly interesting as she just graduated high school about a year ago. She's been working there for about a year as well. Her concerned grandmother told me that she's been hoping that she goes to college and that she's very smart. Apparently, she has no desire to do so.
Most of the young women I know, and I know them only barely, are either newly minted lawyers or friends of my daughter. My daughter, as noted, is in grad school. Some of those young women are as well. Some have graduated from school already and are in the early stages of careers of one kind or another. Because we live on the shores of jello belt, a few are Mormons, who are already married (Mormons tend to marry young) and have children.
There are a lot of misperceptions about Catholics, including Catholics and marriage. Catholics do not, and never have, tended to marry young. The opposite is actually the case. My parents were in their late 20s and early 30s when then married. My mother's parents were about the same. I think my father's parents were in their early 20s, which isn't up there, but it's not as if its a teenage wedding either. Anyhow, most Catholic women fit in to the general demographics for American women in general on these topics, although not strictly so. The mantilla women are outliers.
What do they all hope for?
That's hard, if not impossible, to say. Each person's hopes and dreams are personal to them. . . but. . . well, within the confines of the nature of our species.
So perhaps they're more determinabel than we might think.
Peter, most people don't like their jobs. But you go out there and you find something that makes you happy.
You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of 'the artist' and the all-sufficiency of 'art' and 'beauty' and 'love,' back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermude, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time--back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.
Tomorrow it will be 28 years to the day that I've been in the service. 28 years in peace and war. I don't suppose I've been at home more than 10 months in all that time. Still, it's been a good life. I loved India. I wouldn't have had it any other way. But there are times... when suddenly you realize you're nearer the end than the beginning. And you wonder, you ask yourself, what the sum total of your life represents. What difference your being there at any time made to anything - or if it made any difference at all, really. Particularly in comparison with other men's careers. I don't know whether that kind of thinking's very healthy, but I must admit I've had some thoughts on those lines from time to time. But tonight... tonight!
Col Nicholson in The Bridge On The River Kwai.
Related threads: