For a lot of people, the word pacific is always capitalized (Pacific) and refers to a body of water just west of California. Nothing wrong with that as far as it goes, but it doesn’t really go very far. It is not always capitalized and it does not always refer to a body of water. And “Atlantic” is not its natural opposite.
At some point, I should probably say that this essay is about words more than it is really about retirement. That is fully within my mandate as a dilettante, but this is not an essay you will enjoy if you are trying to learn something useful about retirement. About words…maybe.
Ferdinand Magellan sailed out of the very nasty seas around Cape Horn and found a relatively quiet body of water. He was thankful for how peaceful it was for the same reason that the Pilgrims were thankful for food after having lost half their number the previous winter. We could say that the seas Magellan found were “relatively” calm. So in the general sense, “pacific” means “peaceful.” Everyone who has ever given a baby a pacifier ought to understand that. [1]
But the thing about the English language is that we rely on the neighborhood of words to give them their meaning. So a title like Pacific Retirement Services could make “pacific” the adjective and “ retirement services” the noun (phrase). On the other hand, it could make pacific the adjective and retirement the noun. We are now talking about a pacific retirement, which sounds really good to me, especially given the alternatives (antonyms). [2]
I put the full set in the footnote, but I especially like these five.
Some of those are really funny in the context of retirement. Here are my favorites.
annoying retirement services
quarrelsome retirement services
nettlesome retirement services
provocative retirement services, and
unsympathetic retirement services
It is expressions like “nettlesome retirement services” that clarify my preference for pacific ones. A pacific retirement is a great goal to have and whatever services it requires are of immediate interest to me.
Of course, the people who chose that name had nothing of the kind in mind. There are hundreds of businesses and associations in California, Oregon, and Washington that are called “Pacific” simply because they are in states that border on the Pacific Ocean.
But I don’t have any direct interest in Pacific Retirement Services where “Pacific” refers to the ocean. Bette and I are going to be living at Holladay Park Plaza—in a few weeks—and HPP is one of the retirement centers belonging to (affiliated with) Pacific Retirement Services. [3] So right away, as I begin to wonder whether PRS is good for HPP, my mind drifts over to a pacific retirement, the kind I want very much. And that raises the questions of what “services” will help me achieve that. [4]
Not that there are not other values to be sought and sustained in a retirement center. Of course there are. Old people, like young people and middle-aged people, need to be engaged as active agents in their own lives. They need to live lives of meaning and, at our age, of service as well. But I don’t worry about those things for myself. I actively pursue those things. “Peaceful” is not always a part of the bargain in my life—my own fault, mostly—and it is the peaceful part of the retirement phase that attracts me.
[1] The root is pax, pacis, of course (Pax Romana?) but you will note that there is more to Pacific than that. The -ific comes from the Latin facere, “to make.” Actually, all the English words that end in -ify or -ification contain this contribution from facere. So the body of water Magellan faced was not just “peaceful,” but had been “made peaceful.” It had been “pacified.”
[2] abrasive, aggravating, annoying, chafing, exasperating, frustrating, galling, inflammatory, irksome, irritating, maddening, nagging, nettlesome, nettling, offensive, provocative, provoking, rankling, riling, vexing; engaging, incensing, infuriating, maddening; antagonistic, antipathetic, hostile, inhospitable, inimical, unfriendly, unsympathetic; aggressive, agonistic, argumentative, assertive, bellicose, belligerent, combative, confrontational, contentious, pugnacious, quarrelsome, scrappy, truculent; martial, militant, militaristic, military, warlike
[3] “The PRS family of affiliates is made up of 9 Continuing Care Retirement Communities (CCRCs) and 25 affordable senior housing communities. We are located in five states: Oregon, Washington, California, Texas, and Wisconsin.” That’s from the Pacific Retirement Services website, where I learned for the first time that Texas and Wisconsin also border on the Pacific Ocean, probably in some honorary sense.
[4] Nothing is a “service” just because it is called a service. My mind goes immediately to Steven Spielberg’s movie, The Terminal, in which the evil director of the airport is trying to get Viktor Navorsky (Tom Hanks) to walk out of the terminal so he can be arrested and become somebody else’s problem. Making him hungry ought to work and Viktor has no money for food—until he discovers that when you return a baggage cart you get a quarter. So he collects a lot of carts and gets a lot of quarters until a new “service” is invented just for him. One morning, he has collected…let’s say 20 carts (worth $5.00 to him)…and as he is about to return them, he is stopped by a man with very large arms. “Thanks,” he says, “I’ll take it from here.” Thanks, that is, for collecting all the carts, now I will take all the money they represent. And then he gives his title, a title invented just for this particular job. He says he is the Transportation Liaison for Passenger Assistance. None of those words points to what he is actually doing. What he is actually doing is providing a “service” that is not a service.
But before we get to Rover Joe, let’s go back and pick up Kermit. Leroy’s bumbling master, Mordecai Sledge, managed to throw a Sousaphone up in a tree and it came down around Leroy’s neck. Leroy takes off, hauling a whole wagon of musical instruments behind him. He doesn’t know what this thing around his neck is and, having escaped “from”—with no thought yet given to the “to” part—he doesn’t really know who he is either. Kermit solves both of those problems.
throwed out.” That can be usefully abbreviated as OBUWATO. It is why, in response to the first question, he is sad. It is why, in response to the second question, the reason that his master, Mean Floyd, threw him out the window. They invite him to join them as a travelling musician. Rover Joe declines. What to know what the reason was? OBUWATO. He says it so often that T.R. begins beak-synching with him.
private if you know what I mean.” That seems clear enough. T. R. hears her with respect. “Come on Rover Joe, the lady’s got her rights.” But again, that is not what she wants and the second verse of the song begins “Well now no one care about this story…”
In the first scene after Leroy escapes, he is just a donkey running away. But he runs into Kermit, who says, in effect, “You are not a runaway donkey, you are a traveling musician!” I have never seen, in real life, the instantaneous transformation Leroy goes through because Kermit gave him an identity, but I have very often seen a new name given and I have seen a person grow into that name. I have been that person.
moments ago, you were lying here in solitary misery. Catgut was waiting to die and Rover Joe had been OBUWATO. But someone said, “Why don’t you join us?” The choice is really clear. Yes awful things have happened to you. Yes you are lying here because you had no alternative. But now you do. We are asking you to join us.
I’ve been there a lot in the last few weeks on one errand or another and I have used the restroom on the first floor just north of the lobby. There is good hot water there and a soap dispenser and a tray of rolled up cloth towels. Very classy. Because people wash their hands at the sink, there accumulates on the counter little pools of water and soap suds. So after I have wiped my hands on the towel, I mop up all the water and soap and throw the towel into the basket under the sink.
That way of understanding the story has not helped me. It has brought a consistent and principled demand down on my behavior. It has not caused me to intervene when otherwise I would not have. I don’t think I have ever seen anyone intervene because of the “do likewise” instruction. That formulation is really good for blaming yourself, of course, and it is even better for blaming other people, but without compassion, it doesn’t actually work and I think we know that.
I think that’s a really good idea. The bully’s aggression works by isolating some vulnerable person. If the bystanders refuse to fall away, to expose this boy or girl to abuse, then he or she is not isolated and the bully will have to reconsider. He may very well reconsider by going after you, but that is one of the things you might have to risk. You might be willing to risk it because you feel compassion for the bully-bait, especially if you have seen it before. You feel compassion and you are impelled to follow those feeling with actions.
Cute.
I know there will be other sortings as well; I’m just not sure what they will be. Will there be a group—a real group, not just a category—of “people who used to be teachers?” Will there be “people who used to run businesses?” Will there be a group who used to be important and miss it dreadfully? Will there be a group of movers and shakers who serve on retirement center or on neighborhood committees and who want to tell you what is going on? I have no idea.
I know this happens all the time in new settings. I know I am going to walk into the dining room and look around. I am going to see some people dressed as “we used to be teachers” or “we used to run businesses” or “we were stay-at-home moms.” And they are going to look at us, at “the new guys,” and make the same kinds of early decisions. Where is the Sorting Hat when you really need it?
As I tried to find a way to say what it was about the two conventions that bothered me, I made my way back to 1895 again. That’s when H. G. Wells’ well-known science fiction work, The Time Machine was published. As nearly everyone knows—I’m sure there is a Classic Comic version of this famous story—the Time Traveler goes far into our future, to a time when there are only two species: the Eloi and the Morlocks. Here’s a piece about their relationship from the Wikipedia article on Morlocks, but you can see it all in the picture.
The production and distribution of goods and services are being globalized. American manufacturers want to find customers for their products and as a global middle class continues to develop and grow, they are finding them. Not the American middle class, but still, a customer is a customer. A global labor market is also taking shape. This pool of “laborers” includes blue color and white collar; it includes jobs in production, sales, and services—including some very demanding services, like architecture and engineering. The need for workers—reduced as it is by robotics—is still quite large, but there is no need for these to be American workers.
What would help? OK, I’m not going to call it socialism. I’m not going to call it anything at all. But here’s what needs to happen. If American businesses are going to go to the least expensive labor markets and if they are going to sell their products to a rapidly emerging global middle class, then we might as well admit that the cost to our own middle class—the late great American middle class—is going to be catastrophic. [5] The pain these policies cause makes they angry. The pain needs to be mitigated. That is something governments actually can do and they should. They can’t fix the problem, but they can make it hurt less.
Since Bette and I decided to leave our Hayhurst Neighborhood and move to a good retirement center somewhere, we have been thinking about the going part. How can it be done thoughtfully and gently, honoring all the neighborhood has been for us? And now that we have bought an apartment at Holladay Park Plaza, our choice of retirement centers, it is time to think about the coming part—coming to a new home. [1] HPP is actually in the Sullivan’s Gulch Neighborhood, as Portland counts neighborhoods [2], but I think it would be better for Bette and me to think of HPP itself as our neighborhood.
standard are very likely to be rejected at the outset, even though there are other values that also need to be considered. If it isn’t thoughtful and gentle, I don’t want to consider it. I was shopping for a metaphor that would help me think through the process and in the middle of my search, I stumbled on the metaphor I used last January for leaving the neighborhood: it is “the abscission layer.” As soon as I saw that, I knew that I wanted to go around to the other end of the process, which is grafting. Bette and I want to be grafted in to our new neighborhood.
ced by sunlight and magic and sent to wherever in the tree it is needed. I don’t understand photosynthesis, really, but I know it involves an interaction at a part of the tree whose principal responsibility is to make nutrients and put them into a transportation system that will bring them to the right place.
Not everyone would call the action of hormones like auxins, cytokinins, and gibberellins “politics,” but I would. The production and inhibition of growth and the distribution of resources to one place rather than another sound like the ordinary work of the legislature to me. We’ll see.
vision the end” the saying goes, “resist the beginnings.”
people argue that this or that can be done. Mulgan has the advantage of saying “while this might have happened…it did not actually happen.” Mulgan knows what happened—“is happening,” we would say—and so he knows that the faith in technology was misplaced. And here we have John Kenneth Galbraith, whose book, The Affluent Society focused attention on the early phases of a lot of the issues that are completely out of hand by 2140.
C. S. Lewis’s setting is entirely different, but the mechanism is the same. The “divorce” of the title is the separation between Hell and Heaven. Every day, the people in Hell (the Ghosts) have the chance to get on a bus and go to Heaven to commune with the people there (the Spirits), and to stay forever if they want to. Nearly everyone doesn’t want to. They get back on the bus in the afternoon and go back to Hell where, apparently, they feel more “at home.”
suggested in the first part can be logically extended to the second part. All that passage is nonsense, of course, but I would like for you to stop and consider just why it is nonsense. It is not the words. They work fine. It is not the ideas. They can be made to work. It is the sources. What I am going to call the genres.
Messiah and king and son of God all had triumphant overtones. Jesus just can’t be, according to the Jewish understanding at the time (and today) the triumphant messiah and the suffering servant. One or the other; not both.
I experienced one of the few failures of conversation I have ever had in our Starbucks group last week. I had a position I wanted to sell. It is position the group almost certainly accepts in general, but they didn’t want to accept it this time. And it is the failure of the conversation I want to point to, not my own failure. Although… (see below)
When I referred, above, to the position the group accepts as a general matter, this is the position I had in mind. People should be granted the right to feel what they feel. This means only that we understand that every decision is made on the basis of a welter of considerations, many of them contradictory. I would really like to have my son and his family nearby, but the best job offer is in a distant city and I know the family will be better off there. The Caucus would, as a rule, say that they “understand” my feeling of personal loss and that they “approve” my giving greater weight to the more important consideration. On the other hand, if I said that I am opposed to my son and his family moving to a distant city even though I know it would be the best thing for them and that my opposition is based on my own regret that they will no longer live near me, they would not approve. They might very well characterize my consideration as “selfish.”
The white working class of the post-bellum south has every right to mourn the loss of the one social advantage they had, but they should set that aside in favor of the much greater importance of racial equity and social justice.
trade-off at issue really was. It doesn’t really matter for this essay. Let’s say that it was the satisfaction that Trump voters feel is seeing “their guy” stand up to the enforcers of “sensitivity.” They, it seems to them, are forever being corrected by the Nazis of Political Correctness and they have to adopt new terms because the common old ones are now “offensive” and adopt tortured syntax to work their way around a word that can’t be used any more. They have to stammer and apologize and kowtow to criticisms. But Trump doesn’t. He just doesn’t. He faces the same forces that require us to submit and punish us if we don’t and he refuses to kowtow. How satisfying to see someone stand up to them!
The Dilettante's Dilemma 