Mountain Views News, Combined Edition Saturday, June 10, 2023

12

OPINION

Mountain View News Saturday, June 10, 2023 

JOHN L. MICEK 

RICH JOHNSON 

NOW THAT’S 
RICH

MOUNTAIN 
VIEWS

NEWS

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Susan Henderson

PASADENA CITY 
EDITOR

Dean Lee 

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Patricia Colonello

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John Aveny 

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CONTRIBUTORS

Stuart Tolchin 

Audrey Swanson

Meghan Malooley

Mary Lou Caldwell

Kevin McGuire

Chris Leclerc

Dinah Chong Watkins

Howard Hays

Paul Carpenter

Kim Clymer-Kelley

Christopher Nyerges

Peter Dills 

Rich Johnson

Lori Ann Harris

Rev. James Snyder

Katie Hopkins

Deanne Davis

Despina Arouzman

Jeff Brown

Marc Garlett

Keely Toten

Dan Golden

Rebecca Wright

Hail Hamilton

Joan Schmidt

LaQuetta Shamblee

STUART TOLCHIN


DOMINION OVER 
THE EARTH? WHO 
WERE WE KIDDING? 
WHAT THE 
WILDFIRES TEACH 
US

PUT THE LIGHTS ON


FOR MEN'S EYES 
ONLY!

WHAT WILL BE 
YOUR LEGACY?

For Men’s Eyes Only

Note to all women. Please read no further. 
This column is for men!

Men, as Father’s Day approaches I ask you: 
“Do you want to know how to improve the 
quality of your life?” Of course you do. Simple.

Rename “Father’s Day” “Mother’s Day, Part 
Deux”.

After all, the best gift you could ever receive 
on Father’s Day is a very happy wife and 
mother. If you have children and they are 
over the age of 6, they will agree with you. In 
fact, revering mom is the greatest gift you can 
give to your children.

Now, doggone it. One of you women out there 
is reading this. Stop!

Where were we? Oh yes. Society would 
function much better if we paid heed to a 
contribution by the great sages of Western 
Civilization.

First, the late 19th century icon, Oscar Wilde.

“Women are meant to be loved, not to be 
understood!”

Dr. Melchor N. Lim wants to chime in. Who? 
Who better than a renowned cardiologist to 
discuss affairs of the heart? 

“A man who says marriage is a 50-50 proposition 
doesn’t understand two things: 1-Women, 
2-Fractions.”

Back to Father’s Day. Guys, shock your family 
and have something nice for your wife on Father’s 
Day. This suggestion is the best gift you 
could receive. And I sought help from close, 
close friends of mine:

 Of course, I asked Groucho to weigh in:

“Only one man in a thousand is a leader of 
men, the other 999 follow women.” 

And I just got off the phone with British actor 
Peter Ustinov. Considering he hasn’t been on 
this plane of existence since 2004, his comment 
was profound and timely.

“Men think about women. Women think 
about what men think about them.” 

Agatha Christie mysteriously contributed to 
the discussion:

“An archaeologist is the best husband a woman 
can have. The older she gets the more interested 
he is in her.” 

Comedienne Rita Rudner gifted us with her 
insight:

“Men forget everything; women remember 
everything. That’s why men need in-stant 
replays in sports. They’ve already forgotten 
what happened.” 

I suspect Comedienne Elayne Boosler was 
with Rita and bullied her way in:

“When women are depressed, they eat or go 
shopping. Men invade another country...” 

Sunday Adelaja Pastor of the Embassy of 
the Blessed Kingdom of God for all Nations 
summed it up:

“Women love with their ears, men with their 
eyes.” 

When word got out about my pending column 
this week I got several anony-mous 
callers wanting to contribute. I’ll call them 
“Unknowns”.

“Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, 
since it consists principally in dealing with 
men.” Unknown

“Men who don’t understand women fall 
into two groups: Bachelors and Hus-bands.” 
Unknown

“Few women admit their age. Few men act 
theirs.” Unknown

“A man wears the pants in a relationship, but 
the woman tells the man which pair to put 
on.” Unknown

Also, from beyond the grave, William Shakespeare 
contacted me insisting he had dusted 
off important insight into men and women:

“Women speak two languages – one of which 
is verbal.”

In closing, this week’s attempt to make June 
18th the most tectonic Father’s Day in modern 
history, I offer to this discussion this final 
thought.

“Real men stay faithful. They don’t have time 
to look for other women, because they are too 
busy loving the one they have.”

One more week until Father’s Day. Buckle up 
for the ride. Your intrepid cul-ture commentary 
commentator!

 I have come to realize that I am a life-
long member of the “Good Little Boys Club”. 
I realize that almost all of my friends and colleagues 
are these grown-up good little boys 
who lived trying their best to meet the expectations 
of their parents. We are all Doctors, 
Lawyers, Accountants and seemingly respectable 
admirable people except for one thing 
--- we have never lived in ways consistent 
with our authentic selves. What am I talking 
about? It’s not just that we never break laws, 
or take risks --it’s just that we have all been 
so busy meeting other people’s expectations 
that we have barely ever even gotten to know 
ourselves.

 We have all been married with various 
degrees of success but all have maintained 
strong relationships with our children. None 
of us are drinkers, or non-prescription drug-
takers. None of us even have tattoos but, in a 
big way, I believe, we are disappointments to 
ourselves. It is as if we are living our lives to 
please others and have never had the courage 
to discover much about ourselves. At least for 
me, there is another me I wish I had gotten 
to know.

 I am struggling with this feeling after 
watching the movie “Living” featuring Bill 
Nighy. Bill Nighy is a favorite actor of mine 
relating to his role of the washed up pop singer 
in the marvelous movie “Love Actually” 
which, for me at least, stood for the proposition 
that anything is possible if you are 
willing to take the risk. One of my favorite 
memories of that film is the ordinary British 
bumbling male deciding to go off to some 
unknown place, Milwaukee Wisconsin, in 
the hope of meeting attractive women. Soon 
he returns to England with three beautiful 
women fascinated by his accent. Who knew?

 In his Oscar nominated role in “Living” 
Bill Nighy plays an aged civil servant 
bored and underworked who learns from a 
doctor that he only has six months to live. 
Somehow he cannot break the routine of his 
daily life to confide in his son or daughter-in-
law with whom he lives. He cannot confide 
in his co-workers because sharing such personal 
information is socially unacceptable. 
Trapped in his empty life he simply absents 
himself from work where he is the authority 
figure and confides in some stranger that he 
meets. This begins a search for meaning that 
eventually gives him a purpose to create a 
legacy for the next generation. I read reviews 
of the movie and learned that the film 
derives from the 1952 film “Ikiru” directed 
by Akira Kurosawa , which was inspired by 
the 1886 Russian Tolstoy novella “The Death 
of Ivan Ilyich”. That’s right; 1886! I had formerly 
believed that my particular way of life, 
of being a permanent Good Little Boy was 
characteristic of contemporary culture affecting 
senior citizens. All of us, especially 
my Jewish friends had been raised by parents 
who grew up during the depression and were 
closely affected by the hardships of World 
War II even though no one ever talked much 
about it. The result was that we all lived our 
life mainly thinking about our own everyday 
problems and acceptable social advancement 
but never really doing anything unexpected 
or taking any risks or ever working very hard. 
The Tolstoy novella clarifies this unfortunate 
human tendency as existing long before our 
own time.

 Last week as I was walking down the 
hill into town a car stopped and the driver 
asked “Are you the writer? You look like the 
picture in the paper. I read your articles every 
week.” That reached me. I am aware that I 
have a need to write, to speak into the darkness 
and try to find myself. I want to connect 
to others and realize that I have never worked 
or searched hard enough to experience much 
of a connection. Being a “good little boy” is 
not enough and this culture filled with “good 
little boys and girls” seems to be in the process 
of drowning. Our best joint legacy to the 
future would be to stop sinking even though 
we aren’t quite sure how. For me better, careful 
writing would be a good beginning. I will 
try. 

On a clear day, the view from the top-floor terrace of the 
Kennedy Center is one of the best in the nation’s capital.

Turn one way, and the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials, 
along with the iconic pointed top of the Washington 
Monument, frame the sky above the National Mall. 
Glance uptown, and there’s the U.S. Capitol dome. Turn 
be-hind you, casting your gaze across the Potomac River, 
and northern Vir-ginia’s sprawl runs away from its 
banks, stretching interminably into the suburbs.

On Wednesday, with much of the Eastern Seaboard 
cloaked in dense smog from wildfires raging hundreds 
of miles away across the Canadian border, all those historic 
sites you learned about in sixth grade social studies 
class were still visible – but the dense haze, and the glare 
from the sunlight bouncing off of it, was impossible to 
miss.

It also was a reminder that, for as much as we talk about 
“saving the Earth,’’ we’re really talking about saving 
ourselves. And every time we in-flict some injury on 
our shared home, we move that much closer to has-tening 
our own demise. Because, let’s face it. The Earth is 
going to be just fine whether we’re here or not.

At 4.5 billion years old, it’s survived meteor strikes, 
the dinosaurs, ice ages, tectonic shifts that have erased 
and redrawn the planet’s surface like a cosmic Etch-a-
Sketch, volcanic eruptions, destructive storms, and reality 
television.

Empires have risen and fell. Nations have come and 
gone. Kings and queens – when anyone remembers 
their names – are buried, as the Stoics famously remind 
us, in the same ground as their servants and the peas-
ants they thought they were ruling.

For the planet, this too, shall pass.

But for the rest of us, whose time here is barely a rounding 
error, the stakes could not be higher.

The wildfires that annually inflict billions of dollars of 
damage on the American West, where they long have 
been a fact of life, are now part of the “new climate reality” 
for the United States’ northern neighbor, experts 
told The Guardian this week.

In fact, the fires are “a really clear sign of climate 
change,” Mohammad Reza Alizadeh, a researcher at 
McGill University in Montreal, told the Guardian, 
which noted that a 2021 study by the National Oceanic 
and At-mospheric Association found that climate 
change “has been the main driver of the increase in hot, 
dry fire weather in the western United States.”

And by 2090, wildfires worldwide are expected to only 
increase in their in-tensity, The Guardian further reported, 
citing a United Nations report re-leased last 
year.

It’s already been well-established that human activity 
has played a role in climate change. And that changes in 
our activity can help arrest its pro-gress, though we’ve 
already missed one chance to turn down the temper-
ature, and the window on another opportunity is rapidly 
closing.

“We’re the first generation to feel the sting of climate 
change,” Washing-ton Gov. Jay Inslee said as he 
launched his 2020 Democratic bid for the White House. 
“And we’re the last who can do something about it.”

A fast reading of the first chapter of Genesis would have 
us believe that the “dominion” that God granted us over 
“the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over 
every living thing that moveth upon the earth,” means 
that we’re somehow in charge.

We’re not. And you don’t have to go any further than 
the next verse to be reminded that it’s a gift not to be 
taken for granted.

“And God said, ‘Behold, I have given you every herb 
bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, 
and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding 
seed; to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast 
of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every 
thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, 
I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.’

“And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, 
it was very good,”

Yes, for as long as we can keep it.

Those memorials peeking above Washington D.C.’s 
skyline remind us just how precious and altogether brief 
that time really is.

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Mountain Views News 80 W Sierra Madre Blvd. No. 327 Sierra Madre, Ca. 91024 Office: 626.355.2737 Fax: 626.609.3285 Email: editor@mtnviewsnews.com Website: www.mtnviewsnews.com