Resolve as a Precious Commodity

The news of Putin’s invasion (and it is HIS invasion, more than it is Russia’s) was gut-wrenching.  Especially so because I think we would be doing more to stop it if we hadn’t spent our resolve in another war we started decades before. s before.  

Going to wary is a scary, horrifying, decision to make.  It should always be a decision of last resort.  The last thing tried to resolve a political problem with another country.  Some done with extreme reluctance.  

Sometimes, I’ll even say rarely, there come times when it’s the only choice to be made.  I thought that way back in 2001.  This was after the towers fell and the perpetrators were identified as a group of terrorists based in a country somewhere on the other side of the planet.  It’s an axiom of international politics that if you allow an enemy to strike at you with impunity, then they would do so again, with greater force, and keep doing so until you stopped them.   

When the Taliban government ruling Afghanistan refused to hand over Al Qaida, they had to be dealt with.  They made themselves accomplices after the fact to the greatest criminal act perpetrated in modern history.  They had to pay.  

It may sound like I was gung-ho about the prospect.  I wasn’t.  I remembered how scary it was when my little brother went into Kuwait during a previous conflict, which I also regarded as necessary.  But I accepted the axiom as valid and applicable.  And I hoped that those we of the body politic had put in charge had the same clarity of purpose, and clearly stated goals as their predecessors had.  

At first, it looked like they did.  Afghanistan started as a relatively limited operation.  About twenty thousand troops.  Mostly special operations units, air support, and intelligence teams, allying themselves with a native group already fighting the Taliban, the Northern Alliance.  We gave them arms, information, and training to help them break the stalemate in their fight with our now common enemy, while we started hunting down those that had attacked us.  In relatively short order, they took Kabul, we brought in more people to help them set up a government to legitimize themselves, and we tracked down Al Qaida.  

Then, the sideshow took over.  Based on an assumed connection I even heard repeated in popular entertainment (“You’re crazy if you think he had nothing to do with it”), using “evidence” that proved to be flimsy at best, and maybe even fabricated, and hyped to the public with statements that underscored the crassness of the real reasons and objectives of this expansion of conflict(“The war will pay for itself”).  We invaded Iraq.  Something which the father of the then current president refused to do despite pressure for within his own party because it wasn’t “prudent.”  

History has proven H.W. Bush to have been right.  It became the quagmire that Dick Cheney, as Defense Secretary under Bush #1, warned it would become had we gone on from Kuwait to head toward Baghdad.  Too bad he couldn’t remember saying that when he became Vice President.    

And it drained us.  Of lives, money, resources that could have been used to conclude our operations in Afghanistan successfully (and by “successfully” I mean something more than a thinly veiled cover to allow us to get out without too much embarrassment, which is what success eventually came to mean).  More importantly, it drained us, the American people, of resolve.  Collectively we reached the point where we just wanted it to end.  No matter the result.  

While we were dealing with the mess we’d created, Russia was rebuilding itself.  Or, more accurately, Putin was rebuilding Russia in his own image.  Gathering power internally.  And recreating the modern version of the Soviet Union (the fall of which he laments as the greatest tragedy of the 20th century).  In Georgia.  In Belarus.  In Syria, after we drew a “red line in the sand” that was promptly crossed and forgotten.  And then in Ukraine, in 2014, after a democratically elected government not to his liking (and what democratically elected government could ever be to his liking?) came to power on his doorstep.  Threatening to provide sharp contrast to his failure to create a better life for his people and country.  

Putin has done what he has done because he could see what we were willing to do, or more importantly, not do.  We’ve even saying it every time we announce new sanctions were going to apply against him.  After a listing all the stern action we will take, along with the assurances that he will “pay a cost” for what he has done, there always follows the almost obligatory statement of, “but we won’t be sending troops into Ukraine.”  

That’s the part he’s hearing.  Putin has been under sanctions already.  He’s learned to deal with them.  He’s built up a fund to get through this.  It’s the only part of what the West is saying that he is paying attention to.  He hears, “Blah-ba-blah-ba-blah-blah-blah, we’re not sending troops” and turns to his generals and says, “they’re not going to stop us.  Go ahead.” 

The Zeitgeist of this age is a scary one.  There appear to be a fresh crop of “Bad Guys” running countries.  The ones gaining power for themselves.  The ones telling obvious lies.  Lies so obvious they’re the equivalent of pointing at the noontime sun and saying it’s the moon at midnight.  The ones reaching out to take more and more of what they can get. 

Then there’s “The Rest of Us.”  The ones watching all this happen, shaking our heads in horrified disbelief.  Some of the Rest of Us are, like those in Hong Kong, are seeing what they thought were their rights being torn up and discarded.  Some of the Rest of Us are now picking up weapons as the Bad Guys send tanks and troops across their borders.  And other Rest of Us, like those living in Taiwan, are looking at their calendars wondering when it’ll happen to them. 

I’m remembering old newsreel images of Prime Minister Chamberlain of Great Britain, holding a sheet of paper that was dancing in the wind, declaring he had secured “peace for our time.”  This was in 1938, after returning from Munich, Germany, where he’d rubber-stamped Hitler’s annexation of the Sudentenland of Czechoslovakia.

I am not drawing a comparison with Chamberlain with Biden or any other leader working to stop Putin from going further.  I am thinking it’s an example of what can happen if you allow a lack of resolve to keep you from doing what should be done.

Hello. My name is Erick. And I am a Daydreamer

It occurred to me recently that I might have Walter Mitty Syndrome.  Or, “Maladaptive Daydreaming,” which is what I found when I googled “Walter Mitty Syndrome.”  

It comes from the movie made back in 1947 with Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo,  About a pulp magazine editor that lives in a fantasy life all day long, using the things he’s learned from the lurid stories he helps get ready for publishing.  

Like Walter Mitty, I spend a lot of time entertaining myself with daydreams.  An ex-girlfriend of mine once told me, “You love to daydream.  It’s your hobby.  It’s what you do.”  I tried to come up with an argument to prove to her that I wasn’t like that, but by the time I realized that she had me pegged, she’d fallen asleep.  

I’ve recently started wondering if my penchant for daydreaming was actually distracting me from living a better life, from achieving my goals.  Because, as I’ve wondered, if I can get positive emotional impact of success from daydreaming about fantastical successes and storybook achievements, then it might take the edge off the desire to actual do something real.  Right?  

I found the term Maladaptive Daydreaming when I wondered if someone had come up with a name for someone like that.  The term was first used when it was identified as a disorder in 2002.  The symptoms include: 

Vivid, richly detailed daydreams.

Abnormally long daydreaming sessions, up to 4 hours a day. 

Daydreams triggered by real life events.  

Daydreaming sessions that interrupt sleep.

Repetitive motions or whisperings while daydreaming.

Going through this list gave me some relief.  While my daydreams tend to be rich and detailed (I’ll even research the things I daydream about to make them more accurate, which is NOT listed as a symptom I will point out), and real life events trigger daydreams for me ALL the time (don’t they for everyone?  Is THAT rare?), I don’t go on for hours and hours at a time, and I don’t make repetitive motions or whisperings while I daydream, and it’s more likely for daydreaming to delay falling asleep as I entertain myself.  

Interesting Note: My Fitbit can analyze my sleep, showing the state I’m in (Deep Sleep, REM, Light Sleep, Awake) throughout the night.  I’ve noticed that it sometimes indicate I’m in REM sleep at a time when I’ve been awake and letting my mind play in some fascinating scenario.  Would be something like guided dreaming?  

Also some of the descriptions of the benefits of daydreaming I found good to hear.  Such as greater creativity, improved productivity, better problem solving skills, AND progress TOWARD goals.  Whew!  That unless daydream was interfering with daily tasks and routines (which it doesn’t for me) it is a virtue.  

Ok.  Good.  Glad to hear it.  But…  While I may not need psychological help (at least not for my daydreaming) I still had the feeling that I should do something about them.  

So, I started to catalogue them.  

Every Saturday, I use my writing session to write down all the things I’ve daydreamed about.  What prompted them, if I can recall that, how they changed and developed.  Their sequels (yes, my daydreams have sequels).  And spinoffs (Is THAT unusual?). Who I cast in them.  Everything.

Since doing this I’ve noticed that some of the daydreams have gone away.  After writing them out, they don’t seem so interesting to me.  But others have become more complicated.  They’ve been recast.  Produced more variants (reboots I guess is the term), with more spinoffs and sequels.  

And one has been tagged to turned into a short story to write after I get the Second Act of the novel I’m currently rewriting read and reviewed.  Another, a sequel to the novel I’m rewriting now.  And a third that would be a cool zombie series.  Maybe.  

And, I’ve decided to not call them “daydreams” any more.  I’ve started to call them “Imaginings.”  So I’m no longer a daydreamer.  I’m an Imagineer!

Crap!  Disney already uses that term.  I’ll have to dream up something else.