Respect

I got up late today—5:30 a.m. It's 34° outside. It's the blue hour, that hour before dawn when everything has a shade of blue about it. This is Martin Luther King day in the US, a federal holiday, so no mail today and federal offices are closed and banks are closed, too. 

I got up and went to my PC. I checked the news and read an editorial. I watched a couple of YT videos. I defrosted a freezer biscuit: a frozen nugget of sausage, egg, and cheese wrapped in tasty carbohydrate. The biscuit had just the right balance of protein and carbs to send my brain back to sleepy time. So I crawled back into bed and drifted into slumber.

Time passed, but I was dead to the world.

My eyes opened again, and I found myself looking directly at the clock beside my bed. It displayed 9:09. For a split second my foggy brain thought I had slept the day away and now it was 9 p.m. But no, it was still morning. I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and stood up. The day was sunny and 39°. On the way to my PC I grabbed a bottle of Savia Aloe Vera drink from the fridge.

The Savia drink is sweet. You can dilute it with water if the sweetness overwhelms you. A friend in Costa Rica introduced me to it, and later I found it on the Hispanic food aisle at Walmart. Aloe Vera juice is reputed to have health benefits, but I don't know what, if any, benefits might be found in the Savia drink. For what it's worth, you can see bits of Aloe Vera gel suspended in the water in the bottle.

My first order of business is to take an online Spanish lesson. I'm studying (re-learning) Spanish on a website that is multimedia. Sometimes it plays samples of spoken Spanish and asks me to type what I hear. No problem—or, no hay problema. But I do have complaints. For one, when they tell me to type what I hear, and I do, sometimes they tell me I am wrong. How can I be wrong? I typed what I heard, just as they asked. If it isn't what they wanted me to hear, then that's on them. I'm just listening and typing. Maybe their instructors should speak more clearly.

When I was in high school, in those long ago days of yore, I had an excellent Spanish teacher. Her name was Mrs. Pulley, and she had the best diction of anyone I've ever heard. I wrote about her in a blog post here. I never knew her first name. Back in those days of yore, students had respect for their teachers and would never think of addressing a teacher by his or her first name. It is like using Tú and Usted in Spanish, a distinction that also seems to be slowly disappearing. Even my Spanish-teaching website teaches me to say Tú with barely a mention of Usted. It's a distinction that shows respect—a nicety that is, in its own way, dying in my country, too. Small children, who visit with their parents and who don't know me, can now call me by my first name, and their parents see nothing wrong with that. The child isn't taught respect because the parent was never taught respect. And where does that lead? Apparently, it leads to a country where people have no respect for anything—not for lives, not for property, and not for their own government.

If Jesus were still amongst us, he would look at the world and say, "Oy vey!" Except, of course, he would say it in Aramaic.