Back in the 90's I worked the Flight Deck of the USS ENTERPRISE

I had a memory of being assigned to ENTERPRISE, where I was a catapult and arresting gear officer. One day after we shot training command jets for 3 days (new pilots flying with instructors earning their carrier qualification the first time), my boss (the “Air Boss”), who knew the CO of the training squadron, got a ride for me in the back of a trainer jet - 5 shots and traps.

The catapult shots were 4g of acceleration – 0 to 120 in 4s. It feels like nothing could possibly stand up to that much pressure, the thought in my head was “nothing could survive this” even though I was surviving it. I learned it is best enjoyed when giving a rebel yell when the jet started down the track.
At the end of the cat shot, 60’ above the water, the transition was from crushing acceleration to none. It felt like the jet was hovering off of the bow of the ship, absolutely surreal, like the plane could just fall into the water. 

I had a moment at work like that Thursday morning - only not a physical experience, a purely mental one when the frantic work hit the finish line and I had nothing to do ...

There was a lot to love about my tour aboard Big E, and a lot to grieve as we lost 5 members of the team in that 3 years - and I watched helplessly as a Sailor lost his hand in a jet intake in a moment of carelessness on deck. 

I enjoyed the intensity, the team work, and my sense of responsibility to the youngsters on deck working long days in the cold and heat, with way too little sleep. I did my best to shepherd them, I pulled or directed many of them out of dangerous spots and was honored to have the opportunity. 

Thanksgiving 2020

 I spent Thanksgivings either in Florence or Demopolis, Alabama. We lived in Florence and had grandparents there. Demopolis held hunting camp with extended family, and family tradition that ran 50 years, and a huge feast with kid tables and all kinds of family stories.  

We were so white and professional and religious and polite and, at least for the kids, oblivious.

Most of my relatives were married and older and successful in their fields of work. Their professions were thinks like airline pilot, NASA engineer, accountant, doctor, civil engineer, lawyer and businessmen. I don't know that any of the spouses worked. Virtually all of the couples had children.

These were hard working people and very kind and mannerly. They could also hunt, fish, work a farm and had travelled the world. Many were veterans. They were what Brokaw called "the greatest generation", having lived through the world wars, the 1918 flu pandemic, the depression, the Korean war, Viet Nam, the 60s and the Cold War. They grieved the Kennedys and King, and saw the attempted assassinations of Wallace, Ford and Reagan. 

I don't know if they were democrats or republicans. Much more relevant was that some were Auburn fans. We didn't love those folks any less, though, and enjoyed playing poker with them (gentlemen's poker, nickel-dime-quarter, max of 3 raises per round of betting, nothing wild), getting them some branch water for the whiskey (I never saw one drunk until later when my granddad's alcoholism was beyond hiding), letting them tell us about squirrel hunting weapons, and having them set up shooting challenges after lunch at hunting camp. 

I recently acquired a 20 gauge double barrel shotgun. My uncle Ellery, WWII pilot and NASA engineer, of the even, confident temperament and always ready with a warm greeting and grin, used to hunt with a 20 gauge double. I asked once why he didn't get a 12 gauge - bigger must be better, right? His reply was polite and firm and he noted he didn't need a bigger shotgun for squirrel hunting, the 20 was plenty. He may have pointed out how the 20 was also lighter and more pleasant to carry in the field. He probably remembered when hunting for food meant using the least expensive ammo (shells for the 20 being cheaper than for a 12). I had forgotten that exchange until recently as I described why I purchased the 20 to my youngest son. I dismissed Uncle Ellery's logic outright all those years ago, since I didn't value light weight or "big enough" - I was a teenager, I wanted "more".  I used magnum 5 or 6 shot for my 12 gauge semi auto, (although I had plenty of luck shooting squirrels with a single barrel 20 until I was deemed big and responsible enough to handle the 12 gauge at age 12).  I'm looking forward to toting the 20 gauge double next year for squirrels or turkey or some such game, to complete the circle of Uncle Ellery's wisdom. 

I liked some more than others, of course, but they were all admirable men. I never saw them say an unkind thing to another person of any race, or treat a spouse with anything but kindness and respect. They tended to their kids, they loved their sick or healthy spouses and they acted interested in all us kids. I didn't have as much luck success find friends my own age back then, and their care and interaction was a gift. Of course, I found out later their struggles were hidden to me, and some were not as kind as they seemed. Nonetheless, the strong, kind, competent man, even tempered and hard working, was the vision of masculinity I grew up in.  

I didn't know how profound and lucky that experience was. No doubt, what I believed would be "the good life" was what I saw from my parents and grandparents and that was reflected by these men and their families. 

Those days are gone. Most of them are gone. I live 2000 miles to the north. I've grieved having lost touch with them, but that's what a US Navy career will do to a person (and knowing that, I delayed joining for as long as I could).

Today I am thankful for them, for that time, and for the gifts they gave that still benefit me today.

"Never Forget"? I Remember

I remember 9/11. My family lived through the aftermath in a personal way - lots of time apart, in uncertainty.  I look at the mess the government has made of the post 9/11 efforts of our military.  Either the government sent out us to do things we shouldn't, or the government took its eye off of national security and began to look to politics, or both.
My conclusion is simple.  Government is not competent to much of anything, especially wage war.
We argue about whether the death penalty is right or wrong, and whether it was Bush or Obama or Kennedy or Johnson or Nixon or the Democrats that are to blame for the seeming disasters of our incompetent foreign interventions.  Those people are just the bit players in a political system.  We commit the lives of the military with high sounding big talk about 1% risk of this or that, and then back up all the talk - after the blood is spilled and limbs lost and brains scrambled and the civilians get whipsawed as we blast in and breeze out - with decisions based on political polls and electability and some froth about the political legacy of this or that buffoon sitting behind the desk in the oval office.

Political legacy?  Pathetic.

I don't think it is possible for our government, any government, to wage a just war beyond a war of survival.  I don't think any government is competent enough to deprive a citizen of his/her life, no matter the crime that citizen may have committed.

I would prefer that the US military withdrawal from the world stage were conducted competently, rather than accidentally, but I think if it is allowed to continue, military withdrawal will eventually be a good thing.

I think of the valor of many soldiers and sailors and airmen and marines who are not here to remember.  I think of hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis who were killed in the turmoil that we created and then recreated when political expedience dictated that we leave.  Only the soulless can ignore all those who pay for the incompetence and short sightedness and soullessness of the US government.

Let other peoples' incompetent governments screw their lives up - let's get our pathetic politics out of that business, so that at worst, we Americans and only we Americans pay the cost for the idiots we elect.

Honor to you my fallen brothers and sisters.  Honor to those who did their duty, who bore the costs, who did as they had sworn they would, who defeated the enemy in the field and cared for many non-combatants who needed your care.  Honor to those who lived the horror, saw the dying and paid in blood for the privilege.  It's not your fault that politicians are who they are.  The things you were fighting for were real, and those things were much larger and more real and more meaningful than the sots who sit in DC and choose our fates based on their insatiable need for significance.  I salute you.  

Paul Ryan’s Way Forward | National Review Online

Since 1999, when he became its second-youngest member, Ryan has been an intellectual ornament to the House of Representatives — and a headache for risk-averse Republican-party operatives. They pay lip service to electing conservatives who will make the choices necessary to stabilize the architecture of the entitlement system and unleash the economic growth that must finance the system's promises. But they want to let voters remain oblivious about the choices required by that architecture's rickety condition.

Such Republicans are complicit with Obama, who demonstrated the self-destructive nature of his now-evaporating presidency by his contemptuous, and contemptible, treatment of Ryan on April 13, 2011. After he loftily aspired to teach Washington civility, the White House invited Ryan to sit in the front row at a speech in which Obama gave an implacably hostile and mendacious depiction of Ryan's suggestions for entitlement reforms. Obama thereby repeated his tawdry performance in his 2010 State of the Union address, when, with Supreme Court justices in the front row of the House chamber, he castigated them for the Citizens United decision, which he misrepresented.

Both times, Obama's behavior bespoke the insecurity of someone who, surrounded by sycophants, shuns disputations with people who can reply. Ryan, however, has replied with a book that demonstrates Obama's wisdom in not arguing with a man who has a better mind and better manners.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/386714/paul-ryans-way-forward-george-will

Are Liberals the Real Authoritarians? - Bloomberg View

MM right on target.

http://www.bloombergview.com/
In the ultra-liberal enclave I grew up in, the liberals were at least as fiercely tribal as any small-town Republican, though to be sure, the targets were different. Many of them knew no more about the nuts and bolts of evolution and other hot-button issues than your average creationist; they believed it on authority. 

Emotional Quicksand

An actor recently died of apparent suicide.  I was reminded of when a famous race car driver died.  I read of a lady who spent three days crying in her room after that.  She had never met the driver.

On deployment to the Arabian Gulf in 2002, two of my crew mates were discussing Ozzie Osbourne. One held Oz in a very high esteem, the other - not so much.  At one point in the discussion, one cremate, about to fly into a combat zone with the other, threatened physical violence of the expressed poor opinion of a musical/life performer.  It was a joking expression but nonetheless caught my attention.

It made me wonder why we can create the pseudo relationships with people we've never met, people we will never meet, people who wouldn't know us if they saw us, people who won't answer our letters/emails/calls/instagrams if we sent them.  We can care about and think we "know" people who don't even know we are alive, and who's careers and livelihoods depend upon our favorable opinion of them.  How?  Why?  It's so weird it should be in a movie - "hey, this person has imaginary relationships with people they have never met!"  But we all seem to do this.

My best guess is that this is some version of orientation to power.  That is to say, we perceive that "stars" or celebrities have social power.  As tribal humans it was important to be aware of and orient to those tribal members who were powerful.  We needed to be able to behave around those with power in a way that was helpful to us, and did not accidentally get us into bad favor with the powerful.  Or, we needed to be able to oppose those with power, knowingly, cunningly, effectively.  And live to tell the tale.

For the actor, one could think many things about his death.  "He quit on life, he quit on his family.  His pain is over, thankfully, but I will use his choice as an example of how to not hurt others."  Or, "poor guy, don't want to believe he was in such pain and despair."  Some comments I've seen spoke of how open he was with his life's struggles, but I wonder if all those folks who read all those stories wouldn't be better off if they'd never read the carefully crafted story released by the PR agent designed to get attention to the actor when he needed to sell some product to someone.  As far as I an tell, just as politicians have to lie in order to be able to convince all of us they'll serve only us at someone else's expense, actors are constantly in need of image crafting.  They must say and do what is necessary, whatever is necessary, to get our favorable opinion, so another 1% or so of us will go to their product and pay for it.

So to me it seems like they need us, and they shape their public image to suit what they think, what they hope, we want.  And we find ways to either like, or dislike, these public folks - whom we neither know or will know, who will never either like or dislike or know us.

What a weird dance.  What I find is that the only way I can avoid the dance is to shut out the noise that all the actors and singers and politicians are always playing in order to get us to react towards them like humans naturally react.  I'm not savvy enough to participate in all of that noise and not get drawn into it.  The only way to stay clean is to stay away.  It's nuclear.

So this actor, were he alive today, would fulfill all of our imaginary notions about what his life means in the context of our own lives.  We wouldn't know what he was doing, who he was hurting, who he was loving or anything.  We would just hold this imaginary creation we have of who he is in a way that seems to serve us, a way that seems to help us.  I don't think that's bad per se, I just know it is bad for me.  It is a distraction.  It is a dilution of the energy I have for people I actually see and touch and love every day.  I'm not going to give that energy up that way.  I'm averting my eyes, I'm leaving the actor for his family to bury and grieve.  And I'm going to figure out a way not to hurt the people that I love, how to not be "that guy" as I face down life's never-ending choice to find despair or joy in the natural cycles of both we all seem to experience as we live and learn.

I Got Those Old Beat-Up Orion Blues | Military Aviation | Air & Space Magazine

This was a fun read, reminds me of my time flying the mighty Orion.  Very forgiving and versatile, the P-3 became sexier as you put it through its paces chasing subs, and with the other missions the Maritime Patrol and Reconnaissance community picked up over the years.
http://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/I-Got-Those-Old-Beat-Up-Orion-Blues-241532641.html?device=iphone

George Will: John F. Kennedy the conservative - The Washington Post

Folks will use the dead president's legacy to whatever purpose they would like to make it serve.  This is an interesting presentation of JFK as conservative, with LBJ being a much more transformative figure.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/geoege-f-will-john-f-kennedy-the-conservative/2013/11/20/92be8164-513d-11e3-a7f0-b790929232e1_story.html

He did not have history-shaping effects comparable to those of his immediate predecessor or successor. Dwight Eisenhower was one of three Americans (with George Washington and Ulysses Grant) who were world-historic figures before becoming president, and Lyndon Johnson was second only to Franklin Roosevelt as a maker of the modern welfare state and second to none in using law to ameliorate America's racial dilemma.
The New York Times' executive editor calls Kennedy "the elusive president"; The Post calls him "the most enigmatic" president. Most libidinous, certainly; most charming, perhaps. But enigmatic and elusive? Many who call him difficult to understand seem eager to not understand him. They present as puzzling or uncharacteristic aspects of his politics about which he was consistent and unambiguous. For them, his conservative dimension is an inconvenient truth. Ira Stoll, in "JFK, Conservative," tries to prove too much but assembles sufficient evidence that his book's title is not merely provocative.

Oliver Stone: JFK conspiracy deniers are in denial

I don't care how many shots were fired, or who killed JFK.  It was fifty years ago.  The kind of things JFK supposedly did (I didn't see him do those things, I wasn't born yet, but there's not too many folks denying what he did either), some girl's dad would have killed him for in a different time and place and probably would have been applauded for it.

It doesn't defy logic that the head moved back.  I read an analysis 20+ years ago that explains what happened and replicated the physics with a water bucket.  I've also read of 12 year olds who replicated the shot Oswald made, and those 12 years olds didn't have Marine training.  Being in denial isn't always bad, although it is in vogue right now to say "Anyone who does not believe what I believe is in denial and therefore very, very naughty."

I assume Stone is a progressive but don't know or care - the irony would be that if he is, he makes the libertarian case quite well; you shouldnt trust government and you should want it to be as limited and powerless as can be.  It would take a strange cognitive dissonance to want more government, and government control of health care, when you know govt is prone to corruption.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/11/20/oliver-stone-jfk-conspiracy-assassination-oswald-column/3657321/

Graveyard Sustainability?

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303342104579097100412815862
I've always wondered about the sustainability of graveyards.

No Braver Warrior

Fifty years ago today, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. electrified the nation with his "I Have A Dream" speech - and helped establish himself as one of America's founding fathers.

A half-century later, King stands equal to Jefferson, Adams, Madison, and Hamilton, the people who invented America, designed its government, and shaped its unique democratic experiment. Taylor Branch, the incomparable civil rights historian, has called him "a new founding father." An insightful essay in Time Magazine by another great historian, Jon Meacham, also awards King that stellar status.

Here is why I believe King is the most significant American since Lincoln in his impact on how we live and work together in the world's oldest democracy.

King changed America forever. It was largely his movement that finally extinguished Jim Crow in the South, ending the overt racism and segregation that had persisted for a century after the Emancipation Proclamation. In a very real way, King picked up where Lincoln had left America at the end of the Civil War. That America had yet to overcome what Condoleezza Rice calls the "original sin" of our Constitution: African-Americans were not treated as fully human.

King led that fight more skillfully and convincingly than any American in our history. He offered a hopeful, transcendent idea of how America could be truly great. Meacham observed in Time that during his memorable speech at the Aug. 28, 1963, march on Washington, "King - like Jefferson and Lincoln before him - projected an ideal vision of an exceptional nation . . . In doing so, King defined the best of the nation as surely as Jefferson did in Philadelphia in 1776 or Lincoln did at Gettysburg in 1863."

King also found a way to touch the conscience of white Americans all too complacent about the need for change during the tumultuous decades of the civil rights struggle from Birmingham to Little Rock, Selma, and beyond. It was not preordained that the most important black leader would wave a flag of nonviolent civil disobedience and redemption rather than hatred and revenge.

His message even reached places where whites knew precious few black neighbors, such as the privileged town where I grew up, Wellesley. I have no memory of King's great speech at the Lincoln Memorial, which occurred when I was 7. But I retain a clear and sharp image from five years later, when our enlightened sixth-grade teacher, Jean Barton, wheeled a television into our classroom in April 1968. She asked us to watch the funeral of a great man, Martin Luther King. In the years that followed, when I went looking for a true hero, I found one in King and his ringing message of what was clearly right and clearly wrong.

In many ways, King's most lasting legacy is the America we know today - far from perfect, still halting on the question of race, but light years from the hateful South of Bull Connor, George Wallace, and the pathetic nostalgia for the failed cause of the Confederacy. King created in its place the America that chose Barack Obama, now leading a country turning an irreversible corner to redeem the promise of our founding.

Throughout the lonely years of the civil rights struggle, King embraced the power of language in his ministry to the nation. In reworking a powerful statement by the nineteenth century Boston abolitionist, the Rev. Theodore Parker, Kingnever let us forget a central truth that Obama later evoked on the campaign trail in 2008: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

It must have been this deep reservoir of faith that brought King to his brilliant, beautiful, lyrical, rousing vision on that hot day in Washington 50 years ago.

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Martin Luther King Jr., founding father. http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2013/08/28/martin-luther-king-modern-founding-father/P2zwClCthoF3z7bW5jWOiL/story.html

Fabulous Holiday Wishes

I hope yours is fantastic and memorable!

RGIII - WOW

"I'm thankful for a lot of things in life, and one of those things is your support. Thank You."
http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/335872

Read the article if, like me, you totally missed this series of events.


I feel lucky. I loved Hank Aaron, and Wilbur Jackson, and Sylvester Croom, and pretended to be Paul Warfield. I never had a thought about that one way or the other - I could identify in that child like way with great athletes regardless of their skin color. I was gifted to be in a household where that was not an issue in any way. I know others have paid a different price for either their color or their education about
what color means, and I know there's more healing to come. I hope it comes quickly.

To my idealistic parents, thank you.

Observations Around Tragedy

My friend and instructor used to tell us a tale, or perhaps parable, about a day when a Chinese family celebrated the birth of a grandson. A religious leader (I don't remember the actual title) was invited for a blessing. The blessing was "first may you die Grandfather, then you (to the now father), and then you (to the new grandson)."

Everyone was confused at first but then all agreed it was a powerful blessing.  When that sequence is inverted, we experience a near universal horror.

I attended "The Hobbit" this week. Four themes emerged for me. Our strength to excess is our weakness. Humility is a gift to oneself. There are powerful forces at work in the world and we do not control them. We all dream/wish/hope/desire to be able to call on the forces of goodness so as to make ourselves and others safe from the powerful negative forces. 

In a fantasy world, certain folks can summon goodness to fight evil.  In our world, that is often not an option.

We could pretend to have an answer for unconscionable killers, auto wrecks, plane crashes, tsunamis, home fires, abusive parents, etc (AKA orcs and goblins). We do not have an answer. Horrible things happen. We love anyway, or are as good as dead.

I am not suggesting that there is nothing to be done to prevent tragedy. I will say plainly: hijacking a moment of tragedy to suggest that empowering pompous assholes called politicians to deprive the citizenry of rights is offensive to me. It is a repulsive choice, full of pretense about what governments can or cannot do, and about how your grief means more than my rights. Government is not Gandalph. Government is Saruman, laden with the pretense of wisdom, overmuch power, hubris to spare and only one step from becoming the next cause of horrible tragedy.  In the vast tally of tragedy, government owns the balance by a wide margin over natural disaster and individual evil.

I'm not just talking Hitler, Stalin, and Hirohito.  How about Lincoln, who sent 500,000 to their deaths?  How about the government that authorized citizens to own, buy and sell human beings for the better part of 100 years, making Lincoln's choice look justified? 

I am also struck by how moments of surprising tragedy can arouse us while we remain immune to an equal but expected tragedy. How many children will die of parent abuse this year? Many more than 20. How many will die auto wrecks? Arson events? Plain old house fires? Bike accidents? Drowning? Poison?

Do we suggest that pools should be outlawed? Cars? Houses?

What accounts for the discrepancy in perception? How can we be deluded that changing a law will change human behavior when we all KNOW, know for certain, that is untrue? To wit, the drug war, which is putting millions in jail but cannot be said to have stopped one person from using "unlawful" drugs. Drug use is even higher among the youth of Iran, which has an even more draconian anti-drug government than ours. 

And if guns could be "controlled", would it be any better if we saw bombs used vice guns, as we do in countries where they have "controlled" guns? 
We live in a world in which at all times unspeakable pain is experienced by parents and children. There is no Gandalph to whom we may appeal to hold these goblins back. What then is within our circle of control?

These are the questions I find to be of  value:
How will we act to defend ourselves and our loved ones? Will we be prepared to act in the event that our actions might save another?
How will we live with joy and passion in a world that may take away all that is dear to us in an instant?
How will I do what I do with more skill, more care, more result and less effort so that I can be certain I am giving my best love to my friends and family and children?

No Dueling, Less Civilized?

Interesting story, well told.

Would society be more polite if this custom were carried on today?  I believe that might be the case, even if the villain were not always the one to take the bullet.
http://www.aaronburrassociation.org/Smithsonian.htm

"Hang Tough" - WTF?

The basic message of this article is this:
"
“Hang tough” was a regular refrain of Winters' during the war. He exhorted his men to do the best they could given their circumstances (often horrific). We as a country would do well to remember that advice too."
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/06/12/normandys_lessons_for_obama_--_and_all_of_us.html

What I am struck by is the juxtaposition of this message with the reason we need to give each other this messag right now - that is to say, because we seem to unwilling to let people hang tough in their individual lives, we have established a circumstance in which the entire western world is on the brink of permanent financial implosion.

We can't hang tough, we know that.  We can't bear the brutal suffering of having folks say mean things to us, we can't be expected to provide for ourselves or our families.  We can't be expected to save our own retirements or work out our own arrangements for health care.  We are not smart enough to choose whether we should take the drugs deemed illegal, nor whether we can satisfy our sexual needs with a financial transaction.  That stuff is hard.  We threw in the towel on hanging tough a long time ago.  We made the choice - we need tough talking politicians waging wars on poverty and drugs and the health care emergency.  We need political geniuses, compassionate and wise, to establish the rules for us and throw us in jail if we violate those rules. 

We cannot be expected to be responsible for ourselves! 

Hang tough?  That message is about forty years too late.  Singing that song now is a bit late.  We should've considered trying that before we gave up our authority to an all knowing, all loving, and much too powerful government.

Leads to Everything

In the world today in which correlation and causation are intermixed without any awareness, I can't help but remember George Carlin's joke about marijuana being a "gateway drug":

"Mother's milk leads to everything." 

No one I've ever seen could mix humor with deadly seriousness better than Carlin.

Never Fails to Interest

Never fails to interest those of us on the outside when we see folks doing monumentally stupid things and getting the hammer for it.  This is the "Bathsheba Syndrome" - leaders gain so much confidence in their ability to control events that they think they can do whatever they want.  It's happened to a lot of talented folks.  The first clue should be - "how come I have to lie to the most important people in my life to feel the way I want to feel?"  If you can't catch yourself by asking that question you won't be able to control what happens after that, either. 

Rob Roy's memorable quote in the movie by that name was "honor is a man's gift to himself.  Kings cannot give it and king's cannot take it away."  To guard your own honor, on should follow that thought with "Humility is a man's gift to himself.  It gives us a chance to not throw away what is invaluable for those bright shiny things that we already know won't make us happy." 

I'm no genius. I have made that very clear over the years, usually by accident. And I had no idea that Bobby Petrino may have been sleeping with a young Arkansas fundraiser named Jessica Dorrell. Nor do I really care.
But if we were playing a game, and you asked me to guess which major-college coach hired his mistress to work with his football program, got in a motorcycle accident with her on board, then lied to his bosses about the relationship, I could have guessed "Bobby Petrino" faster than it takes him to print out his resume, and I probably could have gone for the bonus points and guessed the woman was a blonde.


Read more: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2012/writers/michael_rosenberg/04/10/guillen.petrino/index.html#ixzz1rkkAq6ql

What Would Happen?

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/295087

What would happen if this was the national dialogue?  What could happen if it was clear to all that it is wretchedly dangerous to be a young black man around other young men, and has been for some time ... could it be changed? 

Too some degree poverty accounts for the statistics, thus we speculate about why there is poverty - but fatherless children is a formula for poverty, so we can get into "poverty-fatherlessness-education-fatherlessness-violent culture" reinforcing loops very quickly.  What breaks a cycle like that? 

Is there some level of basic human competence below which no one can help a person to have a reasonably good life?  How does anyone develop that basic level of human life competence?

What could be done to help those caught in a cycle of incompetence to break loose?  We know there are good people caught in horrible situations.  It may not be possible to save everyone, could an option be finding ways to save a few?

There will be no answers soon, but I wonder whether the circumstance wouldn't shift if articles like the one above were part of the daily spew. 

Just Wait Here, He'll Be Back

Of course, the administration’s pandering argument would be more convincing if Obama hadn’t engaged in the same tactic as a candidate in 2008, criticizing George W. Bush for the fact that gas prices had more than doubled during his eight years in office.

Meanwhile, the inconvenient truth that oil is a global commodity whose price is not entirely dictated by U.S. energy policy is one you will rarely hear in campaign ads.

http://www.nationaljournal.com/2012-presidential-campaign/gas-prices-and-snake-oil-20120318

There's an old joke about a football player facing a team with a running back nicknamed "rabbit."  I was always told as a youngster that if you could get a good rabbit dog in hot chase of a rabbit, you just had to stand there and wait, because the rabbit would always run in a circle.  The football joke was told in the context of a heroic effort make which resulted in a missed tackle on "The Rabbit", and the punchline was "I'll just lie here and wait, he'll be back directly."

It's kind of like that with politicians.  If you wait long enough, they'll double back on their trail, as noted above.  There's no real point in noticing since voters clearly do not vote based on fact, but rather on who they consider to be the lesser of the two evils.