Blond is the new blue.

or,

"He disagreed with something that ate him."

Can anybody guess where this is going yet? It's just a bit of social commentary for today: slightly over fifty years ago, Ian Flemming had his secret agent James Bond posit that Florida was full of older women with blue hair. That's the way it was in the 50s and 60s (and maybe the 40s and 30s, too: I don't know back that far). The point was that there was some kind of artificiality about the Floridian lifestyle, the blue hair being the symbol of it all. Flemming had a way of working that kind of social commentary into his work: in the same work, Live and let die, M states that "the negro races are just beginning to throw up geniuses in all the professions — scientists, doctors, writers ... They've got plenty of brains and ability and guts." Quite a daring statement in 1954.

So where did the blue-haired ladies go? They became blonds! My grandmother did the blue-hair thing back in the 50s and 60s (and 70s). My mother was a blond. In fact, I've started noticing that many women in their, shall we say, gray-hair years are not, gray, not blue, but blond (or brunette or, well you get the point).

This is empowerment. We don't see age as a type of branding: it's the true empowerment of "you're only as old as you feel." A woman's "life" does not end just because her hair turns gray, just because she reaches a certain age. That works for men, too. (Of course, its sad that a person would be judged by the color of their hair to begin with, but that's an entire other train of thought.)

So aging has a whole other dimension now. We age "young" and we look "young" as we age. We carry that with us now into a different type of aging. The older adult of the first decades of the 21st Century will be a completely character from the older adult of the mid-20th Century. Living longer, healthier lives, we will look the part. HOw about that, Ian Flemming?

So angry my Hair Hurts!

That's how I get sometimes. Tonight it was watching We were soldiers once. That's the movie based on the book We were soldiers once, and young, about November of 1965 and the battle of Ie Drang in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam. It's not that that battle upsets me, but the entire idea of 58,000, mostly young, U.S. service men and women, and the Lord only knows how many Vietnamese, both north and south, killed is horrifying. And why was it? Because Lyndon Johnson was afraid of being labeled the President who lost Vietnam to the Communists? I believe that the late 1960s was the time of the height of U.S. power and prestige, that it all started to drift away along with the end of the Johnson administration, along with the Great Society, and that it's never come back since then. Nixon was too busy establishing the new conservative majority, based on his southern strategy of division and racism; Ford was too busy putting Nixon behind him; Carter was too caught-up in his own national malaise; Reagan was too busy solidifying the Nixon strategy of division and wedge-issues; and so it's gone. For U.S. global power, for the U.S. military, for international prestige it was never what it was in the early second half of the 1960s. I'm not saying this is a good or a bad thing, although global strength at the cost of 58,000 lives in a senseless war is not something for which I would argue in favor.

Which brings us to another point. We are faced today with one legacy of Vietnam: survival rates for battle-field casualties are higher. Body armor now protects a soldiers body, and evacuation to first-class medical treatment quickly happens.

This is at the expense of crippling injuries, injuries that the Department of Veterans Affairs, ex- the "VA," seems ill-equipped to handle and that will be a legacy of this war for years, for decades to come. TBI, traumatic brain injury, seems to be at the top of the list of unintended consequences. Way too much head rattling around, too little post-rattling care, what with roadside bombs and other such hazards. How do we plan on caring for these scarred soldiers? It does not seem like there is a plan yet. Of all the lessons learned on the battlefields of Southeast Asia, we still don't do well on the home front.

Odd how Vietnam, for so many reasons, still casts it's long shadow.

Healthcare not Welfare!

Catchy slogan, huh? That's because I stole it, sort of, from a local political campaign, "Healthcare not Warfare." A good lefty sentiment, but not on point for me, at the moment (anyway, it's a primary, and I'm not registered in either of the tweedle-dee/tweedle-dum parties). No, I'm still thinking about why it's so easy to cut benefits programs. Right, it's because there's always a (more expensive) entitlement program to catch people who can't get the benefit: like EISEP and Medicaid.

So the point is, let's get healthcare on track now, and not let the welfare system catch the people who fall through the cracks of our less-than-optimum healthcare system.

Doesn't it make more sense to manage ahead of time and avoid the crisis response system when healthcare as usual fails to provide? That's why we need healthcare, not welfare.