As the World Turns: A fish story*

By Ed Rogers

A couple of weeks ago, our colleague Paul Clark (aka motomynd) brought to my attention a news story out of British Columbia about a fisherman being sentenced to a lifetime fishing ban and prohibited from ever being aboard a fishing vessel again (story by David Strege, MSN). Paul asked whether Vancouver Harbour isn’t on the fringe of my old Northwest haunts.
    Indeed it is. The city of Vancouver is right across the border from Washington. My friend Edda’s brother and sister lived there. Fishing and crabbing are highly controlled in both Canada and Washington. A lot of people up there live off the water, and generations of people know no other way of life. New laws come along telling them not to do things that their family has always done, and that leads to problems like the guy in the news story had.

As the World Turns: Whatever Happened to That Fairchild C-123 of the CIA?

By Ed Rogers

The country of Nicaragua has seen its share of war, and the CIA has been in the middle of it all. In my book Boystown: The Cocaine Highway, I tell of my characters flying guns into the mountains of Honduras and drugs back to the United States. That story took place in the mid-sixties and all with the knowledge of the CIA.

As the World Turns: Just Another Saturday Night South of the Border

By Ed Rogers

Back in 1959, when I was sixteen and newly released from the hospital after being shot through the mid-section with a forty-five, I was with four friends and we were on our way back from Boystown, which is outside of Matamoras, Mexico. About three blocks from the international bridge we had a flat and there was no air in the spare. It was decided that, because of my condition, I would stay with the car along with one other of our friends. The other two headed off with the spare toward the bridge and the 24-hour gas station there that, at one in the morning, was all that was open.

As the World Turns: Golden Years

By Ed Rogers

“Golden Years” is what they call this time in my life. I sure don’t understand where, or who came up with that name. I know David Bowie sang a song about it^*. I liked the song but never really understood how it related to me.
    I’m also not sure if your Golden Years start when you go on Medicare at 65 or when you retire at 67. At any rate, mine started with colon cancer at 64. I turned 65 the following January the 3rd and Medicare paid for my last chemo. We were lucky; my wife, Janie, who worked for cancer doctors, had very good insurance. So, along with my life insurance, I had a cancer policy that covered everything.

As the World Turns: Humana sucks

By Ed Rogers

I have gotten to the point of accepting things as they are – not that I feel good about it – but there is little I can do to change them. People have become so locked down in their own tribe that they have stopped noticing what is going on around them. For some reason, we are letting the stock market and unemployment reports trick us into believing all is well. Prices are going up while wages stay the same, so, while more people are working, they are working for less. I don’t own stock, but I know that the money stock owners have has to come from somewhere...that would be your pocket. The only reason I’m writing this is that the last straw landed on this camel’s back.

As the World Turns: For plenty to be thankful for in 2020

Collard greens and cornbread New Year

By Ed Rogers

I’ve got the blackeyed peas cooking this morning and later the collard greens and cornbread. I don’t know how many people do that each New Year’s Day, but it was a tradition in the South for my family and others, and it’s about the only tradition I carry on. In the hard times that was the only meal most people had down here, and it is said that if you honor the hard times on the first day of the year you’ll have plenty to be thankful for the rest of the year.

Copyright © 2020 by Ed Rogers

As the World Turns: Control the throne

A new strategy for Democratic government

By Ed Rogers

From my most recent novel, Unwanted President:

Adam Weishaupt realized that the real power was with those who controlled the seat of power, not with the one who happened to be sitting on the throne. [p. 71]
    [President] Benton forgot the rule of rules: the power is always in the dark behind the throne. [p. 277]

As the World Turns: It turns for my friend Harvey

By Ed Rogers

In my December 29, 2015 account of my friend Harvey’s Costa Rica tale, “Shots in the night,” I reported Harvey’s fleeing Costa Rica after living there for 11 years, getting married (to Ileana), buying a house and a bar and land on the coast, and even becoming a citizen of Costa Rica, which meant he could then own guns.

As the World Turns: It’s the end, my friend

By Ed Rogers

It was the summer of 2021 when the ice cap covering Greenland broke apart and slid into the ocean. The tidal wave was thirty feet high. It wiped out everything on the East Coast of North America, from Canada to South America. Millions died along the US coastline, and Florida was gone. Along the gulf, there were mass evacuations.

As the World Turns: Shit storm

By Ed Rogers

I keep waiting for the shit storm to settle down that was released the day Trump won the election. But it seems to get wilder each day – his team is even inventing words to explain the stink coming from the White House. How did Papa Bush— Or was it Reagan who called it a shining city upon a hill? We once knew it as the White House, but I believe it needs a new name now.
    I have been wondering about the people who think the new President is a genius. It’s hard to believe, but there are a lot of them – many more than I would have thought possible. What is bothering me is I’m trying to ascertain if they are crazy or could it be me? Crazy people don’t think they are crazy, so I guess it could be me. After all, he was elected President of the United States. In a way it is easier to believe I am insane and everything is going along just fine.
    If I lived on the West Coast, I could roll a fat one, turn on, and tune out – it worked for me during Nixon’s time in the White House. But now I live in the forward-thinking State of Mississippi. “Go Rebs!” “Hotty Totty!” (For those not in the know, those are cries of football fans at Old Miss.)

As the World Turns: A stranger in my own land, Part 1

What becoming an expat can be like

By Wally Tucker

[Editor’s Note: Wally’s account accompanies Ed Rogers’s piece yesterday in his As the World Turns column, “Going native.”]

I repatriated back to the USA in September 2000, leaving our apartment exactly six years to the day after my wife and our two young sons had arrived in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. Six years and weeks earlier, we had packed 27 boxes and eight rolling duffels with everything we thought we needed and wanted for our new adventure abroad. Naively, we left behind a fully furnished home for rent. Don’t ever do that!

As the World Turns: Going native

By Ed Rogers

I can’t remember the first time I heard the term “going native.” I’m willing to bet it was in a movie, but I also heard it when I was in the Army. Soldiers who had spent too much time in-country found upon returning that they had a hard time being around their fellow soldiers. It was as though their common link had broken. I had a friend in the State of Washington who had been a Green Beret and done three tours in Nam. He once told me, “I don’t belong here.” I laughed and said something stupid like, “Hell man, this is your home.”

As the World Turns: My four years in Costa Rica (2012-2016)

And what I learned from them

By Ed Rogers

Let me start off by saying how much I love Costa Rica. The country and the people are like a part of me. But not everything is rosy. True, there are many up-sides to living there, but there is also a price to be paid. I will cover two of the down-sides in hopes it will help others not make the same mistakes I made.
    But first let me recap our adventure:

As the World Turns: A fool and his wall

By Ed Rogers

A wall is built to keep something or someone out. It is supposed to make the builder of the wall feel safe. In most cases, it does just that – until the wall is breached for the first time. The fear of being unprotected is overwhelming at that point. It is more intense even than before the wall was built, because there is no backup plan. Once your wall is breached, your faith in it will never be the same. Your only choice or hope is to find a bigger and better wall – right?

We are bringing back named recurring columns

Starting in August

By Moristotle

[Note: I’ve decided to refer to myself as “Moristotle.” That is, after all, who I am.]

We have decided to return to naming recurring columns in the sidebar^*. The reason is simple: a number of members of the staff confessed that they needed recurring columns to motivate them to write more things for the blog. And they cited a need for encouragement from me (some called it nagging) to get with it and submit something!

First Saturday as the World Turns

Education and hunger

By Ed Rogers

I believe, as we look ahead and see the road much shorter than the one behind us, we have moments where we reflect on where things went wrong. Everybody thinks that the movement in the sixties was about the Vietnam War, but that was only a part of it. There was a war on the poor even back then and many a debate centered around what we could do about the poor. While Nixon was bombing the hell out of Vietnam with operation Rolling Thunder, his "Re-elect the President" campaign was blaming those on welfare for pulling the economy down.

First Saturday as the World Turns

Parkinson’s disease

By Ed Rogers

As is the case in most things, we never really pay serious attention to diseases until we are confronted with them personally. That is how it was with my wife and me. Things were going along just fine. Then her right hand began to shake.
    Parkinson’s disease is not uncommon: There are over one million Americans who live with Parkinson’s disease. This surpasses the number of people diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy, and Lou Gehrig’s disease combined.

First Saturday as the World Turns

A little of the shine has worn off Pura Vida

By Ed Rogers

I have lived in Costa Rica for almost two years now. While I still love living here, I have begun to see cracks in my idea of the Costa Rican government.

First Saturday as the World Turns

Why have homes lost value?

By Ed Rogers

I had a thought the other day. It came to mind that house prices going up and down made no sense. If it cost you $100,000 to build a house today, and five years from now it cost $150,000 to build the same house; why would your house only be worth $75,000.
    The first answer I could come up with, in my mind, was it had to be the banks. I’ve always believed in the saying, “Follow the money.” In the past, as it is now, market value has little to do with what your house is worth. Before all the crooked dealing throughout the nineties, the cost of labor and material set the bottom line for value. These costs the bank covered by a building loan, which the contractor paid off from selling the house.

First Saturday as the World Turns

It’s not about the poor, stupid—it’s about the rich!

By Ed Rogers

While debating how the Congress and your local elected representative act—or, more often, don’t act—toward the poor, I have seen idea, after opinion, after facts even when they are not facts, and a whole gambit of crap that has nothing to do with being poor.
    I was raised poor and came from what folks called land-poor people. That is to say, before WWII, my family were farmers. My father and most of the young men who grew up helping farm the land joined the WPA as soon as they could. No one had money to buy your crops and it was cheaper not to grow more than you could use. Going to work for the WPA meant there would be one fewer mouth to feed.