All The Time In The World

It appears that today is Bastille Day. I know because the French news person skipped complaining about America’s problems to exclusively show footage of the parade progressing down the Champs Elysees. Everyone seemed pretty cheery. Which should engender some small hope–give it a couple of hundred years and everything takes on a hazy golden glow, even things that at the time (coughreinofterrorcough) would have been pretty stressful. I say that having made the mistake of reading this right before I went to sleep:

One of the key issues raised by the officers interviewed for the report was a concern that Navy leaders spend more time focusing on diversity training than on developing warfighting capacity and key operational skills.

‘Sometimes I think we care more about whether we have enough diversity officers than if we’ll survive a fight with the Chinese navy,’ lamented one lieutenant currently on active duty.

‘It’s criminal. They think my only value is as a black woman. But you cut our ship open with a missile and we’ll all bleed the same color,’ she added.

One recent destroyer captain said: ‘where someone puts their time shows what their priorities are. And we’ve got so many messages about X, Y, Z appreciation month, or sexual assault prevention, or you name it. We don’t even have close to that same level of emphasis on actual warfighting.’

‘While programs to encourage diversity, human sex trafficking prevention, suicide prevention, sexual assault prevention, and others are appropriate, they come with a cost,’ the report’s authors wrote.

‘The non-combat curricula consume Navy resources, clog inboxes, create administrative quagmires, and monopolize precious training time. By weighing down sailors with non-combat related training and administrative burdens, both Congress and Navy leaders risk sending them into battle less prepared and less focused than their opponents,’ the report added.

I’ve become so dependent on emojis that I can’t any longer think of words to express what I am feeling when I press that one with the wide-open anxious eyes that is my particular favorite. I didn’t know this was a thing but I wasted ten minutes of my life on #RachTalk wherein she discussed at length her most used emojis. She likes the one with the teeth, and one that is chiefly composed of hearts, and the crying/laughing one, upon which I believe we are all excessively dependent. And why wouldn’t we be, when it’s so hard to even find words to describe how one feels so much of the time. Especially after watching this, and then also reading the comments.

So anyway, my oldest child is nineteen now, and the thing she wanted for her birthday was a stack of books, which I would never have expected as she was so sure, at a much younger age, that reading was something she would not be interested in ever doing. Also some good headphones and a travel mug. She, I have come to discover, is the AntiRachelHollis, even more than me, who am constantly lured into watching mindless stuff on youtube and trying to express myself using emojis. What amazes me the most about my child is her executive function and the way she has, for many years, arranged her day.

She wakes up pretty early, and instead of dancing around like a maniac and trying to learn another language (I don’t do that, #Rach does), she reads a novel, first thing, and then after that reads the Bible and eats a sensible breakfast. This seemed to me to be So Decadent, and wicked, when she told me, but as I have considered my own frantic life, I think it must be the sanest thing ever. Imagine thinking that one had that sort of time.

We all do have time, as #Rach preaches all the time. What are you going to do with it? Stuff in some more diversity training? Scroll through youtube and Twitter? Panic? Patch up your sinking ship? Throw away all your relationships? Decide to be some other gender? Or maybe let God be God for a few minutes. Haven’t decided which one I’m going with this morning, it’s still too early to tell. Happy Guillotining Everything Day!

Photo by Courtney Cook on Unsplash