Wednesday, January 11, 1984

Love is a wreck, a mass of nerves when he is smoking, but ten times worse now. He knows he isn't hungry, but he thinks he is anyway. He's talking about joining a health spa. I wish he would, so he could take his frustrations out on somebody else.

According to statistics, smokers are twice as likely to have heart attacks as non-smokers, and twenty times as likely to have lung cancer. Seventy percent of the male population smoked twenty years ago but thirty-five percent smoke today. Thirty-five percent of women smoked twenty years ago, and fifty percent smoked ten years ago, but today the percentage is again thirty-five percent. The filtered cigarettes have slightly increased the chances of a heart attack, but have reduced the lung cancer statistics from twenty times as likely, to sixteen times as likely. Within a year ex-smokers have a normal incidence of heart attack, but it takes ten to fifteen years for an ex-smoker to have a normal incidence of lung cancer. Nevertheless, please leave all my vices intact, and keep reformed smokers, reformed drinkers and born-again Christians away from me.

El Salvador seems to want the United States to give it guns, so that the El Salvadoran government can hold it's people at gunpoint until an economic recovery is under way, which the El Salvadoran government also wants the United States to finance. What's wrong with finishing the economic recovery in this country before we take on an additional task, or is all the attention focused on El Salvador intentionally to detract attention from our own inability to recover economically. El Salvador seems to be in the midst of a Civil War, the same as we once were in this country. We fought bloody battles and lost many lives. Why is it that El Salvador, contrary to what the news media tells me, doesn't seem to be on my back door step? It seems farther away than Pluto.  The United States has had plenty of internal and external strife in it's growing up, with the Indians, the Spanish, the English, the blacks and the whites. We certainly have had unhumanitarian approaches in our own country. We deliberately broke every treaty with the Indians that we ever made, except one. If I were an Indian in the USA, I would rather deal with the Russians, and would consider them at worst, no worse than we are, and at best, honorable and trustworthy.

I always liked Nikita Khrushchev. You knew by his actions what he was feeling: it didn't matter that he spoke a different language. He reminded me of 'Grandpa', who lives in the house behind me. When he's frustrated, he yells; when he's angry, he cusses;' when he's happy, he's all smiles. I hope 'Grandpa" doesn't mind being compared to Khrushchev, because Khrushchev was a very great man, and helped to shape his country, the same as our Presidents have helped to shape our own country.