Who Moved the Cheese?

Yesterday, the people of the Crimean Peninsula of Ukraine voted overwhelmingly to unite themselves with Russia, to which I say, “Who moved the cheese?”

If the good people of Crimea would rather go back to their historical ties with Mother Russia, then that is certainly their business, and I wish them luck. But Doug, you might be thinking…there were Russian troops at every polling station and no international observers were allowed in to monitor the vote! Yeah, I know and that really stinks. Every time we have an election, I feel the same way about Chicago. If we just had a few international observers in there in 1960, Tricky Dick would have won. But Doug, but Doug, this is a horrible setback for America and NATO’s prestige and could signal a new and dangerous revival of Russian hegemony over Europe. In that case, sounds like Europe has a problem. Perhaps the European Union should mass a few of their crack divisions on the banks of the Bug River as a deterrent to Russian aggression. No, wait…the European Union doesn’t have any divisions. Well, looks like that turned out to be a bad decision. What about NATO, you might ask? Yeah, well as it turns out NATO is really just the United States army, a handful of beret-wearing French units, and a few serviceable, sharply dressed British commandos, and none of them are in the mood to fight. But Doug, this is terrible! It’s Hitler’s Austrian Anschluss all over again!

Ok, what would you have the United States do? Would you like President Obama to draw another red line?  Maybe he can fly over to Kiev and make a speech, “Mr. Putin, tear down the metaphysical wall of your ambitions!” Perhaps you would have us send John Kerry to Moscow to once again remind Vladimir just how 20^th century his behavior is. Doesn’t he know that we have moved on from brutally pursuing our own narrow national self interests? The fact that Putin prefers the old ways of brute force should be embarrassing for him and his country. If a heart to heart with Sec. Kerry doesn’t do the trick, what then? Would you have us go to war?

Our job in Crimea is to stay out of what is clearly none of our business. If Russia wants to begin a quest for European domination and destroy itself in the process, who are we to muck up the works? Besides, we’re kinda busy right now destroying our healthcare system, spying on private citizens, and dealing with a 17 Trillion dollar debt, not to mention Detroit. Maybe another time.

Taking Care of Dad

It’s Sunday morning and My Dad’s live-in caregiver has the day off. I will be leaving soon to spend part of the morning with him. Pam is busy making homemade cinnamon buns, scrambled eggs and bacon for me to take to him in hopes that I can get him to eat a decent breakfast. His appetite hasn’t been great recently. Actually nothing about his condition has been great lately. A recent fall has been a setback. Each week brings some new reversal of fortune, but that’s how life works when you’re 89 I suppose.

I will leave him around 10 or so once he’s settled down in his trusty recliner. Then for lunch Pam and I will return with Paula and Ron for a St. Patrick’s Day lunch of Irish Soda bread, potato soup, corn beef and cabbage. Since Dad eats anything put in front of him, he will make an attempt, but probably finish only half of it. He will enjoy having us at the table, listening to the conversation, but adding little to it. His voice has gotten weaker lately. Conjuring up the words has become a labor. Everything is a labor.

After lunch, we will get him resettled into his chair and spend some time trying to get the DVD player to work. He likes to watch old episodes of the Beverly Hillbillies, Gomer Pyle, The Waltons and Andy Griffith, great taste, my Dad. At some point he will doze off. We will leave around 3 or so, then Christina will walk over to check on him, and a couple of hours later Bill will arrive to see to it that the DVD player either gets fixed or replaced. Bill will bring Dad’s supper, and stay with him until he’s down for the night.

This is how we care for Dad. It has been 21 months since Mom passed away. Dad has required increasingly specialized and more intensive care. My incredible family has somehow figured out a way to provide it. Whether it’s his sisters, Nancy and Emma spending a Saturday afternoon talking about the old days, or Donnie calling him from Maryland every single day, it has been all hands on deck. Orchestrating it all has been my sister Linda, who with the tender mercies of a saint has organized it all.

We have not always agreed on how best to care for Dad, largely because we’ve never done anything like this before. None of us except Linda has any expertise. But we all agree that our Dad deserves our best efforts. When God finally decides to allow him to be reunited with Mom, we don’t want to have to deal with regrets.

So, Pam is downstairs whipping up cinnamon buns and trying to figure out how to transport scrambled eggs properly in a container that I can pop into the microwave to rejuvenate them when I get there. No way in the world she would let me make bacon and eggs by myself on Dad’s stove. Bad appetite or not, he doesn’t deserve my cooking.

The Power of Freedom

Whenever my politically active friends discover that I am a Libertarian, they are always disappointed. Then they tend to ask, “Why?” The long answer I give them has to do with philosophy; the short answer has to do with expedience. “I have no choice!”

Republican friends usually accuse me of throwing away my vote, or worse, casting a de facto Democrat vote. Christians don’t understand how I can be a Libertarian and a Christian at the same time since, “don’t Libertarians want to legalize drugs??” Democrats think that being a Libertarian is just cover for anti-government zealotry, one step away from anarchy. So, it’s sort of a mess.

As a Libertarian I can freely admit to a variety of contradictions and conflicts in my views. A belief in individual freedom will do that to you. In this regard I am on the far end of the universe from my Democratic friends who simply cannot admit to any limits to what benevolent government can accomplish. When you’re a hammer, everything you see looks like a nail. Underperforming schools? Raise taxes, increase teacher pay and reduce class size. Unemployment too high? Raise taxes, and extend unemployment insurance for life. Being a progressive Democrat is the easiest thing in the world. Just throw money at every social problem that exists and bask in the glow of your moral superiority. If anyone questions the effectiveness of your policy proscriptions accuse them of wanting to starve children and throw grandma into the street.

My Republican friends, since the days of Dwight Eisenhower, have served as the tax collector for the welfare state built by FDR. Even Ronald Reagan who showed such promise, failed to reduce the size of Leviathan. In fact, he barely slowed its growth. Republicans talk a good game about desiring smaller government, a government which does fewer things more efficiently. But in practice they simply rearrange the deck chairs on the Titantic. They are perfectly fine with a robust, powerful government when it comes to stuff they like, the military comes to mind.

But Libertarians aren’t without faults. Ours pop up when theory collides with the depravity of human nature. For example, I can believe without reservation that the government’s war on drugs has been a colossal failure which has resulted in the waste of billions of dollars, the criminalization of millions of our citizens, and the creation of a prison-industrial complex that exists nowhere else on this planet. And yet, I can also see what drug addiction has done to millions of my fellow citizens. Here’s the thing…when I look at the 4000 years of recorded history, I find nothing more conducive to human flourishing than the idea of individual freedom and liberty. Allowing men and women the freedom to pursue their own interest and dreams and allowing them to keep the fruits of their own enterprise has ushered in more invention, discovery and happiness than all other theories of government ever conceived. It is the one unique aspect of the American experiment, a country that has garnered more greatness, wealth and power in a shorter amount of time than any nation in the history of the Earth. So, if I err, I prefer to err on the side of liberty. The down side of all of this freedom is that we humans, in our freedom to choose our own way, often choose poorly. The results can be horrifying. Greed, exploitation, envy, strife, racism are largely the fruits of human freedom. So, conflicts and contradictions abound in a political philosophy which proposes to tell the government to butt out of all but its most central, constitutional responsibilities.

Still, I would rather take my chances with flawed human beings living in freedom, than a world ruled by government elites in far off capitals telling me how to live my life. Perhaps if Democrats showed more humility and restraint and Republicans demonstrated more resolve and commitment to their alleged beliefs, I could be persuaded to support them.

How To Succeed in Business

A couple of days ago, I quoted one of my favorite economists in a Facebook status thusly:

“Avoiding long-term poverty is not rocket science. First, graduate from
high school. Second, get married before you have children, and stay
married. Third, work at any kind of job, even one that starts out paying
the minimum wage. And, finally, avoid engaging in criminal behavior.”

My very bright but contrarian son responded with this:

“I thought the reason we graduated from high school, and then college was so we wouldn’t have to work a minimum wage job.”

A few comments are in order.

When the great Walter E. Williams made these comments he was responding to how confounding long-term poverty has been to big government liberal proscriptions. When confronted with the largely ineffective “war on poverty” track record, liberals always retreat to the explanation of how complicated the problem is and therefore extraordinarily difficult to fix. Mr. Williams simply looks at the poverty statistics and identifies the most common traits of poor people and works the problems backward to great effect. Take me for example.

Thirty-one years ago I took a job with Life of Virginia as an insurance salesman. They agreed to pay me a salary of $350 a week. Every three months I had to produce an increasing percentage of this amount or I would be unceremoniously canned. In exchange for this $350, I was expected to labor a minimum of 60 hours a week. Back in those days, the only way to get appointments was to endure marathon cold calling phone sessions. Because this was 1981, no one had answering machines, so you could only reach people at night. The numbers were always the same…100 dials, get 35 people on the phone, set one appointment. Needless to say, this was brutal, gut-wrenching work. You try getting hung up on and cursed out for three hours a night!

Now, if I divide my salary by the number of hours I worked every week, I come up with an hourly wage of $5.83. Allowing for inflation, it was a bit higher than minimum wage, but not by much. Why would a recently college educated young man agree to such an arrangement? Well, I had just gotten laid off by a company that went bankrupt because of malfeasance by the owners, a company that owed me over $5000 at the time. The fact was that I was desperate for a job. It never occurred to me to lie around my apartment collecting unemployment for 99 weeks. The degrading experience of applying for it had so traumatized me that after I received my first and only unemployment check, I swore that I would dig ditches before I ever cashed another one. But that’s just me.

The moral of this story is that, the worst job I ever had at Life of Virginia morphed into a career in the investment business that has propelled me into becoming a business-owning member of the evil 1%. (actually, more like evil 2%, but who’s counting?) This happy story, along with the fact that I got married and stayed married, had my kids after the ceremony instead of before, and have largely avoided criminal activity has helped me to be able to pay cash for my contrarian son’s college education, proving Mr. Williams right.

One more thing, Mr. Williams’ advice is how to avoid long term poverty, not necessarily how to get rich. This is not a distinction without a difference. Still, any list of successful people who started their working life working for minimum wage would fill a pretty large book. Besides, a job that “starts” at minimum wage doesn’t necessarily stay there. Take the trash out at McDonalds and they’ll pay you $7.25 an hour. Show up on time every day and smile when you take out the trash and they’ll bump it to $8. You can’t get ahead in this country by demand or by fiat, only by performance. You want to make more than the minimum wage? Make yourself more valuable to the marketplace.

It really isn’t rocket science.

Climate Change. My Opinion.

I am informed this morning by my relatively free press that Senate Democrats held an all-night talk fest on the floor of the United States Senate making speeches about climate change. The alleged purpose of this talk-fest was to attempt to move the needle of the public’s awareness of this scourge, since recent polls have suggested that we rank it 14^th on our list of most pressing problems…right after heartburn and just before crappy tasting lite beer.

This issue is a witch’s brew of contradictions and hypocrisies. On the one hand, we are constantly being lectured about its dangers by limousine liberals who live in 20,000 square feet McMansions and fly around the world in Co2 belching private jets making a killing selling carbon credits, who now that they’ve got theirs, want the rest of the world to give up air conditioning. On the other hand we have conservatives who receive millions in campaign cash from the Oil barons, telling us that even if there is a problem with the climate, it ain’t because of us. Those environmentalist wackos are just this generation’s flavor of Marxism whose real agenda is to destroy capitalism and take away our freedom. So, what to think?

I am not a science guy. It’s so bad; I can’t even Google up enough faux-intelligence on the subject to fake it. It’s like the part of my brain devoted to scientific stuff never fully developed. Maybe it has something to do with how my Mom carried me in the womb, or more likely, it’s all the fault of that incredibly hot girl in my 10^th grade Earth Sciences class for distracting me. Whatever the reason, when it comes to scientific debates, I’m more a “yeah, what HE said!” type of debater.

Having said all of this, my reading of this issue tells me that yes, the planet is probably warming, although the absence of such warming over the last 15 years should inject a little humility into those beating us over the head with all of this settled science claptrap. Further, my trick knee tells me that if the planet is warming, we probably have something to do with it. Anyone who has ever driven up 95 from Richmond to Princeton should instinctively know that there are just way too many freaking cars on the highway. I do have a certain sympathy for the default position of the environmentalist. Back in Eden, God gave us dominion over his creation and we were charged with its care. By all accounts, like everything else man was charged with, we have largely screwed over the planet. Don’t believe me? Just walk along any street in down town Newark, New Jersey and look at the filth in the streets.

Here’s my problem. Although I’m not comfortable in the company of the Global Warming deniers’ crowd, I’m also weirded out by the tree huggers. Start reading their positions on the issue long enough and you run head long into Statist idolatry. These people have unfettered confidence in the power and benevolence of government, especially world government. The solutions they champion for a potential 100 year increase of world temperature of perhaps 1.5 degrees is nothing short of a radical reworking of the social contract between mankind and their government, whereby we give up most of our autonomy (not to mention much of the comforts of our lifestyles) in exchange for an impossibly empowered government whose geniuses and experts will clean up our water and air. In other words, their proposed cure is more terrifying than the disease.

 If history teaches us anything it is to beware of people so enthusiastic about powerful government.

Patrick's Masters Recital

My son is nearing the end of his 6 and a half year musical education journey that has taken him through Nashville, Tennessee’s Belmont University to Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey. This weekend was the culmination of all of that high-brow training. As a composition student, his Master’s Thesis consisted of 45 minutes of his own works performed in concert under his direction. Pam, Kaitlin, Nana and I were on the third row. We had actually been on the front row for a time, but five minutes before the concert began, a frantic, wild-eyed young man rushed out to inform us that we couldn’t possibly sit on the front row, because it would be much too close to the conductor and might possibly freak him out. This wild-eyed young man was our son!

We had met him for dinner earlier in the evening and had noticed how agitated he was. He was non-stop chatter and spoke of the cat-herding quality of getting 20 other highly talented musicians to understand the subtleties and textures of music that had sprouted to life in the fertile soil of his own imagination. They knew the notes, but could they come to feel and comprehend the music as he did? Patrick wasn’t interested in having a good concert; he wanted it to be rapturous.

Sitting there at dinner, I couldn’t help but think back to the day we dropped him off as a lowly freshman at Belmont. In my heart I was convinced that he wouldn’t make it to his sophomore year. Patrick was a gifted musical freak, yes. But he only graduated from high school because of his mother’s constant assistance. He has the attention span and organizational skills of an under-achieving fruit fly. If it hadn’t been for his mother’s vigilance, her frantic trips to Godwin to bring him something he had forgotten, her last minute runs to Walmart to buy something that he had known he needed for two months but had neglected to mention until the night before the drop dead date, he never would have made it. And now we were leaving him to his own scatterbrained devices, 600 miles from home. The over/under for his college survival stood at one semester as we watched him disappear in the rear view mirror that hot August afternoon, six and a half years ago.

Now, at dinner, he kept using the name Sarah-Mae, as in “Sarah-Mae will help you with the reception. Sarah-Mae will meet you outside of Bristol at 7:45 to tell you where to unload the food”..etc.. We soon met the Filipino fireball who was Sarah-Mae, and immediately realized that for the past three or four weeks it had been this charismatic young woman who had served as his organizational director. This adorable girl began telling stories of the days leading up to the concert and each of them rang true. She definitely knew our son and his idiosyncrasies, and assured us that the concert was going to be amazing simply because his music was amazing.

I won’t do a musical critique because I don’t feel musically qualified to do so, plus I am impossibly biased. Suffice it to see that I loved ALL of the choral pieces because of the harmonies and the powerful emotions that beautifully performed, expertly written music produces in me. I could take or leave the solo stuff. Meh.

What moved me the most had nothing to do with the inspiring music or the beautiful words of Carl Sandburg. After it was over everyone crammed into the student center for the reception. I was approached by at least a dozen strangers, some fellow graduate students, some of Patrick’s professors. The words that they spoke to me were the sort of thing that we parents never forget:

“Everyone knows how talented your son is, but the best thing about Patrick is the fact that he’s just a wonderful person…”

“Thank you so much for sending Patrick to us. We are so lucky to have him on this campus.

“Patrick brings a passion to music that few people have.”

“I have a feeling that your son just might change the world with his music.”

“As good a musician as he is, he’s an even better person.”

 

The business of being a parent is a brutal thing. From the minute they are born, we never have another stress-free moment. Anxiety becomes our hand maiden. How will they get along in the world? But, when you are afforded the privilege of watching your child doing what they truly love to do, what they were born to do, just for a fleeting moment, the thought enters your mind that everything is going to be alright.

   

This picture was taken at the end of the performance. Patrick had turned around to take his bows. He stood there for a second with his hands together looking out at the audience, an expression partly of relief, but mostly of joy at what he had just done.

Rapurous.

Wedding Planning: Part V

The spreadsheets were laid out neatly on the table, color-coded by category. I knew immediately that serious business was afoot. This matter could no longer be put off. Time was growing short and decisions had to be made. Yes, it was time…time to finalize the guest list.

Pam was succinct in her instructions, “There are 211 people on this list. Tonight, we must make the final cuts. None of us are leaving this room until this list only has 180 names.”

The names were grouped into various categories, Dunnevant family, Manchester family, Kaitlin’s friends, Jon’s friends, work friends, family friends, borderline acquaintances, and people who get invited to weddings because of tradition or guilt, and finally a group of people you invite out of courtesy knowing full well that they will never come because they live 1000 miles away.

“But suppose someone we think won’t come decides to make a road trip?” I warned. “Maybe we should add an insert to their invitations as insurance, something like…We would love for you to attend Kaitlin and Jon’s outdoor July wedding here in the south where we consider it bad form for gentlemen to remove their jackets even when it’s 95 degrees with 100% humidity. Can’t wait to see you!”

The delicate strategy of paring down a wedding guest list seemed to center around one central question, who is more likely to get their shorts in a knot if they don’t get invited? A secondary consideration was, did they invite us to their daughter’s wedding?

I glanced down the list. At $75 a head to feed these people and a “chair fee” for every soul over 100, extreme care must be taken. “Who the heck is Elaine Krazinski?” I blurt out. Kaitlin says, “She’s that really nice neighbor lady I met down in Winston-Salem during grad school. Don’t worry, I’m sure she won’t come.”

“Why are we inviting Bob and Sally Buttinski? Do we even like them?”

“Of course not, silly.” Pam explains. “But they are best friends with the Krunkshanks, and since we’ve invited them, we don’t want to make things awkward for Bill and Patty.”

After an hour of such machinations we had our 180 names. Then it happened. As I was cleaning up the supper dishes, I heard Pam say that the postage required to mail out the invitations and the save the date announcements was going to be somewhere around 80-100 bucks. That was when I said, “Finally, something that I can write off as a business expense!”

Pam turned to me with a puzzled expression, “Wait, what do you mean?”

“I’m running those invitations through my postage meter at work!”**

Pam then gave me that look that I have grown to recognize over the years. It’s a combination of, “Oh, aren’t you adorable” and “How can you be so clueless.” She then lowered the boom, “Honey, you are not going to run wedding invitations through a postage machine! We’re buying special heart and romance stamps.”

“What??!!” I pleaded, even though I knew it was no use. “I can’t use my postage machine? I have to buy what.. wait, romance stamps?”

Pam seemed genuinely shocked at my ignorance. “Sweetie, these are wedding invitations, not business correspondence. They are works of art, even and especially down to the type of stamps required.”

So, now the list of things I didn’t know about wedding protocol has reached 87.

 

** To the NSA/IRS blog scanner: this is known as dramatic license, a writing technique whereby the author exaggerates to better make a point. I would never actually attempt to claim a business deduction for wedding postage. Haha.