Social Media is About to get Hilarious

Back in April of this year I wrote this:  https://doug-thetempest.blogspot.com/2022/04/here-are-just-few-random-thoughts.html.

With today’s announcement by the Biden Administration of their college debt forgiveness program, I fully expect that social media platforms will soon be exploding with invective from all quarters, from the left for being too timid, from the right for the audacity of asking the taxpayers to pay off debt obligations entered into by willing adults. It will be brutal and unrelenting for a few weeks, then we will all move on to the next outrage. Can’t wait for the creative meme war!

It is worth noting that my biggest objections and worries from the April piece noted above, which appeared in the next to last paragraph, were both addressed by the administration…proving clearly the massive weight carried by The Tempest in shaping public policy. 

This is one of many problems that come up in the course of politics where I feel that it is impossible to craft a perfect solution. Every proposal for fixing some things is flawed, because the problem is complex. We are the largest consumer economy in the history of planet Earth. As such we can simply not afford to have an entire generation opt out of consuming because of a crushing college debt burden. If that happens we all lose. On the other hand, forgiving loans, comparatively speaking, is the easy part. The hard part is passing along the 300 billion dollar price tag for that debt forgiveness to the American taxpayer. How will the non-college educated crowd feel about that? Not to mention the college educated crowd that somehow found a way to pay off their loans? It is a no win situation for anyone proposing a fix.

I have great sympathy for the folks who say, “Look, you signed up for a loan. You understood at the time that loans have to be repaid. So why should the government or anyone else have to come along and bail you out?” Excellent question. However, we Americans aren’t always opposed to governments bailing out those who make dumb decisions with their money. In my lifetime the government has at various times bailed out the following:

- New York City

- Chrysler Corporation

- The Entire Savings and Loan industry

- Bank of America

- Wells Fargo

-The Stock market in the Panic of 1792…thanks, Alexander Hamilton!

- Bear Stearns

- Home Mortgages of one million Americans in 1933

- AIG Insurance Group

- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

-  Penn Central Railroad

- Lockheed

- The entire American Airline Industry after 9/11

- General Motors

- Ford

- Citigroup

- Small businesses via the TARP bailout of 2008

This is nowhere near an exhaustive list, but you get the idea. I mean, how do you think we have accumulated a 29 Trillion dollar national debt? So, its not that large scale financial bailouts are anything new. It’s just that the beneficiaries of this particular bailout are people that at least on some basic level should have known what they were signing up for. 

My background, education and experience leads me to be against any sort of bailout both on economic and moral terms. But that’s in a perfect world where trade offs are not required. In the world where we actually live, bailouts have become like the air we breathe. (Did you cash your relief checks from the government during COVID?) Still, when I look at this list of bailout recipients I must ask myself this question. If my government is going to bailout out anyone would I rather they bailout young, college kids with their entire lives ahead of them…or the arrogant, amoral morons who ran AIG, Bear Stearns, or Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? While many of the college graduates who will benefit from these bailouts may have made bad life planning decisions, they didn’t line their own pockets through malfeasance and greed. Besides, what will most of these graduates do with their newfound financial health? Probably go out and buy a house, or a car, or some decent furniture. They may even have the confidence to start a business. On the other hand what did most of the suits at Citibank do with all that bailout cash? probably bought that fifth vacation home in Barbados.

So yeah. This is a tortured fix to a giant problem, and absolutely nobody is going to be happy about it.

But, Facebook is gonna be hilarious for a couple weeks!

A Good Thing or a Bad Thing?

Back in April of 2019 we were all in the midst of the COVID pandemic. One morning I was leaving my office after an abbreviated visit and happened to take note of the beautiful bank of flowers across the street from the entrance to our parking lot. Back then, everyone was noticing the beauty of the natural world, since being quarantined felt so artificial and confining. That particular morning I stepped out of the car, walked across the street and took this picture…

On the other side of this lovely bank of purple flowers was a thick forest of poplars, cedars, oaks and pines. I remember thinking at the time how odd it was to have such a beautiful natural environment directly across from our offices.

Then suddenly, a couple months later a sign went up announcing that a new development was planned for our little idyllic slice of nature, but since it was COVID nothing happened for months and months. Finally in January of this year we arrived on a Monday morning to discover that over the weekend, the developers had been busy…

It was such a shock to my system seeing the land stripped bare. A light dusting of snow had fallen overnight making the landscape feel almost lunar and even more desolate.

Then, this morning, after being away for six weeks, my system was given another shock when I crossed the overpass of Interstate 64 on Church road and saw what had happened while I was in Maine…

I learned that this development would be apartments. Just behind this structure is a giant parking deck that can’t be seen from the road.

Of course, there are two ways to look at something like this. One way is to view this as a loss of something. I will no longer see the purple flowers. I will never again wonder what might be lurking within the dark woods that used to stand at that spot, old and mysterious. But a second way to view this new building is as a sign of progress. These apartments will provide a place for individuals and families to live. Where do you live? A house? An apartment? If so, what was there before your house was built? Every place I have ever lived at some point in the past was part of a deep dark woods, or a cow pasture, or a wind swept field of flowers.

For me though, I suppose I feel the loss more than the gain. Perhaps if I was twenty-something and looking for an affordable place to live for a while I would feel differently. When I look at the green insulated exterior walls are all I can think about is how much longer it will take me to turn left out of our parking lot. I wonder if they will have to put in another stop light. I wonder what kind of clientele this apartment complex will attract.

But the thing I will miss the most is the flowers in the spring. They were a glorious sight to see every April.

On the other hand, maybe a child born to a young couple living in that building might one day find a cure for cancer.

…but I’ll still miss the flowers.

 

Good Things Are Coming

We made it back home safe and sound yesterday afternoon after an uneventful two day trip. Lucy, as usual, travels like a boss. Much better than either of us do. As is always the case, our house seemed huge when we walked in the door, each room bigger than we remembered. This morning I had to think for a minute to recall how to make coffee. But eventual it all came back to me like muscle memory that had atrophied. It felt good to settle back in to our home. We are lucky to have a place that we love to go, and a place we love to come back to.

There’s no telling what awaits me at the office this morning. Whatever it is I’m sure that Kristin has it all organized and laid out perfectly on my desk. Although I have not missed the work, I have missed the people there. It will be good to see them again, to begin anew my daily harassment of each of them. I’m sure they have missed it.

So, Pam had gone to the grocery store and I was unpacking when I hear a knock on the door. It’s Kennedy from next door, she’s the artistic middle child who is always painting, sculpting or knitting something. I have accumulated quite a collection of her work over the years. I’m keeping them all since one day she will probably be famous and they will be worth a fortune. Anyway, I opened the door and there she was on my front porch with her hands full of stuff she had made. I sat down on the steps and listened to her explain how she made each one. For me there was a coaster that she made at pottery class. For Pam there was a potholder she knitted, and then there was a bag of warm chocolate chip cookies…

My heart melted. First of all, she’s in elementary school yet has the skills to create this type of art. The coaster is a dog’s paw of her own design. That she would choose that to make for me is adorable. She knows how much I love Miss Lucy, I guess. But beyond the merits of these things as art is the thoughtfulness, the kind and tender heart, her desire to…give. Her little sister Sully and her big brother Cash are the same way. Their parents, Jamie and Stu, are killing it, even though they don’t think so half the time. Like all parents they are overwhelmed by the responsibility and the hard work involved in raising kids today. But they are doing something right!

I had planned on giving each of them their Maine gifts last night, but by the time we had finished dinner I was pooped. So I will go over this afternoon.

I often think about this culdesac where I live and the kids that have been raised here, including my own. Among them are one who wound up at West Point, another at the Naval Academy. There is a girl at JMU, another girl in high school who has been the go-to dog sitter and baby sitter for the entire street. There are two beautiful little ones down the street with blond curls and radiant smiles who we have gotten to see grow up from strollers to bicycles. Then there are these three knuckleheads next door who have squirreled their way into our hearts since the day they moved in.

It’s one of the reasons we live here, that we have stayed here. I watch these kids grow up, watch their parents raising them and I take heart for the future. Good things are coming.

The Calm Before the Storm

The schedule says we are supposed to leave here first thing Saturday morning, which leaves us two full days left. But there’s a problem. I mean, other than the fact that we only have two more days. The problem is that one of those two days—today—looks to be a washout. It is pouring down rain at the moment. However, tomorrow’s forecast is lovely. So, Pam thinks we should do 90% of our packing today so we are freed up to enjoy Friday’s nice weather. On paper this sounds like a totally reasonable plan. There’s only one problem…Lucy.

Actually there are two problems…Lucy, and the layout of Loon Landing.

Lucy, our famously neurotic pup, has never been a fan of suitcases and the process that goes in to packing them for a trip. Whenever we start, she immediately assumes we are preparing to leave her forever. Use all the happy voices you’ve got, it won’t make any difference, so convinced is she of our pending betrayal. Combine her conspiratorial mindset with the prospect of leaving the lake and she will be at Death-Com 5.

Then, there’s the issue of space. As you can imagine, when you pack up to go anywhere for six weeks, you bring a ton of stuff with you. Now, although we love Loon Landing, it’s smallish. There isn’t a lot of room for extraneous knickknackery. Fortunately there is a lovely loft upstairs which serves as a suitcase storage facility while we are here. So, in order to start packing, we will have to haul all of them downstairs. But, once they are packed, there isn’t anywhere to put them downstairs. We could begin loading them into the car, but doing so in a driving rainstorm sounds like a terrible idea. 

The struggle is real.

But, the plan is sound. We will pack up today, doing our best to calm Lucy’s fragile temperament. Then tomorrow we will enjoy our final day in beautiful sunshine. Later today a final shopping trip into Camden is on the agenda. We will say our goodbyes and pick up a new collar for Lucy, one that doesn’t smell like fish. Then, Saturday morning we will begin the two day drive back home. Believe it or not, we will be happy to be back home, to sleep in our own bed, to take a proper shower in a proper sized bathroom, to be back in our lovely neighborhood. It is quite possible to miss Maine and look forward to Short Pump at the same time.

Just don’t try explaining that to Lucy.

…the calm before the storm.

A Sunset Speaks

Every year towards the end of our time in Maine I start sorting through the nearly one thousand photographs we have taken looking for my favorites. Eventually I will publish my top ten in a future blogpost when I am in a place with sufficiently fast internet. This morning I want to talk about one particular picture that mesmerizes me.

Some nights the lake is too rough, the wind is up and the water is choppy. Occasionally it rains or is totally overcast. But whenever possible, Pam takes her paddle board out somewhere around 7:30 and waits for the celestial show to begin. Sometimes I tag along in my kayak. It’s a difficult business predicting the brilliance of sunsets on this lake. Some nights all the conditions seem perfect but you get nothing. Other nights when you’re not expecting anything special, magic happens. The night that this picture was taken was a night when it could have gone either way. There was a massive dark gray/slate blue cloud hanging over the entire lake except for the edges of the horizon. The sun set at 7:47 that night. Five minutes or so after, we noticed specks of yellow popping up in random spots under the huge oval shaped cloud. Ten minutes later, everything suddenly transformed before our eyes…

As beguiling as this photograph is, it is a pale imitation of the reality of the moment. Neither of us in all our time here had ever seen anything like it. The bright pink and orange highlights of color against the dark canvas of purple with tiny cracks of blue peaking through was breathtaking in real time. It made both of us feel small, very small. It felt like a presence, both beautiful and ominous. We stopped our paddling and watched the evolution of the thing. Eventually it faded away as quickly as it had come…

We come here every summer weighed down by the demands of modern life. Along with everyone else in the world, we carry burdens around. We often attach outsized significance to inconsequential things. It is the way of human beings. We overestimate our importance. We begin to believe that we are much bigger than we are. Then we see something like this and it recalibrates our hearts. There are much bigger things in the world than us and our travails.

It wasn’t the most spectacular sunset, not even close. It was simply unique and it spoke to me uniquely. Let not your heart be troubled. Come to me all you who are heavy laden and I will give you…rest.

Aqua Pup

At 6:00am I wake up to 54 degrees. Yikes! I found Lucy sleeping in a tight ball on the sofa. When I sat down and plopped my feet up next to her she hardly budged.

That’s probably only partially due to the chilly temperatures. It has more to do with the fact that yesterday this girl broke her all-time record for longest swim without a break…one hour. It’s hard to believe really. No way in the world I could stay afloat for an hour in the water. Up here, Lucy becomes AQUA-PUP.

It started when Pam took her out for a swim on her paddle board. This is one of their favorite activities up here. Pam goes out and Lucy dives in off the dock and follows her everywhere. They paddle all over the lake together. Then after thirty minutes or so, Pam heads back to the dock. But this time, Lucy had no interest in leaving the lake so she just swam around our cove for another full thirty minutes, happy as she could be. At one point we saw her trying something new. Several times she suddenly stuck her entire head under water for several seconds! Each time bubbles would rise to the surface. She somehow knew that she needed to blow air through her nose to keep from drowning. We have no idea what she was thinking. Maybe she was looking for fish? Or maybe she wants to take up scuba diving? At this point, I will put nothing past this girl when it comes to this lake. She is going to be so depressed when we leave on Saturday.

That’s right, we only have five more days. We are trying to decide how best to spend our remaining days here. Pam wants to walk the Rockland Break Water before we leave, and there’s a restaurant in Lincolnville Beach we want to try. I have one more round of golf to play.But honestly, the hardest part is ginning up the motivation to leave the lake. When the weather is perfect and the lake is calm, it is practically impossible to leave. Wednesday looks like a washout rainy day. We will probably spend that day with indoor pursuits. For Pam that means trying to finish the cross stitch pattern she’s been working on for six weeks. For me it will mean finishing my last bit of reading…

An American Journey

He has become what is commonly referred to as a man of a certain age, born in the 1950’s and nearing retirement in a nation that bares little resemblance to the one he was born into. In some respects this has been true of every age since America’s founding, change being the one reliable, inalterable fact of our national life. But he can’t shake the feeling that there is something distinctly different in the air now, and he thinks he knows when it all started. It was his first political memory.

The America that he inherited in the 1950’s stood astride the world as the one unchallenged colossus. After World War II, America seemed on the march everywhere. The economy was booming, patriotism seemed like the least we could do to show our appreciation for having been born in such a place. We were the land of Ozzie and Harriet, Leave it to Beaver and Mayberry, or at least we wanted to believe we were. It was never that easy or clean, of course. Hollywood’s ability to distort reality was just as strong then as it is now. Still, America was the land of heroes, at least to him it was. He grew up idolizing John Glenn and Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays. Politics was contentious but always seemed to end at the water’s edge of conflict. We had one uniting adversary, Communism. He remembers the duck and cover drills in elementary school. Everyone knew which side of the Iron Curtain they wanted to live on. America was the answer to Khrushchev and Mao, an emphatic, winning answer. All you had to do was look at them, old men dressed like clowns grinning like feral cats. Our President, on the other hand, was young and handsome with a beautiful wife. He was funny, clever and possessed a winning smile. Then he got shot.

He was still a little boy but remembers the day. It was his introduction to politics. The President had been murdered and his parents were distraught. One minute he was smiling and waving at the folks in his convertible and the next minute his brain was splattered all over his wife’s dress, and Walter Cronkite took off his thick black glasses and said, “The President is dead.”

The next year he remembers the day he saw a President with his own eyes for the first and only time. Lyndon Johnson was giving a speech in town and his father thought the family should go to get a glimpse of him, not because he revered him as some sort of God, but because he needed support…because the President had just been shot and LBJ had the weight of the world on his shoulders. So, there they were standing inside a rope with hundreds of others. A line of limousines pulled up and men with sunglasses stepped out, then the President excited the building and walked ten yards to the biggest car in the line, stopping to wave at them for a few seconds. He was as far away as second base is from home plate. He seemed to look right at the 6 year old boy. It was his second political memory.

After that everything seemed to change. The killing of a President seemed to unleash a fury of unrest in his country. There was a war in Asia and it divided the country in profound ways. Soon an explosion of protests spread over the country like mushrooms after heavy rain. Civil Rights. Get Out of Vietnam. Suddenly, the bloom seemed off the American rose. His father’s generation seemed to be the problem to some. To others it was the fault of the hippies. The divide seemed to get deeper with each riot.

One of the sharpest divides that he noticed, even as a young man, was the divide between the kind of people who attended Harvard and those who didn’t. It was the Ivy Leaguers who tended to believe that Ethyl and Julius Rosenberg were innocent. It was the Ivy Leaguers who were most likely to make excuses for even Communisms worst atrocities. People who didn’t attend college or if they did went to state schools seemed more likely to take America’s side. People like Richard Nixon. But then, he ended up being a corrupt crook, despite his protests to the contrary, so all bets were off. Nothing that has happened since has been able to change this dynamic. Even when the Berlin Wall fell and the newly released Rosenberg files proved their guilt, the Ivy Leaguers contextualized. Even when our own intelligence agency’s sins were revealed the kinds of people who loved Richard Nixon made excuses. The divide was permanent.

Years later Ronald Reagan came along calling America a shining city on a hill. It sparked something in the young man who had grown disillusioned. He so desperately wanted America to be just that, a place of hope and goodness, a country that stood for something. There were others who attempted to call the country back to unity and goodness with phrases like a thousand points of light, and building a bridge to the 21st century, or the optimistic yes, we can. But they all fell flat on his middle aged ears. Something had changed. Politics now seemed like warfare. Suddenly campaign slogans started sounding like battle cries…Courage to Fight for America, Fighting for us. 

Then came…Make America Great Again. It was clever. It called upon our best memories from back when the post World War II America rebuilt Europe, when America was admired around the world for its enthusiasm, positivity, and ingenuity. Whenever anything is ever great it’s natural for people to want it to always be. Some mocked the slogan, not even trying to hide their contempt for their own country…We were never great! This attitude helped Donald Trump win. The experiences of most Americans cause them to be grateful for their country, flaws and all. The Ivy Leaguers never seem to grasp this simple fact. And so, a poorly educated, boorish carnival barking idiot became President and the older man found himself adrift, and keenly aware of the dangers of political nostalgia.  He finds himself in disagreement with people near and dear to him. He hates that politics has such power.

With the election of Joe Biden, half the country followed the lead of their deluded hero and refused to accept the verdict. Now, when the FBI executes a search warrant of the ex-President’s home, radicals start calling for armed resistance. Now, his biggest fear for his country isn’t who will win the next election, but whether the result will bring violence and a further rupturing of the country that has been the only home he has ever had. 

He opens his laptop and pulls up the news for the first time in a while. He reads about Mar-a-Lago, armed groups gathering around FBI offices, and the knife attack on Salman Rushdi. He is overcome with anxiety for the country of his birth.

So much so, that he writes this blog post.