What Does Non Essential Mean?

So, our elected representatives failed to come up with a workable compromise last night, mearning that the government has shut down. Consequently, a relatively small percentage of the federal workforce deemed non essential has been furloughed. My Facebook wall has been peppered with comments about my use of the term non essential, so I’ve decided to clear up any confusion and misunderstanding of this controversial term.

First of all, no one with an ounce of self respect wishes to be thought of as non essential. Everyone likes to think that what they do for a living is vitally important work.( My own occupation is not immune to this calculus.) The problem is, it isn’t true...and it never has been true. But, just because something isn’t essential doesn’t mean that it is worthless either. The guy who drives the school bus in the morning is essential to getting your kid to school. The guy who washes the bus and cleans the bus out every day, not so much. But let that school bus go unwashed for a couple of years and never cleaned out, and before long you’ll have a storm of angry parents screaming at the board of supervisors meeting. In the case of my son-in-law, who happens to be the hardest working, most enthusiastic and able park ranger east of the Mississippi, the classification of his job as non essential by the government bean counters is a source of great frustration. While the job of park ranger might not be as essential as someone making life or death decisions about our nuclear arsenal, try telling that family from Nebraska who scrimped and saved for five years to be able to take the family to the Grand Canyon next week only to discover the gates locked because of a government  shutdown...try telling them that a park ranger’s job isn’t essential. 

Here’s the thing...we all do work that is essential to someone. In addition, all work is noble and honorable. Having said that, when you live in a country with a federal work force of 2 million people and that government spends 4 trillion dollars a year, the notion that all 2 million of those employees and every dime of that 4 trillion is absolutely essential and absolutely none of them can be spared and not a nickel of that money can be done without is a laughable suggestion. Yes, it is true that the last time the government shutdown, for 16 Days, it cost us 24 billion dollars. But, to put that in perspective...24 billion dollars is .006% of 1 percent of what this government spends in a year. By any definition, that is a negligible number.

But, getting back to this essential vs. non essential thing...there is one thing I know, any organization, private businesses included, get more inefficient the larger they become. A friend of mine posted a comment to my last blog suggesting that government was worse in this regard than private enterprises are. He might be right in a broader sense, but not completely. I rather believe that even large, for profit companies, fall victim to bloated payrolls. The following photograph might help illustrate my point:

There is only one essential employee in this photograph...and it sure isn’t the Human Resources manager!

Let it be known that I consider the government shutdown a complete political failure. It is never a desirable outcome to furlough hardworking employees who are supporting families. While I have spent lots of time in this space criticizing government waste and malfeasance and will continue to do so, a shutdown should be an embarrassment to the citizens of this Republic. If any government employees should be furloughed, it should be the 535 members of Congress and the President of the United States. Let a few of them go weeks without a paycheck and see how they like it. 

Government Shutdown?

Today, Friday, the 19th of January, 2018 holds the promise of a government shutdown. If it happens, it will be the 18th or 19th such shutdown since I graduated from high school in 1976, depending how you count such things. The short term impact will be negligible with only a handful of non essential government personnel getting their temporary pink slips. If the shutdown were to drag on for weeks or months, pestilence and devastation would surely sweep across the land. 

Government shutdowns, since the bicentennial year, have occurred when there is a funding gap between what is required to run leviathan and how much actual money the Congress has authorized the government to spend. The government’s fiscal year starts on October 1st of each year. Prior to 1976, that’s when a Budget was passed. But since then lawmakers have instead relied on continuing resolutions, a short term fix that funds operations for shorter periods of time amidst great rancor and namecalling between politicians.

Here’s a fun chart. If you’re keeping score at home, that’s 112 continuing resolutions over the last 20 years, 2001 being an especially dysfunctional year. The federal budget is made up of 12 individual appropriation bills. The last time all 12 were passed by October 1st was in 1998, so our federal government hasn’t functioned with a proper budget in over two decades. Not coincidentally, the federal debt has skyrocketed from 5.5 trillion in 1998 to over 20 trillion today. Many acts of treachery, malfeasance and perfidy have contributed to this mind-boggling amount of red ink, but none more than the continuing resolution, which is a code word for incompetence.

So, what’s the cause of this potential shutdown? Depends on which echo chamber you’re stuck in. It’s either the Republican refusal to grant amnesty to the dreamers, or Democratic refusal to fund the CHIP program for six years. Oh..also, somebody hates our troops and wants them to die for lack of funds. I can’t remember who though. The greatest debate among the political class has been, Who will get the Blame? I don’t know what the fuss is about. I’ve lived through 18 of these things, and I can say with complete confidence that the Republican Party will get the blame, not because they don’t deserve it, but because, the Democratic Party has never gotten the blame for a government shutdown in my lifetime and never will. That’s because the people who are charged with assigning blame in these matters are the Press, and with very few exceptions, the Press runs with Democratic Party talking points. This isn’t a scandal, it’s just the way things have always been. I don’t care who gets the blame. Actually, in this 2018 shutdown, it’s hard to argue with the blame landing squarely on the GOP since they control both houses of Congress  and the White House. If they can’t get this done, it’s on them.

Maybe they work something out today, cobble some ridiculous deal together and vote for it late this afternoon so they can all catch their flights home, since there is absolutely nothing that politicians hate worse than working on the weekend. Or maybe the government will shut down. Whichever way it goes, I have to go to work, since I don’t have a printing press in my basement and can’t rely on a continuing resolution to pay my mortgage.

Day Four

Snowing outside, temperatures falling, wind starting to gust a bit. A couple of inches on the ground with a couple more to come. It’s our third snowfall of the winter here in Short Pump, Virginia. Yesterday, my wife headed over to the new Publix mere hours before it was to begin and texted me: Publix is so quiet...either Richmonders have stopped freaking out about the snow, or this store is doomed...

I feel reasonably confident that my fellow Short Pumpians have not stopped freaking out about the snow.

Day Four at Shangri-La, Short Pump finds me getting more antsy by the minute. Our two bedroom, two bath suite seems to have shrunk considerably since Sunday. But, it’s the little things that are starting to annoy me. In case you’re wondering, we still have a blanket-covered stack of luggage in front of the vent to nowhere, having decided that our makeshift solution was preferable to having to pack up and move to a room with a more logical HVAC plan. I’ve moved on from the big things and started to obsess over the smaller annoyances...

- a coil top stove with burners that will not lay flat, leaving every pan deployed on them tilted manically 

- showers and sinks which feature dial turned spigots which go from arctic cold to scalding hot within a millimeter of each other

- trash cans so small, they are filled up halfway through the preparation of one meal

- a sofa which can’t decide if it’s a sofa, futon, or chaise lounge, but regardless of which it is, declares war on the spinal column of anyone sitting on it.

While all of these things are incredibly annoying to someone like me, I must admit that when you write them down and read back over what you’ve written, it practically screams back at you...First World Problems!!!  Here I am, four days into a stay in a hotel suite which is bigger, and more luxurious than the bedrooms of the world’s richest Kings two thousand years ago, and considerably more luxurious than the homes of over half of the world’s present population. I’m agitated about the scalding hot water while 2.5 billion people on this planet would give just about anything for clean running water at any temperature. So, yeah...I’m a spoiled American.

Something else has occurred to me during my stay at the Residence Inn...Network and cable television is doomed. Each night of our stay, we have had three televisions to choose from for the night’s entertainment. The standard cable package along with HBO is available, free of charge. Not once have we chosen to turn them on. Instead, we sit close together, huddled around my wife’s laptop to watch the latest episode of Black Mirror...on Netflix. We do so despite the tiny eleven inch screen and the inadequate speakers which require extreme concentration to hear. Sure, we watch Andrew Freiden in the morning, and we did watch the end of the Vikings / Saints game Sunday night, but that’s about it. I don’t think we’re alone. If I worked for one of the major networks or a cable television company, I would be looking to acquire a new skill set. Their days are numbered...

Day One in the Wilderness

Day one of our week in the wilderness has started well enough. Our suite here at the Residence Inn is at the lower end of the acceptable scale, but acceptable nonetheless. I have found nothing especially complimentary about the complimentary breakfast, except for the fact that it is, um...complimentary. Our quarters are a reasonable attempt to be like Homewood Suites. Of course, the attempt failed last night as we had finally settled in and noticed a cold draft pouring into our living room as if someone had left a door opened. Upon closer inspection we discovered the source of the freezing air...

To the untrained eye, this would appear to be a garden variety intake vent for heating and air. But when we felt frigid air rushing through the vent, we were perplexed. It was only when we removed the filter that we noticed...

...that it wasn’t attached to anything, sorta like a bridge to nowhere! That’s right, some genius decided that they would slap a vent opening on some random door, attach it to nothing, then allow the unheated crawl space to pass along freezing air directly from the great outdoors into our room. This is American mechanical expertise at its finest. Of course, both of us were too exhausted to call the front desk to report this outrage, since the prospect of having to haul all of our stuff to yet another room after so long a day seemed ridiculous. So, my wife brought another example of American expertise to bear...the jack-legged, jerryrigged solution...

Meanwhile, Lucy is adjusting quite well to her new surroundings. There have been a few low growls directed at other patrons walking past our door, an occasional bark that seems to startle her when the sound bounces off the walls, which is enough to make her stop. Having said this, I have to admit that the old girl is sleeping with one eye open...

Yesterday, someone made the observation that these next couple of weeks might give us a better understanding of what it must have been like for the Children of Israel when they were kicking around for forty years in the wilderness. Well, except for all the actual details of the story, this might be true on some warped scale. Yes, the Residence Inn is not our home, and yes, the promised land is so close we can taste it, but after that, everything falls apart. The complimentary breakfast is much tastier than manna, water comes out of the faucet, not a rock, and no animals will be sacrificed during our stay here if I have anything to say about it.

Hawaiian Nightmare

Yesterday, the fine people of Hawaii heard the wail of first alert sirens and for fifteen horrifying minutes, prepared for incoming ballistic missiles from North Korea. It was a false alarm, brought on by a series of inexcusable mistakes that boiled down to some idiot somewhere actually pushing the wrong button. Unfortunately, this hamfisted blunder had the citizens of Hawaii thinking that they had fifteen minutes to live before the fiery death of a nuclear attack. Their responses are/were fascinating.

Stories have filtered out of mothers huddled in closets with their children, of fathers trying to shield their children with their own bodies from the impending flash, of frantic calls and text messages speaking of deep love and affection...along with stories of copious consumption of whiskey, all very human reactions. As I have read these accounts the thought occurs to me...If I suddenly had fifteen minutes left, what would I do? What would you do?

Nobody can say with certainty what they would do under such circumstances. Our reactions are merely hypothetical approximations...what we think or hope we would do in a crisis is often at odds with what we actually would do. All of us would like to think that we would be calm, steadfast and heroic. No one wants to imagine themselves gulping Jack Daniels and cowering in a corner like a child. But, here is what I would probably do...

- Text or call my children to tell them that I love them.

- Hold on tight to Pam while awaiting the end.

- Confess my sins before Almighty God.

Then, if I had any time left....

- Lament the fact that I didn’t take the family on a month long European vacation, since I could have stiffed Capital One with the bill.

- Since it turned out that I shouldn’t have bothered, I would kick myself for putting so much money in my SEP.

- Enjoy a nice laugh realizing that all of those insufferable Bitcoin know-it-alls won’t be able to spend any of their new money.

- Take comfort in the fact that the coming nuclear apocalypse will also destroy Twitter.

- Delight in the realization that despite being, at best, an infrequent flosser, I will die with a full set of teeth.

- I would probably ask Alexa to play something by Sinatra.

- I might consider cooking up the last of the bacon, assuring that my last smell would be the very best smell.

Anyway, my heart goes out to the citizens of Hawaii. What a nightmare to have to endure because of a false alarm. I’m hoping that when they find the guy(or girl) responsible, he or she is punished to the fullest extent of the law. 

A Word About Shitholes

Yesterday, with sudden and mighty force, a new word entered the American vocabulary...shithole. While it might be argued that this isn’t really a new word, or even a word at all, because it came from the mouth of a sitting President, it has been thrust into the limelight by a news media suddenly aghast at foul language coming from the Oval Office. But, with this word, like all others, context is important. Our president used this term to describe a country, or countries, from which he didn’t wish any more immigration. The specific countries in question were, depending on which news account you prefer...Haiti or any country from the African continent. In some quarters the use of the epithet “shithole” to describe countries populated predominantly by black people is clear evidence of racism. Others point out that a healthy immigration policy should begin and end with skills-based requirements, the unlimited entry of unskilled poor people from countries that can be described as shitholes not being the kinds of places where one finds highly skilled professionals. What to make of all this?

First, I think that most reasonable people would be willing to acknowledge that this world does in fact contain many shitholes. Anyone who has ever wandered off the grounds of their luxury hotels in Jamaica would soon be confronted with conditions that closely resemble something fairly described as shithole-like. There are vast regions of this planet where shitholery abounds. Indeed, if some of the journalists who are catawauling the loudest at the moment were dropped in the middle of a Haitian shantytown, the word shithole would fairly leap from their lips. But, does the existence of shitholes mean that we should not allow immigration from such shitholes? This is a different question that deserves greater attention.

The words of the President yesterday ignited a firestorm on Twitter. One particular thread I read was instructive. Someone with a vowel-heavy last name proclaimed...The Mayflower didn’t come from Haiti!!!...to which someone else, who has my undying admiration, replied...It didn’t come from Poland either! 

When the first wave of immigration surged into this country from Ireland after the great potato famine, I feel confident that conditions in Ireland at that time could fairly be described as shitholeish. The conditions in Dickensian London that propelled people across the Atlantic were certainly at least close to shithole territory. The truth is that throughout our history, the people who have fled to this country have all pretty much been fleeing something horrible, whether from European horribleness or Asian horribleness or, yes, African horribleness. During periods of great inflows, our government has passed laws that sought to limit one sort of immigrant over another. I believe that this is perfectly fine. It is the responsibility of any government to control its border. The question becomes, are the rules we propose designed to limit people bases solely on their race, regardless of their qualifications? With regards to Haiti, it appears that our President is neck deep in racist intent, especially when you consider the fact that the average immigrant from Haiti is more educated than the average American. Is it merely a coincidence that our chief executive used the modifier shithole only to refer to African nations? While Jerry Falwell Jr. could probably come up with a way to justify this latest rhetorical bomb, the rest of us, probably not. 

Seems like just yesterday I read an incredible story about some guy who raced into a burning building to rescue five strangers. On his second trip into the inferno he died in the flames. The hero in question was a private in the National Guard, and an immigrant from the African nation of Ghana. When the President famously asks, “Why do we want all these people from shithole countries coming here?” The answer is, because that’s what America is, a place created by people great and small, fleeing shithole countries for a chance at a better life. I don’t object to having rules for entry. I don’t care how oppressed you are, if you have tuberculosis, you ain’t getting in, pal.

But, if our reasons for denying someone entry into this country are based on racist assumptions of your value as a human being because of where you come from, or what color your skin is, then we should be ashamed of ourselves.

Planned Obsolescence

It is 6:12 am and I am sitting at my desk at the office, clean shaven, showered and ready for my day. After a fitful night of half sleep, I finally gave up at 4:15, so here I sit. I blame this all on my empty house. 

Yesterday, the furniture movers arrived and cleared out everything except the refrigerator from downstairs. This morning they come for that. After a late appointment yesterday, I met my wife over at a friends house for dinner, so I didn’t get home until about 9. I can’t tell you how disconcerting it was to walk into a dark and empty house, and hear your voice echoing off the bare walls. By 10:30 or so I was exhausted by a long and rigorous 10 hour business day. I collapsed into bed and was asleep practically before my head hit the pillow. But within a couple of hours I was wide awake. A couple of hours ago I read my twelve pages from Numbers. Now, I’m alone in my office a full two hours before my first appointment is due to arrive. This place is creepy quiet at this hour.

Have you ever noticed that when you’re up super early, every detail of your environment comes into sharper focus? For example, I don’t think I have ever noticed this before, but my desk chair has started to list a bit towards port. How did I never notice this before? It is definitely leaning to the left, irritatingly so. Upon closer examination, the left side of the seat cushion is more worn, reflecting this unequal weight distribution. All of a sudden, my chair is intolerably uncomfortable. This stupid chair can’t be more than five years old and I paid good money for it. Now it’s tilting to one side? 

This is an outrage. Office chairs are only good for half a decade now? The big shots at the chair factory are cooking planned obsolescence into office furniture now? What the heck ever happened to the reliable, comfy chair? A couple of days ago I walk into the office and notice that there was a furniture truck outside and six sleek new conference room chairs were being carried into our office while the old ones were headed out the back door to Goodwill. This, despite the fact that the old chairs didn’t have a mark on them and had given us 8 years of faithful service without a single chair-related fatality. What in the world was going on? My partner informed me that these new ones were more modern and stylish, and would contribute to a more 21st century look. They actually are more modern and stylish looking, I had to admit, while being about as uncomfortable as the old ones. But still...conference room chairs only have an eight year lifespan? When did this happen? When in the world did basic business environment furniture start either falling apart or becoming hopelessly unhip in less than a freaking decade?? 

I need a good night’s sleep...