How do we get out of here?

Proposition: That our Founding Fathers sought to fashion a government capable of accommodating free will with justice and human dignity.

To wit: Inherent in the American economic system are cycles of growth and decline. Those cycles are as much a part of our national economics as is the "law of supply and demand." What we seem to have trouble doing is figuring out how to help people during the periods of decline without making them dependent on government during periods of growth. Perhaps even more difficult is to figure out a method that keeps the same racial or ethnic groups from being the ones that suffer the most during the declines and gain the least during the growths.
     Any rational person who looks at our history over the past 75 years will note that the present financial crisis is not the fault of any one party or person. And even if it is, our Constitution reads, "We the People..." meaning that we all have a responsibility to help solve that crisis. We did not get into this crisis overnight and we are not going to be able to get out of it quickly, either.
    Deficit spending was adopted during the Great Depression as government attempted to bring the nation out of severe economic troubles. Since the 1950s we have continually relied on deficit spending until we have reached a point where almost half of every tax dollar is going to pay interest on the debt. Is the sole solution to cut all government programs so that we can devote more resources to paying down the debt? With unemployment in the 9 to 10% range, what kind of crisis will be fostered with we dump hundreds of thousands of government employees into the unemployment lines?
     The real test of our willingness to do what is right is not found during the moments of crisis. It is found in the growth times when real discipline is need to make choices that gradually reduce the size of debt and government.
     Government is like very pleasant drug. We like having things done for us, things handed us, and things built in our communities. We've become too dependent on those "fixes," and now we find that declining economic times make it hard for us to get our "fixes." But kicking that habit--going through rehab--is very difficult. Now we are faced with either going "cold turkey" or into some sort of treatment program that gradually weens us off our dependency. But, again, there's the rub. Do we have what it takes to keep cutting, gradually, when times get better? Can we resist when someone points out a new "need" that cries out for a new government program? Are we "heartless" to do so if there is a real need?
     The current crisis over the debt ceiling is being compounded by the fact that both parties have sworn off the so-called earmarks. How do legislative leaders get their party members to line-up behind a plan if the only incentive to do so is "its the right thing?" Ironic that one of the reasons we have a problem with the national debt is that it got that way in part due to earmarks, but now when we need the carrot of earmarks, all we have is a stick.
     To truly solve our problem, in the long term, without creating a bigger economic crisis, we need compromise and gradual reductions in government programs and gradual increases in revenue. Everyone must be willing to sacrifice, but the only ones currently being threatened with sacrifices are government employees, Social Security pensioners and the military. After 9/11 we were told to go out and spend money. Only members of the military and their families were asked to make true sacrifices. The entire nation should have been asked to pay a "war tax" to foot the bill for the "War on Global Terrorism." Instead the debt ceiling was raised again and again as we borrowed from the future.
     It is time for all of us to give a little for the good of all. If we freely give, it will be just, it will preserve human dignity. And our Founding Fathers would be proud.

Life is Bittersweet

     Last weekend was filled with as wide a series of emotional swings as I have experienced in some time.
     Pay Myers, a lady with whom I worked for many, many years died after a long and difficult struggle with cancer. Not only did we have to bare the news of her loss while out of town, we were unable to gather with other colleagues to mourn with them at her funeral.
     We got the call about her passing as we were driving to Pennsylvania to attend the wedding of Boss Cook's great niece. I always find great comfort in how families come together to celebrate such events. However, the joyful wedding was interlaced with pain of wittinessing Mom Miller's continuing mental decline.
     Then there is the news that friends who have been struggling to have a child after having previously lost one in the middle of a pregnancy, did give birth to healthy twin girls.
     The opening of the TV fictional medical series "Ben Casey" comes to mind: "Man, Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity." 

I Wanna be Like Mike?

     Over the first 50 years of television, a commonly held belief has been that people who watch TV (and movies for that matter) tend to model their behaviour after the people they watch. Hence the strict censorship of TV in the 1950's to the 1980s. The normative behaviour theory has been the basis for forcing networks to impose some sort of ratings system to warn-off people from programming that might be considered offensive.
     From shows like "Daddy Knows Best" (even though his wife and kids usually did know best) to "The Cosby Show," Americans were presented with "ideal" middle class families. The implication being that we all ought to live like, act like, and aspire to the types of behaviour we were watching.
     Now cable/satellite TV gives us "Swamp People" and reality shows about Texas women and wild hogs in Texas and the people who hunt them.
     Is this the new normal?"

The Macrocosm of the YMCA Locker Room

There is a certain element of membership of the YMCA who leave towels laying around, spill food on the floor and don't clean it up, don't flush toilets, etc. Among the membership of the YMCA there are four basic thoughts of how these slackers should be treated:

Those who use the up-scale special locker room that costs extra but gets cleaned more often:
  --Conservative: "Let's leave those boors in the regular locker room to their own devices and lower my taxes."
   --Liberal: "Let's put more money into education so that everyone will know how to behave in a locker room and I am willing to help pay for the cost of that education."

Those who use the regular locker room (where the messes are):
   --Liberal: "Let's put up a few signs with rules and then try to point out to those who have not had a proper education how it works--lead by example, and I'm willing to pay a little more to help out.
   --Conservative: "Constitution says I can do what I want and so does the NRA. And  by the way, lower the taxes of those wealthy dudes.

Brain Thought Transmissions

Based upon many, many years of research and observation, I have a theory to offer the scientific world: The size of jewelry worn about the face and neck is in direct proportion to the diminished mental capacity if the wearer because said metal and plastic ornamentation blocks the transmission of intelligent thought waves within the wearer's brain.

This is especially true with very large earrings.

The alternative theory is that large quantities of jewelry around the face and neck attract those random stupid thoughts that float in the universe having been released when brain surgery is done on people who have had the self-restraint not to act on them.

Thoughts on Memorial Day

Having grown up in a family with a Dad who had served in World War II and a Mom who worked in a defense plant during the same war, and both of them very active in the Veterans of Foreign Wars post in my hometown, Memorial Day was always an important event in our home. There was a parade and then some ceremony. I recall Dad on the speaker's platform when he was serving as commander of the VFW post. So I approach this "holiday" with a reverence that borders on religious.

From younger days when I saw American history as an endless string of "us versus them" conflicts where the emphasis and fascination was on the "heroic soldier," my thinking and feelings have evolved into something much more sophisticated and subtle. While Memorial Day was originally intended to honor those who fell in battle, it has become a cross between honoring anyone who served and some sort of official start to the summer outdoor grilling season. The later having no connection to the former in the minds of many people--just a three-day weekend at the beginning of summer.

More and more I have come to view the true human costs of war not in terms of those who laid down their lives for our country. In a sense their pain and suffering ended when life left their bodies. The long term costs of wars has been in those left behind. The broken families, hugs never given, friendships never shared, communities and homes a little diminished for loss of each life. There is also the suffering of those who survived battle's horrors. Today we are more attuned to what is labeled post-traumatic stress, but that does not lessen the internal battles which occupy the minds of those who survived.

The film "We Were Soldiers," which is about the U.S.'s early involvement in Vietnam, offers images of what I have come to see as the ultimate costs of war--the delivery of telegrams to the wives of men who were killed in the battle. The soldiers who died paid a heavy price, but so did their families, loved ones and friends who had to live out their lives with only the memory of their lost ones.

This Memorial Day I will keep in my thoughts all those who are today still paying the price for war: lives traumatized, the "vacant chair," the parent gone forever. Herman Wouk wrote, "Th beginning of the end of War lies in Remembrance." When we forget the true price of war, we will continue to fight wars.

Men doing what?

Admittedly, I have gone way out of my way the past 40+ years to avoid locker rooms, but my recent foray into water aerobic exercise has caused me to become re-acquainted with those bastions of maleness. What has caught my attention is the tendency of men, even the 20-somethings, to grunt and groan as they dress and undress, towel or eliminate bodily waste.

Is the Freeport YMCA an enclave for overly vociferous males who announce every exertion with what Shakespeare calls "windy suppuration of forced breath," or am I too long away from male company in such surroundings? Do women vocalize their efforts with such in their locker rooms?

I find it all so odd, so very odd.