Ask Not

We are running out of time, and soon it will be too late. Al Gore’s ecological “tipping point” has an evil twin in Finance, and he is at our door. The U.S. must reduce its debt. Not think about it, just do it. I’m talking about virtually nuking the way we have lived and starting over.

We are in this mess because previous congresses and presidents lacked the political will to solve the problems. Doing so would have cost them re-election, most likely, but they would have served their country in the spirit they so earnestly proclaimed in their election campaigns. Democrats and Republicans share this responsibility equally. More importantly, so do we because we allowed it. It is we who must lead now, not our politicians.

There is only one approach that offers a realistic chance of getting the nation out of its fiscal quagmire: a war. A real, no-holds-barred, financially bloody, scorched-earth war against the political, economic and social sloth that has led us here. Here’s a possible war plan:

First, the children. Stop raising them “easy.” Don’t buy them everything they want. Make them earn it. Better still, make them save up for it. Don’t let them play more than one sport at a time. Make them learn music. Teach charity. Remove the TV from their bedrooms. Restrict their computers and cellphones. Make them read a book a week and write letters to their grandparents or cousins. Give them chores. Take them to church. Teach them how to cook, fight, shoot and ride. Teach them humility and manners. Be tough. Be loving. Be a parent.

Second, you. Lead by example. You and your kids save up for their college or they don’t go unless they win a scholarship. Want a new car? Buy it outright or keep and maintain the one you have. To hell with what your co-workers and the neighbors think. If they ask what’s up, explain that you’re a soldier at war to save our country, then recruit them.

Third, Washington. Outlaw lobbyists. End foreign aid. Make banks be banks and nothing more. Take the exotic out of Wall Street: stocks, bonds and commodities only. Give cheaters and frauds long, long jail time.

Fourth, the tax code. Nuke it and go to a flat tax. No write-offs, no deferreds, no loopholes, no exceptions.

Do at least these things – constitutional amendments as needed -- and maybe we can get our country back.

Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do to save it.

The Gift

As a young man, I enjoyed a nearly perfect sense of direction. Rain or shine, winter or summer, I could tell within ten degrees on a compass which direction I was facing. Not everyone my age had this gift. Its display was even met with envy at times. I wasn’t much good at anything else, so it was nice to be good at something.

The gods, however, award such gifts grudgingly. My internal compass began to fade in my 30s, and has long since shut down entirely. Built-in obsolescence, I suppose.

Without that factory-installed compass, I am lost. This is wholly unfair. Mature men need it more than young men, for the young are much more adept at faking it.

My wife has watched this erosion (and happily complained about it) for years. It used to be that I knew which way to turn and she didn’t. This was immensely satisfying. Men, you see, must be acutely aware of their surroundings at all times so as to pounce on any approaching threat.

Naturally, the angst of the missus grew inversely proportionate to my fading sense of direction. The worse it got, the more she dutifully pointed it out. Thanks, babe.

For awhile, I could blame cloudy skies or nighttime for obscuring the sun by which I navigated. That argument survived for about three days.

At length, one of my sons – acutely aware of the crisis – bought me one of those GPS things. Voila! I installed it at once, carefully licking the suction cup on the windshield mount and planting it, just so. It had a for-real compass built in! Screw the cloudy skies! Screw the dark of night! Problem solved!

The gods must have been amused by this. For sport, they inflicted near-record heat on Texas summers. The defenseless GPS began falling off the windshield, clanging right onto the steering column and scaring the crap out of me and the missus.

There are some things one absolutely should not attempt while driving, such as grabbing one’s crotch to protect the boys from incoming.

Only slightly less dangerous is driving while attempting to affix a GPS mount to the inside of a windshield. While steering with both knees to keep the hands free for the task. And at night. And (naturally), while trying to remember directions to an unfamiliar address which you expected to find easily because you had this GPS but which from this moment forward stands not for Global Position System but instead for ***-damned Piece of ****.

I wonder what we did with that old street map . . .

THE TEST

She stood outside the office building, trying to light her one cigarette of the day. She used to smoke a pack a day, but for the past three years she has been cutting down. "Almost there!" she said.

She was nervous, anxious and near tears. She said that she had just come out of her nursing exam and she wasn't sure that she passed. For three years she had read and studied hard and prepared for this day. The hours-long test was over, and in a few days she would know her fate. She would not be able to sleep until then.

So here she stood, trembling a bit but trying to hide it from the others trickling out the door and heading to their cars. She had been so nervous on this day that she asked a friend to drive her to the test site. Now, she waited for her ride to take her back the nearly one hundred miles to the small town where she lived and had studied and crammed for months and months.

She said that she's wanted to be a nurse for years. She couldn't recall when she decided that. She likes helping people, she said. It gives her great satisfaction to help ease another person's discomfort or pain. There's nothing like it, she smiled.

She worries most about the medications part of the rest. See, all candidates must answer at least 75 questions. The student can opt for more, up to two hundred and something, she said. The test-givers randomly assign a few in the class to submit to the whole test. She had opted for the whole battery, and she believes that she did okay except for the very last question. Now she worries. Maybe her whole future in medicine lies in that one, lousy test answer written on a piece of paper in a large room in a tall building in a big city.

She is among hundreds of thousands of nursing students attempting to enter a profession that is begging for qualified practitioners. This woman -- a single mother of three -- may someday tend to your mother or father, or maybe even to you, or your spouse.

If she passes today's exam.

Wish her well. Tell her will that it is an important calling that she has answered. Ask any doctor: a good RN is worth his or her weight in gold.

We need everyone to be really good at what he or she does, actually. We are Americans, after all.

We are family.

We are the American family.

Obama's Oil

That's the message being broadcast everywhere. It's the President's fault. Well, okay, he didn't actually cause the spill, but he hasn't done enough and quickly enough to fix it. Yeah, that's it.

"Why has the Bush Administration been so slow to intervene into what was from the first day obviously a major environmental crisis?"
--The Los Angeles Times
March 30, 1989
(six days after the Exxon Valdez disaster)

Back then, there was public debate about whether to allow oil and gas exploration in ANWR -- the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The Bush administration -- barely two months into its first term -- was for it, but the Exxon Valdez disaster killed the idea. The Obama administration recently proposed allowing it 50 miles off the East Coast. The BP disaster has now killed that idea, too.

The fact is: we Americans demand fossil fuels and oil companies meet that demand. Government is supposed to protect us from shoddy practices but it cannot. Whistle-blowers go unheard until there's a disaster (think Countrywide, undertrained pilots, ignored intelligence).

That's SOP unless and until we change it.

THE GREEN ROOM

Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden. –The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

It wasn’t a 30-yard fence, but a patio we had enclosed to create an additional room. Never mind that we never used the darned thing. For one thing, it’s ugly, with siding all ‘round, and emerald green indoor/outdoor carpeting laid by the previous owner. For another, we’re just not “outside” people: we don’t go camping, hiking, picnicking or any such thing. At most, once a year we drive to a remote spot to watch the 4th-of-July fireworks over downtown. We’re pasty-white indoor folk.

So there it was, an outdoor-indoor room that needed painting. I knew how to paint a wall, but it had been awhile. “Preparation,” a housepainter once told me, “is the thing. Get all your gear on-site, ready.” So I prepared exactly nothing. How hard can it be? I thought. Just paint the damned thing.

The wall that we created to enclose the room was made of fence wood, board-on-board. At the time, we thought it was a good choice. It was not. It soaked up the paint like a sponge. An hour into the task, I had completed one wall when the phone rang. A friend and I talked for half an hour. By then, the paint roller had stiffened a bit. *sigh*

And what’s that on the floor?? A big drop of paint that went unnoticed ‘til now. And another over there! Jeez.

Thus it went for the next three hours until I’d had enough. Clean-up took another 45 minutes because paint rollers hold a lot of paint.

Tonight I sit here, achy and hungry. My arms and shoulders are threatening legal action against my brain, and my jeans are sporting new designs that suspiciously resemble painted finger wipes.

Tomorrow, the remaining two walls.

Don’t say a word; two walls in one afternoon ain’t bad. But if you spot Huckleberry Finn, tell him I'd like a word with him.

BROKEN DOWN

I've been a Triple-A member for years, and until recently it has served me well. Mind you, I don't call upon them for anything but a tow or a boost. Twice a year at most, and the driver always gets a tip. Lately, though, the service has deteriorated. The drivers are universally courteous and professional. It's the folks in between the driver and me who have become the problem.

The process is simple enough. The call to the Roadside Assistance number gets you a customer service rep who takes your information, schedules the truck and gives you the driver's Estimated Time of Arrival. Once he's on the way, you get an automated call confirming (or slightly adjusting) that ETA. The driver arrives, does his job and -- in my case, at least -- always gets a tip. That's the way it's supposed to work.

Tonight, my car died right at the fast-food pick-up window. Three young men at the store hustled right out and pushed me to a safe area nearby. (Who says today's kids are going to hell in a hand basket?)

I called Triple-A's Houston headquarters and was promised a tow truck driver within 45 minutes. Houston always promises 45 minutes. Thirty minutes later comes the automated call, estimating the driver's ETA 20 minutes later than first promised. After a half-hour, I call. "Uh, I'll contact Dispatch, find out what the problem is and get back to you." Twenty minutes go by with no call-back, so I call again. "He's on his way and will be there in 30 minutes." Thirty-five minutes later I call again. "He's 8-10 minutes out," which proved true. The driver was courteous and professional, and he apologized: he's the only guy covering Plano, Allen, Frisco, Richardson and West Garland, and he's got 4 more calls after me. I've heard nearly-identical excuses the past two years. Tonight, this driver did his job well and got the tip. Houston is lucky that my car wasn't down a ditch in BFE tonight and that the weather was tolerable and that there happened to be a Starbucks within walking distance while I waited three hours for Triple-A's tow truck driver.

Footnote: The disabled car was our "nice car," which has about 100,000 miles on it. The car that my wife drove to the scene was our "everyday car," which has more than 150,000 miles on it and has been far less trouble.

THE BOOK

At around the time of Barack Obama's inauguration as President, Doris Kearns Goodwin was a guest on NBC's "Meet the Press." Since the new President had studied Abraham Lincoln, she was asked to compare the two. By my count, the presidential historian has written five books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning "No Ordinary Time," about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt's gallantry during World War II. She not only knows her stuff (duh!), but she also is wonderfully articulate.

On this occasion, Kearns Goodwin was asked about her 2006 treatise on Abraham Lincoln, "Team of Rivals." She described how Lincoln managed to pull together a first-term cabinet that included bitter political rivals, virtually all of whom grew to respect and love the rail-splitter. The suggestion of the interview was that perhaps Barack Obama would capitalize on the lessons he learned from Lincoln and meet with equal success.

Based on that interview, I went out and bought the book. For me, it was a heavy read:

Text: 749 pages, including the Introduction, photos, maps and illustrations
Epilogue: 4 pages
Acknowledgements: 2-1/2 pages
Notes: 121 pages of tiny print
Illustration credits: 1 page
Index: 33 pages

I plowed into the book head-on, soon realizing that this would take a while. So as I have done in the past, I removed the jacket and whenever leaving the house I took it with me and tossed it onto the back seat of the car. One never knows when opportunity arises: waiting at the car wash, the doctor's office, the barber shop and -- my favorite -- those weekends when my wife and I both read our books together. Except, she's a faster reader. Once we went to the library together. She checked out three books and I pulled two. She easily read her three that weekend and I barely finished my two. More about that weekend in another post.

One reason that my wife reads faster than I do is how I read. It must be hard-wired in my DNA, for I note sentence structure, voice, grammar, etc. If all is well at first, the read flows well. If not, I watch for things. Doris Kearns Goodwin reads very, very well.

Reading a good book is a treat. It's visiting with someone who has a tale to tell, yet whose only presence in the room is the story unfolding before your eyes. Years ago I signed up for one of those book clubs that send you a new book every few weeks and automatically hit your credit card. I was working 12-hour days then, which begs the question, "If you have no time to read, why buy books?" My answer was, "Well, I should be reading more and one of these days I'll get to it." After a couple of years, I cancelled my account and the books sat on the shelves of my library, staring at me.

My boys were young then and playing soccer. I'd go to practice with them, but found that I actually enjoyed solitude more than sitting in the bleachers and listening to other parents yell the darndest things at their kids, the coaches, the referees and occasionally each other. My boys weren't that good at soccer and didn't play much anyway, so one afternoon I grabbed one of those dusty books and took it with me to practice. They consented to me sitting in the car, reading.

I'd never heard of this particular author and had forgotten most of what I learned in school about the dawn of civiization. In brief, it was a wonderful book. It was about 325 pages covering the the dawn of man through the Early Renaissance. To me, the most striking attribute was the writing: crisp, thoughtful, wonderfully descriptive and -- well, informative. I so admired the writing that I have read it three times. Since then, I have nearly always been working on a book of some kind. Some, like "Team of Rivals," take time. Others go more quickly.

As I said, reading a good book is a treat for me. Occasionally, I'd leave the house without the book and be immediately disappointed. But there's always the weekend. Or an evening. Or a doctor's office. And nearby, the book.