So This Is Christmas

So this is Christmas, and what have you done?  ---John Lennon

This moment, right now, is the best part of Christmas Day.  My wife and I have had our coffee together, and she has retreated to the shower. The Christmas tree is lit, and has held onto its needles well enough to still look half decent.  Our “children,” who by virtue of age hardly qualify as such anymore, haven’t yet arisen from their beds to pierce the stillness with their bickering.    

Let me say up front that we are very, very fortunate, in many ways; and for that I am thankful.  Yet, 2012 has been a dog of a year, for so many reasons.  It seems we have entered a period of universal discontent.  It’s a bit of a paradox: by many external measures, at the national level, “things” are getting better: unemployment is ticking downward, and the economy is recovering, albeit painfully slowly.  So what explains the malaise that seems to afflict nearly everyone I know?

I am old enough to remember the Vietnam War, or more accurately, the tail end of it. It seemed then that our country was painfully divided.  We were hawks or doves.  In the 1972 election, we supported Nixon, unless we were from Massachusetts, in which case we supported McGovern {ahem… sorry, I couldn’t resist; disclosure: I was not, then, “from” Massachusetts, nor was I old enough to vote.}

I came of age in the 1970s, which by most traditional measures were terrible years.  There was the Watergate scandal, which forever changed the degree to which we were inclined to trust our government leaders. On the economic front, we had “stagflation” – persistently high inflation and unemployment, a terrible combination. There was the 1973 OPEC oil embargo, which led directly to the 1974 stock market crash.  The stock market went virtually nowhere for a decade. 

We faced gasoline rationing, with lines that snaked around city blocks. We groused, but waited in those lines for hours nonetheless, so that we could continue driving our behemoth Chevys and Fords, which in those early days of EPA-mandated catalytic converters, all smelled like rotten eggs.

There was disco.  There was cocaine.  There were Qiana shirts.  There was the Pina Colada Song.  There was no MTV.  There were no laptops, or iPods, or cellphones.  I believe I’ve made my point (OK, except for the cellphones, maybe) - the seventies sucked.

And yet, “misery index” notwithstanding, we did not turn against ourselves.  Despite our many differences, about which we were quite vocal at times, there was an unspoken camaraderie of sorts – we were all in it together.  We maintained, more or less, our national sense of humor.  We poked fun at ourselves with TV shows like Norman Lear’s All in the Family. 

Fast-forward to 2012.  What has become of us?  We have just witnessed one of the most divisive presidential elections in recent memory. We are a nation bitterly divided.  Battle lines have been drawn along countless dimensions.  Republicans vs. Democrats.  Red States vs. Blue States.  Pro-Choice vs. Pro-Life.  Pro- vs. Anti- gun control.  Pro- vs. Anti-gay marriage.  Pro- vs. Anti-immigration reform.  Pro- vs. Anti-Keystone oil pipeline.   Belief vs. disbelief that global warming is real.  On, and on, and on, ad nauseum.

As I write this, we stand at the precipice of a so-called “fiscal cliff” that is likely more symbolic than it is consequential.  It displays, in sharp relief, the complete and utter breakdown of civil discourse in our politics.  The so-called “Super-Committee” failed miserably in its mission to resolve this economic quandary last year, and odds are good that we’ll soon see “Kick the Can 2.0” from our alleged leaders.

To quote an individual who, by virtue of his personal actions throughout most of his life, deserves to be relegated to the dustbin of history rather than immortalized by the likes of me, but for the fact that this is such a great line – I refer to the late Rodney King – “Can we all get along?”

Apparently not.

And so this is Christmas.  Where’s the Red Baron when you need him?  How do we move forward, now that the vitriol has become so very personal?  How do we get back to a place where, like Archie and Meathead, we manage to tolerate each other, recognizing that we have something, anything, in common?  And what would that thing, that common ground, look like?

Let’s begin by stating the obvious: we are all human.  We eat, breathe, struggle, love, die.  We nurture our beliefs, varied though they may be.  We make choices, good and bad.  We have dreams, of which some get shattered, some we abandon, some we can no longer recall, and some, perhaps, are realized.  We experience pain and sadness, illness and grief.  If we are lucky, in the sweetest of moments, we experience great joy.  We reflect and learn from all of this, or not.

I was awakened this Christmas morning by my wife, asking me to carry our beloved, elderly dog down the stairs.  Her hind legs are giving out, and on bad days she can’t do the stairs anymore.  I know, in my gut, that we will soon have a very painful choice to make. 

Later this week, we will drop our dogs off at a kennel, and drive a couple of hundred miles to visit family, including my 90 year old mother.  Though blessed with longevity, she, too, struggles against the limitations of a failing body.  Our visits are typically bittersweet, at once joyful and painful.  I’m acutely aware that any given visit may be our last.

The uncertainty is humbling.  We are reminded, daily, in a thousand small ways, of the fragility of life.  The media render this message unavoidable; our loved ones drive it home.

And so it is, I imagine, for everyone, in one way or another.  Each of us faces our own challenges, our own demons, our own motivators and calls to action.  Our biases and world-views take shape at a tender age, and are forged in the crucible of our life experiences.  None of this is new; it has always been thus. 

So what is it about this place and time that has rendered us all so rigid in our beliefs?  Why is 2012 so very different from, say, 1975?  I have theories, but this blog post has already grown way too long, so they’ll wait for another day.

I will instead offer this: We need to chill out.  All of us.  And what better time to start down a path of “Goodwill Toward Men (read: people)” than Christmas day?
 
Let’s take a moment, each of us, to think about our friend, our neighbor, our family member, our ‘frenemy’ – as a fellow human being, deserving of our respect and our kindness.  I’ll start.
 
Since starting this humble little ‘blog about nothing’ a few months ago, I’ve been gratified – and surprised – by the responses and kind comments I’ve received from readers.  I wish each of you well.  We may disagree, but that does not matter. Not to me, anyway.  More than anything, I wish for you and your loved ones: peace.

Jerry  

The Tipping Point

Another mass shooting, and once again tongues are wagging.  The massacre in Newtown is especially poignant because it involved the murder of innocent children.  There are tears, including from our president, as there should be.  It is a time to grieve.

But it is also a time to act.

Nuts With Guns have been holding this country hostage for far too long.  We have become inured to the idea of mass shootings, as though they are an unavoidable fact of life.  But they are avoidable.  Where is the outrage?

What is, unfortunately, an unavoidable fact of life is the tyranny of the minority, or more accurately, the tyranny of the very few, in which a tiny fraction of a given population ruins things for everyone else.

The world changed on 9/11.  As a society, we were shocked into action on many fronts. We were in reaction mode, collectively trying to figure out how to function in a world where our old assumptions no longer worked.  Today, the TSA certainly has its own issues; but for the most part people have come to accept that air travel involves what would have seemed an egregious invasion of privacy and personal space back in 2000.  We have, grudgingly or not, forfeited a fair number of what used to be our rights, and lowered our quality-of-life expectations just a bit, in order to harden the target. That the actions of a small number of terrorists have led us to this place is rather astounding; but this is our reality now.  Sad but true.

As 9/11 was to air travel, Newtown is to firearms.  If not, it should be.  Our old assumptions are no longer working.  We need to figure out how to function in this new reality.  We have reached, and passed, the tipping point.

The coming months will certainly see an animated debate about the merits of gun control laws.  The standard arguments on both sides of this issue (guns don’t kill people, people do; the second amendment refers to a militia, not to individuals; pry it from my cold, dead hands) are so familiar, so shopworn that I need not recount them here.  Everyone has heard them all. The battle lines have already formed.

I am a believer in the merits of small (read: non-intrusive) government.  I believe we have too many laws on the books already.  My gut reaction to any given proposal involving a freedom-restricting law is negative.  I believe we are an extensively over-regulated and over-policed society. So my evolving belief in the need for much stricter gun laws goes completely against my gut.  But it is my belief nonetheless.

I am a car enthusiast.  One might not guess that, based on the makeup of my current fleet, but trust me - I drive a Honda Civic because that is what I can afford.  In my mind’s eye it’s a 3-series.  I enjoy driving.  My friend, Jack, and I haven’t missed the annual New England Auto Show for as long as I can recall. 

I’ve held a driver’s license for 36 years. I commute 90 miles to and from work, every day.  I’ve probably owned a couple of dozen vehicles. In all that time, across all those miles, I have never been involved in an auto accident.  Not one.  Not even a fender-bender.  Yes, some of that is luck; but not all of it. I recognize my driving privilege for what it is, and I take it seriously. 

Every time I hear yet another report of an elderly driver crashing through a plate glass window, I cringe; because I know what’s coming.  There has been a burgeoning epidemic of car crashes involving elderly drivers, fueled by the giant, aging baby-boomer demographic, of which I am a part.  The calls have begun for stricter licensing requirements for older drivers.  The chorus is just getting started; the crescendo is coming. 

The AARP is fighting this notion, on the basis that it constitutes age discrimination.  In the long run, the AARP and the oldies will lose.  By the time I’m 70 years old, I will probably be required to demonstrate my agility on a freakin’ balance beam once a month in order to hold onto my license.  And odds are, at 70, I will still be a safer driver than most, of any age.  It’s not fair.  The idea of it galls me.  But it’s coming.  It’s inevitable, and I know it.

My friends who are gun enthusiasts need to develop a similar understanding.  They may be “responsible gun owners” to a person, but the tyranny of the few is wrecking it for them.  They may have the second amendment (or their particular interpretation of it) on their side, and the NRA may have their back, but the tide of public opinion is turning, and in the long run, they will lose.

It’s not fair.  I get it.  I empathize, to a degree.  But we cannot continue down this path of carnage.  Better the gun lobby should accept the inevitable now, and allow countless innocent lives to be spared by not dragging the fight out over many years. 

This is your Christmas/Holiday Card

Dear friends, relatives, acquaintances, loved ones, total strangers, and people I used to know:

It’s that time of year again, and I’m [thinking of you, wondering how you’ve been, trying to remember who you are, wondering who will show up and read this.]  We’ve had a [trying, amazing, expensive, humbling, brilliant, near-suicidally boring] year.  It’s amazing how time flies.

Each year at this time, we engage in familiar holiday traditions [/rituals /obsessions /mind-numbing tasks.]  It all begins with our traditional Thanksgiving dinner, at which every detail is an exact replica of Thanksgiving dinners past, from our last-minute inability to find the matching crystal salt and pepper shakers [and our discovery anew that the latter is broken, upon which we return it to the cabinet shelf and pull out the little rectangular metal McCormick’s pepper can for placement on the holiday table] to the dinner table conversation.

And by “dinner table conversation,” I don’t mean that we generally tend to discuss similar topics from year to year; I mean that we have the exact same conversation, word for word, syllable by syllable, as last year [and the year before that, and the year before that…]  An elderly family member kicks it all off upon entering our front door, with the words “What time are we going home?”  Yes, the Gould family Thanksgiving dinner is a scene from “Groundhog Day.”

And that’s just the beginning.

When we moved to this semi-rural town many years ago, our children were very young.  We thought it was a cool idea to go to one of the several Christmas Tree Farms in town, and “cut our own.”  There’s a ritual associated with this.  One does not just arrive at the farm wielding a chainsaw, and go for it.  It’s much more civilized than that.  Rather, while still digesting that wonderful Thanksgiving dinner, we'd visit the Tree Farm to select the family tree, and “tag” it, essentially reserving it.  A couple of weeks later, closer to Christmas, we'd return to the farm to claim our tagged tree, and the fine gentleman who runs the place would drive his rusting Dodge pickup truck, with fuzzy reindeer antlers affixed to the side-view mirrors, through the muck (it’s always raining on tree pick-up day – that’s part of the tradition) to the tree site, fell it with his buzz-saw, plop it into the truck and bring it to the front “office” [a tiny outbuilding resembling a sugar shack, complete with pot-bellied stove ablaze] where we'd pay and go happily on our way.  The kids and dogs always came along, and seemed to enjoy it. How wonderful to live in such bucolic surroundings, where such a quaint New England tradition still lives on.

But… as years have passed, the experience has become less and less enjoyable.  For one thing, tree-tagging has evolved into a blood sport.  The day after Thanksgiving?  Fuhgeddaboutit…  all the “good” trees have been claimed by then.  Not only claimed, but decorated on-site, so ornately as to appear to have been visited by Martha Stewart herself (which I understand would have been physically impossible, given that she had taken up residence in the Pokey during much of the time period in question.)  And there were we, showing up a month late and a dollar short, with nothing more than our empty plastic gallon milk container, a Sharpie, and a roll of duct tape to make “our” tree easily identifiable within the forest. 

Twenty years ago, that approach was de rigueur…  but, as with everything else in our little slice of exurban paradise, the stakes have been continually raised.  To wit, our friendly proprietor, Dodge pickup-guy, has gradually increased the price of a freshly-cut tree at a steady pace – roughly equivalent to the pace at which houses out here seem to sprout additional rooms and wings and such.  Last year, my wife and I - our children having long since lost all interest in participating - found ourselves trudging through the mud with our elderly dogs, minds still addled and bellies still swollen from our turkey-day festivities, in search of a tree – ANY tree that had more stage presence than the object of Linus’ affection in “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”  We completed the ritual, but I think we both sensed a turning point.  This whole thing was just not worth it anymore.  

This year, we’ve made the bold decision to switch things up.  Change does not come easily in this household, in case you haven’t inferred the obvious quite yet.  Yesterday, we went to a familiar big-box store and purchased a cheap, already-cut Christmas tree.  I’m aware that this thing was most likely severed from its life source back in July, trucked down from some forlorn, deforested corner of Nova Scotia on a flatbed tandem trailer with about 5,000 of its brethren, and that it will likely spill its remaining needles by Wednesday.  I don’t care.  It was cheap, and it smells good.  I’m actually quite proud that we’ve deferred the ultimate concession to practicality – buying an artificial tree – a bit longer.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been the greeting card writer in this household.  Each year during the holiday season, I sit amidst several boxes of cards, list at hand, trying to come up with something unique and appropriate for each person or family with whom we exchange cards.  For the past several years, I’ve experienced an increasing sense of [futility, redundancy, silliness] as I’ve gone through the motions of printing address labels, scribbling vapid content, and affixing stamps to snail-mail greetings meant for people with whom I interact much more frequently through social media and/or e-mail.  Not that any of this has ever been insincere; it has just grown to seem so… pointless.  So, I set about exploring alternatives.  There are “e-card” sites these days, at which one can find, well, e-cards; most of these seem to involve some sort of multimedia presentation of holiday cheer – music, blinking lights, dancing reindeer; I developed a headache after viewing the first three or four.  Nah.  Not for me.  I have decided, dear reader, to go commando.  And so:

If you are still reading this, you are among the faithful.  I hope you will understand why we’ve decided to go electronic with our conveyance of holiday cheer.  We’re making exceptions, of course, for the elderly [or ultra-sensitive or long-lost-and-possibly-dead] relatives for whom we have no e-mail address or other electronic means of contact.  We could point out how “green” we’re being, but that would be a tad hypocritical for people who just, once again, murdered a Douglas Fir to display in our family room (though technically, I think we may get more 'green cred' this year than in the past, seeing as how the tree was already on the flatbed long before our decision to purchase… but I digress.)

So, from our home to yours, we wish you and your loved ones a very Merry Christmas [/Happy Hanukkah / Kwanzaa / Festivus / Holiday / Weekend] and all the best in the coming year.

With love,

The Gould Family

The Fever

“You’ve got to be in it to win it!”
 

I was leaving the office for the day.  That was my colleague’s parting shot.  On the table was a potential $500 million (and growing) Powerball payout.  “Get your ticket, man!”  This, from someone whose judgment I trust, most of the time.  I actually paused and thought about it.  Score one for peer pressure.  And, I suppose {ahem} for greed.

By the time I got to my car, the thought had vanished.  I wasn’t going to be “in it.”  I was going to hold onto my two bucks.

One in 176 million.  Those were the odds.  I heard some statistics wonk on the radio equate that to the likelihood of having twenty-two grandchildren who are all female.  According to CNN, the odds of dying from a lightning strike are one in three million.  Odds of being struck by lightning in the course of an 80 year lifetime, one in 10,000.
 
I’m a risk-averse guy.  I brush and floss.  I brush WITH floss.  I wear my seatbelt at all times.  I’m wearing it right now, sitting at my desk.  Because you never know.

Powerball?  Not so much.

So I drove home, with that familiar, warm feeling of mild superiority enveloping my spirit.  I was wise.  I was thrifty.  I was prudent.  I used my turn signals.

Over dinner, my wife told me that she’d entered her workplace Powerball pool.  Once again, that tiny greed-voice whispered: maybe I was “in it” after all!  There was a nanosecond of something that felt a little like relief.  Then my True Self reappeared, with its litany of questions: how many others were in the pool (as though splitting 500 million dollars with a handful of elementary school teachers was really going to create a hardship?)  Who collected the money, and can we trust that person?  Interesting side note there, the individual who actually did collect the money was the brother of a notorious murderer {true story…  curiously, this is the only detail of this blog post that is not tongue-in-cheek; go figure.} 
 
In the end, none of it mattered.  The next day, we didn’t get to tell anyone to shove anything, anywhere.  Probably just as well; just imagine the taxes.       

 

 

 

Dear Old Dad

 

                                                               Arthur W. Gould, 1900-1973

I was working in temporary office quarters, in a swanky high-rise office building in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood.  It was early; I was, as is still my custom, among the first to arrive at the office.  The elevator doors closed.  I glanced up and noticed a man in a suit, staring at me.  I blinked.  He blinked.  I’d seen this guy before, but where?

I snapped back into reality.  I was alone in the elevator.  The man staring back at me was my own reflection in the mirror-surfaced elevator door.  Of course, I’d known this all along.  But there had been something unsettling about my split-second inner reaction as the doors closed and I caught the visual.  It was as though, in that fragmentary moment, I was seeing someone else.   

I connected the dots that evening at home, when I saw the framed photograph on my dresser: a very old, black-and-white, studio portrait of a businessman in a suit.  My father, at about age forty – roughly the same age as I was. 

I’d known my father only as a much older man.  He had become a father very late in life.  I was his only child.  We had a close, albeit too brief, relationship.  He taught me the fundamentals – knowing right from wrong, being honest above all else.  The life lessons I’d learned from Dad were conveyed less often by words than by the example he set.  His was a high bar to clear.

Although he didn’t achieve extraordinary wealth or fame, my father led a remarkable life – one that would be literally impossible to recreate in modern times.  He was of a different era.  He was, as are we all, a creature of his times. 

I am thinking of my father because this week marks what would have been his 112^th birthday.  That’s not a typo – my father was born at the turn of the 20^th century, November 21^st, 1900.  President William McKinley was in office.  Before my father’s first birthday, McKinley would be assassinated and his Vice-President, Teddy Roosevelt, would assume the presidency. 

As a young boy, Dad lived on a farm.  There was no electricity, no running water.  He had a pet goat (I have a picture of this, somewhere.)  His formal education ended after the eighth grade.  These were not markers of a poverty-stricken background; they were simply facts of life, at that time, in that place.

Following in my grandfather’s footsteps, Dad went off to work on the railroad.  It was a “good job.”  He started at the bottom, as a “fireman,” shoveling coal into the giant steam engines.  Over time, he worked his way up to conductor – walking the aisles of the passenger cars, checking tickets.  There he came to know a regular passenger named Mr. Murphy – the inventor of the “Murphy Bed,” the popularity of which had made him quite wealthy.  Mr. Murphy took a liking to the young man.  Somehow, through their conversations, he convinced him that there were greater opportunities, and more money to be made in construction.  Dad took a correspondence course to learn the basics of carpentry, and became a carpenter.   

Although he would never have used these words, Dad “reinvented himself,” in today’s parlance, several times throughout his life.  He spent many years working in the building trades, ultimately as a self-employed general contractor.  Although it’s a detail lost to history, I can identify several of “his” houses that still dot the landscape in North Jersey. 

My father witnessed the rise of the automobile and the telephone, two world wars, and the Great Depression.  At the time he sat for the photograph on my bureau, he was married, soon to be divorced, the owner of a small business  - a coal and lumber company that bore his name.  In the years that followed, he became a real estate investor and banker.  He indulged his lifelong love of horses and boats.  At one point, he acquired a sizable cabin cruiser by negotiating it into a real estate deal (it had belonged to the seller.)  He remarried and, at 59, became a father. 

 When I was a very young child, we moved into Dad’s dream house.  He had designed it, and oversaw its construction.  It was a “gentleman’s farm” in what was then a rural area of Orange County, New York.  We had acreage, a barn, a corral and a track.  There were horses for riding, and Shetland ponies as pets.  Both of my parents were at home most of the time.  It was an idyllic lifestyle, of sorts, but sadly, it was not to last.

The symptoms were sporadic, strange, and progressively worse.  There was no conventional diagnosis.  Exploratory spinal surgery was recommended.  A well-renowned New York City neurosurgeon performed the operation.  It failed, massively.  Dad returned home, paralyzed from the waist down, in excruciating, unrelenting pain. 

The seven years that followed were a poor substitute for a childhood, but during my father’s remaining time on this earth, he taught me more than many people learn in a lifetime:  determination, humility, resilience, pride.  Counter to what the doctors had predicted, he eventually did walk again, albeit with two canes, slowly, and always in great pain.  Through sheer force of will, he re-established something approaching a normal life.  Only we, his family, were privy to his daily struggle with pain and ongoing medical complications. In my eyes, his most significant legacy was this: he never complained.  Even on days when his body betrayed him most, he managed a smile.     

The farm boy with the eighth grade education had, by the end of his life, been named Chairman of the Board of Directors of a bank.  This is the man I remember – intelligent and well spoken, with never a hint of arrogance or self-pity.  I’ve spent my life in the shadow of his achievements.  When I was a younger man, full of piss and vinegar, I believed that one day I would emerge from that void.  But the days have grown short, and I now realize that that will not happen.  He was the better man.  I am left to honor his memory with mere words; and so, I shall.

Happy birthday, Dad.  And thanks.

Dear Mr. President

Dear Mr. President,

Congratulations on winning a second term in office.  I hope you enjoyed your night of celebration, and I’m glad to see you getting back to work today.  I hope the rest of the country does the same. 

I voted for you enthusiastically in 2008 and, like many others, I’ve suffered a major case of Obama Buyers’ Remorse since you took office.  Yesterday, after having seriously considered not voting at all (save for my local senate race and ballot questions,) in the end I cast my vote for you.  But my vote this time represented a very different level of endorsement than that of 2008.  Honestly, it was closer to a “hold my nose and pull the lever” vote.  You’ve done a lot of good things in the past four years, but you’ve also failed miserably to live up to the promise of “hope and change” that swept you into office to begin with.  Your second term does not arrive with an overwhelming majority nor a clear mandate; in reality, I think there are lots of people like me who went to the polls specifically to vote against Romney, versus voting for you.

Tonight, Mr. President, I am viewing you much like a recalcitrant teenaged son, who has gotten into some kind of trouble.  He’s my kid; I love him, so I’ve bailed him out, but now we’re in the car, riding home, and he’s going to get a tongue-lashing.

 You know you’ve screwed up on the economy.  I don’t need to tell you that; plenty of others already have.  You need to fix it.  Spending more of my money does not constitute fixing it.  Yes, you inherited a mess from George W. Bush.  Absolutely.   And, as Bill Clinton has pointed out, no president would have been able to “fix” the economy within four years.  I get it.  But your multi-stimulus-program, wealth-redistribution spending spree is yours and yours alone.  Those are (rather, were) my dollars, dammit!  If I had wanted to invest them in some doomed-to-bankruptcy “green energy” initiative, I’d have done so without your help. 

You need to address the crisis that is our national debt.  Oh, I know, those nasty Republicans have blocked your efforts with their “no tax increases” stance.  Yes, there’s plenty of blame to lay on them as well.  If I see them in the sandbox doing that to you again, I’m going to knock their heads together.  But you know what?  They have a point.  They – and you – just need to back off from your polarized, ideological positions, and learn to play nice in that sandbox.  I agree with your stated position that we need to aim for a “balanced approach” to fixing the economy.  But a “balanced approach” is not 90% tax hikes and 10% spending cuts.  And let’s keep in mind that the accelerated pace of spending that you have put in motion needs to be throttled back before we even start talking about a “balanced approach.” You need to take aim at those way-out-of-control entitlements, and especially entitlements that are enjoyed by people with no earthly, justifiable right to be “entitled” to anything. 

You need to finish what you’ve started, and get the rest of our troops back home from places they never should have been, and out of harm’s way.  Kudos to you for hunting down Bin Laden, and for the progress you’ve made toward withdrawal, but you should have finished long ago.  Someone will almost assuredly die in service to our country in some god-forsaken middle eastern country that doesn’t want us there to begin with, whether tomorrow, next week, or next month; and there’s just no excuse for that.  Bring them home now.

 You need to refine, repackage, and sell Obamacare.  Seldom have I seen such a fundamentally good idea be so badly miscommunicated and thus so wildly unpopular.  You need to simplify the Affordable Care Act.  Contrary to Mitt Romney’s wildly exaggerated claim that it runs to 2400 pages, it does encompass 906 (not that I claim to have read it.)  It doesn’t need to be that complex.  You need to be able to explain to people that insurance is, pure and simple, a risk sharing mechanism.  The more broadly you spread the risk, the more affordable the insurance becomes.  This is true for any property, casualty, life, or health insurance program, and I speak with some authority here, having spent 30 years in the insurance industry.  Mandatory insurance is not Socialism.  It is not unconstitutional.  Nobody balks at the notion of mandatory automobile liability insurance for individuals, or Workers’ Compensation insurance for businesses.  Those are understood.  Obamacare, for whatever reason, is not.  You need to fix that, or you’ll be wasting time, energy, and (my) money defending / refining / arguing its finer points for the next four years.

You need to deal with immigration.  Not band-aid, finger-in-the-dyke “Dream Act” amnesty measures, but reasoned, rational, broad-based, and enforceable immigration reform.  You need to understand that many Americans are offended by the notion that we extend benefits, driving privileges, public education, all manner of taxpayer-funded services to people who have no right whatsoever to be in this country.  We cannot afford to continue down that path.  I already hear the howls of protest: “But we’re a nation of immigrants; my {father/grandmother/whatever} came here from {wherever}. ”  True.  Mine did too.  But they did so without benefit of handouts.  They learned our language.  They worked like dogs at any job they could find.  They obtained “sponsors.”  They followed the rules of the times.  They studied for the exam and became citizens.  They were responsible.  They contributed.  “But the rules are unreasonable.”  Ah, now there’s a valid argument.  They absolutely are.  Country-specific waiting lists are out of control.  The whole crazy-quilt system of visas, green cards, “diversity lotteries” and what-have-you is broken.  We lack a coherent immigration policy.  THAT is the problem to be solved.  You’re up.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you need to cease and desist from your divisive, “us vs. them” class rhetoric.   It’s extraordinarily ironic that a president who claims to be a “uniter, not a divider” has, in four years, cleaved a chasm between the self-perceived “haves” and “have-nots” in our society.  Your unrelenting rhetoric about “millionaires paying their share” has drawn battle lines between groups of people who, most likely, would otherwise not have even regarded themselves as groups.  Look in the mirror – you’ll see a millionaire staring back.  You (as well as Mr. Romney, and all of your followers and handlers) have played fast and loose with terminology.  Who, exactly, is the “middle class” in your world view?  Whoever they (we) are, they are going to be screwed if you and your Republican colleagues in the legislative branch fail to reach an actionable compromise to address the looming “fiscal cliff.”

Your work is cut out for you, Mr. President.  You have the intellect, the character, and the compassion to get the job done.  You need to harness all of these, put aside your ego, and work with others – any and all others who can help you – to make that happen.  I believe the country is ready to rally behind you. 

I wish you the best of luck.

Sandy

“This is like déjà vu all over again” --- Yogi Berra

It’s Friday evening.  We are approaching the end of what has felt like the Week From Hell.  Hurricane Sandy has cut a swath through our lives.  As I write this, I’m watching still more footage of the devastation.  ‘Dateline’ is reporting from Staten Island.  Lives have been destroyed – literally, ended; as well as figuratively, cut to the quick, left with nothing.  I watch this from the comfort of my home in New England.  Save for a few moments without electricity earlier this week, we have been spared.  For this I am grateful, and feeling somehow guilty.

I feel guilty because I spent much of this week focused on my own, personal challenges, unrelated to the hurricane.  Absent context, I’d be writing about those.  It really was a rough week.  But there is, in fact, a much larger context.  Earlier this evening, Mayor Bloomberg made the wise decision to cancel the New York City Marathon, in deference to the larger context of death, destruction, and far greater need for scarce city resources.  I will follow his lead.

I am a Jersey Kid, born and bred.  I say that with pride.  The first of my ancestors to settle in New Jersey arrived in the late 1600s. There is a street in my hometown named after my mother.  The home in which I spent most of my childhood had a front porch from which one could see the city skyline, with the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center as prominent landmarks.  Although I’ve spent my entire adult life living elsewhere, New Jersey will always, on some level, be home.  So, while we have all watched in horror this week as news reports have shown us the flooded homes, the shredded boardwalks, the darkened city skyline, I feel like I’ve been punched in the gut.  Or at least punched in the gut just a little harder than my Massachusetts and New Hampshire friends and neighbors who have no connections to the area. 

The video footage of the Jersey Shore devastation was especially hard to watch.  So many wonderful memories were made there.  It’s where I learned to swim.  It’s where I proposed to my wife (a native Bostonian.)  It’s one of a handful of places I’ve daydreamed of moving to in retirement someday – no slight intended to my beloved Cape Cod, also on the Short List.

At some point this week, it occurred to me that I’d seen this film before.  Or maybe it was an earlier director’s cut.  The television is still on, and I am still writing.  Now the news is telling me that Governor Christie has announced mandatory gas rationing, using an “odd /even license plate number” approach.  It is 1974.  The country is reeling from the “Arab Oil Embargo.”  I’ve seen this before.

Earlier this evening, there was a benefit concert for Sandy victims.  Bruce Springsteen, Jon Bon Jovi, Billy Joel and others performed amidst photos of the hurricane devastation and pleas for donations.  It is 1985.  The “We Are The World” benefit concert, featuring the likes of Michael Jackson, Ray Charles, Cyndi Lauper, and yes, Bruce Springsteen AND Billy Joel take the stage.  I’ve seen this before.

My most poignant déjà vu moment came midweek, when President Obama toured New Jersey with Governor Christie.  The two men put aside their vast political differences and joined forces to get help to the hurricane victims, stat.  In that moment, it was clear to me, and, I think, clear to all but the most cynical of political animals that their motives were sincere, their cooperation genuine.  The political climate in our nation has been so toxic for so long that the contrast was striking. 

I had seen us all pull together at least once before, on September 11^th, 2001.  On that most horrible of days, and for a while afterward, our differences didn’t matter.  There were no racial or class differences.  There were no political parties.  There was only us, all of us, Americans, with tiny American flags duct-taped to our car radio antennas. 

I do not romanticize that dark chapter in our history.  It was without question the single most traumatic event I can remember.  Yet somehow, from the ashes of an absolute disaster, we came together.  We were united.  I caught a glimpse, a glimmer of that unity this week.  It’s still there, in the deep recesses of our collective consciousness.  Let’s try and find it again.  The past decade has seen more than its share of mean-spirited and ultimately pointless animosity.  We’ll never get to “Kumbaya” on issues that divide us.  But we can do better than we have in the recent past.  We proved it to each other this week, whether we realized it or not.

To the people of New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and all of the other places still experiencing the pain of Hurricane Sandy, Godspeed. 

     

Calm Before the Storm

Hurricane Sandy is coming.  It’s going to be big, and destructive.  This much we know.  The details, as yet, are much less clear. 

The news mavens, always eager to dispense advice, said “prepare.”  Right.  So, prepare we have.  Window screens have been taken down, bathtub filled, gutters cleared of leaves, patio furniture brought inside, potential projectiles removed to the best of our ability. 

We really need to buy a generator.  We’ve been saying this for nearly twenty years – ever since building this house in a neighborhood with underground utilities, which we thought would be our salvation from ever enduring another blackout.  We could not have been more wrong.  The underground wires, you see, are “fed” by a network of above-ground supply wires.  A butterfly flaps its wings five miles to our west, and we go dark.  It's worse here than anywhere else I've lived.  Best laid plans.

We’ve been known to check into a hotel, a few miles closer to civilization, during protracted blackouts caused by winter storms.  That’s been our backup plan, as well as our rationale for not shelling out for an expensive generator (our reasoning being that we can spend many nights at the SpringHill Suites for the cost of the sort of sizable, built-in generator that would be required to power our well pump, furnace, and other essential systems.) 

This time, our backup plan has failed.  Trivia question:  Do hotels have backup generators?  I made several calls today to find out.  Trick answer: For the most part, yes, but only to power the emergency lights in the hallways.  Hot water for a shower, not so much.  With Sandy’s projected  800 mile swath of destruction, I reckon we’d need to head for Canada to be assured of having power.  So we’ll be camping at home this time.

 To be clear, I’m not complaining.  Folks to our south are far worse off.  I’m very concerned about my family of origin, living in New Jersey – Ground Zero for Sandy.  My mother, living alone at 90 years old, is terrified.  I’m powerless to help her, other than by talking by phone to try and keep her calm.  My cousin, living in a flood plain, will surely be evacuated from her home, if she hasn’t already been.  The news reports from the Mid-Atlantic region are becoming increasingly intense.  The Atlantic City casinos are closed, evacuated.  The New York City subway system is shut down.  Public transit into and out of the city will be halted.  The word “unprecedented” is being tossed about with abandon.

Here in Massachusetts, our governor has declared a state of emergency, and closed all schools in the state.  At this moment, all seems eerily normal.  Our elderly dogs are restless.  They know that something’s up.  My daughter, racing to complete her online college applications while we still have internet access, is mildly freaking out.  Poor kid – the deadline isn’t till Thursday (11/1) but, tech-dependent society that we have become, one can no longer apply to college in analog mode.

As for me, now I wait.  It’s going to be a hell of a week.  To my friends and family reading this – stay safe, we’ll all make it through, one way or another.  I don’t know when my little world will go dark, but I’ve no doubt it will be soon; so I’ll see you on the other side.

The Bad Guy

A crime story has been dominating the news headlines this week.   As originally reported, a young woman had gone missing.  A search ensued, with the usual helicopter-and-ground-crew efforts to find the local university student.  Days passed with no results.  Then came the awful news: a man had been taken into custody, charged with her murder.

In an odd twist, the arrest came without the woman’s body having been discovered.  As I write this, the search for the body continues, in the treacherous waters at the mouth of a river.  Details of the case remain largely undisclosed; the authorities are playing this very close to the vest. 

The victim’s family has appeared on television, exhibiting tremendous grace in the face of overwhelming grief.  Her father spoke softly and eloquently at a candlelight vigil, honoring his daughter’s memory by thanking virtually everyone in the town for their support.  If I were in his shoes, I’d be unable to function, let alone speak before a crowd of friends and neighbors, with TV cameras rolling.  My heart cried for this man. 

Each of us views the world through our own lens.  What we see is shaped by our experiences and biases, and by our own uniquely arranged personality traits.  Our capacity to feel empathy for someone, for example, is determined in part by how closely we are able to identify with that person.  This was one of those situations, I’m sure, to which those of us who are parents can easily relate.  “Every parent’s worst nightmare,” hackneyed phrase though it may be, is spot-on here.

 I have since become aware of another parent’s nightmare: the suspect in this case is the son of an acquaintance of mine.  I don’t know this gentleman well, nor do I know his son at all; but I’ve known him casually for many years – a seemingly nice guy.  And because we have this connection, tenuous at best, I’ve found my mind wandering into territory that would normally be far out of bounds: I began thinking about the “parent’s nightmare” that he is experiencing.

The blog comments on the news sites are already piling up, calling for the death penalty and worse.  “Innocent until proven guilty” is a concept understood by all, but ignored by most when forming opinions about news stories of this nature.  And typically, I’m right there alongside the snap-judgment crowd; the facts seem obvious, fry the bastard.

This time things seem strangely different.  I know the guy’s father.  I know what it is to be a father.  This is not abstract to me.  I’m reminded of the farmer’s daughter who names the cow that she has chosen as her pet.   The cow is destined to be slaughtered.  One day Bessie will appear on the girl’s dinner plate, and that, somehow, makes things different.   Personal.   Uncomfortably real. 

My breakthrough realization here is that not one, but two families have been torn apart.  I’m not suggesting that we blur the very clear distinction between victim and perpetrator, nor that society should deal with this case differently from others.  I guess I’m just viewing it all through a different lens.

The Curse of Competence

“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”  ---Confucious

I’ve just returned from a three day weekend on Cape Cod.  Idyllic as that may sound, I am exhausted and sore from having spent the majority of that time sanding the wood shingle siding of our house.  Make no mistake, these were days spent working.

Faithful readers of this blog may recall that this began, a few weeks ago, as an exterior painting project.  That was then.  I had intended to start by “roughing up” the paint, preparing the surface for re-painting.  The previous owners of our house had, unfortunately, painted the cedar shakes a light shade of grey.  I say “unfortunately” because this is Cape Cod, where the prevailing architectural vernacular is the unpainted, weathered cedar shake.  ‘Round here, folks paint the trim and shutters, but leave the siding au naturale, the better to withstand the corrosive effects of salty air and wind-whipped storms.  When we bought the place, we had told ourselves that, from ten paces back, the light grey shingles could pass for “weathered.”  Over the course of time, the surface had deteriorated.  Ten paces became thirty.  The paint was peeling.  Those damned pilgrims had it right, after all.  Time to paint.

My first “summer job” as a teenager involved painting.  Specifically, painting motel rooms - in a seedy motel, located on a forlorn stretch of state highway, in New Jersey.  The owner of the motel, my boss, also happened to be our summertime next-door neighbor.  This made commuting convenient, as I was too young to drive.  Our deal was that I would paint every surface – ceiling, walls, alcove, bathroom – in as many rooms as I could complete, as quickly as possible, without spilling anything.  For this I earned $3 per hour, cash.

I became very good at painting motel rooms.  I developed a system.  It was a model of efficiency.  I reached a point where I was able to complete an entire room in one day.  That may not sound impressive, but it was all-inclusive, start to finish – moving furniture to the center of the room, laying down protective tarps, preparing the surfaces (which required copious amounts of Spic ‘n Span in those bathrooms,) one coat of primer, two of topcoat.  Everything cleaned up, brushes and rollers washed, grimy wall-mounted A/C unit left "on" to speed drying, the room back to rentable condition for the next day. 

By the end of the summer, I had become very good indeed at painting motel rooms.  And I promised myself I’d get a different job the following summer – something, anything other than painting.

Roughly a decade later, I bought my first house.  It was a “handyman’s special.”  That made me the handyman.  During the years I lived there, I frequently drew upon my latent skills as a painter, and expanded them to include hanging wallpaper (and very basic plumbing, carpentry, and electrical work also, but those will be subjects for future blog posts.)  By the time I moved again, I had single-handedly painted, papered, stained or varnished every inch of every surface, inside and outside of that house.  It looked great.  And I swore I’d never again pick up a paintbrush.

Suffice to say that this cycle repeated a few more times.  In each case, my mental calculus going in was along the lines of “damn, I can do that myself for MUCH less than a professional would charge.”  In each case, I was right.  And each time I completed a job, I promised myself I’d never do another.

Which brings me to present-day Cape Cod.

We had gotten bids on professional installation of new siding.  That would have looked great, and been so much easier; but for the prices quoted, I could instead have bought a new car.  In fairness, we had asked for new windows to be included in the mix; but still – it was serious sticker shock.  The math just wasn’t working for us.    

And so…

I pressed the electric sander very lightly against the first shingle.  The paint vaporized like chalk dust.  I was down to bare wood in no time.  Hmm.  I continued sanding.  Within a short time, I’d convinced myself that this would be not be a painting project after all – rather, I would sand the shakes bare, restoring them to something close to their original appearance (inasmuch as forty year old wood can be made to look as it did when new.) 

Not a painting project!  Sweet!  I’m not painting!  But it was a Pyrrhic victory.  What had seemed relatively easy at first became more complicated as the job progressed.  Cracked shingles, rusty nails, and multiple layers of near-impenetrably well-protected paint behind shutters all were impediments. And there’s still the trim, and those shutters in need of paint – work still to be done; but the end is in sight.

And I swear,  I’m never going to do this again.  Until next time.

Bang

"Happiness is a Warm Gun"  ---Lennon / McCartney


The young man had recently graduated from a prestigious private university.  He was biking across the country in this, his final summer before traveling to Russia, where he had planned to teach English as a Fulbright Scholar.  He made several stops at various waypoints along his route, staying with friends, soaking up the local culture.

It was a warm July night in Colorado. He and a friend decided to catch a movie.  It was one of those mundane decisions that, in the end, would forever change the course of his life.

James Holmes, 24, was in the audience that night.  Before the film ended, twelve people had died and 58 others were injured in what came to be known as the Aurora Massacre.

He was among the injured.  25 shotgun pellets were lodged in his face and neck. But Stephen Barton is a survivor.  His wounds still healing, he filmed a brief ‘public service announcement’ and launched a grassroots campaign to “demand a plan” to end illegal gun violence.  His video message and petition can be viewed here:  www.demandaplan.org.

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We have a problem with guns in this country.  Illegal guns are, of course, the biggest and most intractable problem.  They find their way into the hands of whack jobs.  They get the big headlines.  Waco (1993.)  Columbine (1999.)  Virginia Tech (2007.) The shooting of Gabby Giffords (2011.)  Aurora, The Empire State Building, The supermarket shooter.  All this year.  The trend is not good.

Then there are the accidental shootings, tragic in their own right.  Within the past week, there was the Connecticut man who killed his own son, mistaking him for an intruder, and the young man in Stoughton, Mass, who had just received his gun permit, and was showing his gun to his younger brother when it fired, killing him.

_______________________________________________________________________

 

“Take good care of your mother, son.”  It was a final goodbye.  The boy began to protest, but with that, the EMTs whisked the stretcher out of the house and into the ambulance. It was the last time the boy would see his father.

Hours passed. The boy crawled into bed in his parents’ room.  He wasn’t really sure why.  His mother returned, alone.  There was nothing she could do, she’d been told.  She accepted the ambulance driver’s kind offer of a ride back home from the city in the middle of the night, because the alternatives frightened her.

The inevitable phone call came. Tears flowed. The elderly aunt and the mother comforted each other.  The boy felt himself grow numb. His left arm reached out to the bedside table, the one beside the wall, out of sight of the others. He grasped the loaded gun. 

His father had spent the last part of his life as a paraplegic; he’d kept that gun at his bedside, thinking it might be the only way he could protect his family from an intruder. The boy had always known it was there. It had been drilled into his head for as long as he could remember, he was never to touch the gun.  And until this moment, he never had.

His mind raced.  At thirteen, he was overtaken by emotions that he could not handle. He knew that his mother was in agony, and that he could not help her. He couldn’t envision a future beyond that moment. Within a split second he had decided.  He would shoot his mother, then himself.  He would save them both from a life of never-ending grief.  His grip tightened. He closed his eyes.

Perhaps it was divine intervention.  More likely, it was simple cowardice.  The boy released his grasp on the gun. 

It really, truly could have gone either way.

This happened nearly forty years ago. The wounds of the moment eventually healed.  Lives went on.  The boy’s mother will go to her grave never knowing this story. 

Unless she reads his blog.