A salute to the Military

Today is Memorial Day. I hugged my father good bye this morning as I left to return to Atlanta. He was so emotional about Memorial Day. His frail body shook as he cried about the people who served in the military and who have died or been injured as a result of their service. He asked me to remember them today.

When I was very young, Dad was in the Air Force and we were stationed in El Paso, Texas at Biggs Air Force Base. At that time Dad was part of a squadron of Tanker planes that refueled other planes in the air. I’m not sure about what happened, but one of the planes exploded and the entire crew was lost. As a child, I went with my mother to make condolence calls on the families of the crew members. The flags on the base were flown a half mast and there I felt as if the entire base had become a place of mourning. When the grieving family members weren’t present, there were hushed conversations and quiet remarks made by the wives expressing not only sorrow but relief that it wasn’t one of their husbands.

Growing up in a family where duty to country was honored, I have a great respect for the members of today’s military. They face a greater challenge than generations of military before them. They have to fight on foreign territory without knowing who the enemy is. They fight to stop oppression and build sustainable democracies. Most of all, they fight to protect us from attacks against our own country.

The members of the armed forces leave their families and risk their lives and their safety to eliminate the training grounds that breed terrorists.

I am thankful that they are willing to serve their countries, to risk their lives for me. I know that when a member of the armed forces falls in combat today, the hushed conversations among family members on our military bases are still filled with sorrow and at the same time relief that it wasn’t their husband or father who was killed or wounded.

Members of the military deserve to receive pay and benefits that keep their families off of food stamps. They deserve to go into combat situations with the best equipment and intelligence possible. Most of all they deserve our gratitude for doing a difficult job with honor and for the sacrifices they make on a daily basis.

In the name of Jesus

I have a strong belief in God and my spiritual life has played an important part of my adult life so I don’t want anyone to take this as making fun of religious belief. That is far from my intent.

I went over to someone’s house, years ago, and she asked me if I wanted a cup of coffee. “Yeah, sure that would be good.” I answered. She went over to the coffee pot and pulled the basket out to put in a new filter and coffee. As she pulled the filter out, roaches ran everywhere. She raised her hand and said “In the name of Jesus, be gone. Roaches be gone!”

I am a believer, but I was shocked at her actions. I told her to get a can of bug spray and not to call on Jesus. To me this was something that she needed to handle and not something that needed to be turned over to the Almighty.

Why is it that we expect God to handle every thing? Common sense tells me that there are some things that I have to take care of myself. While I frequently pray about actions I am going to take, I cannot neglect to take care of the basics responsibilities of living.

As a country, we use the expression “In God We Trust” but I wonder if God can trust us to take care of things that need to be done. There are expectations that we will act with honor; that we will take care of things that are within our realm of responsibility.

I should not expect others to pay for my foolishness and I certainly don’t expect the government to step in and take care of me when there is a problem that I should be handling myself. The government, like the Almighty, should be called on to protect us when we can’t take care if ourselves. In both relationships, I have personal responsibility.

I cannot protect myself from industries that pollute the water and the air. The government has a role in protecting me in this instance. I like to know how many calories are in foods and what the ingredients are. Organizing disaster relief is a function of government, but why in the world do people expect the government to take care of everything?

People live in flood zones, but don’t have flood insurance. They expect the government to help them after a flood. People bought houses they couldn’t afford. With their knowledge, mortgage companies falsified applications so that those mortgages would be approved. When the economy went south, those same people expected the government to step in and help them. I could write a book about other examples but I’ll stop with these two.

We need to handle some things our self.

Dealing with mess

One of my best friends came to Atlanta today so that she could ride with me to see my parents in South Alabama over the Memorial Day weekend. My youngest son cleaned up the condo so that it would be clean when she got here.

He picked up everything and put it in my bedroom. The rest of the condo looks great, but I almost had a stroke when I saw my bedroom. Papers and files that I had sorted and was working with on the dining room table are lumped together and dumped in the floor. Dirty clothes are in a Rubbermaid tote next to the dresser. Boxes and bags of books that I had brought home from school, because I was afraid they would get misplaced over the summer, are in the middle of my bed.

As I lift things and sort through them, I expect to see a box of dirty dishes at any minute (I hope I’m wrong). It reminds me of when my daughter cleaned her bedroom before company. She put the lid down on the toilet in her bathroom and stuffed everything into the bathroom then locked and closed the door.

When my stepfather took his knife out and unlocked the door, piles of stuff fell out on him.

If you don’t do things right when you clean up a situation, you create a bigger mess or you just make a mess in another area. It is impossible to hide mess. You have to deal with it or it re-emerges in a different place.

There are several rules about dealing with a messy situation:

1. You can’t hide it. It eventually comes out.
2. The more you stir it up, the worse it becomes.
3. To eliminate it, you have to start with the root cause.
4. Sometimes you have to get rid of things.

Our government has become so dysfunctional that all we get from Washington is mess and messy situations. We have corruption, bribery, lobbyist and unethical behavior as the political norm. The media goes beyond reporting and they stir the situation to sensationalize the news (they don’t have to stir much, the news is pretty sensational without help). The root cause of the problem is embedded in a polarized Congress and a party system that chains members to party lines. Additionally, we have a system of political pressure groups and lobbyist who only look out for themselves. Sometimes as citizens, we need to use our power of the vote to clean house so that we can maintain a government of the people, by the people and for the people.

The Cookie Jar

When my children were little they played the blame game. They would blame each other for whatever happened. One day one of them broke my cookie jar. It really didn’t matter who broke the cookie jar, the results were the same. All of the cookies, along with the shards and slivers of glass that had been the cookie jar, went into the trash can.

Living on a tight budget, I could not afford to buy more cookies until payday. I loved cookies as much as the children did. All of us suffered the consequences for one person’s actions. It did not matter if they intended to break the cookie jar or not. It was broken and the cookies were gone.

Listening to Transocean, BP, and Halliburton blame each other during the recent public hearings didn’t make me feel warm and cozy. They sounded like older versions of my children shifting the blame and saying “not me.”

Halliburton with its history of cheating the citizens of the United States with cost-plus contracts and with its corruption charges in the Nigerian oil industry is one of the usual suspects in contract corruption. It reminds me of my sneakiest child; the one who was usually at the bottom of the trouble. Add to this the information that government inspectors and employees of the agency charged with protecting environmental interest were dipping their hands into the pockets of the oil industry in exchange for not doing their jobs. My youngest son would charge the other two to keep his mouth shut.

Halliburton might be completely innocent of any wrongdoing. BP might be innocent. Transocean might be innocent. Wrongdoing should be determined by an investigative panel with knowledge of best practices in the oil field and not by speculation of the media and the public.

At this point, it doesn’t matter which of the children was responsible for the oil spill in the Gulf, we all have to pay; however, we should ultimately hold those responsible for the accident accountable. The time for childish blame games is over. This isn’t a cookie jar.

The kids will pay

Today is a furlough day. All teachers in my school system are taking today off without pay. Of course all days off are without pay unless it is one of our accumulated sick days. Teachers only get paid for the contracted days they work. In spite of popular opinion they do not get paid holidays. Teachers take reduced salaries through the months they work, so that they can receive equal paychecks during the calendar year.

President Obama and the economic officials are telling us that we are now in a state of economic recovery. It doesn’t feel like a recovery to me. It isn’t that teachers are being given furlough days that bothers me. It is much more than that. Besides the furlough days, the metro area school systems have been in the process of laying off teachers and support personnel, increasing the number of students in the classroom, reducing the music and art programs in schools, eliminating effective programs and closing small schools in an effort to make the budget work.

It is proven that children do better in smaller classes and that the arts enhance education.

Teachers will do what they have always done next year. They will go into the classroom and teach to the best of their ability with the resources they have available but in the long run children will still pay the price.

This situation is not something that is happening only in the metro Atlanta area. School systems across the nation are finding it more and more difficult to meet the needs of children in woefully underfunded educational systems. According to the 10th Amendment to the Constitution, all powers not granted to the federal government nor denied to the states is reserved for the states. This includes education; however, the federal government has already stepped into the domain of education through several funding programs that could be relaxed a little in light of the current economic situation.

The federal government, in an effort to provide educational opportunity for the poor, provides funds for reading and math through Title I programs. The use of these federal funds are tightly regulated and closely audited. It is probably the only government program so tightly regulated. Since these are time of unparalleled difficulty as state tax bases and sales tax collections decline, it would be appropriate to liberalize some of the Title I spending to allow school districts to offset funding shortfalls from state and local funding sources. This should not be a permanent solution but could be used to temporary offset the loss of available funding.

Remember that the children we educate today will be drawing your blood at the hospital tomorrow, fixing your vehicles, and inventing the machines that might save your lives. They will be the artists, musicians, engineers, doctors, nurses, scientists, teachers and lawyers in our future. We cannot let them down.

Bubba can save America

I want to talk about Bubba. In the south, Bubba is an endearing nickname for the man who can fix almost anything. Today, more often than not, Bubba is a college graduate with a degree in Agri-science. Anyway, if something is broken, Bubba can fix it. He welds. He engineers and rigs equipment that he needs. He modifies what he buys to meet his specific needs. He is a natural born problem solver.

Look at those two southern gentlemen who proved that putting bahia and bermuda grass on the oil spill would absorb the oil. The hay absorbs the oil and can be scooped up like sea weed. While this solution only works for the surface oil slick and not the deep water oil plumes, it is only one example of the problem solving that occurs when there is a need.

My father is most certainly a “Bubba.” Until recent health issues occurred, if something broke, he would fix it. He is undoubtedly one of the smartest men I know. After a plane crash, instead of stopping work, he built machines that would help him continue to work. It was as easy for him to build an addition on the house and to engineer an elevator outside so that they would not have to climb the steps or carry groceries up the steps at their river house as it was for him to fix a car or airplane.

Inside the average American, Bubba’s spirit lurks. There is an unharnessed creativity and ingenuity that could change the future of this country. Somewhere, some Bubba has ideas about how we can solve the energy issue but because he is not from a doctoral program at some research laboratory, his ideas are not taken seriously. I would like to challenge every Bubba in the United States to work on their ideas and to put the oil companies out of business. This is a matter of national security and our future economic stability.

Responsibility and Entitlement

Today, I was listening to a CNN broadcast and they were interviewing a man who could afford his mortgage but he decided to return the house to the mortgage company because the house was no longer worth what he had paid for it. He said that he did not feel that the mortgage company had made any false claims. For him, it just made sense to default on the contract because he could rent the same house for $500.00 less than he was paying for his house.

When he was asked if he understood that it would make it harder for other people to get mortgage loans, he said that there was no difference between him defaulting on a contract because it was best for him and for banks to default on their obligations. Basically, if it okay for a business to dump a bad contract for financial reasons, then it was okay for him to do so.

I have made many trips up fool’s hill and I have learned the signs that I’m beginning to take the trip again. When I make a mistake, I own up to it and face the consequences. I cannot get out of personal debt without admitting that I have made mistakes and taking painful steps to correct them. I don’t expect an obligation to go away because I don’t want it any more.

There is great sense of entitlement developing in this country. What has not developed at an equal rate is a sense of responsibility. Every right comes with an equal responsibility. Peter Parker’s (Spiderman) grandfather told him that with great power comes great responsibility. We have great power as individuals in this country. We have the power of the vote and power of influence. We should use it wisely and we should also hold ourselves to the same standards that we expect businesses and government to be held to. We need to make sure that we are exercising personal responsibility. I understand that is not possible to legislate morality. We cannot force business or people to do things that they don’t want to do, but failing to do the honorable almost always results in taking a trip to the top of fool’s hill.