A Resolute New Year

Welcome to the end of 2013, dear Reader.  As I sit watching the snow fall gently on the City, I think back to all of the changes this year has brought.  I bought a new house, got married, but most importantly, I joined Facebook.  I mean that as sarcastically as possible.  That too, actually. 

Thanks to Facebook, one of the things that I saw, for the first time I can recall, is a whole lot of popular culture.  I’ve never been one to watch the hit Reality TV shows, listen to commercial talk radio or drive-time pop music stations.  Admittedly, I would learn about new cultural idioms and inside-jokes through satirical shows or thorough my friends (the latter, usually after something like “You can’t be serious that you haven’t seen that!”).  What I learned this year from Facebook is that at as soon as life isn’t perfect, it is popular to believe that you deserve better than whatever you have.

A friend of mine recently was having some relationship issues.  I’m a “he” and she is a “she”.  She asked me generally what I thought she should do, so I said to love him even more.  She appeared surprised.  But when I look at what I see tossed off on Facebook as self-help wisdom, I can see why my answer was surprising.  There are hundreds of items each week with short statements meaning “Don’t Look Back”, “If it didn’t work out the first time, it wasn’t meant to be”, and “Love yourself because you matter most.”  Also, it’s not like I haven’t dated over the past few years.  I know that when past relationships hit hard times, my friends told me “there are more fish in the sea” and her friends told her “you can do better than him.”  With that type of support, there is no chance to forge a stronger relationship, to grow, to learn, or to soften your edges. 

There were a few exceptions.  Those in the generation I’d call “Group A baby-boomers” (the oldest of the baby boomers) or those even older, were usually quick to say “stick it out and it will be even sweeter later on.”  But that is a too-quickly dwindling cohort. 

My fortunes were incredible this year.  Someone chose me.  I chose her, too. 

In 2014, should I get the opportunity, I choose to be resolute in my support of loved ones.  Don’t give up on each other.  Don’t let arguments, disagreements, even momentary pure hate take down long-term love and friendship.  If you are happy, be thankful for what you have.  If you’re not happy, look in yourself to see why not.  Chances are, you have a lot more to be thankful about than you think, and it’s your own fault you’re miserable. 

Peace.

I am not outraged

A little bit ago, the popularity of the IRS went down even more.  It was reported - widely and with vigor - that the agency that collects taxes targeted a particular group of potentially tax-exempt groups unfairly.  To boil that down some, that is Government singling out particular Americans.  That is one of the things that always gets my blood boiling, regardless of the target.  Government is a greater good organization, in my mind.  I don't believe that the government should be in the business of fixing my life personally, but I enjoy the fact that it functions to make all of our lives better by balancing the nature of other institutions, like business interests.  Blind justice and all that.  Anyway, this one made no sense to me and I have, until now, kept my mouth shut.

I've long understood the greater metro area of Cincinnati to be rather conservative.  And since the IRS is a professional organization and not a political one, I just kinda figured that the local hires would be Midwestern Conservatives.  At least a healthy portion of them would be, preventing the liberal subversives from hatching their master stroke.  So why would those Conservatives torpedo their own cause? 

Then, it was the silliness that got me.  TEA party groups cried about how they were singled out for something regarding taxes.  Again, the "Taxed Enough Already" party cried about taxes.  The stories in the news were little comedies.  The IRS had a rule - the 501(c)(3) - that allows groups to NOT pay taxes if they meet certain criteria.  Because it took too long to work, the TEA party cried out.  It sounded to my ears like this:
"Here child," said the parent, "here's exactly what you want, but you have to wait for it."
"NO," cried the brat, "I WANT IT NOW!" 

So it all smelled like the sort of thing that blows up and doesn't work out the way the brats intended.  I was on the right side of quiet.  Most of the "reputable" news outlets now seem to report that it wasn't that way at all.  And further, there appears room for inquiry into why the original inspection of the complaint was allowed to focus only on right-wing parties.  Regardless, I wasn't outraged.

Except, of course, everything else still existed.  Like the fact that we allow for 49% Political operations to be as tax-exempt as religious day-cares, veteran outreach groups, and homes for abused women.  Or that this story was pushed off of the front pages by a Southern woman that cooks and uses offensive language.  I'm no flat-taxer, but the "complexity" of the tax code starts right here with these groups - left and right alike.  Elections shouldn't be wars of attrition, anyway.  Let's just give PBS a few extra million dollars, let them host debates between all candidates for all elections, and leave it at that.  We'd free up all of that capital to create jobs! The billion dollars spent on the last presidential election alone would have been 20,000 jobs at $50,000 each.  Before taxes.  

I guess I was outraged... 

Zenith Radio

I don't know how it came to this.

I had a radio - a Zenith. For as long as i had it,
It was held together by electrical tape
And sounded tinny
And I was sure it would give out for good soon.
And I felt that way for years.

It did falter often. Sometimes no sound,
Sometimes the wrong sound,
And always right when I really wanted to hear
What it was playing.
I'd get frustrated.
I'd throw it away.

I'd get a different radio - there's always one around -
And listen to it. The clear sounds
And the sleek look
And the reliability I thought was there
Were great
But I wasn't used to them.

I'd race to the trash can and retrieve the Zenith
I felt honestly sorry
It did its best and the fault was mine -
Who was I to judge?
And we had seen so much together,
And I knew how to fix this radio.

This played out dozens of times. I should have known
After the first time I went back
That the radio was part of who I was
No matter what.
But I kept throwing it away in frustration
And the garbage man came early today.

Representation

I thought of something that, once it came into mind, seemed so incredibly obvious to me that I figure I must be stealing this from somewhere. There's been a lot of little stories about gerrymandering electoral districts and how some states want to divide electoral college votes in alignment with those gerrymandered districts. I was peacefully driving along the highway and wham-o! It hit me…


I remember back to my grade school days and our basic discussions about the three branches of the government, checks and balances, and the bicameral congress. The two chambers of congress were supposed to be different from one another. One was to be slower and moderating as each chunk of land (State) had the same strength of voice regardless of size, while the other was to be faster acting and more purely representative of the individual. The latter was to be the House of Representatives and, in my opinion, it doesn't represent us anymore. Or not all of us, anyway.

For one, on a simple average alone, each member of the House represents about 700,000 people. That's about the size of the City of Detroit. Also, it's about the size of the population of Alaska. It's slightly more than the population of Washington D.C. and around one-fifth of the population of Puerto Rico, but those two don't really matter since they don't get votes in our federal government…

If you want to continue with the simple average path, at the time of the Founding Fathers, representatives had about 30,000 people under them (excluding "Indians" and "other persons"). These representatives were to be apportioned among the several states. From that, no matter how metropolitan or rural areas actually functioned, Representatives were tied to state borders. This leads me to the real juicy center of the idea: State borders should not apply at all to the House of Representatives.

I live near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. If you look at traffic patterns into and out of the city each morning during the news, there is a lot of connectivity between Camden and Philadelphia. Further, the suburbs are, obviously, more closely tied to the city than to the rural areas to the north and west of Philly. However, the Philly Suburb districts (PA-6, 8 and 15) grab up a lot of open space, all of which was at one time farmland and some still remains as such. How does one person represent the needs of the districts like those? I'd suspect it's an easier job to represent PA-5 to the northwest, which is the beautiful Pennsylvania Wilds (and oil country). At least that area is somewhat economically coherent.

So I'm completely aware that no matter what, representative government is going to be messy. But one thing that it still needs to do is be representative. That's just in the name. If it isn't representative, then it isn't representative. The fact that a government is reflective of the will of the people is essence of what it means to live in something other than a dictatorship. But we seem to want to make ourselves a separate entity from our government. "Them jerks in Washington..."

But I can empathize with the narrow minorities in districts all across the country that have been stripped of representation by congressional borders alone. Just having a representative doesn't mean a person is represented. Everyone had a Feudal Lord at one point too, but that didn't mean representation in the King's court.

So what? Remove the arbitrary state line boundaries and bound congressional districts by activity / economy / etc. Then, without the need for being part of a state but only being part of an American economic or cultural region, territories and non-state districts could finally have a voice in their government. At the outset, states could work together regionally to set up the districts and then they would be approved every ten years (two years after each census) by both Federal and State legislatures and executive branches… or something else to keep them from being modified to meet a political goal at the expense of honest representation. The Senate will still have two representatives per state, so it will remain a body that slows everything down (I mean that in a good way). And while we're at it, change the way the president is elected to straight popular vote. With different parameters on each part of the elected government electoral process, everyone is assured at least some voice in the government. And I think that even when the minority loses out, if we can say out loud that we believe the government is truly representative of the will of the Nation's people, we will be happier and less polarized than we are today.

I base all of this on nothing, of course. Like I said, I was just driving along and it hit me.

Nothing that can make anyone happy

I think that there are probably two types of compromise: one of them compromises over a single issue; the other takes two or more unrelated issues and gives each side something as a win. The first one finds some sort of common ground. Let's not talk about that.

So, the other one might be our salvation. But I've been wrong before.

Dear reader, let's talk about gun control, illegal immigration, and a national ID card. But let's make it a short conversation as I've been too long winded recently.

There is no reason to change any gun control law today. There are already a bunch that we don't fund sufficiently to enforce, so the law does no good. The same is true with immigration. It's already illegal to be in this country without documentation, but we don't enforce it. Actually, our federal or state governments cannot enforce it. It's impossible to get 100% compliance with any "thou shalt not" law. So what do we do? Give up, of course.

No no. No giving up this time. Let's trade instead.

To the Left: You liberal shits want more big government and stuff, right? So we'll go the first step. Everything must be registered, but everything remains legal. And you need to give back something. Something related to immigration would be best.

To the Right: Look douches… You can't just block every single control on firearms when our leaders, our girlfriends, and our children are gunned down seemingly nonstop. (Did anyone get all three references???) You need to allow something, so let's start with a national registry. But while we're at it, we'll make that registry binding for all Americans whether they have a gun or not, via a national ID system.

So one ID system could be a big reform for gun control and immigration. Really, let's go ahead and roll the passport system and the IRS into this and shrink the overall bureaucracy while we're at it.  Maybe we'd be able to afford to enforce the laws we pass this way...
Anyone? Anyone?

When I was almost shot

I think of this line from one episode of The Simpsons, where Moe rushes into a mob gathering and he says something like "Wow, this is the second most number of guns I've ever had pointed at me." That's funny.

I'm 33 years old now and was just starting my senior year of college in September of 2001. At that time, I had been to Canada a handful of times and never flown commercially. I had never been to either coast, either, and maybe to Chicago, "the big city" to folks in Southwest Michigan, a dozen times. So when July of 2002 rolled around and I moved to the suburbs of Philadelphia, I felt very out of place when I saw, somewhat randomly, National Guard troops, armed with rifles, patrolling the public transit lines. This was a more regular occurrence when I got around to visiting New York City. Maybe a year later, I flew in a commercial airliner for the first time and saw quite a bit more of this militarization qua safety. A lot of people at that time said how terrifying it was, overall. This was, of course, in the long wake of the 9/11 attacks.

After spending the first 26 or so years of my life with exactly zero desire to travel internationally, I got a job that took me to Ireland every month. Ultimately, I moved to a job that took me all over the world, including all over Europe, India, and elsewhere. My first time to India is the place where I was almost shot.

Background for this… A few years back, before I ever went over any ocean, there was a Pakistani bombing in Mumbai. I can't claim to be an expert on any of these things, but from what I heard, this started a whole new world of security measures in India. This includes armed guards (heavily armed guards) in the airport, at the hotel, at the factories I'd visit…

So picture this: I'm standing at the line at the desk where they check your passport (this is after 18 hours of flying, so I look and feel my very best). An armed guard stands on either side of me. They appear to both be right handed as each is pointing his rifle to the left. Picture that? Two guards, each pointing their gun to the left, and I'm in the middle. That means one gun is pointed directly at my hips. The guard on the right keeps turning to talk to the guard on my left, each time poking me with the business end of his gun… high up on my right thigh, toward the front… Though I was absolutely certain this person had no malice in his heart and was also equally sure that he had nothing against me personally, I didn't feel comfortable. A few minutes of me dancing forward and backward in an attempt to clear the line of fire ensued, but ultimately, my passport was stamped and I just kinda gave myself up to the fact that I was in a world different than my own. In this world, security was driven by an obvious military presence. I just thought back to 2001 and figured it must be awful to have that kind of tension every day of your life. And I stayed in my hotel as much as possible.

The part about this that stuck with me is that I am not afraid of guns at all. I own some. I enjoy shooting. I try to hunt but find little time and less skill. And like I said, I was absolutely sure that the people charged with protecting us weren't going to shoot me for any reason. But having those loaded-for-bear assault rifles everywhere still made me feel like a different person than I did normally. This, in the face of the very obvious fact that every police officer, most guards, and lots of private citizens are armed with pistols in the U.S. It was just different when those pistols are replaced by AK-47s or other such assault weapons.

And I guess that's a point to be underlined. Americans are constantly surrounded by small arms and even these small arms can do a heck of a lot of damage. Something doesn't feel quite as militant about a 1911, or even a semi-automatic 9mm…

We have a hard time talking about tragedy. When we as a large nation begin to talk about the reasons for these tragedies, or compare those reasons to the reasons for other events, parts of our nation often feel that we're somehow condoning the actions of the criminal. The argument against trying to understand is often boiled down to a sound bite along the lines of, "he was insane and that's all there is to it." That is not the case. That cannot be the case. We need to contextualize and rationalize in order to prevent these tragedies in the future, but that does not mean we ever condone them.

Regardless, there are a lot of people out there talking about these events, so I my voice here doesn't really add anything. Maybe, though, I can talk about getting stuck in the hip with an assault rifle as being part of a normal life in other parts of the world.

There's this other issue in here, though. Our government (by extension, we the people) are dealing with a lot of big issues right now. We are also having trouble getting along. So add together big challenges, stubborn people, and an absolute timeline and often, you end up with tactical solutions. Just to be clear, I mean "tactical" as opposed to "strategic." Tactical solutions have a tendency to build up, one after the other. To make up an example, imagine your job is to pound one nail into one board. You do that on Monday, and your job is done. You come back Tuesday to do the same thing, but now, because of a new tax on nails or something, you need to fill out a form before you pound in the nail. That new form is in response to that tax and is a tactical solution to meeting that need. Wednesday rolls around and due to an injury suffered by another person using a hammer similar to yours, you need to first fill out the tax form, then fill out a check sheet examining your hammer (in response to a new safety regulation) and then start to pound in that nail. I’m not saying that the tax is wrong or that safety isn't important… far from it. But after a thousand days and a thousand more tasks to complete before you can pound that nail, the tactical solutions to real needs have made the work impossible to accomplish. Here, I'd like to say, is where a systemic change would be the thing needed to remove all of the "red tape" built up over time but would still meet all of the needs that drove the tactical solutions in the first place. But that probably won't ever happen…

I bring this up because we could start that same thing with guns soon. The NRA came out recently calling for a huge increase in a militarized presence in schools. This is a tactical solution to a challenge in the same way that the short-lived National Guard presence everywhere was a tactical solution. And these sorts of actions have a tendency to keep building on each other. I'm talking to you, TSA.

If our mindset is that only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun, then we need really figure out what a good guy is. Police and military personnel are probably good guys in general. We entrust them with our safety in the most extreme of circumstances. However, we pay them to do it. So maybe they're not as "good" as they are just earning a living. This isn't to belittle them at all. It's only to make this next point: what if they volunteered? See, volunteers would be the best way to ensure that we only get the best of the good people out there with guns protecting us, right? This would be like a neighborhood watch system. Right? I'm sure that George Zimmerman thought of himself as a good guy. I'm sure that his neighbors thought that too. Then one day, he shot Trayvon Martin, killing an unarmed kid. Good guys with guns can make mistakes, too.

Living in America is effing awesome. The same is true with Europe and the "Western" world. When we go through customs, we don't get rifles poked into our baby-makers. We don't stop talking and laughing as we pass a security official with an assault rifle on the street corner in Cleveland, Ohio, just to be on the safe side. There are places on Earth where the death of innocent people in large numbers at once is not all that uncommon. This doesn't make it any less horrible there or make our loss in Connecticut any less painful.

So as usual, I have no suggestions and am far from having any answers. All I can be sure of is any answer that makes Americans less American is no answer at all.