G4001-2 Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks

     The local newspaper had an article recently about a man who went back to school to get his degree. Life and circumstances had intervened some years ago to keep him from completing his college degree.  Now, at age sixty-eight, he finally finished his degree and recently graduated. Shown in the same article were his two adult daughters who were also college graduates with master's degrees. All in all, it was a happy family circumstance.

     The more cynical and jaded among us - and that would certainly include me - would find something grotesque about the father and his two daughters moving the tassels on their mortar board caps from one side to the other. You see, these graduations are not things for which we should be especially proud.  They are, in fact, representations of an enormous waste.
     The father, retired from the world of work, has completed a degree that has no practical employment implications. He has been trained for something - but something that he will never use. His degree is nothing more than a flowery garland around his neck, a glittering decoration, an anachronistic chest full of ribbons: in short, it represents a profligate waste.  He will never use any of the training and education behind that degree.  The reasonable question, then, is this: Why would he put in all that time and effort for something he will never use?
     Every now and then we read about some elderly woman completing her fifth doctorate degree in the university at age ninety-five. We are expected to stand back and admire her accomplishment. But I'm always taken back by that, however.  To what end would a ninety-five-year-old woman seek another doctorate degree? What would she do with four such degrees, much less five of them?  More to the point, why should the citizens of the state pay for her pointless narcissism? If she wishes to pursue even more advanced degrees in her dotage, why are others being asked to pay for it?
     Those two daughters with masters degrees share in the same narcissism. When those two women were unable to find jobs after completing their baccalaureate degrees, they decided "to continue their education" by pursuing masters degrees at a state university school. Their thinking then, as it is with many students today, was to mark time by getting a master’s degree while the job market improves enough so that they could find a job. Again, the cost and expense for that education was largely paid by others.
     What I find interesting is this: the particular state I live in has lost 400,000 jobs since Obama became president. There are no jobs available in this state. And yet the state is pouring enormous resources into higher education for students who will take their degrees and move to another state to find employment. The reasonable state taxpayer should ask this simple question: Why are we training people for employment in, say, Texas?
     What is the true price of narcissism? Maybe it’s a lot more than we can afford.

G4001-1 Paying for the Entitlement State

     I noticed this morning a young woman reacting to an appeal for a modest amount of money to be added to a retirement fund for certain types of retired clergy.  Her main argument seemed to cluster around the concept of affordability: she and her husband were living on limited means, and even a modest donation to that retirement fund would have been difficult for them. Her's is a situation that will increasingly come to be seen as the typical situation for most working people in this country. Most of them will begin to question why they are funding a lavish retirement for someone else when they are unable to fund their own retirements. At that point the Entitlement State will begin to disappear.
     I am not suggesting that the clergy retirement fund is lavish by any means. It is not. By the standards of most people it is entirely inadequate to the needs of those who have served their church faithfully for many years and are destined to retire in relative poverty. But the principle holds nonetheless. What is at stake here is the social cohesiveness wrought by one group of working persons paying for the retirement of unrelated, non-working, persons. Stories in the news recently of persons retiring on $600,000 per year in California do not make the average working schlub happy about funding someone else's retirement.
     The real question many people will ask in future years is this: "Why am I working to pay for your retirement?"  It’s a good question.
     Some years ago, in a city nearby, public housing units were demolished and hauled away. Those housing units were originally erected for the benefit of those "living below the poverty line."  But the residents of those units systematically destroyed the buildings, the plumbing fixtures, and generally made those public housing units unlivable. In time they were bulldozed and the land was returned to a state of nature.
     The displaced persons ‒ the persons who destroyed that housing in the first place ‒ demanded that new housing be built for them. And, of course, new housing was built for them. That's how we do things in the United States: we reward the destroyers with new stuff because we feel sorry "that they have to live below the poverty line." Yet, we cringe slightly whenever we drive through their neighborhoods and notice the well-kept lawns (city crews do the yard work, you see), the tidy homes, and better-than-average automobiles in their driveways.  It must be nice - especially if one happens to be driving a older, rather shabby, car through their neighborhood.
     The more prescient ones among us begin to wonder who is really the fool here: those who trundle off to work each morning, or those who lie abed until noon each day? Quite soon, in the next several years or so, something called Resentment will rise up to gobble up the Welfare State, when young workers come to understand that entitlements ultimately destroy opportunities for those workers to get jobs, to raise their families, and to plan for their own retirement. Working for a lifetime to pay someone else's freight may not seem like a bargain to them anymore.
     There is an incredibly delicious irony in all of this, is there not?  Those young people who worked so hard to elect Obama will be his very first victims.  Then they will discover how difficult it is to kick one’s own keister.

F2101-1 Great Uncle Jake

     You know, I'm kind of happy to know that my family has its roots in the Holy Land (Note: not that Holy Land.  This one’s in Fond du Lac County Wisconsin).  I've always felt some ill-defined attraction for that place and never knew quite why.  It goes deeper than the memories of spending that summer at Albert and Florence’s farm, or the fish dinners on Friday nights at Steffes' Tavern in St. Peter.  It's  almost as if the land itself had some metaphysical allure that went beyond the shallow experience of merely driving through it's winding roads and admiring the rugged scenery.  Rather, to me, the red till on the backs of the rolling drumlins seems to say that they have been shaped by that scrappy horde of my ancestors who felled the trees and cleared the land so long ago.  And I suppose that Great-Uncle Jake got his incredible toughness from that effort at defining the land and not from long hours spent dreaming about a better life as he dozed on the wicker chair on his front porch.
     And believe me, Jake was tough!  I remember that cold day in January, 1964, when a storm blew through Fond du Lac and walloped the city with 16" of snow.  Nothing was moving that day.  The streets were too deep in snow to permit anyone but the really foolish or the really hardy to venture out of their homes.  And yet, as I trudged those four blocks to the tavern to tend bar that day, I kept thinking how utterly useless it was to leave the comfort of the house to go to a tavern that surely would have no customers.  I had to walk down the middle of Main Street to get there, knee-deep in snow, and if it wasn't for the fact that a stiff and snarly wind was blowing straight out of the north, I would have turned and walked back home.  And I wouldn't have felt guilty at all.
     A few minutes after 8:00 o'clock in the morning Uncle Jake was beating on the door of the tavern and demanding to know why I hadn't unlocked the door.  He had walked some eight blocks from over on North Park Avenue to the tavern.  He was the only pedestrian on the streets that day.  His face was fiery red from the biting wind.  But he was his usual impish self - that special impishness that only Uncle Jake could display.  "Where the heck is everybody, Billy?" he asked.  "They aren't nuts like you and me, Uncle Jake," I said.  "They're home standing on the register instead of flopping around in the snow like a bunch of clowns."  He was about eighty-six years old at that time.  Toughest man I ever knew!
     He had a full head of dark hair and he used to challenge people to grab a hold of his hair.  "Hang on tight," he'd say.  And he would pull you over the bar if you hung on long enough.  He was one foxy sheepshead player and used to embarrass a lot of wannabe players who mistook him for a doddering old man.  "Kid can't play," he'd say.  "Guess the old man showed him how, didn't I, Billy?"  Ah, yes, that he did!
     He had a reverential way of talking about his wife Annie.  You could tell at once that he deeply loved her.  He told me once, "I rode the rails from Iron Mountain, Michigan and then I married Annie." I pretended to appear stupid, "You just got off the train and then you married her?  Didn't you court her first?"  "Of course I did, you darned fool," he'd say.  And then he would tell you about his wonderful bride.  "Oh, what a woman my Annie was!"