NONE LEFT BEHIND

(News-Herald, January 2003) Yes, I was initially resistant to the federal education initiative. I know that in the past I may have referred to “No Child Left Behind” as “dangerously dopey” or “a cynical attempt to dismantle American public education.” But I have seen the light.

It makes perfect sense to approach the human endeavor of education with the expectation of a 100% success rate, and it seems only right that any school district that falls short of perfection should be stripped of financial support and taken over by the government.

In fact, I think the feds should extend the principle to more fields devoted to improving the human condition. Let me propose a few programs.

“No Smile Left Behind.” It’s time for the dentists of this country to provide thorough and effective treatment of their patients. There’s no reason in this day and age that we can’t have 100% perfect dental health—so all dentists will be expected to have 100% success with their patients. If not, they’ll be replaced with special government-issue dentists.

“No Patient Left Behind” Probably the only area of human service as wide-reaching and important as education is health care. In a world with 100% perfectly educated youth, surely we need to have 100% success in health care.

So we’ll give hospitals twelve years to improve their delivery of treatment, and at the end of a decade we’ll have hospitals that cure every person who comes through their doors

See, the beauty of No Child Left Behind is that unshakeable 100%. For too long, we’ve accepted less than perfection. For too long we’ve accepted, for instance, that saving lives from cancer is hard. Let’s adopt, instead, the NCLB philosophy; if any hospital fails to provide 100% cure of anything from cancer to the common cold, we’ll stop giving them any money for treating patients. That’ll get them to stop monkeying around and trot out that 100% successful cure that we know they’re hiding somewhere.

But let’s not stop there. We need to address other aspects of health. We’ve heard repeatedly that America is overweight. That gives me an idea for our next program:

“No Behind Left Behind.” Most every town has a YMCA or YWCA or health club; there’s no reason for America to have any fat people. I say there’s no reason not to expect each exercise-based facility to have 100% success in getting every person down to perfect fighting trim. Biology, habit, ambition, determination, desire—these minor quibbles won’t stop us from having perfect schools, so if the Y can’t get every rear end in the area into a slim pair of jeans, then the government should take over and implement their plans for weight reduction in the US.

And why stop with physical well-being. Let’s have “No Soul Left Behind.” Churches have clearly been dogging it in this country. After several centuries, we are still surrounded by sinners and evil-doers. I say it’s time for church leaders to get off their duffs and get that salvation train rolling.

It is time that every single soul in this country was saved. So let’s give the churches and synagogues a decade or so, at the end of which we’ll expect a salvation rate of 100%. And if any church fails to produce, then we’ll just bring in government officials to properly supervise the salvation of American souls.

I’m excited about this revelation. As a teacher, I’ve always bought into the notion that there’s no such thing as a perfect school. But all the things that we have claimed stand in the way of perfect education—individual differences in abilities, goals, circumstances, ambition—are the same factors that challenge the success of most human endeavors. So if government legislation erases these from schools, they can be erased from other areas of human existence as well.

The feds have given us great new principles to live by: Perfection is attainable and we should never settle for less. People fall short of perfection because they’re unmotivated; threaten to take away their livelihood and they’ll do better.

And if you lose your way on the path to perfection, the government is always ready to step in and show the way, because the government, apparently, knows the secret of achieving 100% successful perfection. In fact, I’m sure they can make a go of two more programs—“No Evildoers Left Behind” in which 100% of America’s military enemies are neutralized and “No Stomach Left Behind” in which 100% of all Americans have enough to eat. Should take twelve years, tops. And if the feds don’t get it done, I think we should cut their funding.

COUNTRY POP

(News-Herald, April 26) Country music has always occupied an odd spot in our culture consciousness. It has often been treated like a poor cousin, even as it has almost always generated more money than basic “mainstream” pop music.

Perhaps that is what has caused the curious dilution of the product.

First, the sound of country has become more broadly defined. My brother maintains that if the Eagles were a new band today, they would be filed under country, and I would guess that would also be true of many other bands of our youth. Little River Band, those guys who recorded “Amy,” Crosby, Stills, Nash (and Young)—ten minutes on GAC will turn up many performers who sound far less “country” than the oldsters. Some bands, like Lynrd Skynrd, have been turned into country bands retroactively.

In fact, watching videos, one wonders what exactly makes one performer country, or not. Many of the classic distinctions seem to have disappeared. Garth Brooks became a famously wealthy and sought-after concert artist not by following in the footsteps of Hank Williams or Roy Acuff, but by taking performance tips from KISS.

Country was always supposed to be more in touch with traditional values than mainstream pop. But I can find just as many half-naked, rear-end-gyrating, hydraulic-plasticine-breasted women worshipping cars and money in country videos as I can on MTV.

Rather than offering itself as an alternative to the world of pop and hip-hop, Country now gets right in the same line. Just one example—“Honky-Tonk Badonkadonk” -- takes a term from the rap world to use in a country song/video celebrating, staring at, and otherwise treating like a piece of meat, the posteriors of young women. Even the blandly conservative Bonnie Raitt-sounding Sugarland requires its lead singer to wave her cleavage around on camera.

Then there’s “Tequila Makes Her Clothes Fall Off,” celebrating a young woman who likes to get drunk and naked (apparently in that order). In fact, while country fans have often been the sort of people to decry the evils of drug use, country music endlessly applauds the virtue of getting drunk until you fall down, throw up, or otherwise do something stupid. Currently in heavy rotation on GAC is “All My Friends Say,” a hilarious ballad about what our hero thinks he might have done while drinking himself into a state of alcohol-induced amnesia.

If country music does indeed celebrate and honor a world of older traditional values, it also a world where men start fist fights, cheat on their women, and drink millions of brain cells into oblivion. So if country music fans are going to claim that country music embodies some sort of moral superiority, well, I’m just not seeing it.

Country does seem to require an anti-mainstream pop attitude. Gretchen Wilson sings a song about how we should be glad that they aren’t all California girls. She and her friends stand there in the video, stripped down to bikini tops and the kind of shorts that don’t include enough material to mop up the amount of beer spilled at a church picnic, complaining about those skinny little girls struttin’ around in their size zeros. I am not an expert clothes sizer, but Gretchen and her size-zero-mocking friends appear to be big, beefy size 0.5’s. (She also takes the courageous stance that Parris Hilton is a jerk, which I’m not sure qualifies as a radical point of view.)

Often country seems to have to try way too hard to be outside the mainstream, but country stars can now come from the same bland over-hyped mass-produced American Idol musical sausage grinder. Plenty of songs hit the top 40 in both a country and non-country incarnation.

While country acts aren’t conservative when it comes to sex, drugs & alcohol, or recycling rock& roll, they are pretty politically uniform. So the Dixie Chicks, like Neil Young before them, can make music based on traditional folk forms and instruments, but be shunned by country radio because of their political posturing. And there are slightly fewer black country stars than there are white rappers.

But at the end of the day, all I can come up with is the twang. Big and Rich don’t make music that’s any more countrified than the Beatles or N’Sync, but they sing with that little twang and make sure to use words like “country” and “cowboy.”

It is what hip-hop, rap, heavy metal, country and performers from every other pop music niche have in common—putting on an act, playing the game, pretending to be whatever the marketing kings tell them to pretend to be, having a rowdy good time, then laughing all the way to the bank.

GLOBALLY WARMED

(News-Herald, April 19) I finally got around to watching An Inconvenient Truth, the movie about Al Gore and his traveling Power Point presentation about the upcoming end of the world due to global warming.

As a piece of filmmaking, it is fairly clever. To begin with, trying to add pizzazz to a slide show is like trying to add air to a Twinkie—power point is a great technical aid in making a paragraph’s worth of vague information look like Gone With the Wind. But the filmmakers make the series of slides look pretty substantial while simultaneously making Al Gore look like an elder statesman, a scientist, and a globetrotting investigative reporter.

Amidst all this, I remember seeing some Really Important Points being made: Many glaciers are shrinking. There’s more CO2 in the world now than ever before, and that’s really bad. Hurricane Katrina was very unpleasant. All scientists everywhere agree that the world is getting warmer and human beings are causing it. Global warming is cooler when it’s explained in an almost edgy, faux-irreverent cartoon by the creator of the Simpsons.

Of course, there are counterpoints to all of these, many of which can be turned up fairly quickly on the internet: They’ve been shrinking for a while. No, there isn’t, and no, it isn’t. Yes, it was, but that has nothing to do with global warming. No, they don’t. Not so much. And so’s your old man.

Global warming is still the subject of considerable debate. In fact, there’s even a debate raging about whether there’s a debate raging. And for the average innocent-but-thinking bystander, it’s not easy to pick a side. Even finding facts on which to base an opinion is difficult.

There’s plenty of opposition science out there, but an awful lot of it is bought and paid for by the corporations that would be most hurt by legislation to curb the warming. The Bush administration has already been caught telling government scientists that they couldn’t express conclusions that support the views of the Global Warming alarmists.

But folks like Gore build their case on an awful lot of tissue and smoke. Inconvenient Truth uses words like “implicated” and “suggestive” to frame their support. The levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are a cornerstone of Global Warming arguments, but there is no conclusive link between CO2 levels and warming (and two sets of conflicting charts about how high the levels actually are).

And really, it’s hard not to suspect that the Global Warming Police believe its true because it casts all their favorite villains in the role of Bad Guys. It has to be seductively attractive to discover that rapacious industries and thoughtless consumers you always loathed are actually destroying the world—at last we’ve caught them red-handed!

Of course, just because some environmentalists are long on zeal and short on facts does not guarantee that they’re entirely wrong. And their arguments certainly aren’t any sillier than the counter-theory that Global Warming is happening because the sun is getting hotter.

But climate is mighty difficult to study and predict. It’s a chaotic system (I don’t know why we aren’t all learning a lot more about chaos theory) and that means it can change suddenly due to small, hard-to-predict factors. We don’t know what triggered the beginning or ends of any previous ice ages; we don’t know what will trigger the next big climate change.

Still, our ignorance ought to be a good reason to be extra cautious. If you don’t know where the sensitive spot on a sleeping lion is, smacking it indiscriminately with a pointy stick is not the smartest plan.

Nor is free market capitalism a great model for preserving the future. The driving force is self-interest—I’ll make the best choices with my property and business because those choices benefit me. But there’s no benefit to me in insuring that the environment will be in good shape in a hundred years-- I’ll be dead. Environmental concerns require a larger, longer view than the usual business decision, or, for that matter, the usual decisions we all make in our daily lives.

We can all make smarter choices. Though I’m not sure I want go as far as this line in Gore’s film: “We can all make choices to bring our individual carbon emissions to zero.” I was not the greatest biology student in school, but I could swear that the only way I can bring my carbon emissions to zero is to stop breathing—a sacrifice I’m not willing to make.

But smart choices are hard. And to make them people need real information, not hysteria, whitewash, and propaganda from both sides.

AMATEURS & PROFESSIONALS

(News-Herald, April 12)Wherever you go, you’ll meet amateurs and you’ll meet professionals.

You can’t distinguish between the two by whether or not they’re paid. Particularly in an area like ours, you’ll meet professionals who volunteer without compensation and amateurs who draw regular paychecks.

There are qualities that mark professionals whether they’re paid or not.

Do what you say you will, when you say will.

It’s a clear and simple principle, but some folks just don’t get it. When you promise to do something—do it. And if you say it will be done in a month, don’t take six.

Yes, sometimes it’s hard to know how tough a job will be before you start it. In that case, don’t make a promise you don’t know you can keep. And yes, sometimes surprises foul up a time line. In those instances, a professional picks up the phone, apologizes, and explains.

Give the clients something they value.

It’s easier to see this with businesses. Nobody sets up shop and then tells customers, “Give me your money because I’d like to have it.”

When it’s amateur hour in the marketplace, some people do come close to that request. People start a business and think of all the reasons that they’d like to have people give them money. And then they fail. Leonardo’s is successful because they provide a dining experience that people are happy to pay for.

The same principle applies with volunteers, but there are amateurs who don’t get it. Time is the currency of the volunteer world. Yet people who would never just grab money out of your hand will still tell you that you should be happy to donate hours of your life to them.

Let’s be clear. Even people who donate expect a return-- at a minimum, the knowledge that their donation will do something they can feel good about.

This one is a pet peeve of mine because amateurs often approach young people with this amateur attitude. They think of lots of reasons that they’d like to have teens donate time to their cause, but not one reason that the teens might actually want to do it.

Know what you’re talking about.

When it’s amateur hour, good intentions are all you need. It’s not that professionals know everything. But what they don’t know, they try to find out. They talk to people who do know. They consult the experts. Nobody chooses a brain surgeon saying, “Well, he’s never studied it, but he’s really interested in it.”

Don’t make yourself at home.

You aren’t. You’re at work. Your personal hobbies, your personal conversations, your desire to be done in time to catch your favorite tv show—it’s all amateur hour.

When you’re calling someone into a “meeting’ just to find out if they’re mad at you, it’s amateur hour. When your treatment of a fellow workers or your judgment of their competence depends on whether you think they’re your friend or not, it’s amateur hour.

When you indulge in any behavior that would be most appropriate in the privacy of your own home, it’s amateur hour.

It’s not about you.

It’s about the job, whatever the job is. When you make your workplace choices based on what you feel like doing instead of what the job demands, it’s amateur hour. When people have to know what mood you’re in in order to know what kind of work they can expect from you, it’s amateur hour. When you decide not to do part of your job because, well, it’s inconvenient and hard, that’s amateur.

There’s nothing amateur about asking folks to do things differently because it will produce a better product. But when your goal is just to make life easier for yourself, it’s amateur hour.

There are organizations in these parts languishing and fading because their leaders aren’t worried about doing the organization’s job—only about how to keep coasting and taking care of their personal concerns.

It may not be possible to be professional every single day. But whether you’re practicing law, fixing a water heater, volunteering for a non-profit group, or building a dog house—be passionate about the job, be committed to the job, but do the job. And beware of amateurs.

ART & THE MOMENT

(News-Herald, September 2003)This summer I had the chance to stop in DC. I hadn’t been in quite a few years, and I think everyone should drop in every decade or so. You won’t find a better collection of cool free stuff anywhere else (actually, strictly speaking, it’s not so much free as we taxpayers have already paid our admission price).

The mall was mostly as I remembered it. There was little evidence of security concerns. Museums required a brief check of handbags and backpacks. The Washington Monument was loosely surrounded by concrete highway dividers creating a barrier that would require terrorists to spend an additional ten seconds approaching the spire.

I had my first look at the Vietnam and Korean memorials. Both are moving in their own ways. The Vietnam Memorial was larger than I imagined, moving and elegant. The World War II memorial is under construction, destined to be a subtle but stirring addition to the non-Lincoln end of the reflecting pool.

I stopped mainly to look at the Smithsonian, but ended up devoting more time to the national art galleries.

I didn’t particularly expect to be gripped by the art, but apparently I was in an arty mood. The thing is, the national gallery has so many familiar works. And yet, though you think you’ve seen these works, you haven’t.

Take the Monet cathedral paintings, or Van Gogh’s Roses. I have seen prints of these paintings more times than I can count. But it isn’t the same. No print that I’ve ever seen captures the intensity of the color, and nothing at all captures the actual sight of the brushstrokes, the texture on the canvas. For me, there’s also the realization that I am looking at the exact materials that the painter himself touched and applied a century or so ago.

There was a Dutch work with a moon so bright, light thrown across a dark nightscape that seemed to glow. Rembrandt as an older man, more real and solid than a photograph. A Seurat lighthouse; up close some dots distinct with others carrying the imprint of a tool used to flatten them.

There were plenty of folks in the museum just breezing through, glancing at work after work, nodding at the familiar the same way you acknowledge a hit coming on the radio for the twentieth time. I’ve seen that before and I’ll see it again, their half-attentive glances seemed to say.

It strikes me as one of the most prevalent human mistakes, all summed up in that moment.

I don’t just mean the appreciation of art. I can look at Monet’s work and feel it, like a palpable thump to the heart, a jolt to the center of my chest. But that’s me, my reaction, not necessarily yours.

But the intensity of that moment, standing before that painting and feeling the sight and sense of it—that’s an unrepeatable experience. I can buy a print, download it as a screensaver, even take along a digital camera and snap a picture. But it won’t be the same.

One of the great seductions of technology is the notion that our saved shadows and imitations of experience are as true and powerful as the real thing. We think that if we’ve seen a picture of the painting, we’ve seen the painting. We think if we listen to the cd, we’ve heard the performer. If we watch love or loss on the dvd, then it’s the same as going through the experience.

Well, no, it’s not.

And sadder than our belief about the recording of experiences we’ve never had is our belief that we can capture moments of our own lives.

How many weddings have been commandeered by the videographer capturing the experience on tape? How many children’s performances have been cluttered by parental recorders?

The mistake is in the belief that we can really capture and relive these moments. We can’t. Each moment, each experience comes just once, and if you ignore it the first time because you’re busy “capturing” it on film, you’ve lost something that you won’t ever get back. We miss living it as it happens, thinking we can have the experience later, at our leisure. But what we return to will be the empty shell; the real thing will be gone.

Imitations, reminders, keepsakes of life are all well and good, but it’s no good to miss the real stuff of life on the way. It doesn’t matter if it’s the real Monet on the museum wall or the moment when the sun cuts through the mist below a tree stand on the first day of deer season or the game when you’re perfectly in tune with the ball and the team or the perfect kiss that draws the air right up out of your heart—you’d better pay attention to the moment while it’s there, because no cage known to man can hold it.

PARTY-JUMPING

(News-Herald, April 5) The flap over party-hopping county commissioner candidates is a new twist on an old Venangoland election tradition.

For virtually every other election it’s normal procedure for candidates for every office from school board to ferret inspector to file as candidates of both parties. This has nothing to do with political philosophy or the principles of one party or another. It has to do with the laziness of county voters.

A candidate for office has two pre-election details to sweat. One is making sure that he is listed with both parties. The other is hoping that his name will be drawn for the top of the candidates listing on the ballot.

Plenty of people in Venangoland still love to vote the straight party ticket with no particular regard for the actual person running. If my dog were running for office, he could get 20% of the votes cast by crossfiling; if his name were at the top of the list, he’d get 35%.

It’s a curious phenomenon because political parties stand for so little these days.

Nationally, the GOP has been spoiled by success. It got tromped in the last election by valuing, as John McCain correctly observed, political power over principle. The GOP forgot that it had any principle other than the desire to keep and exercise power, and so the party that once championed smaller government spent money like a drunken sailor and stuck Uncle Sugar’s nose into every nook and cranny of American life.

The Democrats are similarly principle-free. They have found some things to pretend to believe that get them votes, but their main message is still, “We aren’t those guys.”

As little as parties matter on the national scene, they matter even less here.

Take, for example, the Cranberry School Board. You would think that these folks had run out of ways to embarrass themselves years ago, but no. There are always new ways for them demonstrate the fine art of scrabbling and wrestling for power. It’s hard to escape the impression that the district could be fabulous if the board members focused as much energy on education as they spent on putting “those people” in their place.

This is local, small-time politics at its finest. We’ve watched these two factions, in one form or another, battle it out for years. Yet I would wager that most of us have no idea how the party affiliations stack up in all this mess. Nor in all the heated rhetoric do we read any mention of Democrat or Republican.

The politics are personal. It’s my good, noble friends and I, trying to stop those big doodyheads over there. Small town party affiliations don’t tell us much about the candidate’s ideology or philosophy. Mostly party affiliation tells who they hang with, who they’re loyal to, who sits at their table at the country club.

The requirement that county commissioners not come from all the same party makes sense, not because we need a balance of ideologies, but because it improves the chances of electing people from different political cliques.

I can see why Dems might be touchy about the matter, because that one seat is the only office in the county that a Democrat has a good shot at winning in an election. It has to be annoying to nominally Democratic candidates that some nominal Republicans are trying to take even this small prize away from them.

But for the general public to complain is just silly. Telling Republicans apart from Democrats in this county is not a matter of distinguishing between sheep and wolves or elephants and donkeys. It’s more like distinguishing between guys who wear boxers and guys who wear briefs—it can be done, but not with a quick, superficial glance.

The electorate loves to complain about elected officials, but then, a large portion of the electorate never even shows up to elect. And when it does show up, it doesn’t bother to learn anything about the candidates (who could, on the local level, be anything from a highly-qualified capable grown-up to a clueless dimbulb to my dog).

Yes, sometimes voting is a fruitless exercise. Cranberry’s board isn’t the first to ignore a clear message from the voters, and it won’t be the last.

But if you don’t want to elect a Republican in Democrat’s clothing, don’t vote for it. And if you really want to vote in a way that is useful, learn something about the candidates and decide who has the brains, ability, commitment and skills for the job.

When the time comes, go to the polls. Exercise your ability to think. And if you can’t do that, exercise your ability to stop complaining.

EASTER

(News-Herald, March 2002) We arrive now at what may still be my favorite holiday of the year—Easter.

I have fond memories of Easters past. Back in the day, the ministers’ forum of Franklin put on a nifty sunrise service out at Two Mile Run Park every year. It was my privilege to play in a brass choir that Tim Young directed in those days, and one of our prime activities every year was to play at that service.

It was a good reminder of the vagaries of local weather. I can remember at least one service that was moved inside because there was a foot of snow on the ground. But when it worked—well, there we’d be, playing Easter hymns on a flat-bed trailer parked on Pioneer Flats, the sun coming up over the hill behind us and illuminating three large crosses mounted on that hill.

Afterwards we’d go out to breakfast and eat too much, then disperse to our individual churches. My own church would have a large cross at the front of the sanctuary covered with lilies, and the scent filled the building.

I love that Easter has stayed largely impervious to our tendency to water down every religious holiday until it’s palatable to anyone, regardless of creed or lack thereof. I suspect that an alien landing in the US in December would assume that he’d arrived in the midst of some festival of General Nice Behavior without ever picking up a clue that the festival had anything to do with some sort of religious faith. We’ve loaded the season down with secular songs and worldly justifications for Getting Stuff; we’ve even reached the point where some folks suggest that Hanukah and Christmas are really pretty much the same, which is rather an insult to both.

But Easter resists. Marketers have never quite hit on a good hook for Easter. No matter how many times we redesign him, the Easter Bunny looks either scary or ridiculous. There’s only so much candy you can give folks, and most of us don’t know enough about seasonal clothes any more to appreciate the transition. Do I have to wait till after Easter to wear white snow boots?

An Easter egg hunt is hard to pass off as anything more than kids chasing around to grab stuff. Entertaining, but what’s the message here? Christmas gifts are supposed to represent our love and appreciation for each other, but what do we make of groping in the underbrush for fake eggs. Sometimes in life you have to look for the prizes under a bush, and then it’ll just be some cheesy plastic thing? And for music we don’t have anything beyond “Easter Parade.”

I suspect that Easter hasn’t “caught on” because the message is a bit too complicated. Christmas has been boiled down to “Be nice. Enjoy your family. Give people stuff.” But the whole death and resurrection thing—that’s a bit harder to squeeze down to a motto that will fit on a chocolate bar.

Easter isn’t as pretty as Christmas. Babies are cute (particularly if you imagine fresh-scrubbed hay and well-groomed farm animals) but there are no pretty pictures to go with the Easter story. Even Christians have trouble with that aspect; Sunday the churches will be full of folks celebrating the resurrection part of the story, but in the next forty-eight hours there will be a lot of lonely ministers in the county talking about the dying part.

And, in the end, the Easter story has a message that is not exactly the one we tend to hope for. If the life of Jesus was to be remade for the movie market, producers would definitely tweak that ending. “We’ve got to lose that whole nailed to the cross thing,” some Hollywood mogul would holler. “How about Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson parachute in and blow the Roman soldiers away? Or all the kids that he preached to before make googly eyes at the soldiers and get them to turn him loose?”***

We like stories where the Bad Thing doesn’t happen and people don’t have to go through anything really hard. For me, part of the Easter message has always been that Bad Things do happen, and yet there is renewal and resurrection and the Bad Things don’t have to be the end of the story.

It’s not an easy message to absorb or accept (which is why I think it sometimes gets garbled in translation into things like “Jesus died so that you could win a softball game or get enough money for a new Lexus”). But in the end it’s a hopeful one, just right for spring. Things really can be as bad as they seem, but that doesn’t mean that life can’t surprise you with something better than you can imagine.

***This was a rare instance of my editor's removal of my original text. For the newspaper audience he was probably correct. Since my audience here is rather more limited (and since Mel has since caught up with surpassed my thought here) I present the original full version.

SERVICE (Or the lack thereof)

(News-Herald, March 29) How hard can it be to provide service?
You know. Just respond to customers as if you were concerned about meeting their needs and not treating them as time-wasting annoyances.
I am conducting an ongoing battle with my phone company. They would like me to answer some admittedly simple questions and make some reasonable arrangements. I would gladly do all these things—but only if I can do so by talking with a live human being.
I know for a fact that phone companies employ live human beings. Every time they’re interested in getting me to change companies or phone plans, they have no end of live humans who call me to chat about the various reasons I should want to give their phone company my money.
So when the phone company wants my money, they have live humans (in fact, live humans with American accents) in abundance. But when I want to talk to them about my service, suddenly all the breathing carbon-based life forms have vanished, leaving me to wander in an endless maze of automated replies.
It only adds insult to injury that these automated systems are now programmed for charm. The computerized conversation is peppered with little conversational touches such as “Now let’s see” or “I’d like to make sure this is right” or “Gosh, I can’t find the vocabulary you just used in my word-recognition software.”
I have to assume that my phone company thinks I’m too much of a moron to know when I’m talking to a computer instead of a human. Not a thought that endears them to me.
Talking to the software has actually made me nostalgic for calls to computer help lines and chatting with some charming young man in New Delhi. The accent may be impenetrable, and he may just be reading to me out of a database, but at least I know he’s real.
Incredibly, the organization that, for me, sets the standard for customer service is the government. No, really. I can hardly believe it myself, but there it is.
Because my daughter is in Austria this semester soaking up art and culture and visiting the places in Salzburg where they filmed The Sound of Music, I needed to make arrangements for her drivers license renewal and filing taxes.
At the state Department of Transportation, I got through directly to someone who personably and pleasantly answered my questions. I received the information I needed, and nobody tried to make me feel like an idiot for asking.
At the IRS, I experienced the most speedy, responsive and servicey service I’ve received maybe ever. The people I talked to gave me their name and badge number, told me exactly what they were doing if they had to stop talking to me for more than five seconds to do it, and repeatedly apologized for any delays, even though at no point did I have to sit through even a full chorus of “Guantanamera”. I was almost embarrassed to have federal employees try that hard to make me happy (almost--but I got over it).
It seems that customer service may be a new wave. Home Depot was recently shocked when an on-line column complaining about their service generated 10,000 grumpy “Me too” responses. Their new CEO immediately set up a direct complaint line and e-mail address, plus creating an in-house task force to address service issues.
One can only hope that other corporate giants deduce that it might be a bad idea to save money by cutting staff until a store only has one employee per 62,000 customers.
It is a bit amazing to realize the degree to which we have to come to expect poor or non-existent service, the resignation with which we assume that whatever business we deal with will not be interested in helping us (and that’s before we get to the truly awful examples like health insurance companies who use poor, unresponsive service as a regular strategy to make more money).
Here’s one of the under-sold selling points of small businesses in a market like ours—deal with a business where you actually see a real face, talk to a real human, and get assistance as if you were not an enormous bother. It’s one of those clichés about small town life that’s true. Even if you’re dealing with someone who’s strange, obnoxious or cantankerous, you’re still dealing with a human, one person to another.

SERIOUS BUILDING

(News-Herald, November 2002)I learned a few things on my recent jaunt to New York City.
First, I learned a relatively easy way to get there. I now recommend driving to the Newark Air Port and taking a bus (or other ground transportation) into Manhattan. It was quick and simple and not too expensive.
Unexpected though it may be, my trip also gave me lots to think about regarding Venango County.
There’s the speed thing. It’s common to talk about life in small towns being slower than the fast-paced urban life. But New Yorkers must have to develop a sort of mobile patience, because it takes comparatively forever to get anywhere. An hour in mid-town Manhattan traffic would have one of us praying for either a bazooka or a small tank.
Manhattan is foot-traffic territory. There are cabs everywhere, carefully observing whatever city ordinance requires that each cab horn be tested roughly every twelve seconds. I did not notice many overweight people in Manhattan.
Not that they don’t respect our way of life. I stumbled across the Amish Market in Manhattan. The Amish in Manhattan seem to be a bit different from our Pennsylvanian Amish; Manhattan Amish, for instance, speak a great deal of Arabic. The market did include many Amish staples—virgin olive oil, salsa, hot sauces, and votive candles.
And if you’re taking the foot tour, you can’t pass up Times Square. There are, of course, the nightly light displays sucking up enough gigawatts to power Venango County for a decade. But there are other treats there as well. The night we walked through, a man in front of MTV studios was attempting to sell information on 429 sex positions for $1.
There was also a six-piece group of street musicians of some native South American extraction (Peruvian, maybe?) playing with recorders, pipes, guitars, and drum. They played what sounded like traditional music, with the traditional open guitar case in front, while another walked through the crowd selling traditional CD’s. It was a bit odd to be looking at a canyon of neon and super-lit advertising set to a soundtrack from a National Geographic special.
But most impressive to me this trip was Grand Central Station. The sheer giant awesomeness of the main concourse, framed by columns and stone and chandeliers, is impressive in its own right. But spend some time in the station and what starts to impress is the attention to detail.
Loading platforms are framed with carefully detailed mosaic work. Air vents in alcoves are set in finely wrought sculptures. You cannot find a place in the whole building that has been simply slopped together.
What slowly begins to sink in is that this is a piece of public construction built by people who were serious about what they were doing. I think, sometimes, that we have somehow become a culture that is no longer serious about making things.
Being serious about building is not a matter of money. It is not serious to throw money indiscriminately at a project; neither is it serious to search single-mindedly for ways to avoid spending money.
What’s serious is to concentrate on doing the project right, which means making the project as if it counts, as if it is going to be a real and significant part of peoples’ lives. Grand Central Station reeks of that sort of seriousness, just as the Belmar Bridge does. These are structures that were built as if they would be important, as if they accomplished goals that were worth doing and therefore worth doing well.
Our most serious structures in Venango County are our churches. They’re built to matter. They were built with the purpose of worship in mind; no church brags about how cheaply or expensively it was built, but shows how well it was built to its purpose. The county is chock full of serious churches.
Sunday night I stood by the site of the World Trade Center. Years ago I stood atop one of the towers and felt as I did Sunday; that it was too large for my brain to grasp. New York is still struggling with the question of how to fill the site with a serious structure.
We are too rarely serious about our purpose. We allow ourselves to be defined by our limits instead of our vision. We slip into worrying about our wallets, our egos, our fears, or any number of things that are beside the point, as if the purpose will somehow take care of itself. But what we learn over and over again is that it won’t. Know your limits, but live by your vision.

VEGANS (OR NOT)

(News-Herald, March 22) I have to confess that I am happy to be at the top of the food chain.

The vegetarian world has become more complicated than it used to be. If you’re Of A Certain Age, you may think it’s pretty simple—vegetarians are people who don’t eat meat. Well, there are still vegetarians, but in recent generations some refinements of the movement have occurred.

There are varieties of vegetarianism. We’ve got lacto-vegetarians who won’t eat eggs, but will eat dairy products. There are ovo-vegetarians who will eat eggs, but won’t touch dairy products (PETA has some charming posters to accompany the slogan “Dairy is rape”). And there are lacto-ovo-vegetarians will eat both eggs and dairy.

None of these eat meat, though there seems to be some disagreement about what constitutes “meat.” Some vegetarians only include products of the mammal world, while others include any fishy type of creature.

But that’s just the start. For instance, we also have fruitarians, who eat only fruits, nuts and berries- essentially parts of the plant that can be harvested without actually damaging the plant (presumably that refers only to physical damage and not emotionally traumatizing the plant, though given some of what I’ve read on the subject, I may be jumping to an unwarranted conclusion).

At the top of the ethical food pyramid, we find the vegans. Vegans (pronounced VEE-guns) are not just about diet—their goal is to avoid all food, products, and activities that in any way exploit animals from actual meat to leather to cosmetics tested on fluffy bunnies.

On the one hand, I give the vegans credit for consistency. There is a troubling inconsistency in the person who doesn’t want to chop Bossie up for hamburger, but is happy to slice up Bossie’s skin to make a stylish purse. In some parts of the world, veganism is a reasonable extension of religious faith.

On the other hand, vegan websites contain lines like “veganism…is an integral component of a cruelty-free lifestyle.” And dandy quotes about empathy for animals.

And surfing vegan websites inevitably leads one back to PETA. I know many very nice, decent people who belong to PETA, and God bless them all. But the organization itself is a fine example (like the ACLU, the NRA, and the Two Mile County Park Rescue) of a group that has focused so narrowly for so long that it has lost some of its sense of reality.

So we have the spectacle of PETA throwing blood on fur coat wearers while vegan websites talk about developing empathy for fellow creatures. What exactly am I to make of people who can empathize with furry animals, but not actual humans.

Well, as I said, I am happy to occupy the top of the food chain. I like meat, and if you try to tell me that my children have no more value than a cow or a dog or a lobster, I have no trouble telling you that you’re wrong, and possibly a bit silly as well. There’s something disturbing about the level of species self-loathing that some activists express.

Like any group, vegans are not all wrong all the time. I have no doubt whatsoever that if we all had to watch where meat comes from or, worse yet, kill and butcher it ourselves, the number of vegans converts would multiply by a few zillion overnight. As with our inexpensive trinkets and cheap clothes, we are a little too happy to let someone else wade into the dirty work for us as long as we don’t have to see, hear or think about it.

That’s why I think animal rights folks are completely wrong to oppose hunting. I don’t hunt, but even I can see that hunting and killing your own meat creates respect for the animals that can never be gained by harvesting steaks in neat plastic wrappers.

As with many movements, it’s the most vocal fringes that get the attention. There are plenty of vegans and vegetarians living pleasantly meat-free lives among us without creating an enormous fuss. You can actually find one local group online at http://www.geocities.com/the_vword/events.html . As lifestyle choices go, it certainly beats playing heavy metal music in the back yard at midnight before making blood sacrifices to Baal.

The irony is that I know enough the horrific meat-packing industry and sympathize enough with furry beasts that I might inclined to become a little vegetarian-ish. But the knowledge that there are people out there working diligently, doggedly and obnoxiously to support the cause only makes me feel that I don’t need to bother, and I will feel better after I grill a nice steak.

WHY IS THERE A CYBER SCHOOL MARKET?

(News-Herald, March 15) When I swiped at cyberschooling last week, a reader suggested that I had missed another side of the issue. And he’s correct. So let me take off my public school cheerleader hat for a moment.

Public schools create a market for cyber- and home-school by being inflexible and unresponsive to their customers. If public schools were a restaurant, they would offer only three menu items, and serve meals only four separate hours during the day. If you don’t want to eat what they’re serving when they’re serving it, well, tough.

Most people have kind of a notion of what the mission of a school district should be. Many school districts have even written it down somewhere. The general notion is that a school’s mission is to educate students.

That might lead one to expect that in school systems, people are constantly trying to answer the question, “How can we best educate students?” And I believe that many school systems really intend to get around to answering that question.

But instead of defining themselves by what they do to educate students, many school districts define themselves by what they DON’T want to do.

Don’t cause trouble. Don’t get parents upset. Don’t spend money. Don’t do anything that might rile up lawyers. Don’t attract the state’s attention. If trouble does raise its ugly head, don’t make any sudden moves that might stir it up more. Don’t rock the boat. You don’t get awards for mediocrity, but you don’t get in trouble, either.

What creates such massive inertia? State and federal unions don’t help—they’re don’t like to rock the boat either—but they get blamed more they deserve. The old complaint that you can’t fire a teacher because of the union is a crock. All you have to do is document and demonstrate their incompetence. But that would require someone to make a fuss and rock the boat.

It may be a certain amount of shell shock.

Those school system restaurants? They would be restaurants that are forced to serve everyone, even the people who aren’t hungry. Some of the customers would demand their meals for free and some would demand exotic Eurasian squid flambe; other customers would complain loudly that there is no need for fancy meals. The government would tell the chef how he had to cook, and require that he serve filet mignon but only pay him for hamburger.

School systems contain people at all levels who really mean to be active advocates in pursuit of education, but by the time they’ve dealt with a succession of daily crises, they’re just out of time, energy and patience. Many are hidden, like guerilla fighters in the educational underbrush.

Understand, I offer these only as possible explanations for the public school system mindset. Explanation, not excuses. There are no excuses.

When the feds and state stomp in with their big boots to demand actions that we know, as professionals, are bad education practice, we ought to stand up to them. And there are school districts that have turned down federal money because it came tied to government-pushed rotten replacements for district policies with proven success. But mostly we don’t do that.

We are great at dragging our feet. New principal, new programs, new co-workers, new kid with a new learning challenge—we can drag our feet every step of the way. Sometimes it’s easy to understand why—we sit in committees planning the same stuff over and over again, knowing that we just have to wait, because none of it will ever be implemented.

We resist all manner of change. We continue to operate our school schedules as if all families have one working dad and one stay-at-home mom. We never bend to accommodate one customer, because then we might have to accommodate another customer.

If we all sat down with a blank slate to design a system for educating every child in this country to become a capable, good, productive citizen—if we designed that system from scratch based on what makes sense and would work, we’d design a system that looked not at all like the one we’ve got.

If you ask us in the school system why we tend to be so inflexible and unresponsive, we can give you a long list of reasons. And many of them are really good, legitimate reasons.

But here’s the thing—a whole bunch of folks aren’t that interested in the reasons we don’t budge much. They just know we don’t budge much, and eventually some of these folks think, “Well, I could do better than this myself.” And that’s why there’s a market for cyberschooling. Now I’ll put my hat back on.

CYBERSCHOOLING

(News-Herald, March 8) I work in a public school. And I work in public education because I believe in public education, not the other way around.

There has been more squawking lately about cyberschooling. You will not be surprised to learn that I have an opinion.

Cyberschools have vocal defenders, and some of them have good and valid points to make. Traditional public education has a tragic inclination toward a one-size-fits-all model, and the No Child Left Standing meddling of the federal gummint has only made that particular problem worse. If I were the parent of young children right now, what would trouble me most about putting them in public school is that most school districts are either unable to protect their students from politically-based idiocy or simply unwilling to even try.

There are some real needs that cyberschooling can fill. Most obviously I think of all the students over the years who became ill and, because they were bedridden, missed a year of school. With computer technology, there’s no reason for that to ever happen again.

There are students, particularly in smaller districts, who could have cyber-access to exciting specialized learning opportunities. Cyberschooling could be a good supplement to “regular” schooling. Having a variety of available options has to be a good thing.

There are also some real needs that cyberschools don’t help in the slightest.

A student who opts out of regular school because he finds it hard to put up with a regimented day and the imposition of teachers telling him to do stuff often fails to thrive when put in a situation where there is no regimen at all. If all of your work is due “whenever you get around to it,” it takes a lot of self-discipline to stay on track. And if you had that sort of self-discipline in the first place, school wouldn’t be all that hard to put up with.

As with home-schooling, I regret the loss to the school community. If all the best trumpet players are at home, the school music program and all the students in it suffer. Ditto for writing programs, science programs, etc.

I believe that one of the values of public schools is that it puts a wide variety of young people together in a small community, gives them the chance to learn how to cope, to struggle, to work out differences, or to stand up for those differences against the crowd.

I think it’s ironic that Pastors are among the many home- and cyber- school boosters. I suspect that if their parishioners came to them and said, “You know, I’m not going to come to church any more because some of the people are hard to get along with, I don’t like the pews, and I think I can best meet my worship needs at home,” the pastoral reply would not be so supportive.

Additionally, cyberschools, like school voucher programs, disenfranchise whole chunks of the community. As a taxpayer, you may think that your local district spends too much on frivolous waste (like teacher salaries) or not enough on important essentials (like teacher salaries), but either way, there are elected officials who have to take your phone calls and win your votes. They are accountable to all the taxpayers in all decisions.

But parents who cyberschool are accountable to nobody. If they decide to take your tax dollars out of the school district to pay for their child’s cybereducation, you don’t get to say a single word about it.

And cyberschools themselves are barely accountable. Are the students learning? Who’s to say. Some parents are enormously, completely, painstakingly responsible in monitoring their cyberlearners. And others wave “Seeya honey—go get smart today” on their way out the door. Nobody is watching to see which are which. Apparently, the state doesn’t even have anyone auditing cyber school financial books.

Cyberschoolers have a variety of responses to these criticisms. They say cyberschool doesn’t take that much money away from schools (it does), and taking the student out of the school reduces district costs (it doesn’t). The most common internet argument boils down to “It’s my kid, so I should get to educate him however I want.”

That’s wrong, too. Education is not a service provided for parents alone. Employers, neighbors and fellow citizens all depend on the products of public education. And cyberparents are wrong to make the argument in the first place.

If they ever manage to drive home the point, “It’s my kid’s education, so it’s nobody else’s business what I do” the next voice in the conversation will be the throngs of retirees replying, “Fine. If it’s all about you, YOU pay for it.”

This has been a week of major computer headaches for me-- all people who write viruses and malware should roast slowly in Hell. My apologies to both of my loyal readers :)

PERFORMERS IN VENANGOLAND

(News-Herald, March 1)How does an artist make a life in Venangoland?

For some, location isn’t critical. A painter’s work can travel to the audience, and a writer can work in any remote cave that has internet hook-up. For those folks, an area like ours offers the advantage of living cheaply. It’s more of a challenge for performing artists, like musicians or dancers to locate, or relocate, to these parts.

It’s a challenge, first, to find people with serious backgrounds willing to relocate. With luck, we get a John or Susie McConnell or a Susie Daniels with real experience in the Big World, but who have roots that bring them back here. We’re also fortunate when an Ed Frye, a Don Cochran, or a Bob English decide to stick around rather than take their talents Out There. Occasionally someone turns up in these parts just because—well, we get lucky.

You remember the song: “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.” The song is talking about New York City, and it’s dead wrong. It’s hard to leap from small-town performer to big city success, but it’s not easy to jump the other way, either.

It’s hard to make a living in a small setting. “Show up, amaze the rubes, collect bushels of money” is not much of a business plan, though we have certainly seen people try it. Two things inevitably scuttle that plan—first, we rubes aren’t as easy to amaze as big-city hicks imagine; and second, if you’re a pompous jerk, it doesn’t take very long for word to spread through the entire not-very-large, well-networked musical community.

Even with a good plan, it’s tough. Dan and Patty David tried as hard as anyone in a while—they had some talent, some skills, and willingness to invest time working their way into the community. But in the end, they still couldn’t gather up enough money to make a living.

It’s not just the money that makes settling in the small city a difficult choice. People rarely go into performing because they have small, easily-fed egos, but small town settings rarely gush fat fountains of adulation. It’s part of our charm—no fake-smiling cheek-smooching hugfests, but when someone does applaud your work here, you know they mean it.

At the top in the Big City, you get fame and bales of bucks. Small city performers need to be more self-directed, willing to keep plugging because they either believe in the work or just plain enjoy it.

When artists do bring big city performing and teaching skills to the small city, everybody benefits.

First, other performers step up their game. Hackers like me have a little talent, a few acquired skills, and that most important hacker quality—a sense of my limitations, so I don’t bite off more than I can chew. The chance to work with big guns is always a chance to get a little better, and pass that on. It’s the reverse of the Bad Apple principle—a few talented performers can elevate a whole community of artists.

That, in turn, benefits the whole community. The arts don’t make a good substitute for shelter, clothing, and a well-filled dinner table. But I do believe that being surrounded by the arts in action, the chance to be witness to something beautiful or powerful or moving, makes being human a bit better. Otherwise we would all be eating our plain baked potatoes while wearing a plain white t-shirt and staring at the bare walls of our crate-furnished homes.

For the performers, the last big benefit is the chance to do what they do. A Marc Holland could still be in the big city, dancing on the Broadway stage and making his way in the rough and tumble world of the Big Time. Would he get to stage three or four shows a year and run his own studio, while still living a comfortable, relaxed life? Probably not.

What these folks give up makes the last benefit for us natives. Here, they get less attention; we are likely to take them for granted. Our children grow up thinking it’s just normal to live in an area with active theater groups, gifted dancers, talented performing groups, live music. Years later, they may realize their luck—but in the meantime, they enter life thinking that a life filled with art and beauty and music is how things are supposed to be, not some exotic luxury. I think that’s a Very Good Thing.

One of my plans for improving the world: take unemployed performers working in big city obscurity, waiting for one more chance to do what they love—send them to small places like Venangoland. They get to do what they love; the rest of us get to live richer lives.

CHINA

(News-Herald, February 22) We keep hearing that we need to pay attention to China, and given that they’re well on their way to owning us (and the oil we crave), that’s probably good advice. I’ve read a fair number of histories of China, particularly covering the twentieth century, and I agree it’s a good idea for us to pay attention.
For one thing, we’re going to have to deal with them sooner or later (actually, sooner has already arrived for a great number of American businesses), and if there is one thing we are consistently, repeatedly, expensively stupid about, it’s the matter of doing our homework about the countries we’re getting involved with. Cuba, Korea, Vietnam, Iran, Nicaragua, Iraq—our problems often aren’t a matter of military will. We just plain don’t study up on the culture and the people and we end up taking a croquet mallet to a horseshoe game.
But China is different. China is huge. It’s entirely possible that the only reason that China doesn’t already rule the world is that they’ve never wanted anything from the rest of us except some breathing space.
Chinese communism had a lot in common with the old Soviet Union communism, which is to say that in both cases the resulting government has very little to do with communism and plenty to do with national character that was already in place.
And Chinese culture is worth some American eyeballing because many of their most disastrous and undesirable characteristics are outsized versions of qualities we generally like.
Take family values. The Chinese put an enormous premium on family values, and much of Chinese culture is powered by them. And sometimes, it has not been a very good thing.
Chinese family values often ended up meaning that, in a position of power or public trust, your first responsibility was to take care of your family, and that your actual job description was secondary. If your job is to manage food distribution in your district—that means your family is sure to get fed, followed by people who stay on your good side, with people that you don’t like bringing up the rear. If you do the hiring, qualifications are not nearly as important as connections.
In many cases the Chinese valued family over responsibility or principle. In our culture, we don’t really associate family values with corruption, but in excess, unchecked by principle or ethics or a general sense of responsibility, family values can be just as much of a corrupting influence as anything else.
That is probably one of the reasons that the Chinese welcomed Mao and the communists in the first place—because they promised to replace a government based on personal connections and familial corruption with a government that focused on actually doing its job impartially.
Not that Mao ever delivered on that promise. But what I read leads me to suspect that says a lot more about Mao and China than about communism. Communism’s wide-reaching control simply allowed traditional Chinese corruption to become even more pervasive.
The Chinese also have a history of being really good at loyalty. And as much as we value loyalty and patriotism, it’s instructive to see how the Chinese have occasionally shot themselves in the foot with those virtues as well.
In the late fifties, Mao decided to turn China into an industrial giant by simply having all citizens turn their attention to steel production. China did not become a steel giant—but millions of farmers were taken away from the business of food production.
It was considered disloyal to question any of this. It was, in fact, considered disloyal not to claim enormous crops and great success, regardless of the facts. So as people across China celebrated their loyalty to their leader and their country, people across China also suffered and died because there simply was not enough food.
Under Mao, loyalty trumped truth. Facts were unwelcome; all that mattered was loyal and patriotic beliefs that stirred the heart and fostered the view of a strong and powerful country. Couple this belief with the drive to stay on the good side of the local people of privilege, and you begin to see why Chinese leaders have never needed anything like the Gestapo or the KGB.
It’s easy to imagine that certain values or ideals can never be perverted or twisted or over-emphasized, that they can never lead us into dark and dangerous places. “As long as I believe X, I’ll never do wrong,” is a lovely thing to tell ourselves. But our nature allows us the ability to make a hash out of just about anything.

BETTER LIVING THROUGH DENTISTRY

(News-Herald, February 2002) Today I’m apologizing to my dentist. I’m not going to name him for the same reason that you don’t usually volunteer your mother’s name when you’re arrested; he’s a good guy who does good work, and I’m afraid my conduct might not reflect well on him.
I was not always a Terribly Awful Dentistry Patient. But a few years ago—
Note: If you are considering the removal of wisdom teeth at any time in the future, you may want to skip the next few paragraphs.
--a few years ago, I had some wisdom teeth removed. The first round wasn’t bad. At least I’m pretty sure it wasn’t bad. I can’t claim to really remember a whole lot about it. I was under the influence of the kind of drugs that make it dangerous to walk past heavy machinery, let alone operate it.
But the second time around, some serious fear reaction vaporized every molecule of senses-clouding drug in my system. I felt no pain, but I heard and felt at the same time my teeth grinding on bone as they were ripped from my jaw, like character mutilation in a horror flick, only in full sensurround.
Since then, I am a dentistry basket case.
My dentist, God bless him, does everything right. He explains everything so that I understand what’s going on. He uses pleasant Dentist Euphemisms like, “This will pinch a little bit” (I believe we dropped pamphlets on the Taliban that said something similar).
He even has an office full of attractive women. I don’t know if this is by design, or luck, or Dental Technician School just doesn’t accept ugly women. But it’s a good choice. First, there is something vaguely comforting about having an attractive woman in the room. Second, no male over age 15 in the same room with an attractive woman is going to allow himself to scream, cry or beg for mercy. So this staffing choice seems a good thing for all concerned.
But even though my dentist does everything right, I do a lousy job of responding to his consideration.
First, there’s my mental problem. My brain is frighteningly retentive. I can remember a poem from Kindergarten (“Little Charlie Chipmunk”; when I know you much better I’ll recite it for you). I remember the combination to my mailbox in college, and the lyrics of many old bad songs.
However, once I’m told a date and time for a dentist appointment, my brain turns to durable Teflon. Tiny little eraser molecules hunt down the information, wrap it in plain brown paper, and load it on the next sneeze out of cabezaville. If I was at the dentist in the morning and made an appointment for the same afternoon, that evening I would be at home scratching my head thinking, “I wonder what I was supposed to do today. Maybe I was supposed to recite ‘Little Charlie Chipmunk’ for the kids.”
Add to that the embarrassment that’s involved in making an appointment because A) I suspect I’ve missed the previous six and B) I’m calling because of some problem that’s become ridiculously advanced while I waited for the tooth fairy to come fix it. I’m a reasonably intelligent person. I understand that when you put off painful things, you only make them more painful when you finally can’t avoid them. As a rational human being, I grasp this principle and can apply it in many situations. Except making dentist appointments.
Once I make it there, more challenges appear.
First off, I am apparently novocain-resistant. Sometimes it takes a few shots to achieve numbness. I suspect that the same anti-dentistry organ that puts out those eraser molecules recognizes that novocain is a prelude to Bad Things, and tries to get rid of it, like a panicked passenger bailing out a leaky lifeboat. Maybe somewhere in my body is a pocket of saved novocain; I envision being attacked by a bear some day who takes one bite out of me and then collapses when his head falls asleep.
Then, well, I feel bad that my dentist has invested in nice comfy chairs, because once he starts to work, I might as well be strapped to a seven foot two-by-four. I believe I actually shrink; I think I clench my entire body hard enough to compress my bone frame.
So I float a few inches above the comfy chair, heart hammering, congratulating myself on looking reasonably collected, and he’ll ask me, “How are you doing?” in that tone of voice that suggests he knows exactly how I’m doing and hopes that I won’t pass out with my mouth closed. I really should call him soon.

SENIORITIS

(News-Herald, February 15) Graduation is still months away, but it’s not too early for senioritis. If you’ve had children who graduated from high school, you know senioritis. “itis” is medicalese for “inflammation of the fill-in-the-blank.” In the case of senioritis, what becomes inflamed is the high school senior’s sense of self-importance.
The best-known symptoms are the most obvious. For seventeen years, a person can be the most mild-mannered, selfless, kind, considerate and lovable human being ever spawned. But by April of senior year, that same person will become so selfish, with such a ginormous sense of entitlement, that he will become unrecognizable.
By April, a high school senior knows that she is the center of the universe, sees no reason to believe that there is anyone anywhere doing anything more important than whatever she intends to do today.
Nature’s balance is at work here. Babies are cute and cuddly and adorable so that we don’t kill them when they’re screaming at 3 am. High school seniors are demanding and selfish so that we won’t miss them so much when they go.
But there are other side effects of senioritis as well. Take, for instance, senior panic.
Senior panic sets in when the senior combines counting skills and a calendar. For instance, as of right now, a Venangoland senior has only sixteen weekends left in his high school career. Subtract weekends that are already claimed by Prom, school plays, sporting events-- that might leave only a dozen.
Only a dozen weekends left to ask out that Interesting Someone that you’ve been imagining you might some day date. Only a dozen Saturdays to sleep in. Only a dozen weekends to spend with the friends that you may never see again for the rest of your life (and if you do, it won’t be the same). Only a dozen weekends left to square away the hurts and misunderstandings; only a dozen weekends to say those things that you always meant to say.
But it’s not only the seniors who start hearing the ticking of the clock.
Parents of high school seniors experience their own senioritis. Here they are, looking at this person whom they remember fairly vividly as a tiny blob of squalling flesh, realizing that this child is now about to walk out into the world, to be expected to function more or less like an adult. And the parent is not ready to let this adultish child go yet.
I don’t mean the sad loss when a close friends moves away and you know you’ll miss them. That’s certainly part of the package, but I’m talking about the same sense of panic that you felt when the teacher said it was time to pass in your test, and you knew you weren’t done yet.
Suddenly the parent is looking at the proto-adult and thinking, “But I’m not done! There’s Really Important Stuff I didn’t finish imparting yet!”
One minute you’re looking at the child who has inspired nothing but love and pride, and the next minute you’re thinking, “Good lord! How can anybody hope to hold down a real job when he can’t even comb his hair and pull up his pants!? Why in heaven’s name did I not get around to stressing the important of pulling up your pants!!!”
On their best days, parents feel the same love, pride and trust in their senior that they’ve always felt. But under the sway of a full-blown senioritis panic attack, parental units see an oncoming train wreck. They do not panic out of a sense of personal pride, but something far more powerful—the sudden overwhelming fear that a person they love most in the whole world is headed for disaster. And it will be their fault.
So, in a pre-emptive strike against guilt, matters that have not been an issue for years and years are suddenly the serious topic for talks entitled “We’d Better Sit Down and Talk About This Right Now, Young Lady, Part XXIV.”
This, in turn, aggravates everybody’s senioritis. At the very moment the senior is enjoying the belief that he is, in fact, the Master of the Universe, here comes the parents to suggest that he is actually a mass of glaring flaws.
Rinse and repeat for the next five months, until June comes and we find many people of both generations having a good cry—not sure why, exactly, but sure they can use it.
It is, in the end, just a phase for all involved. The Master of the Universe will, indeed, find the universe generally unimpressed with his preternaturally high self-esteem. But the Master’s parents will usually discover that their child is tougher and more adaptable than they had hoped. Good luck to them all over the next six months.

STICKS AND STONES

(News-Herald, August 2002) There are two types of people in the world; those who like to divide the world into two types of people, and those who don’t.
There are many many ways to do the dividing (my favorite new e-mail joke: there are 10 kinds of people in the world; those who understand binary and those who don’t). Let me suggest today that in the river of life, there are sticks and there are stones.
Stones are stationary. The current flows around them; they feel the pressure of the flow, but they stay put.
Sticks ride the current. They are carried along with the rush of the water.
Stones shape the river; sticks are driven by it.
Sticks cover a lot of territory, see a lot of the river bank, come in contact with many others. Often sticks can hook together, and move on to see what’s around the next bend side by side.
Stones become part of their surroundings, anchor the other stones with them. They don’t see much of the river bed, but what they see they know well.
Current may dislodge a stone, uproot it and send it tumbling further downriver, but a stone never really enjoys it. A stone feels disoriented, uncertain, and looks to get itself planted quickly again.
Sticks can become lodged against a bank or caught in an eddy. You can watch them bobbing there, edgy, itching to get back to their journey again.
Some sticks and stones are thoughtless and judgmental. Stones may look at sticks flashing by and be disgusted by their lack of stability, their insistence on moving on ahead, their unwillingness to settle. Some sticks look down on stones and think how dull, how boring, how pointless to sit there in one place.
But sticks and stones can also envy each other. Stones may look at sticks and envy their freedom, their movement, their energy, the sheer excitement of plunging on ahead with the rush of water. Stones can become lonely, feeling as if people and events rush by them and leave them sitting where they have always been.
Sticks can envy stones their peace. Sticks rush endlessly on and may dream of what it would be like to be a stone, at peace and settled in your own stable corner of the universe and the feel events move around you, instead of picking you up and tossing you ahead on the current.
Stones dislike being left behind. Sticks dislike leaving people behind.
Sometimes sticks and stones try to join together. Hardly ever works. There is no way for them to live together in a manner that honors both their styles. Opposites may attract. They may even love each other. But that doesn’t make them able to build a life together.
I think some places are better suited to one or the other. A big city, like Chicago, seems like a place suited to sticks. Venango County is a good place for stones.
I don’t think it’s better to be a stick or better to be a stone. The sticks complain that Venango County is too set in its ways, too stolid and stable. The stones complain that the sticks give up too soon, leave too easily. But each type of life has its rewards, and each requires that you give something up.
Ultimately, I think sticks and stones work well together. For a stone, there is a certain satisfaction that comes from helping to shape and direct the forces that send a stick on its way. And for a stick, that direction and shape to the river of life helps give them direction of their own, for which they can be grateful.
Without stones, a river would be a straight unwavering rush to the sea, without any interest or bend or change, monotonous and ultimately pointless. And if the river carried nothing with it, the life of each little section would be small and limited and connected to very little else.
If there really are two types of people, then we can each be only one type at a time, and our lives are richer and deeper and broader for our sharing with the “other” type. Life really is bigger than one person can take in from one small vantage point.
Sometimes, after a stick has traveled a long time, it becomes heavy and sinks to rest on the bottom; sometimes a stone is worn away until it is light enough to be carried away on the current. To really see the river, we have to see it more than one way. But while we’re waiting for the day our vision may change, we can benefit from the sight of others. That’s the best reason I know to have two types of people in the world. Or 10.

This is what happens when you teach in the same small town you grew up in. Eventually, you find your students hanging out with your mother...

BUSINESS INITIATIVE IN VENANGOLAND

(News-Herald, February 8) If you are going to try to make it as en entrepreneur in Venangoland, there are some specialized rules you need to be aware of.
First, and perhaps most challenging, you need to realize that we’re not very fond of success around here. Oh, we think it’s fine in principle—money rolling into the county, jobs blooming like a thousand flowers.
But as soon as we see anyone personally making money, we get grumpy and suspicious. Around here we don’t even have to meet Well-To-Do people—we know they’re all arrogant and stuck up and think they’re better than everyone else.
If someone uses initiative and wits to come up with a business idea and really makes it work, we know a hundred reasons why they’re Not So Great and their idea is Stoopid and it’s Not Right that they should get money that way.
It’s not just business people—we expect our politicians to stay in place, too. No getting fancy, no getting clever, no taking initiative.
It doesn’t just start in the adult years. You remember that kid in school—she studied for tests, did all her homework, paid attention in class, and when she got A’s the other students made fun of her and said she only got good grades because she was a suck up. As if being hard-working and ambitious is just an underhanded way to beat the system.
And while this may seem a harsh judgment, I’m trying to think of someone who has become locally successful, well-known and widely loved by achieving ambitious, daring, innovative, trail-blazing success. Can’t think of many. If I’m forgetting people, let me know—we need to talk about them.
But while we’re discussing your plan for local success, let’s talk about your personal life. I don’t mean your personal bad habits or your odd clothing choices. I mean your marriage.
We’ve seen it too many times in Venangoland. A couple’s personal issues become a court matter, their property carved up on the judicial block. And when that property includes valuable local businesses, everybody feels their pain.
Count the number of local businesses that have gone through upheaval, or that now stand empty, because Mr. And Mrs. Business Owner couldn’t work things out.
So, new rule. Anybody who’s in business around here who’s single—if they want to get married, they have to have the approval of all of their patrons. I don’t care whether you’ve been brought together by matters spiritual or biological—I don’t want to be deprived of my favorite basket weaving emporium or lemon pie dispensary because you get hitched, then later realize you made a horrible mistake and have to carve the business up in court.
If the business owner is already married, no divorce will be granted until every employee and patron in the area has taken a crack at fixing the marriage. The prospect of a few hundred marriage counselors should be more than enough motivation to make things work out.
Finally, business success in the region requires a thick skin and plugged ears. Because if there’s anything you’re going to get around here, it’s advice. We are loaded with kibitzers.
Selling something? We all know what it should cost. Made a decision? We all know what you should have done. There isn’t a person in the county who doesn’t know where the hospital should have been built or how Two Mile should be run.
And to be clear, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I happen to believe that democracy and capitalism and the free market work best with a variety of opinions, all out there loudly announcing themselves. Some opinions are smart, some are stupid, some are right, and some are just silly. But to sort them out, we have to have them out where we can see them and talk about them.
But if you’re launching an endeavor with the expectation that you will be loudly and unanimously supported by the local public, you’d be better off drilling holes in the Cranberry Mall parking lot with the expectation of striking gold. You can have as many people sit and jaw in the back seat as you like, but in the end, you’ve got to do your own steering as best you can. Even when the people in the back seat start hiring lawyers.
Just because someone has an opinion doesn’t mean you need to listen to him; not even if the opinion is printed in the newspaper.