Bullying

(News-Herald, April 29) Bullying is back in the news. Recently we’ve seen disturbing new developments, including bullying so extreme that it has driven teens to suicide. Bullying in schools is nothing new, but commentators are suggesting that we have turned an ugly new corner.
The problems of society have always leaked into public schools; a new wave of bullying is no surprise. Society has some bullying issues of its own.
The students in school today grew up with politicians and pundits who attack opponents with flat-out meanness. From Ann Coulter to Al Franken, political disagreement has been recast as a professional wrestling match, and political candidates at all levels compete to see who can deliver the most damning smear. Bullying is no longer simply a tactic; it’s the point, the purpose. The winner is presumably he who does the best job of pushing his opponents down.
It’s no wonder than many young people have learned that the best way to deal with someone who disagrees with you is to try to brutalize him into submission.
School bullying is complicated, often subtle, and now easier with internet anonymity. Sometimes one bully is goaded by a stealth agitator. Sometimes the bullied quickly becomes a bully. And let me be clear about this—nobody ever “asks for it” and it is never “his own fault.” But at the same time, there are students who keep feeding the situation that creates their bullying.
Over the past several years, school anti-bullying programs have proliferated with nice slogans like “no place for hate” or “no bully zone.” They mean well and probably don’t hurt anything (they’re better than rules designed to protect “different” kids from bullying by forbidding any students to be different). But I don’t believe they help much, either.
Bullying isn’t about hate. It’s about power. Strong kids bully weaker kids. Smart kids bully dumber kids. Well-dressed kids bully scruffy kids. The social elite bully the social inept. People with power bully people without it. Bullying is about picking a fight, on your terms, with someone who is not equipped to fight back. It’s about being bigger and forcing someone to understand that they’re smaller. It’s not always about hate; sometimes it’s not even personal.
A No Bully Zone is also largely futile because hardly anyone who bullies other people thinks he’s a bully. Tell him this is a No Bully Zone and he will look puzzled and suggest that you go scold an actual bully. To stop bullying, we have to understand what a bully is thinking when he’s making someone else miserable.
Some bullies believe that there are different rules for people who are Right and people who are Wrong. Right = big and Wrong = small, so it’s okay to beat Wrong people down, and keep beating if they won’t stay down.
The bully may see himself as a soldier for Order and Right. He’s not picking on people—he’s just trying to put Those People in their place, because if you don’t keep them knocked down a peg, they’ll start thinking they’re as good as Regular People. He may even see Those People as a personal threat. This is how some alleged Christians end up believing that it’s okay to bully gay folks, and how some gay folks end up believing it’s okay to bully Christians.
And now several Christians and gay people are getting ready to write me a letter explaining that what they’re doing is certainly not bullying—they’re just protecting themselves from Those People, who started the fight in the first place. That’s why people want to be on the losing side (so many people want to “take back the country” that I’m wondering who actually has it)—if I’m a victim, I’m just defending myself, not bullying someone else.
Those People is another tell-tale bully trick. Most bullies will tell you, “Of course I treat other human beings decently. But Those People don’t count because…” In any local school you can substitute another label—tecker, prep, jock, goth, other terms not fit to print—we all already know them.
The antidote is simple. (Not the Golden Rule, because the bully’s response is “If I was one of Those People, I would know to stay in my place.”) Let’s not argue whether to call you a bully or not. Just do this:
Treat other people well. Don’t be mean. To anyone, ever.
No passes, no excuses, no justifications, no exceptions. If we could manage to instill this in students (and their parents), we’d never have a bullying problem again.

New Music with Local Ties

(News-Heralds, April 22) One of the marvels of modern technology is that anybody with some simple equipment can record music and sell it to the masses. It used to be necessary to convince some suit at some record company to give an act a break, in part to help fund the expensive business of studio recording. While the traditional route is still traveled, many artists can create entire discs at home. Of course, anybody can do it. Actually talent is not a requirement, and music buyers in the new digital age must beware.
But amidst this new wealth of great, nearly-great, and not-remotely-great music, some real gems often appear. Here’s some news about two singer-songwriters with both technology and talent at their disposal.
Ami Sandstrom Shroyer graduated from FHS quite a few years ago, but she was a musical powerhouse even then. Since those days she and her husband have embarked on a career in ministry, which includes (but is not limited to) her recent cd release 40,000 Days.
This disc collects unabashedly Christian music that showcases both Ami’s singing and songwriting skills (recordings of one of her previous songs garnered a prestigious Dove award). Her voice is bright and light, clear and clean as a bell. Several of the songs have a nice pop sound, and many use a piano-guitar blend familiar to fans of early seventies folky pop.
Some of the songs here (“I Lift My Hands,” “Holy God”) are ready for prime time as praise songs, easily sung along with by a congregation. That’s no small feat; it’s not easy to write a song that is both effectively moving and approachably simple.
The top song of the disc is “Home,” a song with sophisticated changes that are not only clever songwriting, but also powerfully evoke longing, release and strength.
While a few of the songs are peppy and upbeat (the title track is cheerily, gracefully optimistic, and “Your Secret Place” wants to be a 1971 radio hit, in a good way), the majority of the disc is soft, slow and meditative. Taken together, these performances give a picture of a loving and uplifting God who walks with the singer through marriage, parenthood and even death.
You can order copies of this cd by going to the Shroyers’ site, www.wideopenhome.org.
While Shroyer has been in the music biz for a while, Amy Porter (who graduated from FHS more recently) just released her first album. Love Will Come is a collection of six (seven if you act quickly) of the many songs she has written over the years. The collection is emotional and very well-produced, moving through a progression of the heart.
Porter opens with “Lament,” and dense and driving setting for the serenity prayer, followed by a trio of beautifully sad songs. “Favorite Wine” and “Dream” capture the essence of a yearning and broken heart, while “Grandpa” is a song in which Amy and her brother Mark share memories of the grandfather who has passed away. Unlike a more typical grief song, there is no pat relief in the final chorus. This trio of songs carries heavy emotional weight.
But next is “Love Will Come,” a song that promises relief for a variety of burdened people. One of my favorite Porter lyrics appears here: “When we see her face, we won’t believe the lies that say it’s too late.” After this song raises the Hope stakes, “Only” provides further encouragement, with a guitar-based hook reminiscent of “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” Act soon and you get a seventh bonus track, “Not With You” which offers an upbeat banjo-laced tune and Porter at her most Karen Carpenteresque. The closing trio of songs offers the promise of hope, love, and strength.
The set (an EP, not a full disc) is lushly produced with a mix that ably supports Porters smokey rich voice (she sounds most like Sarah McLachlan), complete with aching strings and crunchy guitars. These are personal songs, and that shines through clearly.
To order the set, go to www.amyportermusic.com . Half of the money made goes to the orphanage in Haiti where Porter works.
Both sets are easy on the ear, enjoyable to listen to, but with a bit more soul and substance than the typical top forty offering. Each of these exceptionally talented young women has produced some beautiful and rewarding music, and both have roots right here in Venangoland. Give yourself a musical treat and support some musicians with local roots.

Teacher Merit Pay: Why Not?

(News-Herald, April 15) The nicest thing I can say about Obama’s education plan is that it isn’t any dumber than Bush’s, which is like observing that it isn’t any worse to be crushed by dead rats than by dead squirrels. I do give this administration credit for admitting that it’s not possible to make every single American school student above average by 2014. Or by 5014, for that matter.
Every politician comes equipped with his own list of favorite education ideas. In the political world, they call these Initiatives for Reforming and Revitalizing Education. In the teaching world, we call them Ideas That Could Only Come From People Who Rarely See the Inside of a Classroom.
Several of these classics appear in the Obama plan, including merit pay.
Let’s skip over the question of how to determine merit. Judging merit is tricky—everyone can name really good and really bad teachers, but most of us work somewhere in between those extremes. I expect that I can find former students who think I did a great job and others who think I stunk. And that’s before we get to people who define merit as “gives my child lots of playing time” or “always gives my child a good grade.”
But lets pretend we somehow solved that issue. What are the other problems with merit pay?
Budgeting is the biggie. The current pay scale system has its flaws, but as a budgeting tool it’s hard to beat—school boards can project exactly what their personnel costs will be years into the future.
Merit pay creates two possible scenarios. In scenario one, we decide what individual merit will be worth and let the chips fall where they may. “Sorry folks,” says the school board. “But our teachers did such a great job this year we need an extra 200 grand to meet payroll.” In this scenario, budgeting is a mystery and the taxpayers root for teachers to do a lousy job.
In scenario two, the board sets its total merit budget, and that pie is sliced thick or thin depending on how many teachers earn dessert. The more teachers who do well, the less they all get paid. In this scenario, teachers in the district fight each other for their paycheck.
Both scenarios promise fiscal challenges and serious damage to the school and community atmosphere.
Obama’s folks want to use merit pay to help push for higher-quality teaching staffs, and that’s a great objective. Nobody would like to see a school filled with top-notch teachers more than the teachers in that school. But I remain skeptical because, in the pursuit of excellent teaching staffs, so few districts use the tools already at their disposal.
Market theory would tell you that districts would compete to get their pick of the best teachers, offering incentives to attract the best people, then interviewing and screening rigorously to get just the right fit before they hire. But they don’t. They trust to luck, which comes through just often enough to make them believe it’s a plan.
Districts could watch new teachers extra-carefully. The first few years make all the difference in a teacher’s growth, but if there’s no sign of potential or growth, districts can fire pre-tenured teachers for any reason at all, nipping weeds in the bud.
Districts could also check for something other than a pulse before granting tenure; it’s not automatic. And once granted, tenure does not give incompetent teachers a free pass. Tenure simply requires districts to do more than say, “You’re ugly and expensive, so you’re fired.” Teachers who don’t stack up can still be pressured, retrained, disciplined and, yes, fired. It just takes some work.
One irony is that teachers have always been willing to give up big bucks in exchange for job security and other intangibles. Districts can easily reward their best teachers with other intangibles—praise, recognition, responsibility, a voice in decisions, just generally treating teachers like grown-ups.
Bad teachers are a small but powerfully annoying group; I’d love to see them get out. Like many teachers, I wish that PSEA and NEA were more aggressive about pursuing quality in the profession. But lousy teachers pay union dues, too, so I don’t look for too much help there. I don’t think the feds will help much, and Obama still hasn’t called me to consult.
However, school districts that are serious about pursuing teacher quality can do it today, with the tools already at their disposal, and without having to spend a cent on merit pay.

The Whiskey Rebellion

(News-Herald, April 8) Can you identify the correct decade for each of the following pieces of American political items:
Regional tension so great that many people expect the country to split in two. Politicians accused of violating the Constitution. Critics asserting that the government’s fiscal irresponsibility will bankrupt the country. Big city politicians dismiss the dumb hicks in the sticks, while rural folks say that the politicians just don’t get it. Debate so polarized that moderate voices duck for political cover. Activists in warpaint to show their sympathy with the Boston Tea Party and the patriots of the revolutionary war. Politicians charged with being tools of big financial interests. War profiteering. Oh, and throw in State’s Rights, too.
Of course, I’m talking about the 1790s, specifically 1790 through 1794 and the events known (but not all that well) as the Whiskey Rebellion. The following quick refresher/introduction courtesy of Thomas P. Slaughter’s excellent book, The Whiskey Rebellion.
In 1790, the American frontier is here. US citizens have pushed as far west as the Ohio valley, and their top concerns included Not Being Killed Horribly by Native Americans. The feds help back a militia raised in Kentucky and Pennsylvania; in October of 1790 that militia faces natives in “pitched battle” for the first time. The militia forces were completely defeated.
In that same year, the feds are looking to pay off the war debt that they have taken from the states. Alexander Hamilton pushes an internal tax, an excise tax on whiskey. It is a hard sell, and before the end its supporters have argued, among other things, that drinking whiskey is a vulgar habit for low-lifes and if a tax made them buy less of the noxious liquid, all much the better.
The tax passes in 1791, the same year as another military debacle and defeat at the hands of native forces. This time it appears that well-paid east-coast suppliers had provided shoddy and useless supplies and weaponry.
Fighting for their lives, feeling federally ignored, and facing a nuisance tax that they found insulting, illegal and unethical, many folks in western PA and Kentucky consider becoming an independent state. It was never a viable option, but it shows just how mad they were.
The next best thing is to fight the tax. Frontier citizens refuse to pay it, and threaten the men charged with collecting it. They hold meetings, dress up as Tea Party Indians, declare themselves the true heirs of the revolution and rail against the “elites” back East who are destroying the country. Many moderate politicians in the West face an angry mob and have little choice but to say, “Oh, I’m with you guys” and hope that a chance to soften the movement might appear.
Faced with open and loud challenges to the federal government’s right to do, well, anything, the feds strike back. First they use law, requiring distillers to face charges in Philadelphia—no small trip for westerners at the time.
The squawking grows louder. The whole frontier is flouting the law, but Western PA is special for two reasons. One is John Neville, one of Pittsburgh’s first wealthy successes; he was charged with collecting the tax, and unlike other men with his job, he was not about to back down. The other is George Washington; the President had recent history with the region, as he had quietly become one of the region’s major landowners. He is both familiar and fed up with the frontier attitude.
The Feds are standing up “for law and order.” The rebels are standing up “for freedom.” Rebel moderates tried to negotiate a solution that the radicals may never have accepted, but it didn’t matter because Washington and Hamilton had already decided to bypass negotiations and use force.
Were there battles? The rebels considered conquering Pittsburgh, which they called “Sodom.” The US army, dubbed “the watermelon army,” could barely hold itself together. What are sometimes called battles might as easily be called riots. The deaths are tragedy and farce; one of the first is caused by a man so unhandy with his weapon that in trying to uncock it, he fires and kills a man instead.
The army captured a ragged assortment of unimportant men who were too slow to escape. The angriest rebels headed west, and many moderates who had tried to soften the rebellion found themselves charged as radical ringleaders. Americans, typically tone-deaf to history, quickly forgot this episode though it featured threads that would be part of our political life for the next 200+ years.

Easter and Redemption

(News-Herald, April 1) I do not ordinarily get extra-excited for holidays. It’s not that I don’t like what the holidays stand for. Whether it’s the Fourth of July (“community and country are good”), Memorial Day (“people who in service of our country deserve respect”) or even Christmas (“Yay, Jesus” if you’re Christian or “Be nice and buy things” if you’re not), they all represent good and worthwhile concepts.
But really, if the sentiment is that important, I’m pretty sure it deserves more than one day’s worth of our attention. Sometimes I think some people use their single day of visible devotion to love or family or patriotism as an excuse for 364 days of slacking on those fine qualities.
Easter is different. Other holidays can be reduced to a single icon, an image that we can fit on a poster or a t-shirt. A flag, a star, a baby, a big smiling Santa holding whatever product he’s being used to sell.
Easter can’t be reduced. Yes, we try. An egg. A cross, empty or not. But those don’t do the job. Flags, stars, mangers, Santas—they all stand for the idea that we associate with the day. But Easter is not about a simple concept or frozen image. Other holidays celebrate concepts; Easter celebrates an event. The cross doesn’t really capture Easter—it’s just the place where something important happened.
Easter is about redemption, and redemption is an action. It’s something that happens, and so at Easter, we can celebrate the moment that it happens. Other holidays are chairs in which we can find ourselves sitting, watching the spectacle, but Easter is a door we have to stand up and walk through.
And what a door it is. The most powerful tool possessed by evil (Satan, bad vibes, whatever you like) is the idea of “Game Over.” We make a mistake, show poor judgment, give in to our lesser selves, or just plain behave badly. There is nothing more powerfully destructive at that point than saying, “Well, that’s it. I’m an awful person, and I’ll do nothing but awful things for the rest of my life. There’s no point in trying to do anything else.” Based on what we’ve done so far, we throw away everything we might ever do with the life that lies ahead of us.
Many cultures lack the idea of redemption. If you have made a mess of things, you have no options but death or exile. Everything good you ever could have done is snuffed out before it can even draw breath. Because things are dark now, we declare the future already dead.
So redemption and resurrection go together, because redemption brings our future back to life.
And it requires action, movement, a change in our own position and direction. You can sit in your chair and think, “Yeah, I am feeling patriotic/loving/reverent today.” You can’t just sit and your chair and think, “Yeah, I am feeling so very redeemy today.” You have to get out of the chair and walk through the door to find that new reborn future.
Now, the future we get may not be the one we were planning on. Messing up, darkness, defeat, bad mistakes—those can all put an end to the path we were on, and it’s a mistake to think that redemption moves us backwards. Easter morning found the disciples facing a future that was newly redeemed from the utter black defeat they had been contemplating, but it was also a future completely different from anything they had imagined.
The other nice thing about redemption is that, done right, it changes our view of others. Because if my future can’t be written off as dark and dead and useless, than neither can anybody else’s. There isn’t anybody so low and dark that redemption is impossible. It doesn’t mean that I give anyone a free pass for bad behavior, and it’s always smart to stay out of the way of dangerous toxic people. But it does mean that I don’t get to simply dismiss people because I see them as just Really Wrong today. No matter how dark it is right now, tomorrow is another day.
Easter is not about standing still; it’s about moving from the darkness into the light, from death to life, from lost to redeemed, from winter to spring. And it is one of the few holidays that does not ask us to sit and watch something happen, but to be the thing that is happening.

Time To Make the Donuts

(News-Herald, March 25) We take responsibility, act responsibly, encourage people to act like responsible adults. We have long, energetic discussions about who’s Responsible For This. We wait for people who have behaved badly to take responsibility for their actions. And we can’t really explain exactly what we mean by any of it.
I’ve arrived at the following operational definition of being responsible. You are responsible for something when you decide to make it your business to see that the matter turns out okay.
Responsibility does not whine and say, “Oh, I would work on that issue, but it would be hard.” Responsibility is part of the solution; whining “It’s hard” is part of the problem.
Responsibility never says, “Well, that’s not my problem.” The best customer service workers are those who consider themselves responsible for the customers that they deal with, who don’t just shrug and say, “Well, that’s not my table/department/area.”
“To see that the matter turns out okay” means that responsibility concerns itself with the outcomes. It is not responsible to say, “Look, I did what I was supposed to do. If that didn’t resolve the issue, that’s not my problem.”
The public and private sector are filled with bad managers and workers who do not see things through. They do what they think they’re supposed to do or what they think should solve the problem. If that doesn’t actually solve anything, oh well. “Look, I filled out the forms. What else do you want me to do?” or “The paperwork says everything’s okay and that’s good enough for me” are not responsibility in action.
You can’t be responsible for things over which you have no power. I can’t be responsible for the sorry state of American health care or the ridiculous state of Congress’s “solution” because, as an ordinary citizen, I have no say over any of it.
On the other hand, in areas where you do have power, you must be responsible or irresponsible, and you can’t duck the choice. If I’m behind the wheel of the car, I can’t try to claim that responsibility for steering lies with my passengers in the back seat.
Circumstances in life put us in the path of one set of responsibilities or another. We can face up to those responsibilities or deny them, but there’s no way to make them go away. Far too many young men try to pretend that they are not somehow responsible for the children they father, but they either face up to that responsibility or act like irresponsible boys. There are no other options. It’s the irresponsible who don’t come through, step up or see things through. “I was going to, but [fill in excuse here].”
When people accept responsibility for their misbehavior, they are acknowledging that it is their job, and nobody else’s, to make things as right as they can be.
Sometimes circumstances put completely unexpected opportunities for responsibility in our paths. It’s the Samaritan’s problem—do we stop for the folks who have been mugged by life?
The modern American response is to look at the problem and say, “Oh, that’s awful. Somebody really ought to do something about that.” Surely there is an agency, government program, community organization or some other outfit that will handle it. Asking someone else to see the matter through and walking away is not responsibility, either.
To check your own responsibility quotient, apply the definition that I’ve offered. What in the world are you, today, right now, making it your business to see through to the best possible conclusion. Not hoping it turns out okay, rooting for the people who will make it turn out okay, or trying to make it turn out okay ( “try” is a word used to pre-emptively excuse the failure you plan to have).
People love to complain about the quality of life in Venangoland. That’s another attempt to dodge responsibility. If you life Here (no matter where Here is) you need to accept some responsibility for what life Here is like. If you’re whining, you’re part of the problem.
When I think of responsibility, oddly enough I think of the man in the old donut commercial dragging himself out into the world because it’s “time to make the donuts.” No whining, no excuses, no figuring someone else will take care of it—Fred the Baker would just get up and make the donuts. Responsibility is as simple as that. What donuts are you making today?

James Murrin & The Great European War

(News-Herald, March 18) Thirty-nine years ago this month, a notable Franklin figures passed away. James Murrin was a newsman, a man who devoted his life to the newspaper business and the community that supported it.
When Murrin graduated from high school in 1912, he immediately moved to Franklin to begin work at the News-Herald. He started out working for his uncle, James Borland, another great newsman and community leader in Franklin. Borland had dropped out of school to start his newspaper; presumably he did not hold Murrin’s diploma against him.
Murrin followed in his uncle’s footsteps, and not just by becoming a newspaper editor. He became postmaster, charter member of the American Legion post, a Rotarian, a life member of the BPOE, a city councilman and a member of the library board. He had a son, Ralph, and a daughter, Nita, who married Lutheran pastor Dr. Robert Thurau.
But before all of that, James Murrin fought in the First World War, and he wrote a book about it—With the 112th in France: A Doughboy’s Story of the War. Thanks to a publishing house (Shelf2Life) with an interest in publishing pre-1923 memoirs of the Great War, Murrin’s book is once again available.
Like many young men from Venangoland, Murrin served in Company F, 112th Regiment, 28th Division. In the summer of 1917, he enlisted. The order to mobilize the National Guard came on July 15. Murrin married Helen Wilson on July 20. He was 22 years old.
Murrin’s book is a testament to his background as a journalist. His reporting is thorough (sometimes too thorough—it seems that he is determined to make sure that each name of each individual makes it into the historical record).
After training in the South, the 112th shipped for France in May of 1918; they would return to the US almost exactly a year later.
The first part of their time there was spent in the time-honored game of Hurry Up And Wait. Murrin’s account is indeed a soldier-eye view of the war, often odd and unclear, cut off from any big picture that might be informing the commands the doughboys received. At one point the company is kept shuttling back and forth between two locations for no apparent reason.
Without whining or complaining, Murrin captures a sense of numbing drudgery, marching, waiting, sleeping, marching. The men pass the time with the simplest of activities, perhaps enjoying impromptu concerts by the regimental band.
The band of 112th gets its own chapter, a source of morale and pride in difficult times. The 112th Regiment Band would have a lasting affect here at home—many of these men (Coulter Hoffman, Major Olmes, Roy Miller, Harland Mitchell) would become important local musicians, and many would form the core of the celebrated American Legion Band of Oil City. Murrin lavishes considerable appreciation on the group.
He also shares a love and admiration for the commanding officer of the 112th, George C. Rickards. The young soldiers expressed great respect for Rickards, who by Murrin’s account was fifty-eight years old when he traveled to fight in France.
Ultimately the 112th ended up fighting in the battle of the Argonne Forest, one of the many incredibly costly battles of the war. It was part of a final offensive push that broke the back of the German army, and the cost was tremendous: the 112th went into the Argonne with 77 officers and 2892 men and finished with 10 officers and 533 men left on the front line.
The First World War should be better remembered. Not only was the war a study in the massive carnage that can be created by clueless leaders and aimless conflict, but a century later we still live with the effects. After the war, victorious powers decided to clean up the map by combining small countries into larger ones like Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Iraq, and heck, we’ve hardly had any trouble in the Balkans or Middle East since then.
When the war is studied, it is usually in the large scale; it’s worth it to see how it looked to the average soldier, and in Murrin we have an average soldier who has above average reporting and writing skills. Some of the details are mundane (sleeping through the unit moving out) and some are surprising (discovering German faux tanks made of scraps of wood). The fact that he is a local, a man who would come home to be a pillar of this community, is a bonus. You can find the book on amazon.com or other reputable on-line booksellers.

Theater and Colons

(News-Herald, March 11) From my mailbag:
Dear Fake Journalist Guy, What do you do with a bunch of ideas that are too small for a full column. Signed, Fake Reader.
Dear FR. By use of seamless transitions, we make separate ideas seem totally related. Watch. Sincerely, FJG.
Sometimes when a week is dragging on, you need a break from routine. For creatures of habit, it can be as simple as a different breakfast cereal. After a steady week of Cheerios, little marshmallow charms can create some excitement.
But sometimes that isn’t enough. So last midweek, I arranged to change up my routine with a colonoscopy.
This was a routine procedure, one of those tests one gets as a reward for being A Certain Age. It’s not the procedure itself that is the fun part. The night before, you drink four liters of a mix-it-yourself concoction made from the sweat of demons who have been roasted while being whipped with the rotting skunk skins and packed in blue cheese.
Okay, I may exaggerate, but when medicine admits on its own label that it tastes awful, you know you’re in trouble. Colyte’s label says, in part, “Keep this refrigerated because when it’s cold it will gag you less” and “Seriously, you want to gulp this down as quickly as possible.”
The stuff lived up to its press. Tastes rather like brine, with a relentless numbing saltiness that skips over the taste buds and heads straight for the gag reflex. I did try mixing this with cran-apple juice and quickly realized that A) it still tasted horrible and B) I had just made MORE of it.
But after a couple of hours, this magic fluid roto-roots your insides, leaving three feet of squeaky clean pipe where your gastro-intestinal system used to be. You would think that the subsequent fasting would be taxing, but by this time my weary innards didn’t care.
And here’s the thing. The next day I went to the ambulatory care center at the hospital, which is clean and friendly. Because this is Venangoland, my nurse was a woman who played in high school band with me and whose sister double-dated with my sister at their prom. My doctor explained everything to me, a nice anesthetist explained what was going to happen. Then somebody said something about injecting stuff into my iv, and the next thing I remember is waking up back in the room, more or less ready to be driven home by my sister-in-law, who deserves some sort of merit badge.
Was that it? Almost. Later comes the part where my doctor leaves me a message that the one polyp they removed was pre-cancerous. In other words, at the expense of the physical equivalent of a bad 24-hour flu bug, I get to not have a doctor tell me that I have colon cancer 3-10 years from now. There are worse things you can do than have a colonoscopy.
But there are also better things. For instance, the highlight of my week was attending Pump Boys and Dinettes at the Barrow.
The show (appearing Friday, Saturday and Sunday) deserves a larger audience. Pump Boys is a concert show, a la Forever Plaid and Nunsense, with just enough story to flesh out some fun characters and tie together a bunch of good music. The style here is what is traditional country; not glossy faux twanging, but the kind of folk-based music that can be readily enjoyed by people who don’t care for either modern C&W or typical musical theater fare.
There are some gorgeous vocal harmonies as well as some hilarious performances (hard to go wrong with material like “Farmer Tan”). Brett Sloan and Suzi Beach are, as always, total pros in their vocal awesomeness, and Richard Roberts’ skills as an entertainer are on full display. The rest of the cast is solid, but the new treat for Barrow audiences is Jim Helmetzi, a veteran bluegrass player who handles all manner of instrument and performs with relaxed, capable stage presence.
Some blues or gospel leaks in, too. The cast ably handles it all. The songs are fun, and treat small-town life with humor without dopey disrespectful cornpone abuse. You will hum many for weeks. It’s a relaxed, fun evening of good music, well-done and well worth your time.
On your way out, you’ll smile and think, “Well, that improved my week way more than a colonoscopy would have.” (Barrow, feel free to use that line on posters).
And that, Fake Reader, is how we do it.

How Managers View Workers

(News-Herald, October 2003) I’m always interested in the fine art of management. First, teaching involves a sort of management, so I have a professional interest in understanding how it can be best done. Second, I think bad management is one of our top five biggest, baddest plagues. Others may lay the blame for the Imminent Collapse of Civilization on all manner of socio-psycho syndromes, but I think the biggest threat we may face is Management By The Incompetent.
One way to classify managers is by their view of the people who work for them. We’ll start at the bottom of the heap.
Workers are a problem. Somewhere under life’s black banana peels, we find those managers who feel that their subordinates are a problem to be fixed.
We can be talking about a wide range of problems. There are business and office managers who think that workers create problems by using stuff. Those darn workers—they want to use up supplies, they insist on having working equipment, and on top of all that, they keep taking the organization’s money for their salaries.
Or workers might be trouble because they insist on mentioning problems that the organization has. They might be rude enough to point out that the company’s fine new software doesn’t do what it was bought to do. They might insist on calling attention to some policy or procedure that keeps them from doing their jobs.
You can spot a manager who views his workers as problems because his managerial focus is on getting them to shut up and leave him alone. When the ship is going down, he’s the one up in the pilot house hollering, “Stop screaming—you’re making the boat all wet.”
The irony is that of all managerial types, this guy is least able to solve problems when they arise (and, yes, real worker-related problems exist) because he has no interest in finding, understanding or fixing the problem. In his mind, the employee is the problem, and said employee just needs to be straightened out, put in his place, set right, etc etc etc.
Workers are resources. Somewhere in the middle of the continuum lies this style. This manager sees his workers as resources to be used.
There are advantages to this. The resource manager would no more needlessly abuse an employee than he would drive a fine Porsche without oil in the engine. He takes care of his staff as he cares for all his belongings.
It’s vaguely unsettling to work for a resource manager. You can feel as if you’re in a Popeye cartoon where Wimpy is looking at you, but seeing a big hamburger instead. The prize turkey is well cared for, too, but eventually he’s just used and consumed. Not everyone’s dream for their work life.
Resource managers also have an unfortunate tendency to view workers as interchangeable cogs, building blocks to be discarded if they are defective (“defective” being defined as “different in any noticeable way”). And in the crunch time, resource managers are likely to view workers as far less valuable than the manager himself. Workers will often work well for a resource manager, but they’ll never trust him.
Workers as foot soldiers. These are the guys everyone wants to work for, because they get a few things that the other two do not.
For one, they understand who does the real lifting and carrying. A general may plan and inspire and lead and deploy, but in the end, it’s the soldiers who shoot and are shot at, who fight and create the victory for their army.
So the foot soldier manager knows that the ultimate success of the enterprise depends on his subordinates. He knows that they need to be supplied and supported and valued and given the material they need to do the job.
He doesn’t tell them that they can’t have guns because the budget was slashed and air conditioning for his tent is more important. He doesn’t court martial them for repeatedly asking for bullets, and he doesn’t put them in the stockade for pointing out that the enemy has broken through the lines.
He doesn’t let them run amuck, and he remembers that he’s the one in a position to see the big picture and set strategy. But he doesn’t throw them needlessly into a fruitless battle or treat them as if they’re expendable as Kleenex, because he knows that they’ll be most effective if he can fire up not only their blood and muscle but also their hearts and minds.
Treat workers like problems, and they learn to be sneaky and helpless and hopeless. Treat them like resources, and they learn to be cautiously cooperative. Treat them like valued soldiers on the front lines, and they will give more to the organization than you, or they, ever thought possible.

Curling and Cable

(News-Herald, March 4) It has been almost a year and a half since I gave up cable television.
I’ve been reflecting on this because I’ve had my first strong feeling of deprivation. It was tough to miss the Rose Parade, and I miss regularly watching the Daily Show.
But Winter Olympics time came, and I was not able to watch curling.
I’d never known about this sport until the last winter Olympics, during which the riveting act of sliding a slow-motion stone across ice captured my attention. I glanced briefly, and then succumbed to the sporting equivalent of the just-one-more-potato-chip phenomenon that allows television to magically erase untold hours of a human being’s life.
Curling—the only sport for which there is no slow motion replay because the sport is already in slow motion. Curling—where we see the perfect yin and yang of a hurler who seems almost frozen in time, flanked by the ice-squeegee guys (I may not have entirely absorbed the correct jargon) scrubbing the ice with feverish blurred intensity.
Despite this test of my resolve, cable did not re-appear in my home. I have learned too many valuable lessons in its absence.
Good shows are better in concentrated doses. I’ve been netflixing my way through many series, and they are much more fun this way. I’ve watched the first six seasons of NCIS in less than a year, the first two seasons of Big Bang Theory in just a few months. Turns out tv characters are like real people in one respect—the more often you see them, the more you enjoy their company.
Best part of dvd viewing? Every viewing choice is a deliberate choice, instead of sitting passively waiting to see what the cable might throw at your brain next.
Do you have any idea how many ads you’re watching? Seriously. If you are watching traditional television, about a full third of the time you are paying for is being spent trying to sell you stuff. It’s like hiring an encyclopedia salesman to interrupt your family’s dinner.
Old shows are fun. Okay, some are perhaps not as much fun as we remember. F Troop is still funny, but not as ribsplittingly hilarious as ten-year-old me thought. On the other hand, Moonlighting is actually better than I remember, particularly without the long gaps between new episodes (but oh those eighties shoulder pads and giant hairdos). Jack of all Trades, a vehicle for the awesomely under-appreciated Bruce Campbell, should have survived longer.
And television may not have been any better, but it was surely cheaper. Watching the Man from UNCLE chase bad guys around the same parts of the same back lot is cheesetastic good fun.
Words are so much better than pictures. I don’t mean spoken words, because my message to the talking heads on the tube is “For the love of Mike, please shut up!”
When a South American country gets all torn up and the international tsunami warning system is set at Freak Out, here’s what I need you guys to do: Point a camera at the pertinent images, put up a bottom-screen crawl that includes your two or three sentences of actual information, turn off your microphone, then go out for a hamburger and a round of golf.
News outlets have carried their unreasoning love of pictures and babble onto the internet, where it would be just as easy to post the pictures and the text of What We Know So Far. Some outfits get that (thanks, CNN) but others feel sure that I want to see the same thirty seconds of footage looped incessantly while some poor news reader finds 147 ways to say, “We don’t really know much more than that, so let me repeat it some more.”
Some times—most times—paragraphs of text that are regularly rewritten by people who have taken five minutes to check their facts and think about what they want to say—those old-fashioned paragraphs of text are way more useful than some pretty dolt doing babbling news improv.
It’s amazing what you can get done when you aren’t waiting till the exact hour or half-hour to start. In truth, the single worst thing about my relationship with cable was not the empty wasteland of its content, but the way it could make hour after hour of my life disappear and give nothing in return. That is the very definition of a bad habit. I miss curling, but it’s not worth a return of the monkey to my back.

The Tea Party Seeks Definition

(News-Herald, February 25) The President of the United States has announced that political factions are threatening the government’s ability to function. A group of dissatisfied citizens decides that the federal government has over-reached its authority and it’s time for citizens to stand up and take radical action.
The time is the 1790s, the President is George Washington, and the radical citizens of Western Pennsylvania are the heart of the Whiskey Rebellion. That rebellion involved actual shooting and killing, and in the end Washington became the only President in history to lead an army against US citizens.
For people who look at DC and the Tea Party movement and declare that Things Have Never Been This Bad, my point is this: from the very beginning of US history, it has almost always been this bad.
The Tea Party movement has interesting days ahead. As fractious a herd of cats as ever took the political stage, the Partiers have suffered a parade of wannabe leaders, some with a sincere desire to help and some desiring to harness power for their own purposes.
The Tea Party movement is a patchwork of dissatisfied Americans, many with widely divergent goals and beliefs. Often this adds up to a somewhat garbled message (the government does too much, except during the banking mess, when it didn’t do enough).
In particular, the movement offers another uneasy alliance of social and political conservatives. This match is less solid than a three-shotgun wedding.
If I’m a political conservative, I believe government should do as close to nothing as possible, including not telling my neighbors what they can or cannot eat, drink, smoke, sleep with, or worship.
Social conservatives fail to grasp one simple truth—a country with true small government is a country where bunches of people will be freely doing things that you don’t approve of. (Of course, some nastier folks believe that this will include freely beating on evil-doers until they behave and/or go away.)
It is easy to find ways to dismiss the Tea Party. It has cast a big net and drawn in among its supporters a variety of wingnuts, from defiantly anti-fact birthers to that guy protesting government-run health care while sitting in the wheelchair that government-run health care bought him.
Many partiers are hamstrung by a basic principle of factional politics: everybody On My Side is always right and everybody On The Other Side is always wrong. You have to agree with the dopes on your side. This is how you end up taking the position that the guys who flew planes into the twin towers are America’s enemies and the guy who flew a plane into the IRS building is an American hero.
Anyone who wants to dismiss the movement can cherry pick sound bites from Tea Partiers who are, in a word, idiots. This is also not new. I don’t care if your organization teaches blind orphans to sing the Hallelujah Chorus while rescuing drowning puppies—I can still find someone in the group who will make you look stupid.
But it’s a mistake to dismiss the entire Party. Many many many Americans are fed up with the federal bozos, and if some folks are about a decade late noticing that DC has its fat clumsy paws in too many pies, their lateness doesn’t make them wrong. There are plenty of reasonable people who would have voted for Barry Goldwater and now can’t see any good choices.
Locally, the Tea Party emerged last year with the AFA, infamous local social conservatives, apparently driving the bus. That wave waned by Thanksgiving, but the Venangoland Partiers have recently re-emerged as Tea Party Patriots. The “Patriots” signals sympathy with the Patriot movement, political conservatives who go back to the John Birch Society and include a few militia types, but who are also tied to the Contract from America, a political item attached to Newt Gingrich.
The Venango group appears to be loosely headed by Kent, a FHS grad I know of a Certain Age who is articulate, intelligent and reasonable in ways that some lefties don’t expect from conservatives (and some rightwingers don’t expect from liberals).
It remains to be seen what the switch from social to political conservative party labels may mean. I’m betting the Party is not done defining itself, splintering into various wings, and shedding the loons and opportunists. It may be more interesting than fun, but at least there’s historical symmetry in having a chapter here in the cradle of America’s first citizen revolt.

Basic Snow Driving 101

(News-Herald, February 16)I don’t know if the “snowpocalypse” was worse than any snowfall of the past, or if it was simply the worst blizzard to hit a large metropolitan area housing many journalists who haven’t spent much time in the North.
This doesn’t seem like a particularly overwhelming quantity of snow, but it has shown a striking level of relentlessness. I’m not sure it qualifies for the sort of adjectives (e.g. “crippling” and “historic”) that have been thrown at it. Our New England ancestors would have been unimpressed—not the ones that walked to school barefoot through the snow, uphill both ways, but the ones who didn’t see the neighbors for three months after the first big winter storm.
Some snow phenomena are strictly local. Regular winter travelers to Erie know that Carpet Barn and the Edinboro exit mark spots where drivers can expect Mother Nature to up the arctic ante.
Those who travel south from Venangoland can marvel at New Route 8, a candidate for the Worst Stretch of Winter Road in Western PA. I’d love to know why the Franklin-Barkeyville Turnpike is always winter’s worst roadway. Not enough traffic to keep the pavement clear? Last on the list for DOT’s attention? When the state went looking for empty land to pave, they didn’t realize that it was empty because locals always avoided building on that fabled stretch of snowy doom? All I know is that when the flakes are thick, I’d rather be almost anywhere else than on that lonely slick white ribbon.
Of course, for the last week or so Almost Anywhere Else has had its own problems. As factoids go, “snow on the ground in forty-nine states” has a nice punchy ring to it. Perhaps it even obligates us to offer snow-going advice to those poor freaked-out snow-averse Southerners, particularly about the problems of driving through the white stuff (or as Dave Dempsey used to call it, for some unknown reason, “the Hawk”). Listen up, y’all.
First, and most importantly, snow makes people stupid. You will see people attempt maneuvers in the midst of heavy snowfall that they would never imagine trying on a balmy summer day. But there they are, suddenly cutting in front of you, spiking the brakes, or careening across three lanes of traffic to lodge sideways in half a parking space.
About that parking. For some reason, snowfall negates all civilized parking rules. Granted, the painted lines are no longer visible, but other handy guideposts such as large buildings and a hundred other vehicles are still available for guidance.
I don’t expect everyone to demonstrate my OCD devotion to proper parking (line up my car with the stadium light post, look sideways, and sight along two bits of shrubbery until they are just the right distance apart in my view). But you would think that someone adding their own vehicle to many other cars in a parking lot would end up parallel to something—the building, the street, one of fifty other cars, SOMETHING!
But it’s as if some drivers are about to crack under the psychological pressure of staying within the lines, and a lifetime of rebelliousness finally erupts when snow erases that dreaded paint. And so ordinarily tidy parking lots end up looking as if someone dumped a sack of angry cats into a half-frozen pond.
Rushing is not allowed in snow driving. Once the snow is down and you have taken the car out, the die is cast. You cannot jam the pedal to the floorboard and shave a few minutes off your travel time. Once the journey has begun, you will get there when you get there—the only way to get there sooner is to leave earlier.
However, there is such a thing as Too Flipping Slow. Below a certain speed, you are simply an easy-to-hit obstacle, a pile-up waiting to happen. If driving in the middle of a snow storm scares you that much, stay home or call a brave friend. If you are driving on tires that are smoother than a baby’s behind (“it’s okay, because they’re radials!”), then you should stay home, too.
You should also stay home if you can’t afford gas. Don’t set out on a trip that may take an extra five hours if you’re running on fumes.
Finally, the legal department of the News-Derrick would like me to remind you that, as always, it’s a good idea not to take advice from fake journalists who write about topics in which they are not expert.

Clarity

(News-Herald, February 11) We humans have a complicated relationship with clarity, that sense of clear and complete understanding.
We make noise about wanting clarity. We “clear” our heads, “clear up” problems. Throughout history we have fasted, meditated, prayed, exercised and studied in hopes of finding clarity.
To see the struggle, one would think there was some outside force in the world that has nothing else to do but spread obscurity and doubt. Most religions’ bad guy is the one who spreads deception and confusion. But when it comes to clarity, we are our own worst enemies.
We put many things in the way of our vision, things that take us from real understanding of ourselves.
Sometimes our vision is blocked by the things we expect to see. We know what our lives “should” look like, what our feelings “should” be. So we see what we expect and not what is.
Sometimes our vision is blocked by the things we want to see. We want to believe that something is true, that someone else feels the way we want them to, that we are acting out our dreams and goals, that we are hitting the mark. So we squeeze our eyeballs into the steely-eyed squint of desperation and make ourselves see those things.
We may claim someone else’s answer. If that’s the view over there, I’ll make myself see it over here. But we’re not theater patrons all watching the same movie. We’re the proverbial blind men stumbling around the elephant.
Denial may be clarity’s greatest enemy.
We convince ourselves that a toxic relationship is not so bad, because the day we allow ourselves to see how bad things are, we will have no excuse not to leave. Or we convince ourselves that the choices we make aren’t hurting people, because the day we really feel how out of line we are is the day we have to fix it.
The escape from clarity doesn’t have to operate on a grand scale. Sometimes we tell ourselves we’ve done a good enough job on a small piece of work simply to avoid the clear understanding that we need to do more. I’ve fixed this well enough. That paint job will do. Those dishes are clean enough. This food is close enough to cooked.
It’s not that a clear view is necessarily scary. We aren’t always trying to hide from the boogeyman. But whether the news we’re trying not to receive is good or bad, the problem is the same—once we have a vision, clear and true, of where we actually are, we are compelled to do something about it.
Sometimes we shrink from the path before us because we know other people will disagree and disapprove. It’s a common human response; unclear and uncertain of our own path, we will nevertheless swear that we know exactly how others should live their lives. But it’s scary to move ahead when the crowd is booing.
For all our talk about and alleged respect for clarity and its related virtues (honesty, directness, straight-shooting), we often prefer to live in a haze of uncertainty and misdirection. It’s simple. It’s easy. And it doesn’t rock the boat.
It’s another one of our simple human struggles. We want to understand, and yet we fear the burden that understanding will bring. It is as old as a person turning to God and complaining, “Really? Seriously?? Are you sure this is what you want me to do? Can you show me something else? Don’t you want to give this path to someone else?”
I believe in free will. I don’t believe in fate, exactly. But I believe that something (God, destiny, whatever you like) always puts a path before us that we are best made to follow, and no matter what our circumstances, a right path is always available. And I believe that many of our troubles come when we try not to see what we see, to convince ourselves that the path before us is really a pile of potato skins, that our path is really through those bushes over there.
One of our greatest moral obligations is to help each other find clarity. To try to keep people from really seeing is wrong. To demand that someone hide or deny what they know to be true is an enormous evil. What clarity shows us can be compelling, exciting, scary, and challenging. But the up side is huge—the knowledge that we are right where we are supposed to be.

Big Fat Liar

(News-Herald, February 4) “Do you think I actually believe you?”
It’s one of those sentences that once in a while you find yourself wishing you could say to a certain someone.
It is one of the great curses of life in our day and age—lying directly to a person’s face has become commonplace, unremarkable, something as easily done as a handshake and a smile. But calling someone a liar is still rude.
Occasionally, the lie doesn’t reveal itself until later. We smack ourselves on the forehead and think, “Well, dang! He got me!” But I think it has actually become more common to meet people whose lies are evident the moment they open their mouths.
There was a time when a lie was teamed up with deceit, as in, “Gadzooks, man, but I am tired of your lies and deceit.” But deceit is retired, cooling its heels on the bench, because we aren’t even deceived all that often. The only person who is deceived is the liar himself, who imagines that because his audience did not actually laugh in his face, his lie must have been mistaken for the truth.
I believe the world would be a better place if we told the truth. I wonder if it might help is we also called people on their baloney. After all, it’s simple politeness to let someone know that he has spinach in his teeth or his necktie on the outside of his collar. So couldn’t we arrive at a place where it would be considered polite to say, “Excuse me, but I think a big fat lie just came out of your mouth” or even “I realize you are still talking, but I thought I should tell you that I don’t believe a single word you’re saying.”
Okay, probably not.
Rudeness aside, most spewers of colorful untruths would consider that an invitation to pile more implausible bricks of detail on top of the shaky straw foundation they have already laid. Liars often believe that if they wear down your brain to a nub of sheer exhaustion, you have to believe them. If you tell him his deal is too unbelievable to be true, he’ll just sell it harder.
Also, these spinners of improbable yarns are often in positions of power, and you can’t afford to annoy them.
So when the boss is claiming that “employees are our greatest asset” or “we really value your input” or “this restructuring will allow us to better serve the needs of customers,” employees smile cheerfully and nod because employees who want to keep their jobs don’t call the manager a liar to his face. And if we’re being honest, there are times when we are grateful we don’t have to face the ugly truth. A business projection based on fantasy can be more comforting than staring disaster in the face.
Those of us deal with bureaucracy often become resigned to the currency of uncalled lies. The state calls a meeting to go over some new policy, and not a person in the entire room believes what’s being said—not even the people saying it. Why point out that we’re knee deep in fertilizer; everyone already knows this deal is not for real.
Unchallenged lies have a real cost. In Mao’s China, an initiative to turn agricultural economy to industrial was clearly ridiculous. Nobody dared speak up. Once implemented, it was clearly not working, but nobody dared speak up. On paper China had abundant surplus food; in real life, millions starved to death. Selling the big line of obvious hooey has consequences down the line.
Why does he do it? He wants to feel important and powerful. He likes the way people show him gratitude when he promises something he can’t deliver. He is so focused on himself that he’s not paying that much attention to his audience; he doesn’t see the eye rolls and the smirks. And the rush that he gets from telling his story is so great that he never really thinks about the future fallout. And when that fallout comes, he’s not there.
Stay silent or speak up; either way you pay a price. When this person shows up, he may offer you a cheap deal or a real deal or and unbelievable deal. The one thing that’s certain is that in the end, there will be a big cost and when you finally see the bill, you’ll be seeing the real deal.

$ for On Line Newspapers

(News-Herald, January 28) This week, in what must be a journalistic first, the New York Times announced that it is going to follow the lead of the News-Derrick. Specifically, the NYT announced that it will start charging readers to look at its on-line version, a decision that this paper implemented last November.
Neither newspaper met much enthusiasm from its customers. The internet hasn’t been around that long, but it has some strong traditions, and one of them is that stuff is supposed to be free. People will pay to DO stuff on the internet (over 12 million people pay real money each month to play World of Warcraft), but to just look at content, folks expect free.
These are tough times for newspapers and magazines. Many print media (“old media” they’re often called) have folded, prompting hand-wringing reminiscent of the days when malls were extinguishing downtown shopping.
For newspapers to stay in business, they must make money. Journalists like to eat, too. The money has to come from somewhere. But many attitudes stand in the way of paying for an on-line newspaper.
One is quick and easy availability of content on line. Why bother with those fancy “journalists” with all their “research” and smarty-pants “facts” that have been “verified” when there’s so much more colorful coverage from a few thousand ranting bloggers?
If a guy is giving away free hamburgers on the corner, why would you go sit in a restaurant and wait to pay for steak? Certainly there are some people who would pay—they’d rather have steak and they don’t trust the corner guy or his hamburgers—but will there be enough of them to keep the restaurant in business?
Another factor is the old media’s own fault. They used to sell nice, fresh-cooked steak, but after a while they just started dragging freeze-dried processed beef slabs out of the freezer, microwaving them, and calling them steak. Many big city newspapers became fat, happy and lazy, and their steak really isn’t all that better than the corner hamburger.
Still another factor is an old one. We aren’t really used to paying for our own entertainment. Television and radio are free (ish). The old media model is a three-cornered transaction, and the audience rarely foots the bill. The tv draws a crowd, and advertisers pay to have a chance to address the assembly. Newspapers do the same. All these years we’ve been paying a token charge while advertisers buy the paper for us.
The internet upped the ante. We could suddenly catch the show without having to stick around for the pitch. Advertisers figured out they were talking to an empty room; they packed up, stopped buying ads, and now nobody is paying for the show.
Modern Americans hate paying our own bills, and in a sense the problems in media are part of a larger picture. We have someone else to pay our medical bills, someone to hire garbage collectors and policemen for us.
Why does the government insist in running up debts? In part, because we the people keep egging them on. Why do we egg them on? Because with the miracle of deficit spending, the government can take one of our dollars and buy us ten dollars worth of stuff. The pain that we are just starting to feel in Pennsylvania is the pain of government telling us, “Sorry, but we can only use your dollar to buy one dollar’s worth of stuff.”
We’re used to having invisible someones buy stuff for us, the illusion that folks are giving us things for free, from infrastructure to entertainment.
The deck is stacked against newspapers, big or small. What can they do? The biggest thing they can do is provide something unavailable anywhere else. That’s a challenge—many papers use wire service content, but that same content is available everywhere on line, for free.
What newspapers need is content that no one else has, and lots of it. This challenge requires nerve. A paper deals with people who want free promotion for their events, and it makes sense to charge for what is essentially advertising. I respectfully suggest that newspapers should not view these folks as people asking for free advertising, but people offering free local content.
However, the other thing newspapers need is reader/subscribers who can grow up and not expect someone else to buy their paper for them. Don’t ask someone to buy it for you or make it for you for free. If something is worth having, it’s worth paying for.
(Note: I do pay for my own newspaper subscription)

Appreciating PA State Troopers

(News-Herald, January 21) Here in Venangoland, we’ve had ample opportunity recently to think about the business of being a Pennsylvania State Trooper.
I learned several things at the service last Sunday for Pennsylvania State Trooper Paul Richey. I learned that troopers are unparalleled organizers, that they can take seemingly unmanageable logistics and manage them. Among their many talents, it turns out that troopers are the world’s best ushers. (As a choir, however, not so much.)
I have also learned that the Troopers do not wear a badge. This practice reminds the troopers that their authority comes from their conduct, not any badge. In other words, the state police do not demand that citizens respect the badge no matter who wears it. Instead, they demand that their troopers earn our respect by being honorable men and women.
In this area, it’s not hard to find people who have an automatic dislike for any and all manner of police. And there’s no doubt that putting on a uniform does not magically transform an average jerk into a hero.
But I don’t think it’s at all easy for an average jerk to put on the uniform of a Pennsylvania State Trooper.
Not all jobs are created equal. Some jobs are more tough, more demanding, more heroic than others. They require a level of guts and commitment that not many people have, and yet the jobs need to be done. Pennsylvania has always known it asks a great deal of its troopers. For the first few decades of its existence, the PSP didn’t allow its troopers to marry.
It has been noted many times that Paul Richey volunteered to go out to the Smith home, that he didn’t have to be there. That tells us a lot about his character, commitment and courage.
But here’s the thing. The same thing is true of every trooper, every day.
None of them have go out there. None of them have to put on that uniform. None of them have to stay on the job, and none of them had to take the job (a job that they had to work hard to earn) in the first place. Scott Mohnkern could be selling cars by day and spinning tunes weekends. Dave Wargo could live off his wife’s teacher salary while he worked as a blues singer. All the members of Troop E could hang up their uniforms tomorrow and the rest of us would have no excuse to complain, because the rest of us didn’t have the nerve to take on that job in the first place.
State Troopers belong to that select group of people who run toward the things that the rest of us run away from.
It is easy for us to forget the level of danger that troopers face in their routine days. On the 13th, after all, the troopers were only going out to talk to a guy with a bad tendency to smack his wife around. Today other troopers will answer similar routine calls, make routine traffic stops, step into routine situations where someone is needed to bring some peace and order. Today, like any other day, they will never know if they’re about to meet some dangerous nut with a beef and a gun.
The rest of us don’t have to think about the danger in such places because there are people in uniform to think about it for us.
Sometimes civilians are called to face extraordinary danger. I wonder, for instance, how well Nancy Frey-Smith knew that she was putting herself in harm’s way every day. But as civilians, we usually find ourselves in a dangerous place by accident or circumstance. Troopers choose it.
In 2008 there were over 50,000 violent crimes in Pennsylvania. There are fewer than 5000 State Troopers.
There is nothing good about the loss of a man like Paul Richey. But it does serve as a shock and a reminder that even here in one of the world’s quieter places, dark and dangerous events can strike, and that there are people who have chosen to stand between that darkness and the rest of us. They and their wives and children and families sacrifice so much, sometimes all at once, and sometimes day after day, year after year, so that the rest of us can rest easy.
PSP’s stated core purpose is to seek justice, preserve peace, and improve the quality of life for all. Paul Richey’s life and death remind us how seriously they take that, and how large a debt of gratitude we owe them.

A Message from the World's Slobs

(News-Herald, January 14) I’m here with a message from the messy people of the world to those of you who are Very Neat:
We are not the ones with the problem—you are.
Being neat wastes enormous amounts of time. Double amounts, really, because you are taking the time to put things away just so, and before you know it, you just have to get them back out again.
The entire Picking Up process wastes time and effort. The wise messy person consolidates work—in the course of a normal day, while traveling about the house for everyday business (eating, dressing, showering), we just pick up anything that’s not where it’s supposed to be and move it to an appropriate location. No extra trips, no extra effort, no time wasted.
You people with incredibly neat and tidy desks—who the heck has time to do that? If your desk is incredibly neat, I have to wonder what you didn’t get done today so that you could do maintenance on your paper clip collection.
Even more troubled are the secret slobs who keep a public pretense of perfect neatness. These people don’t waste time, exactly. Their desks are neat because there isn’t anything sitting out in plain sight that they actually use. The shiny stapler, perfect collection of clips, pristine pile of paper sitting on their desk—they haven’t touched any of it in three months. All the supplies they actually use are shoved in a big jumble in the desk drawers.
Neat freaks (yes, I called them freaks) like to think they are taking control of their environment when actually the reverse is true. Jumble your kitchen condiment collection into a disarrayed higgledy-piggledy (yes, I said higgledy-piggledy) and the slob will be able to walk right by it, still free to go about his business. But a neat freak will be at the mercy of that mess, unable to take care of anything else until the salt and pepper shakers are in proper harmony.
(To be clear, I am not arguing in favor of dirtiness. An entire collection of paperback novels stacked around the dining room table is messy. An entire collection of dishes, displaying a collection of food samples from the last month and covered with growing things that are quite possibly never seen outside of a science lab—that’s dirty, and we messy people of the world do not support it.)
Messiness preserves value. A neat person might jump to the conclusion that a plastic doohickey is not valuable just because he hasn’t had any use for it in the past seventeen years. Messy people understand that tomorrow could be the day that plastic doohickeys suddenly return to prominence in the world. A messy person is not surrounded by random junk, but by a possibly-valuable collection of potential-worthwhile stuff. We understand that someday you will be thanking us for holding onto that doohickey. Jake DeBence ran a messy museum, and Venangoland is now better for his legacy of valuable antiques at DeBence Music World.
Messiness is also more secure. Neat people believe in a place for everything and everything in its place. For the messmasters of the world, the rule is a pile for everything and everything in its pile. A messy person can find that valuable plastic doohickey just as easily as the neatnik can (if the neatnik hasn’t already thrown it away). The important difference is that in the home of a neat freak, anybody can find it.
A burglar can get in and out of a neat person’s house in less than five minutes, loaded down with valuables. A burglar who breaks into a messy person’s home will be found by police five hours later, trapped between the stack of National Geographics and the collection of boxes filled with cans filled with wrapping paper, still trying to decide if anything important is in there.
Mess protects important things. The urban planners who designed Washington DC laid it out as a deliberate, confusing mess, specifically so that invading armies would have a hard time capturing our leaders. Yes, messiness is part of what has made our country great.
Entropy, chaos, disorder—these are the strong natural forces of the physical world, which means that neat people are battling the very natural order of the universe, while we messy ones are in tune with the cosmos. Neatness is unnatural. Come on. Set down those big storage tub organizers and join us on the dark side.

Gossip

(News-Herald, January 7) Gossip has always been associated with small towns. I don’t think we have a lock on the sweet pastime, but I do think there is a special brand that flourishes only in small communities.
Big city gossip is not a pastime—it’s an industry. Entire magazines and cable channels are devoted to dishing the latest dirt about a variety of celebrities. This is not new. Opponents of Presidential candidate James G. Blain shouted “Ma, Ma, where’s my pa?” in reference to his alleged illegitimate child (the reply from his supporters was “Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha!”) As long as there has been print, a certain amount of it has been devoted to gossip about the famous and successful.
Big city gossip has upped the ante by creating faux celebrities. We call them famous for being famous, but they are famous because they are fun to gossip about. In the big city gossip industry, people are willing to pay for dishes of new dirt.
This business model clearly does not work as well in a small town setting. At least, I don’t think so. Perhaps it is time for the News-Derrick to start a local gossip page. But small town gossip is a little like Christmas—it’s more fun to give than to receive.
Small town gossip used to come in more varieties than big city stuff. Small towns could gossip about general misbehavior, attributing all manner of rule breaking that, in print, would feed a flock of libel lawyers. During Prohibition, Chess Lamberton was picked up for an alcohol violation, but charges were dismissed weeks later when the evidence had mysteriously vanished. That much I know from newspaper accounts, but I’ll bet that a considerably more colorful story was traveling around town at the time.
Nowadays, malfeasance gossip is a lost art, mainly because people no longer feel much shame over being caught Doing Naughty Things (“Why yes, I cleaned out the pension fund. But let me show you our vacation pictures from Bermuda!”)
It’s not that gossip requires shame as fuel. It’s that gossip tends to shrivel up in the face of well-dispersed hard facts. If everybody already knows exactly how Floyd burned down his mother-in-law’s house, there’s no fun to be had conjecturing and nobody to pass the conjecture on to.
That’s why personal gossip will always provide entertainment. It’s not just that personal gossip is impervious to facts, but that solid facts will never be available.
The fastest way to get yourself on the small town gossip grapevine is to get a divorce. Divorce can be a matter of public interest (just how many businesses around here have been sunk because the owners went through a messy split), but mostly they provide drama surrounding a set of unknowable circumstances.
Regardless of a couple’s circumstances, nobody outside of the two people involved can possibly know what is between them. It’s fun to make guesses about why two people come together or fall apart, but guesses are all you can really have. As long as the guesses are entertaining, you can keep playing.
Guesses and gossip go together like peanut butter and jelly. And small town gossip can travel with a speed and vigor that the best big city tabloid can only dream of. Electricity seeks the ground, water seeks its own level, and gossip seeks the path of greatest entertainment. Gossip is only fun to know if you can tell another person. But not just anybody. You seek out the person who will be most entertained, whose face will register shock and surprise (or the jackpot—real emotions like joy or anger or pain or outrage).
In fact, passing on gossip to an entertained audience can be such a rush that many people just go ahead and pass on gossip about themselves.
Big city gossip has to hunt for an audience. Before you can be entertained by scoop about Paris Hilton or Heidi Montag, you have to know (and care) who they are. Even in a big city, that’s a small crowd. Because everyone knows everyone in a small town, potential audience is everywhere. The trick is not to find a possible audience, but to find it first, before someone else ruins your fun.
Is gossip bad? I’m not a big fan of Not Truth, but I suppose gossip, like the truth, can be spoken maliciously or kindly. Just don’t mistake gossip and truth for each other, and when you’re the subject, don’t confuse gossip with genuine concern.

Commitment

(News-Herald, December 31) New Year’s Eve is my least favorite holiday. Regret, disappointment, betrayal, sadness, disaster, stupid choices—too many of the ugliest snapshots of my life are time-stamped December 31.
But I like the idea of resolutions. I like the idea of renewed commitment to something, despite the fact that most of us don’t do commitment well.
We often approach commitment focusing too much on the end point. Now, I don’t mean to suggest that taking a clear-eyed view into the future is bad. The world includes too many people who are surprised that when they stick their metaphorical tongues in metaphorical fans, they suffer metaphorical hurt.
But commitment is not about “if.” Commitment is not about, “ I will look at the various obstacles and if I think I can beat them and if I think this will turn out okay, then I guess I will try to do it.”
There is no “if” in commitment. Commitment is more “of course.” “Of course we’re going to do this. There are some obstacles, so let’s figure out how to get past them.” We don’t say, “I’ll eat food today if I can find the time.” We say, “Of course I’m eating today. I’ll just find the time.” Commitment changes “Will I do this?” to “How will I do this?”
This is what people are complaining about when they talk about the fuzziness of modern marriage. Too many folks say, “Yes, I’ll stick with you if we can figure out how to beat that obstacle” instead of “Of course we’re staying together. Let’s work on how to deal with the obstacles.”
Organizations do the same. “Of course we’ll help you, valued customer. Let me just figure out how to solve this” is not “We’ll try to help with this problem if it falls within the list of issues I’m looking at on my computer screen.”
“If” is the enemy of commitment. So is “what if,” as in “What if the other job would be better” or “what if a different person would make me happier.” Making a commitment to Option A always means kissing Options B through Z goodbye. If you insist on keeping your options open, the only commitment you’ve made is to keeping your options open.
Other impulses get in the way of commitment. Keeping your choices hidden so that nobody can critique them is not commitment. Pretending you didn’t try in order to avoid looking foolish in failure is not commitment. That’s one more reason for marriage ceremonies to be held in front of friends and families—it’s what you do if you really mean it. And if your resolution is to lose ten pounds, but you aren’t telling a soul—well, you’ve already decided you’re going to have that piece of cheesecake. Your real commitment is to your goal of not looking foolish.
It’s not that commitment guarantees success. It doesn’t. In life, speed bumps and brick walls look much the same from a distance. Often you don’t know which is which until you try to get past it. If you make it past, it was just an obstacle; if you didn’t, it’s a dead end.
You have to make the commitment to find out. Standing at a comfortable distance making a judgment about which you’re facing, because if it’s going to be a dead end or even just plain hard, you aren’t going to go any further—well, that’s not a commitment. When you commit to go the distance, you don’t get to now how long the distance actually is.
Non-commitment has ultimatums (I won’t stay with you unless you serve me on silver plates); commitment has limits (I will stay here all week, but if I don’t get any food, I will collapse). Non-commitment says “I will try as long as I feel like it.” Commitment says, “I will keep going as long as I can.”
If commitment guaranteed success, everybody would leap whole-heartedly into the commitment pool. But committing guarantees either real success or undeniable failure— and that’s what many people don’t want to face. (As Yoda said, “There is no try. Only do—or do not.”) So they pick the luke-warm not-so-commitment and hope they get lucky.
Our commitments define us, both the ones we make consciously (I will walk five miles every single day) and the ones we make without thinking (I will stay safe and comfortable). Spending at least one day out of the year thinking about them couldn’t be a bad thing.

Boxing Day

Yes, a few days late. I actually forgot I'd written something about this holiday...
(News-Herald, December 2002) Today, Thursday, December 26, is Boxing Day. Well, at least in some parts of the world it is.
Nobody knows exactly when Boxing Day began, and historians offer a variety of theories about why it developed.
Some say that because servants were required to work on Christmas Day, they would have the following day as their holiday. As they headed out to celebrate the holiday, their employers would give them gift boxes.
Another tradition says that it was the day on which churches opened their poor boxes and distributed the contents to the poor.
Both of these ideas fit reasonably well, as December 26 is also the Feast of St. Stephen. St. Stephen, for those of you who are not up on your saints, was the first Christian martyr, one of the original deacons of the church, ordained by the apostles to care for widows and orphans.
There is, in fact, a Boxing Day carol. Remember—“Good King Wencelsas looked out on the Feast of Stephen.” If you have ever actually sung more than the first verse of the carol, you might recall that the song tells the story of the good king rendering assistance to the poor.
Boxing Day is celebrated in Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Canada. The tradition includes a variety of raucous sporting events and has broadened from helping the poor to giving a gift to any of those who have rendered a service in the past year—tradesmen, doormen, mail carriers, porters and others.
It’s not hard to see why the holiday never really caught on in the states. It is very much a class-driven holiday; the whole purpose is to set aside one day on which the upper crust folks deign to share a little something with the underlings of the world. It’s not at all in keeping with the idea of America as a classless society.
Still, I can see some advantages to an American version of Boxing Day.
First of all, any holiday that can be commemorated with a sporting event deserves our attention. Granted, some of the celebratory events, such as cold-water swimming, have a certain lunatic quality about them. But we already play more football games on New Years Day than we know what to do with. Another easily memorable holiday on which to schedule a pigskin romp or two certainly couldn’t hurt.
More than that, though, I support the idea of a holiday that requires us to personally honor the people who do all the grunt work. Labor Day ought to fill the bill, but most of us just enjoy the three day weekend without pausing to consider what the day off is about.
Besides, Labor Day is abstract. Boxing Day American style could be much more direct. There are many people on whom we depend for the daily maintenance of life. The city water doesn’t magically appear in the sink, the mail isn’t delivered by enchanted gnomes, and garbage doesn’t fly off the curb by itself (well, unless it’s left there a really long time). Our roads aren’t self-clearing, electricity doesn’t feed itself into self-repairing cables, and groceries do not grow on the shelves of stores.
All of these things are taken care of for us by real live human beings. We are able to go about our business, take care of the daily stuff of our lives because other people keep the wheels moving for us.
It wouldn’t hurt us a bit to say thank you, not in a vague, abstract way, but as a real gesture to an actual person. Do it not as a sign that you are so much better than they are, but because you appreciate what they do for you.
Sure it’s their job, but they could always do something else. And if nobody was willing to take on the job of hauling away your garbage, you’d be in a terrible mess.
If you can thank Aunt Grizelda for the matching puce and eggplant colored pot holders, you can certainly thank the guy who spent his day today slogging through the slush so that you could get the late Christmas cards from your cousin Beulah in Lake Tahoe.
So we’ll make this year the year we start the American version of Boxing Day. Start slow. Pick someone to thank today. Write him a nice note, or give her the extra fruitcake that’s sitting in your kitchen. Thank someone whose hard work makes your life a little easier. Happy Boxing Day.