Ridiculous Priorities

 When I was a university student, I worked hard for every cent necessary to get my education. I often worked at two or three jobs, and swept together the money to pay for room, board, books, and tuition. One day my junior year, I entered a classroom on test day, ready to take the test after having studied far into the night. I had basically ruined my GPA by goofing off the first two years and was determined to get as close to a 4.0 in my remaining two years (it turned out to be two years and two terms of summer school) to get my GPA to a respectable point and get a degree I could actually use.

By that time, my professors knew me, and knew I was trying. So, when the professor that day got ready to hand out the tests, he told me he needed to talk to me first. He sympathetically showed me the note on the class roll he had gotten that day. My name had been flagged, and I was not to be allowed to take the test. It appeared I had "delinquent" dues on my dorm rent, and I had been suspended indefinitely. I assured him that I was certain I was up-to-date on my dues. He finally decided that he would let me take the test but hold it until I had cleared this up. I'm sure I didn't do as well on that test as I had planned to do, as I was distracted by the disturbing news.

As soon as I finished, I went to the financial office to see what had happened. In those pre-internet days, you paid in person, and I paid my dorm dues monthly. I had two choices: I could use the university postal system, which meant dropping my check in their box and it being picked up -- that had always worked before -- or going to the office (where I was going now), and standing in line for a while, which I had to do that day.

I finally got to talk to someone: a student about my age whose sole job was to read the printout and tell me I was no longer a student in good standing because I was delinquent in my payments. Anyone who could do something about it was safely hidden behind closed doors while I was left to plead with a student on minimum wage who was only working to try to pay her own dues and had no power to send me to someone who could fix things. I will shorten the long story here by saying that, eventually, I was able to clear my name. The internal mail system of the university had failed to deliver and process my check on time -- for a week it had apparently been sitting in a bin on someone's desk. When it finally cleared, I was mailed a statement that my account was again in good standing, and I could attempt to make up the work I had been forbidden to do in all my classes.

That was it. No apology. No acknowledgement that the error was theirs, that the "delinquency" was due to their oversight, not mine. I was left with the responsibility taking the printed mailing (which came a few days later) and begging all my professors to let me make up my work, without penalty, if possible.

I need to add that my "delinquency" was a little over $100, the amount of the delayed check, which clearly showed the date I had written it, several days in advance of the due date. The university had kicked me out of the system over a hundred bucks (yes, good days, when a month in a dorm, including food, was $100. But remember that, back then, minimum wage was $1.60 an hour).

Now, a seemingly unrelated story. This past week, a prominent university in my state fired a football coach. I know, that happens all the time. But what made this newsworthy to me was that, while he was working for them, he was making millions of dollars, and now that he was not, he was going to continue to be paid millions. If I read the article right, they are committed to over $70 million, whether he works or not.

Let's put it in context. That campus has, maybe 150,000 students. I'm sure they are having to pay room and board and books and tuition. I know prices are higher than the $100 monthly I was paying back in the 70s. Having put four kids through school, I also know that whatever the price, if they don't pay, they have to leave. My wife and I did a lot of work to make sure that didn't happen to them, and my children rolled up their sleeves and worked to help the cause.

I'm trying to figure out how the same university that would send a kid home for missing a month's room and board could be the same university that would fire a football coach and say, "Oh, what the heck. Just keep the money." I also realize that they will have to pay someone else to take his place. How could these two worlds co-exist? Some students cannot come up with the money, and university systems are more than happy to help them get loans -- lots of loans. There are adults in America today who are old enough to retire and are still paying off college loans.

Why, in a country that continually complains about inequity, does this exist? Why does a university education cost so much? We are told that it's necessary to maintain a quality of instruction, adequate facilities, all the good things that contribute to success in the university system. My first question, of course, is "How many university professors get contracts for $70 million or more?"

How can a school justify spending money like that? What type of value system invests less -- much less -- in the education and training of its students than they do in trying to get the school into a game in January that gives them a chance to have bragging rights about a "national championship" for less than a year?

I don't fault the coach. I guess if someone offered me a job for $70 million and guaranteed me the money -- all of it -- even if they fired me, I would have problems turning the offer down. But it says a lot about priorities.

Our country, our culture, needs leaders. We need people who have been trained, who have worked hard to get an education, and are ready to use it to meet the challenges of our time. We need people who have learned from the best in productivity, leadership, and innovation. Somehow, schools that get a national championship is not the priority that will equip the next generation. Don't get me wrong. I love college football, and love Saturdays in the fall when I get to watch. I am in awe of some of those young athletes, both the ones who excel on the gridiron and in the classroom simultaneously, as well as the ones who realize that God has blessed them with phenomenal abilities and decide to give back to the community.

No, the villain for me is the class of people who would keep an enthusiastic student out of a classroom through a one-hundred-dollar misunderstanding, and at the same time adopt an "it's-only-money" attitude toward a multimillion-dollar contract that needs to be tweaked.

Can anyone honestly tell me there's nothing wrong with that set of priorities?

End of an Era

When I heard that Lifeway stores were closing last week, I had a rush of mixed emotions, because the stores have been a part of my life for so long.

Once, back in pre-history, Baptists were cared for by something they had invented called "boards." We had a Foreign Mission Board and a Home Mission Board. Pastors looking to retirement had the Annuity Board, but the rank-and-file members knew about the Sunday School Board. They were a service that made sure we had those all-important Sunday School record books, the offering envelopes and even those pesky grade slips for Training Union. Those yellow training union report slips were the bane of my existence, because some schemer had listed "Daily Bible Reading" as worth 21 points, so even if you were there, studied your lesson, were attending worship, etc, you could only make a "79," a "C," in Training Union.

The Sunday School Board took care of us, though. They made sure we had Bible School materials, and of course we could get our Baptist Hymnals there. My home church, even in the 70s, was still happy with the 1940s version called the "Broadman Hymnal," when most of the other churches in our town were using the more contemporary 1956 "Baptist Hymnal." And of course, Broadman was inseparably linked to the Sunday School Board.

And they had stores! The Baptist Book Store was only put in privileged towns. I think there were only a half dozen in Texas when I was a kid, but you could actually walk in in get your materials, rather than having to fill out an order form and mail it and wait for them to get there. And Lubbock was only 60 miles away. There was a Baptist Bookstore there, at a major crossroads called Broadway and Avenue Q. I could wander through the aisles of the store while my parents checked off items from their church list.

It's so strange to think about now, but I was introduced to Robert Heinlein at -- yes -- Baptist Bookstore. His juvie novel, Have Space Suit - Will Travel - was on the shelves there with all the juvenile mission biographies and the sanctified books we bought. I thought Heinlein was probably a missionary Baptist himself until I was a senior in high school and we got Stranger in a Strange Land in our library, and I checked it out, thinking it was another of his juvies. Let's say I was a little shocked, and thought, very un-Baptistically, that perhaps Heinlein had lost his salvation before he wrote that book -- or because of it. I had bought nearly all of Heinlein's juvies, but I will always be able to say that I bought my first science fiction book at Baptist Book Store on Avenue Q in Lubbock.

They had everything, including disposable communion cups and pre-cut communion bread squares boxed and sealed in plastic -- both of those things an abomination to our local church where we drank our Welch's grape juice from crystal communion cups and the deacons' wives baked the unleavened bread, which was broken while the pastor quoted, "This is my body, broken for you."

As a student at Texas Tech, I even bought my first non-King James Bible there, and really felt I had done something. I would even buy a (gulp) Good News for Modern Man and a Living Bible there later. By that time, in the "cool" seventies, they even had a youth section, and played vinyl and cassettes of contemporary music like "He's Everything to Me," while a three color disk turned slowly in front of an incandescent bulb, changing the shading of the Jesus posters on the wall. One poster had "Jesus" in a Pepsi logo, and said, "Come Alive - You're in the Jesus Generation." I bought it.

The Baptist Bookstore flourished in those years, before the Great Divorce between the Southern Baptists and the Texas Baptists, when we all felt like children of the Divorce, and wondered if we had caused it, and if maybe they would get back together. But before that, we lived an idyllic existence. We all got our church music there. We got our Sunday School materials there. In the eighties, when I was made VBS director of our local association, I would go to Baptist Bookstore and buy a load of VBS materials on consignment to set up during the annual VBS convention I hosted, where I showed them the materials we would all use, and ran through this year's filmstrip, and thankfully had some ladies who knew how to do the crafts we would all do and taught the potential workers. And the people would buy their materials there, and Baptist Bookstore gave us, I think, a 10% commission for sales, money which I turned back to the Association so we would have plenty to finance next year's  convention.

Then, things happened. Boards became passe, and the Sunday School Board got a cooler name, "Lifeway." And the Baptist Bookstore, not wanting to seem so one-denominational, became Lifeway Bookstores, then Lifeway Christian Stores, when they realized that books were not really that cool. Of course, Christian Bookstores were on the way out. I watched other bookstores as well as our own, as they moved the books to a far wall to make room for posters, T-Shirts, and records, then cassettes, then CDs. The survivor stores also brought in home schooling materials.

I remember the time I went to the checkout shelf at one Christian store and they had "Jesus candy" for sale there.

And then, one of the competitors for Lifeway decided it was great to be open on Sundays, from 8-5 as well. They were gracious enough to give their employees Easter off, but every other Sunday was just another day. I often wondered who shopped there at 10 AM on Sunday.

Lifeway managed to keep itself unstained from these things, but they had lost their vision. More and more, I found that if I needed something, I had to go online because stores didn't want to be overstocked on inventory for dated materials. There had been a time in the past when I could just tell them the name of my church, and they let me walk out without paying. Our church got the bill later. Then I needed my account number. Then came the time when a lady told me that they didn't do account numbers. That I needed a church credit card or needed to fill out some paperwork.

And now, Lifeway's brick and mortar stores are shutting down, and as far as I know, all that is left is Mardel's Book Store, and I wonder if they are only staying alive because of their parent company, Hobby Lobby, who usually has its own brick and mortar nearby.

Online shopping is easy, usually cheaper, and nearly always "in stock." But there is something about holding a Bible in your hands before you buy it. When you are buying a Bible, you are buying a companion for life, and one of your grandchildren may have it some day. You want to know how a Bible smells, how the pages sound as you turn them, and how the leather feels in your hands. And they still haven't figured how to do that on the internet. I made the mistake one year of ordering our Bibles that we give our seniors outside of a brick and mortar. It was before online took over, and I ordered them by phone, dictating each student's name to be imprinted, and paying by credit card. They got it all right, but the picture in the catalog I had was deceiving. Twelve seniors that year got Bibles that were somewhere between the size of the ones their grandmothers brought to worship, and the one that was on the table in front of the pulpit. No wonder they were a close-out bargain.

Now, all of our record keeping materials will be bought online. All of those Sunday School things -- online. VBS we have done online for a long time, because there is a  smorgasbord of competing companies, all interested in our business. That's also why we don't have an associational VBS clinic any more.

Okay, here it comes. I'm getting old. Would it be too hard to give us a Sunday School Board again? Oh, I know, we now have "Study Groups" and "Discipleship Groups" and "Growth Groups." Forget Training Union (though I was surprised to see they still have Training Union quarterlies online -- they just don't call it that now). Okay, I guess it would not be financially solvent, but then again, the Boards were never intended to turn a profit. There were there to serve.

Don't go calling me an old fogey or some Luddite for having these thoughts. Don't think I'm some close-minded fundamentalist who longs for the good old days. Remember who I am. After all, I once bought a Heinlein book at a Baptist Book Store.

An Open Letter to the New 2019 Congress

Well, congratulations! You got what you wanted -- to be in the driver's seat again. I'm neither elated nor disappointed, as I voted for an independent two years ago for president, and in the most recent congressional elections, I voted third party for congress. I have no problem with having done this. So you might think I don't have a dog in the fight, but I tend to be interested in who gets elected because I expect you all to work for me, since that's the way it's supposed to be done.

Unfortunately, you really got off to a bad start yesterday. You have 235 Democrats in the house, and you elected one of the least popular and least capable for Speaker. You are going to have a tough time convincing me that, of 235 Democrats, Nancy Pelosi is the cream of the crop. She recently told a press conference that she was not going to allow "President Bush" to bully anyone. Please let her know, for starters, that one President Bush has been out of office ten years, and the other one died recently, and that the current occupant of the White House is named "Trump." Maybe that will help.

And if any of you Republicans are listening, why did you vote for a Republican for speaker? You knew you couldn't win that one. Why did you not get together with some of the intelligent Democrats and see whom they really wanted, and promise to help out? You had over 190 votes available, and you could have made a difference, but anyway...

Back to the new majority leadership: I know you are sharpening your axe now. You are going to take down this president. I have all confidence in you that you will do this. At least, everything in your power. And you have some options:

• Censure him. That's easy enough, and it has happened before.
• Subpoena him: If you can't get him, you can at least subpoena everyone who works for him, lives in his house, and works at his hotels. Have fun.
• Impeach him: Go ahead. Make it a trifecta. He would be the third president to be impeached, and you see how much damage it did to the other two. Andrew Johnson finished out his term, left office, and probably said, "good riddance." Bill Clinton finished his term, got full retirement and lifetime secret service, and almost made it back to the same White House where he spent 8 years. The bottom line is, impeachment looks like fun, but it does very little by itself. To make that work, you need the senate to help, and I have bad news for you: the Senate has too many Republicans in it to make anything bad happen to Trump. If you manage to impeach him, it will not be the worst that has happened to him. He's been through bankruptcies, and worse, divorces. He won't lose any sleep. And like his worthy opponent, he's not ever going to jail.
• Pass bills against him. Get him declared the antichrist. Pass a resolution that he's the worst president in history. Pass a bill that denounces him and everything about him. I would like to see you do all this for the next two years, because it's very inexpensive, compared to what you could be doing: pork projects, good-old-boy legislation to get favors, money to holding companies that secretly support the companies that got you here. You know, what the Republicans do, too.

But I'm afraid that there are some of you that are suddenly going to realize that you at least have to pretend to make laws, and you are going to press Madame Speaker to do that occasionally. Oh, I'm not talking about unfreezing the budget. As long as there are chauffeurs, people to hold the doors in the capitol building and the White House, and food in the dining halls, I don't think you are going to worry much about whether those people making minimum wage start taking tickets at the Statue of Liberty and Washington Monument any time soon. You will make the same overtures the president is making, but neither of you will really worry about it as long as your rent is paid and your expense account is still liquid.

But there are a couple of things I would like you to consider if you really, really care about the people you represent, whether we voted for you or not. I put these things in no particular order:

• Taxes. Keep it like it is. Whether we liked Trump and his congress or not, we like the larger standard deduction and the lower taxes, and no, we do not think we are causing the deficit by paying less taxes. We think you are causing the deficit by spending nonexistent money, and of course, you know that the Fed no longer has to even print it. Now it just generates it electronically, like government-sanctioned bitcoins, so spare us the tax increases that supposedly can balance the budget. You could double all our tax bills, and you still wouldn't balance this year's budget, unless, of course, you are planning to spend money only on subpoenas, censures, resolutions, and impeachment votes. Then, you might just balance it.
• Medical care. Please realize that those big, greedy insurance companies are not the sole culprit in all of our problems. For me, it's the twenty dollar Tylenol tablet that they give me with a tiny cup of water. It's the 90 dollar box of facial tissue that was an off-brand, not even Kleenex, that I got charged for, and I didn't even use but one or two of them. It's the hospital room I was in, built some time in the fifties, with the metal bed, and the leaking catheter bag that the nurses were "gonna fix" in a little while, but never did, because, as they barked to my wife, they were "under staffed." But I was better off than most, because the echo from the hallway, "I huuuuurrrrt!" "I need a nuuuurrrse!" made me count my blessings. For that one night stay, I was billed the cost of five Alaska Cruises. One night. And that was just the room. Not the consultation. Not the leaking catheter bag. Not the pills or the tissues. No wonder you have to have an act of congress (excuse the outdated expression) to get an itemized bill, and then, if you are lucky, you can figure out what all the codes mean.
• Medical Care II - oh, and those bills. You don't get them all at once. You get one from this doctor, from that anesthesiologist, that radiology reader that lives in Maine, and -- oops -- that lab technician that was, er, "out of network," even though your medical team and hospital were not. And the double bill that, when you finally prove it to them, they say, "Oh, okay." No apology or admission of a mistake or -- worse -- intentional work. That's what's killing us. Literally.
• Medical Care III - But of course, you have been bravely fighting for us. Privacy. All those privacy notifications, the ones that mean that even our family members who take care of us and maybe pay our bills can't find out how we are because you were more concerned about HIPAA than you are about hip replacements, which can cost 1500 or 15000, depending on where you go and who does it, but you never know until it's over. Oh, that privacy you worked so hard for us to have, so that now we only have initials on our doors, so family doesn't know if the two JJ's next door to each other -- if one is the "Jane Johnson" you wanted to see, or the "John Jones" you never met, so you knock on a stranger's door, hear "come in," and make eye contact with someone you've never met because of, you know, "privacy." If you are not too afraid of the powerful medical industry and their lobbies that will fight you for status quo, you might drum up the courage to organize a bipartisan task force or two and get to work on some medical reform that will stop this powerful group from attacking the people you are representing when they are at their weakest, their sickest, and their most vulnerable, often bankrupting them.
• Other minor things. Today, I got two cloned calls on my cell phone from local numbers with normal names, and both were warning me that this was the last day to lower my interest rate on my credit cards. The third call was from a local man I had never met who was returning a missed call that I never made, probably because a credit card interest rate company cloned my number and called him. I have heard that, this year, over half of all wireless calls will be spam. I have problems believing that 435 elected officials can do nothing at all about this problem which has exploded in the past two years. At work, driving, sitting at business meetings and in funeral services, robocallers are dialing our numbers like never before, and you seem to do nothing. Is it because someone else answers your phone? This is only a tiny example of the many things ordinary people like us face every day, people like you used to be. This year, in record numbers, people stole packages from front porches because most families have two working parents and no way for a housewife in an apron to answer the door when a mailman calls. And you know this. And just in case you don't know, I don't think the first amendment was intended to protect and propogate any of this.

I could go on, but you get my drift. We really want to know that you are out there. I quit voting for one congressman because he refused to answer my emails with anything except a boilerplate that he needed the last extra four digits of my zip code to make sure I was in his district before he would read my letter. Are you all like that?

Part of the deal you brokered with Nancy Pelosi, the most capable leader of the majority party, it appears, was that she promise to be speaker for only two more terms. Let me tell you that, unless you can show you care, in two more terms, it will be given back to the other side so they can elect a speaker as competent as the one you just elected.

Please show me you care. Please pass some legislation that eases my burden instead of costing me more. Please work to lower medicine prices. I know that pharmaceutical companies got you in there, but they gave money to your opponent, too. Show them how grateful you are by voting for fair pharmaceutical prices.

Oh, and one more thing. I have been paying social security taxes for 50 years this year -- ever since I started sacking groceries as a teenager, hoping to buy a red Volkswagen, which I never got, by the way. Had to pay for college. Anyway, 50 years later, I am going to get my first Social Security check. I will disregard the fact that I paid my SS taxes with taxed money, and will get the privilege now of paying taxes on what I get paid, though you ought to be ashamed of yourselves for that. I will disregard that you constantly "borrow" from that money for other things. All I ask is, "Would you please quit thinking it's welfare for old people?" No, it's a return on the investment of people who have worked for half a century, and there is no reason at all for you to be messing with it.

So, what kind of congress will you be? While your new speaker is washing and waxing the private plane she once again has, you might draw up a list of some things that we really care about, and try to do something about it.

If you do, I will not only vote for you next time around, I will even campaign for you. But I have been promising that to every party in power for some time now, and no one seems to care. I hope maybe you do, because I am a baby boomer, and there are still a lot of us, and we all vote.

So, it's the day after perhaps the ugliest election in over a hundred years in US history. I feel like no one got what they really wanted, and I have the same feeling I used to have when I watched a ballgame between two teams that I disliked, and wondered if there was any way for them to both lose.

I had seen this coming. I can readily think of two examples from recent history. The first one was the 2004 election. There were two candidates for president in that one: George W. Bush, and "Not" George W. Bush. I would imagine that many people who voted for John Kerry don't even remember whose name was in the "other" column. I never heard anyone say, "I'm really excited about Kerry. He is going to do such great things for this country!" Whenever I asked a Kerry supporter what they liked most about him, they invariably said something like, "I hate Bush." His greatest claim to fame was that he married an older woman and got into some real money from ketchup. Also, that he was on a swift boat or something. He might as well have used the campaign slogan, "I Am Not Bush." That's the great bulk of his voting bloc, and just to be frank, he came close to winning just because he was not the incumbent president.

Jump ahead 8 years. It's very similar again: an incumbent president running against "whats-his-face." The two candidates on the 2012 ballot were Barack Obama and "Not" Barack Obama. The president had some loyal supporters, but I really didn't hear anyone say, "Romney is an exciting candidate!" or "I really think Romney has some great ideas!" See, Mr. Romney could be anything. When he ran against Ted Kennedy for the senate, he was pro-choice, pro-national-health-care, and pro-gay rights. When he ran as a Republican against the Democratic president, he was just the opposite on all three of these things. And Romney didn't come as close as Kerry did, but he did make a showing in the election. Yet he was, for the most part, a major Zero. His campaign strength was, "I Am Not Obama."

But this year, our campaign makes those last two look anemic -- and nearly normal -- in comparison. This year, for maybe the first time in US history, we have two "nots" running against each other: "Not" Donald Trump running against "Not" Hillary Clinton. Yes, I hear friends from both sides: "I know my candidate is horrible, but the one one is 'horribler.'"

The Thrill of the Hunt

"What are you doing?!" my 5th grade teacher, wide-eyed, startled me as she asked the question.

"I am reading," I answered, a little perplexed. I expected outbursts like that for throwing things in class, stealing something from someone's desk, walking around when we were supposed to be seated -- that kind of thing.

"That is an encyclopedia!" she shouted at me. "Nobody reads encyclopedias. They are for research only!"

"But I finished my research," I said slowly. "I'm just reading until we are all through."

She took the encyclopedia, World Book volume "M," and returned it to the shelf, shaking her head at me.  It was a dilemma I had felt many times. I would be looking up, say, "Llamas" for a report in class, but I would slow down as I passed things like "Lincoln," including the town in Nebraska, or "Limburger cheese," and I would wonder why people ate it if it smelled as bad as the cartoons made it appear to smell. We never had time for all that added knowledge, but sometimes I would detour from a search for class just to satisfy an inquisitive mind.  Did you know that, if all the blood vessels in one human body could be stretched into one continuous blood vessel, it would reach from New York to Sydney, Australia, and back five times? I learned that while I was looking for something else. 

Those World Books were treasuries of information to me, even though they were generic blue, worn at the edges, and some of them still said Truman was president. But that old information was still good, because human bodies don't change that much, including how long the circulatory system is. I never understood why they were "forbidden fruit" to my 5th grade teacher.

Years later, I would  be living on the coast of South America with my wife and three home-schooled sons, and acquire some generic red World Books from the Carter administration. I set them out in the open where my sons could soak up the information in them. In the years we served in Ecuador, most of which did not include even dial-up internet, my sons and I probably each read through the entire set. I learned early that, if you teach a child to read, most of the rest of the education is automatic, and nothing gave me the satisfaction of seeing my 9-year-old son, curled up with a volume of World Book, absorbing the pages of info, and then, later telling me about it. My daughter, as she learned to read, also began that great search.

On one furlough in the States, I was overjoyed to find an entire unabridged encyclopedia on CD, and imagined how great that would be. I was disappointed to find, after installing it, that it merely complies with the questions you ask, that it narrows your search to that item, and that "browsing" is not a function of an electronic encyclopedia. When they went online, I found that they were even worse. I grieved when the printed version of Encyclopaedia Britannica went out of print, because, as a teacher, I have used the online edition, and sent my students to it. It has more information than the print version ever did, but it is a caged animal, and lacks the luster and wild spirit that the printed version had.

It is a basic truth of human experience: Some of our greatest discoveries occur while we are looking for something else. Some of the greatest inventions and scientific discoveries emerged totally by accident.

I am guilty: I use Google, Wikipedia, and other search engines to find info, attribute quotes, and spike rumors. But having said that, I miss the days when I had to work to get the info. The joy of research was in the hunt. Today's information gathering is like shooting fish in a barrel, or hunting game that is in a cage. There is no thrill to it. I can find important information in just a few seconds, and there is nothing else nearby to distract me. Some hunters say they like to hunt because they don't like the "taste of captivity" in store-bought meat. As I think about it, I realize that there was always a "wild" taste to the info that I had to pursue through a forest of information.

Doing a research paper, when I was in high school, involved, among other things, using a multi-volume Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature, usually found in the local and the school library, that could direct you to published magazine and journal articles that featured your subject. You found your item, and then prayed that the librarian had that specific magazine, volume number, and current issue. Then, you carefully copied that precious info onto a note card, a gem of information that you would footnote later.

If someone had told me, when I was sixteen years old, researching the history and function of the Electoral College, and trying to determine if it was beneficial or not, that some day, I would be able to do all of this from a "smart phone" in my pants pocket, I would have longed for such a miracle. But looking back, I wish that young people today could know the thrill of finding information after a strong, stimulating hunt.

Card catalogues in libraries, reference resources on those shelves of books that you could not take home, atlases, city directories, dictionaries, encyclopedias -- they all worked together for me, and the result was something of great value, not only because of the content, but because of the investment that I had made in it.

And that's the problem today. Research is cheap. As a high school teacher for ten years, I would have students ask me questions, and, teacher that I was, I would not just give a straight answer. I wanted them to know why the answer was what it was, to make them arrive at it, so the next time they had a similar question and there was no teacher there to give it, or they were in the middle of a standardized state test, they could figure it out for themselves. Most of the time, the students would turn away, say "forget it," or start a conversation with some other student as soon as they heard the words from me that they wanted.

I had to learn that the students were not being rude. They are members of the "smart phone" culture, and are conditioned to that form of information gathering. That phone is a little educated slave that stays in our pockets until we need it. When we want to know something, from "Where is the nearest Starbuck's?" to "Which president served two separate terms?" we just have to fetch it out of its little prison, ask the question, get an immediate answer, and then throw it back in its own dungeon.

No joy of research. No enticements to branch out to related knowledge, or even learning something on the way simply because another idea happened to start with the same few letters. We learn only what we want, when we want, with a minimum of distraction. And we only get facts, without enough substance to weave them into something that enhances our lives.

I would love to start a school where students had to attend for at least a semester. There would be no computers, but every classroom would have a set of World Books, some dictionaries and thesauruses and atlases, and the library would have only a card catalogue.

In an era of information convenience, we are starving ourselves, and depriving our kids of the "Thrill of the Hunt."

Sick of Politics; Something More Fun!

It has been interesting to find that there will still be "Top Ten" lists in the 23rd and 24th century.  After months of tedious, back-breaking research, I actually found these in some personal logs.  Most of the entries were made by ensigns, and it shines a special light on what went on behind the cameras and below decks, that never made the show.  Enjoy.

Top Ten Reasons I Like Serving on the Enterprise 1701

1. I get free uniforms, I don't have to wash them, and the shirts I have are not red.
2. The phasers make a cool sound, and they have this hilarious "stun" setting.
3. Lots of break time unless you're in engineering.
4. The food is all replicated -- no bones, gristle, or seeds.
5. The communicators have 100 terabyte MP3 players in them.
6. The clueless captain has no idea what 400 of us are doing.
7. Year round perfect temperatures and a rec room on every deck.
8. Two words:  sonic showers.
9. Titanium hull plating, multiphasic shields, warp 15, and photon torpedoes -- this is the safest place in the universe.
10. Free health care.

Top Ten Reasons I Like Serving on the Enterprise 1701-D

1. Red uniforms are not an automatic death sentence.
2. Captain is French.  We don't have to fight much.
3. Ten-forward -- lots of free drinks and the 500-year-old lady will give you the real thing when Baldy's not around.
4. The food replicators have an unlimited supply of tasty, non-fattening food from 1,000 planets -- and you have one in your room.
5. Two words:  holodeck privileges
6. The captain who has no idea what 1200 of us are doing.
7. Command crew that plays poker every night and has no idea what we are doing.
8. Android does most of the hard work, leaving us lots of holodeck time; generally clueless.
9. Children, families, parks, rec areas -- surrounded by deflector shields, and a warp bubble, with photon torpedoes, meta-phasic shielding, and phasers.  This is the safest place in the universe -- unless the Android goes nuts.
10. Free health care.

Top Ten Reasons I Like Serving on Voyager

1. We are in the Delta Quadrant.  Not even the IRS can find us here, though the AARP did get a message to Tuvok when he turned 150.
2. The little lizard guy makes a great omelet, but I try not to think about where he got the eggs.
3. I like imagining what Species 8472 could do to Cardassians.
4. We actually get to build our own cool new ships, and race them against aliens.
5. If I am killed, it will probably be reversed before the end of the program by traveling back in time or something.
6. Forget Kirk and Picard.  Our captain tamed a Borg.
7. Our second in command is a real live Indian with a cool tattoo.
8. We will get seventy years' hazard pay when we finally make it back.
9. Not one Cardassian or any of those idiotic shape-shifters within a thousand light years of us.
10. Free health care and a Doctor who is available 24/7.

Nine Things I Hate and One Thing I Like about 

Living on Deep Space 9

1. Ferengi everywhere.
2. It takes several years for the Cardassian smell to go away, and they keep coming back,
3. Bajorans are a combination of the worst possible traits of Catholics and Jews, with none of the best qualities of either, and a little bit of Baptist arrogance thrown in to boot.
4. Klingons everywhere.  Blood wine taste lingers in a synthesizer.  Ruins the taste of Dr. Pepper.
5. That pesky wormhole that any scum can get through and "bam" we're the first thing they see.
6. The "prophets."  A bunch of stuck-up aliens with technology that have fouled up everything in two quadrants for millennia.
7. The founders.  Yeah, right.  Think of Gumby and multiply it by one billion, then simmer on low heat.
8. The woman with the yam in her belly. Condescending, thinks she knows everything.  Captain calls her "Old Man."  Much nicer than what everyone else calls her.
9. Captain not clueless.  He knows what everybody is doing.

And the one thing I like

1. Free health care.

What If..?

I am posting this blog on my nearly lifeless site mainly for a special friend who continues to be one of the best thinkers I know.  I am a reader and writer of alternative science fiction -- the kind that imagine current events if something changed, like, say Lincoln surviving an assassination attempt, or the Moors not being driven out of Spain.

But this alternative fiction is one that I wish had happened.  I think the world would be a better place if the US had joined the Central Powers -- or even threatened to -- in WWI.  That war actually never ended, and has continued to drone on as the embers flared up to be WWII, then developed into the Cold War that included Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba, and now is in the Middle East.

The ones who actually wanted to fight for England and France lived mainly in what we call "New England."  The Celtic people of the South felt more sympathy for the Germans.  Our excuse for entering the war was German U-boat "aggression," but although we were not involved in the war at the time, we were busy carrying war materiel and support to Great Britain.  The Germans did what anyone would do to a neutral power:  stopped boats and seized armaments and military support, and when that was not enough, decided to make the North Atlantic unsafe for American intervention.  Had we honestly entered the war and fought it in the open, these things would not have happened.  Using cruise ships to arm England and France was a bad idea.

Let's talk about those two "allies."  First, there's England, who had fought three wars with us in the last century and a half.  Then, there was France, who no longer knew how to engage in warfare.  We had no real reason to side with them, and they represented no interests of ours.  By identifying with them, the whole world learned what type of nation we now wanted to be.  England, especially was hated for their vicious colonialism that could claim huge profits in occupied lands that, today, are profitless, such as current day Pakistan and Bangladesh.  They ruled a huge portion of the earth, and maintained it with a rod of iron.  France was doing the same in West Africa and Southeast Asia.  The people that hated them now hated us.

Germany had a good relationship with the Middle East; Britain (read British Petroleum) did not.  In the 20th century the US would help Britain topple the elected ruler of Persia, and install the Pahlavi family to power, whose last ruler was the infamous Shah.  The Shah's people were much more friendly to British Petroleum.  I have to ask myself, If we had been with the Germans, would we have the strife in the Middle East?  Sure, they point at our support of Israel as their point of hatred, but before the initiation of that state, they already hated us because we were Great Britain's right hand.  What would the Middle East look like today if the Central Powers had won?

When the US entered the war, we tipped the balance of power, and England and France, tired of Germany, not only demanded their surrender -- they demanded their humiliation.  The "armistice" that was signed was nothing like the gentlemen's agreement of Appomattox Court House a half century earlier.  It made Reconstruction look like a Sunday school picnic.  England and France -- and New England -- wanted Germany's back broken.  As a result, the nation was instantly forced into poverty.  We all know what happened to the German mark -- a move that gave great profit to a group of American and European bankers who had colluded to organize a banking cartel that included the US Federal Reserve, only a few years earlier.

Humiliated and smoldering, the Germans sought to restore their former glory.  This need for restoration, for a return to hope, for anyone who could get them back to where they belonged, made them ripe to receive an eloquent young speaker named Adolf Hitler, in spite of their misgivings about his character.

My contention is, if we had joined the Central Powers, there never would have been a Fuehrer, an attempt at a third Reich, or concentration camps.  If we had joined the Central Powers, there never would have been the tension in the Middle East, mainly for two reasons.  First, the Jews would not have had to leave Germany, and secondly, Great Britain would not have forced the formation of Israel.  There were many ways to restore the ancient nation; Great Britain and the United Nations chose, possibly, the worst way of all.  Imagine a world without Middle East extremism, without September 11.  If we had joined the Central Powers, Germany would not have slipped an exiled Lenin back into Russia to ease their pressure on the eastern front.  Russia was ripe for revolution against an evil royalty, but Lenin would not have been the one to topple them.  And Stalin would not have been there to take his place, and since, in my scenario, WWII never happens, there would have been no divisions of Eastern Europe, no East and West Germany, no division of Berlin, no domination of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, Bulgaria, Rumania, et. al.   No Cold War.  No Red threat. No McCarthy trials.  No Korean War.  No Vietnamese War.  And no Gulf War.

Oh, sure, I believe mankind has evil at his roots, especially when it comes to politics, and something wicked would have arisen to fill the vacuum, but something in me says it would not have been as bad.

So why did we leave our neutrality and jump into a World War?  As I said before, part of it was the sympathy of the New England region of the US.  I'm sure Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, Texas, and other states with their rich German heritage would not have insisted on the war.  But the biggest part would have to be the strings that were being controlled by the banking cartels who controlled Western Europe and the United States.  In 1913, everything had changed:  the Federal Reserve took over our treasury, the Senate was selected by popular vote instead of state legislatures, and somehow, Americans "voted" for an amendment to allow the income tax.  WWI was a huge boon for banking, oil, and those controlling it.  Millions were to be made, and the debts after the war enriched bankers even more.

What a different world it would be today if the US had sided with the Central Powers.  I don't think we would have had to fire a shot.  Britain and France, seeing their great potential Sugar Daddy join the other side, would have laid down arms and negotiated a peaceful settlement.

And Adolph Hitler would have died in obscurity in Germany, a non-person.  That would have been worth it, right there.