Oh Good

One of the major party's candidate for president would like to see teachers armed, locked and loaded for any situation that might call for suppressing fire. It's all a part of the "good guys with guns" program espoused by Wayne LaPierre and his followers in the National Rifle Association. I suppose at some level I should be pleased and thankful that, as a teacher, I am counted among the few, the proud, the good. I'm not sure exactly how virtue is ascribed in their eyes, maybe it's just being a "good shot" that puts one head and shoulders above the rest, but I suspect that there may be some additional subjective criteria that makes it important for us good guys to stick together. With guns.
The thing about the Second Amendment is that it allows all Americans the right to keep and bear arms. One of the questions that might be asked on one of those illusory background check forms could be "are you good?" That would help keep guns out of the hands of the bad guys. Problem solved. Except for that whole question of just exactly what makes one truly good. It's starting to sound a little more like an essay question, and that might run us into a little trouble. What if you're a swell person in so many ways, but not a good writer? You might not get your gun on account of how you ain't so good with your words.
And that would be a shame, since there are so many good people without a degree in philosophy.  Or urban pacification. Or writing. Like I have. You could be a really good mechanic but a lousy person. Just like I could be a really good writer but a flawed human being. Which may mean that  background checks won't solve a thing after all. Of course, if you lied on a government form that would probably kick you right out of that good person category.
Or if you thought professional wrestling was real. Patricia Anne Crowe jumped into the ring at an AWF show in Georgia last week to rescue fan favorite "Iron Mann" from bad guy Paul Lee. With a loaded gun. A police officer suggested that Ms. Crowe pulled the gun "because of the way he'd (Lee) talked to her." That pistol was a way to put some order into chaos. Or is that the other way 'round?
That can't be good.

Coke And Roses

I'm in mourning. Not in any particular tragic way, but I am currently grieving the loss of something that was once a huge part of my life: Coca-Cola. Don't worry, by the way. Coke is still alive and well for most everyone else, but for me it has been five months of Cold Cola Turkey. Once the very clear and undeniable line that could be drawn between my bouts with kidney stones and the consumption of America's favorite soft drink, I decided to give it up before I turned inside out. Initially I worried that not having me as a customer might do irreparable harm to their bottom line, but as it turns out I needn't have been concerned. The Coca-Cola Corporation is getting along fine without me.
As for me, I confess that I am struggling a bit. It used to be so easy. Friday night we would go out for a cheeseburger and a Coke. At the movie theater, there was always the anticipation of powering through that tub of Coke as the feature presentation unspooled. Even though I had somewhat recently stopped stocking the basement cola cellar for weekend entertaining, I still marked most special occasions or events with a Coke. And a smile.
I used to have a lot of vices. Most of these could be found at the bottom of a beer bottle, including the bad choices that come with that kind of habit. I reasoned that after retiring from the ranks of the semi-professional beer drinkers that temperance would be my friend. I was saving myself from the gutter by choosing a soft drink instead of booze for my libation. Little did I know that I would happily trade most if not all the hangovers I ever had for the pain experienced when passing a kidney stone.
I should point out that my wife, clever lady that she is, has suggested that simply moderating my intake of cola would be an easy enough solution to this dilemma. Moderation has never been one of my strong suits, however, and I have found that flipping the "off" switch is generally the best way to keep me off that slippery slope.
There is also the matter of the upkeep of a fifty-four year old body and the wear and tear that I have already put on this chassis. Many of those were highway miles, and while we are still operating with primarily original equipment, there is some concern around these parts that suggests that nothing lasts forever. With a big red arrow hanging over my head labeled "Exhibit A." So it turns out that when I am asked what I would like to drink at dinner and I can say that I am happy with water, I am saving myself. I will try not to evangelize and point out to others the evil that Coke does both internally and externally.  We had a pretty good run, Coca-Cola and I. I'll wear my red and white logo shirt from time to time and remember how things used to be. I'll be happy when I see young folks sipping on their Big Gulps and sharing those secret caffeinated smiles. I recall some of my own. Back in the days of Coke and Roses.

Muddy Waters

The nine-foot alligator seen with a human body in its jaws on Tuesday has been captured and found to have human remains in its stomach. Below is the statement issued through the alligator's representative: 

"It debilitates me to think that my actions have caused emotional and physical stress that is completely unwarranted and unfair. The thought of this is in my head every second of every day since this event has occurred. These ideas never leave my mind. During the day, I shake uncontrollably from the amount I torment myself by thinking about what has happened. I wish I had the ability to go back in time and never pick up a drink that night, let alone interact with [redacted. I can barely hold a conversation with someone without having my mind drift into thinking these thoughts. They torture me. I go to sleep every night having been crippled by these thoughts to the point of exhaustion. I wake up having dreamt of these horrific events that I have caused. I am completely consumed by my poor judgment and ill thought actions. There isn't a second that has gone by where I haven't regretted the course of events I took on June seventh. My shell and core of who I am as a person is forever broken from this. I am a changed reptile. At this point in my life, I never want to have a drop of alcohol again. I never want to attend a social gathering that involves alcohol or any situation where people make decisions based on the substances they have consumed. I never want to experience being in a position where it will have a negative impact on my life or someone else's ever again. I wish I never was good at swimming or had the opportunity to live in the Everglades, so maybe the newspapers wouldn't want to write stories about me. I know I can show gators who were like me the dangers of assuming what swamp life can be like without thinking about the consequences one would potentially have to make if one were to make the same decisions that I made. I want to show that alligators’ lives can be destroyed by drinking and making poor decisions while doing so. One needs to recognize the influence that peer pressure and the attitude of having to fit in can have on someone. One decision has the potential to change your entire life. I know I can impact and change other creatures’ attitudes towards the culture surrounded by binge drinking and sexual promiscuity that protrudes through what people think is at the core of being a predator. I want to demolish the assumption that drinking and partying are what make up a college lifestyle. I made a mistake, I drank too much, and my decisions hurt someone. But I never ever meant to intentionally hurt [redacted]. My poor decision making and excessive drinking hurt someone that night and I wish I could just take it all back. Before this happened, I never had any trouble with game wardens and I plan on maintaining that. I've been shattered by the party culture and risk taking behavior that I briefly experienced in my four months at school. I've lost my chance to swim in the zoo. I've lost employment opportunity, my reputation and most of all, my life. I want to be a voice of reason in a time where people's attitudes and preconceived notions about partying and drinking have already been established. I want to let young gators know, as I did not, that things can go from fun to ruined in just one night."

We The People

June of 1919, women were not allowed to vote in the United States. With the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, half the country could finally exercise their rights as part of the democratic process. In 1920, women could vote. It took nearly one hundred fifty years to make it happen, but suddenly the principles upon which this nation was founded started to become a reality. It took almost another century before there was a woman nominated by a major party for whom we could all vote for president. This is not necessarily a campaign ad for Hillary Clinton, but it bears some notice.
Let's take a look back at our previous chief executives: Old white guy, old white guy,  old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old not white guy.
Number forty-four bucked a trend after more than two hundred years of white male dominance. Now we have an opportunity to spread the love a step further by hopping the gender line. Jewish Latino woman would have been the real package, but for now we'll take the Southern White woman with a resume that says, "Why not me?"
Don't answer that one yet, by the way. We've still got five months of discussion and conventions and hoopla to live through before the balloons drop. For whomever the country chooses.

Moving Forward

"Everybody's so different, I haven't changed."
-Joe Walsh, "Life's Been Good"
Another year all packed away neatly in boxes and cabinets. What happened this year wasn't radically different from last year. Or the year before. The faces change. Some of them grow older. Some of them grow more tired. Mostly they all stand up and move down one slot, opening a spot for the next group.
I have seen nineteen promotions, and the celebrations are always very similar. There are big, boisterous groups of friends and family on one end of the spectrum, and then there are the kids who show up alone on that last day because that's the way they have come to school for the past one hundred eighty days. They will go home that way too. There may be a party waiting at home. That would be nice. Mostly there will be a few months' respite from the day to day grind of elementary school.
And there are those who loudly announce, "I don't care. I'm not coming back to this school." While this may be true for our fifth graders, it is almost always those kids who are crowing about how we no longer have any hold over them because when they go on to the third or fourth grade their parents have assured them that they will be relocating to some kinder, gentler spot where there are happy teachers and students working together in positive ways. Funny. I thought that was where I worked. I thought those kids were the fly in our educational ointment.
Anyway, sure as the sun comes up way too early in the morning, most of those petulant voices will be part of our choir when school starts up again in August. It's the ones that move on without saying goodbye that tug at my dusty heartstrings. Each year I connect with a certain number of young people in a way that transcends the day to day grind. When they move on, either by promotion or attrition, I miss them.
Then I go back to that box and unpack. It's time to start work on the new year.

Pondernation

So, there I was, sniping away about how those Hollywood types don't care about you and I. This group of narcissistic greedheads will spout off about just how amazing their intents are, all while banking their kerjillion dollars and keeping the one percent squarely at the top of the economic food chain. It is precisely the reason why fingers can be pointed at those champions of the working man like Bruce Springsteen when he has an estimated net worth somewhere north of two hundred million dollars. I would love to give the Boss the benefit of the doubt and imagine that he gives away one hundred ninety-nine of those millions away every year to charitable causes and does nothing but good deeds for those who really need it. 

But that's not how this game works. It is not set up to turn money away. It is set up to generate more and more money until you end up with one percent of the population holding twenty percent of the wealth. If the American Dream was once all about owning your own home and take care of your family through hard work and perseverance, it is now about striving to stay away from that swirling vortex of debt that exists as a result of those who have reached too high for that illusory brass ring. I suppose this shouldn't come as a surprise to a nation that is living with a tab of nineteen trillion dollars, at last count. If you can't afford that better life, borrow it.

Which is why what John Oliver, host of HBO's "Last Week Tonight," brought a little light to this dark tunnel on his show last week. In his report, he pointed out that American households collectively own over twelve trillion dollars in debt, four hundred thirty-six billion dollars of which is ninety or more days past overdue. These debts have spawned a billion-dollar industry in debt buying or organizations that purchase the right to collect debts from the original creditors. The largest debt buying corporation is a group called Encore Capital who claim that one in five consumers either owes them money now or has in the past. One in five. Mister Oliver and his production company took it on themselves to buy up $14,922,261.76 of the medical debt owed by some nine thousand people, and paid it off. John Oliver, TV funnyman, just put a little bit back in to the ninety-nine percent. Mister Oliver did this from his lofty perch of a two million dollar a year salary, from a division of Time Warner whose profits were nearly five hundred million dollars last year. Profits. That's the money they made after their employees, like John Oliver, were paid. This little flurry of redistribution won't ultimately impact the Forbes 500 in the slightest, but it will undoubtedly increase viewership for his show, which will drive up the salaries for the folks around him and maybe then they can afford to have Bruce Springsteen come on and sing songs about the working man. 

Does this sound bitter? Maybe that's the sound of the rest of us waiting for our turn on the game show. Hillary and Donald will be duking it out from the top of the heap. Bernie Sanders is hanging somewhere just below the millionaire's club. That gives me something to think about. 

Fight The Power

My wife and I go to a lot of movies. Maybe not as many as we used to, but enough that we legitimize our subscription to Entertainment Weekly. The reason we have chosen this particular outlet for our disposable income is simple enough: escape. It's pretty much the same reason that people have been heading out to the moving picture show for the past century. I am sometimes challenged for this somewhat hedonistic attitude, since I am generally buying tickets to the most recent popcorn movie or box office blockbuster, I end up feeling a little defensive. I'm just a guy going out with his wife looking for a little diversion, a distraction from the day to day humdrum existence.

That distraction often takes the form of super hero movies. You know, men and women in tights with all manner of special powers that make us feel safe from the evils that they will face. I am looking for truth, justice and the American Way. Whatever that is. Lately, it has occurred to me that the American Way isn't really battling super-villains or even sorting out disagreements of policy between rival groups of super-humans. It's about getting up in the morning and making sense of that day to day humdrum existence. It's about getting to that next place you are allowed to set down your butrden and maybe take a break: go see a movie. 

That's what I was thinking about as I watched Money Monster. There weren't any super heroes in this one, but there were superstars: George Clooney and Julia Roberts. It told the story of a common man who busted onto the set of an investment guru's TV show in order to right the wrong he feels was done with him via the bad advice the investment guru gave him. That wrong was the loss of his nest egg. He is desperate and carrying a gun, insisting that the investment guru wears a vest covered in plastic explosive. He's not looking to get his nest egg back as much as he is looking for justice.

And I'm not going to tell you how it ends. Because there was another movie made last year about a bunch of people who lost their nest eggs. It had an all-star cast too. And it didn't end well. Not for the nest-egg losers. It worked out really well for the guys who bet against The Big Short. It worked out really well for the people who made the movie, making the folks at Paramount Pictures a whole bunch  of money. Not Star Wars or Avengers kind of money, but enough cash to go out and make a few more movies with big stars.

Stars like George Clooney, who recently raised an "obscene amount of money" for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. His words, not mine. This seems to be his super power. Meanwhile, my wife and I are buying tickets to see this movie that ends - well - I promised not to tell. Not because I need you to go and buy a ticket to find out. That's up to you. I do wish that it had ended differently. Just like I wish that Captain America could have taken all the Wall Street evil and taken care of it just as easily as he did that horde of Hydra soldiers and their leader, The Red Skull.

But that's not real life, is it?