Gratitude, Don’t Leave Home without It

Twenty-five years ago, our youngest daughter suffered dozens of critical injuries in a car crash. Luckily, she was quickly rescued and treated by some of Denver’s most dedicated and talented police, firefighters, EMTs, and doctors. After she had been released by the hospital, Denver General, and was on the road to recovery, I began an effort to thank the people involved in her rescue and recovery. My motivation was not as self-inspired as I wish. When we were waiting for our daughter to regain consciousness in Denver General’s brand new ICU, I noticed a picture of a young man on crutches stuck to a post in the middle of the sparkling, hyper-busy, multi-million dollar ICU. It was an unprofessional photo in a cheap 8x10 plastic frame with a small note from the parents of the young man, thanking the medical personnel for their dedication and for their son’s life. After reading that note and seeing how special it was to the people who worked in one of the country’s busiest and most sophisticated hospitals, I started bringing in pastries every morning while our daughter was in the ICU. For several years afterwards, I sent the Denver General ICU a picture of our daughter with an update on the life they had given her and a box of artery-clogging pastries from one of our favorite Denver shops.

That got me into a cycle of trying to identify everyone involved in my daughter’s rescue so that she and I could thank them. What I learned from that was that of the three million people living in the Denver area and however many thousands of people rescued by first responders, almost nobody felt particularly grateful when they or a loved one was rescued, kept alive, brought back to life, and/or returned to good health from near death or terrible injury. The chief of the fire department that cracked open my daughter’s demolished pickup, extracted her from the wreckage, and delivered her to the helicopter the moment it arrived at the scene (14 minutes after the crash) had been with the Denver fire department for 40 years. During his career, the only time a citizen had contacted him about any of the thousands of rescues he’d been involved in was a lawyer delivering a lawsuit summons.

The same goes for the citizens who take on the responsibility of running our cities, counties, states, and the federal government. At the lowest level, it’s a thankless job that sets up the office holders for disrespect and abuse without much return on the time and energy investment. At the highest level, as we saw in the 2016 election, the more service and committment a candidate has given to the community and the country the worse that candidate is treated by both the media and the voters. There is a price for creating a society where greed, ignorance, and narcissim are valued characteristics: that price is best described by “we get the government we deserve.”

A recent editorial in my local newspaper, “Thank Our Elected Officials,” was a timely and decent reminder that we can disagree with our elected officials while still respecting them and appreciating their service. There is no such thing as a successful non-participatory democracy and Americans better either step-up to the responsibilities of maintaining that form of government or we’ll have to relearn that, as disorderly and inefficient as democracy is, it is far better than the alternatives.

Getting Answers Without Making Enemies

Back in my management salad days, we had a manufacturing engineering rule that stated, “Any new paperwork/procedure has to directly benefit the person who does the work.” This put some pressure on management when we began to add quality control processes to assembly line jobs. Anytime we wanted to add an inspection, a check box on an inspection form, or a self-monitoring quality control chart to an assembler or technician’s job, we had to find a way to prove to that person that we were making their job easier, giving them more control of their work, and/or upping their value to the company (making it possible for them to make more money).

I get reminded of this requirement every time someone sends me a SurveyMonkey link. Most recently, Google sent me a link to a 3-question about the effectiveness of AdSense, Google’s blog page revenue generator. That pretty much fits my rule. I make a few dollars every month from my blogs and optimizing that revenue would be important to me if that revenue were a critical part of my family income. It took a few seconds to complete the form and, hopefully, we both got something out of the exercise.

On the other hand, an organization that my wife and I occasionally participate in sent us a survey about a change in the organization’s leadership. While there was no indication of how many questions I’d be asked, after a page of questions I realized I wasn’t committed enough to having my voice heard to waste any more time with the survey. I made it far enough to get to the second page, looked at the repetitiveness and irrelevancy of the questions and bailed out. Back in my academic days, I created a collection of surveys for the faculty senate and administration and I made an effort to be concise and user-friendly. I am perfectly happy to be out of that business, though. Doing that kind of work in a poorly managed environment is a wrestling match between the control freaks and the information collectors. I’m only interested in the information and did everything possible to ignore the control freak requests.

Some questions are more complicated and absolutely require more questions: the Myers-Briggs Personality test or the Political Compass analysis, for example. Otherwise, if you can’t get the answers you need in ten or fewer questions, you need to think harder about what you really need.

The Cost of Inclusion

At the school where I teach, we "enjoy" all of the fruits of our inclusive society. We do our best to cater to non-English speaking students, even though we have practically no foreign language skills among our faculty. We try to find a way to include students with all sorts of mental and physical handicaps. At the core, we are a vocational school (as terrible a thing as that seems to be these days) and while our educational focus is directed toward giving students the background for obtaining jobs, our administration (and federal and state law) appears to be disconnected from the fact that some disabilities preclude the possibility of success in some fields of employment.

There is a delusion in the United States that we "can be anything" we want to be if we just want it bad enough. Working hard to achieve success is generally considered to be unnecessary. Having skills and natural abilities is equally superfluous.  All that matters is that we want something and are given a chance to achieve it. This is an extension of the American weirdness that puts individual rights over the obvious needs of society. Not only do you have the right to prepare yourself for an occupation and employers who wouldn't employ you under any circumstances, but you have a right to require the public to provide you with a school loan that you will never be able to repay.

Here's a hot tip: if you are 62 years old, fat, short, slow, and as agile as a wounded hippo, you can not play professional basketball. In fact, if you are any one of the above things you can not play professional basketball. If you can't sing, you won't star on "American Idol." (Of course, if you are the spoiled offspring of a wingnut media star, you might be a finalist on “Dancing with the Stars” because only nimrod wingnuts watch something as dumb as DwtS and they will, obviously, vote for anything if it is stupid enough.) If you are unable to master the basic concepts of algebra, you will be an unemployable engineer, scientist, or math teacher. If you are lazy, you will fail at everything you attempt. (Unless you are a rich kid, then money trumps everything in politics and business.) If you are stupid, you will be doomed to a career behind a fast food counter, hauling garbage, driving a truck or a road construction implement, or (if you are a child of our ruling class) managing one of the nation's financial institutions. No amount of legalistic coddling will convince anyone to hire you for a job for which you have no ability (unless you have Daddy's money). You may have a degree in Creative Writing, but if you can't write you won't sell books (unless . . . you know). You could, however, be an intern editor at most of the nation's publishing houses for as long as your school loans will support you or Daddy's money holds out.

Reality doesn't have much of a grip on political correctness and federal legislation, though. As in everything about our system, it will apparently require a massive, painful, disastrous depression or a population-depleting plague for us to come to our senses. We will keep pretending that little Buford can become anything he wants to become, simply because several of the dumbest people ever born have become President of the United States. It would be worth noticing that any damn collection of cells can make it to the top if those cells come from the ruling class; Bush II being the best ever example of that. However, people who rise through the classes are a whole different breed from the harelipped spawn of our social elites. Like them or not, Ike, Carter, Clinton, and Obama are considerably brighter than the average schmo on the street. We've had a few mental midgets from the working class, Nixon and Reagan come to mind almost instantly, but the majority of ground-up Presidents have been pretty exceptional people. The representatives of the ruling class haven't been so impressive. Other than the two Roosevelt's and Kennedy, you have to go back to the early 1800's to find an example of a brilliant rich kid rising to power. And Kennedy doesn't look so good under close examination.

Since too much of our "higher education system" has become a babysitting service for rich kids, I suppose it makes sense that we've dumbed down the standards of education to accommodate that bunch. I think it's cruel to set these kids' sights higher than Congress, Wall Street, or the other repositories of fools and bums. It would be unfair and unkind to tell a doofus like G.W. Bush that he could "do anything." His whole life was about proving that he couldn't do anything and that's exactly what he proved while he hung out in the White House. So, in the interests of kindness I recommend that federal college loans be given to kids who have some hope of actually being educated. The rest of us should remain content in the knowledge that most of "higher education" is boring, pointless, and barely manages to be poor preparation for a management position at Starbucks.