It's been a long time since I've blogged. It's not that I haven't had things going on. It's that I've had too much going on, and all of a pretty personal nature.
It was last March when my life began to unravel in earnest. A series of events made it undeniable that I had to proceed with my divorce. The business was failing. I was so stressed that I did a terrible job in my 2nd semester of law school.
Now, it's still not over. I still haven't transitioned from where things were to where they're going to be. However, I've made a lot of solid steps forward. The divorce is final. I'm on my way to finishing up with the financial collapse. I am still in the same house. That's a small blessing. However, I won't be here much longer. Probably sometime in the next year, I'll have to find a new place to live.
My life, last March and prior, was pretty good, really. I was living separately from my wife, but other than that, our houses were close together. My son seemed to be doing well. Now, she moved further away. It's not that convenient for him to just walk over. I have shared custody, but with working out of town, I only have him every other weekend and every Wednesday evening.
The business really had been dying since March of 2011. I'm honestly surprised it hung on as long as it did. That provided nonstop stress for me. Through 2010, I was able to convince myself that it would come back. 2011, though, was when it was clear that unless something major happened, that the business was either going to be barely profitable, or could not be saved.
I have to constantly remind myself that things could be much worse. On average, I havemy son one less day per week. It's not the end of the world, but I feel the loss.
More than anything, I try not to look back. I made the decisions I made, and I live with the consequences. At no point did I have anything but the best of intentions. Things just didn't work out for my business and that pretty much dragged the rest of my life down with it.
Still, the divorce is final, now. So, that's a small step forward, I guess. I do miss owning my own business, but I don't miss losing everything I have trying to keep it afloat. It was something I always wanted to try. I had good times and bad, but it's over, now.
I don't miss the money or the stuff. What I miss is being able to stay at home on a weekday morning and let my son sleep in until 8:15 and running him to school at 9:00. I miss being here when he got off the bus if I wanted to. That's what I miss. I try to remind myself that the way I see him now, although not as good as what it was, is pretty much the way most working people see their kids.
The weather was very, very nice today. I'll be glad of the Spring. The end of the Winter coincides with the beginning of me building a life again. Just having a nice warm day really lifted my spirits.
I still have a lot of uncertainty in my life over the next year or two. However, closing up the wreckage of my old life is a project. Finishing it up will be a relief. It has to happen for me to be able to move forward.
Now that things are clearing up a bit, I've had some time to grieve over my grandmother's passing last May. I'm so glad I got to see her a couple of times in the month before she went. Sometimes I wonder what's the greater part of grief: losing the person, or losing the commonalities you had with that person.
My grandmother raised me. So, there are vast swaths of my childhood where she was essentially the only living person who was there. So, now that she's gone, it feels like, to some degree, that part of me is gone, too. The last person who shared it with me has passed.
There's probably a little midlife crisis wrapped up in there as well. Mine came a little late, but I'm starting to feel the weight of my years. Grandma was just a couple years older than me when I came to live with her and grandpa. Her tales of her childhood, to me, are as quaint as tales of my childhood must seem to my son. That's how far removed the modern day is from the 60s and 70s.
I really wasn't that sad at the moment grandma passed away. I was sad, but not as sad as I should have been for somebody who had been so important in my life. Everything else in my life was being turned upside down. I knew that it would hit me eventually, and it has really started.
I need to get back to Tallmadge to visit my aunts and uncles, especially the McAlarneys, but it's a really long drive and my week is already full with my 300 mile round-trips to Dayton and back.
My son is going to wrap up 6th grade in a few months, here. At that point, I'm down to just 6 more years until he's off to college. If he goes to OSU, Miami or U Cinci, he will only be an hour or so from me in Dayton. I won't have to drive around quite so much.
If I could have just one wish, it'd be for a local job where I don't have to be away from him so much. Given how little the people in power care about anybody in this country who isn't on Wall Street, though, I don't see that happening. Nobody cares about working people in this country. We've all been sold out.
So, I just keep doing the best I can. Keep trying to look forward. There's no sense in mourning for what's lost for long after the initial shock. You just do what you can and move forward.
Sunday, March 10, 2013
Saturday, January 19, 2013
The Truth About the Music Industry, or "those grapes were probably sour, anyway"
This blog posting is inspired by my reading of the life of Kevin Gilbert and also by an acquaintance who is a talented musician who asked about the wisdom of staying in school or striking out on a music career.
I never was, or am, much of a musician. I started learning too late in life to ever really be any good. However, there was a pretty big chunk of my life where being a professional musician was something I truly wanted to pursue. I studied music in college (sight singing, ear training, music theory, applied classical guitar, etc.) I taught music (both guitar and bass... if they had wanted, I was desperate enough I'd have taught accordion too) at a couple of music stores in the Dallas Fort Worth area.
The last paying gig I had was getting $45 to accompany two sweet old ladies singing a Bobby Vinton song at a Seventh Day Adventist Church. I noodled around with a little band project with two of my best friends in college. I sort of outgrew them and started working with some other bands here and there. At a crossroads, I left Texas and came back home when my grandfather was diagnosed with cancer.
For years, I had pretty much daily regrets about that decision. Music is something that will always be one of my greatest loves in life. Somebody once asked me how anybody could enjoy practicing an instrument. I told them that if I had enough money, that is all I would ever do. I would literally never do anything else. I love it so much that, at an emotional level, I usually can't bring myself to take my guitar out of its case because I can't deal with the emotions of having to put it away after an hour or two, and the though of going a few days without playing again (because I have to earn a living), is too depressing to deal with.
Clearly I have some issues with regard to music. Haha!
That having been said, yeah, I'm not much of a musician. However, I am a businessperson, or at least somebody with some knowledge and experience in business. I'm also a student of history and a guy who needs to know how things work.
So, here is what I know about the music industry. Yeah, I'm not an industry insider. If you really want to know the insider's perspective, the best one I ever read was written by Courtney Love. This is a live link to it:
http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/
That's the boots on the ground view. I'll give you the 20,000 foot view. This is something to consider if you're going to make major life changes or sacrifices to try and pursue a career in music.
First, the biggest and best way to get a huge career in the music industry will be based on your looks. Yes, your physical appearance. What? You don't want to be in the market segment of Justin Bieber? Look at the bands you like. Not very many homely looking guys in those. And the few that you can think of probably hit big prior to the 80s. The 80s, in case that doesn't sound too far away, were 3 decades ago. Video did, indeed, kill the radio star. And even bands like Zeppelin, the Beatles and the Who had good looking members.
But you don't want to be big? You just want to make music? Here's the thing. Thanks to modern technology, you can make phenomenal music in your home.
But you want to make money doing this? Go back to the paragraph that starts with "First..."
So, you're good looking. Can you sing? It has literally never been more true that you don't need a great singing voice to sing pop. Trouble is, it's very, very difficult to get anybody to take you seriously if you don't sing at least pretty well.
So, you can sing? Then you need to be able to write songs.
The fun part sorta happens there. Even bands that aren't very good can usually find places to play out. And yes, if you're a guy who likes women, that's a great way to find some.
But what about the money aspect of the industry? I am sure that people can make money in the music industry. However, I'm equally sure that most of them make less money than accountants.
The music industry just needs a celebrity. In much the same fashion as Kim Kardashian is on TV, a record label just needs a celebrity to sell records for them.
These days, the rest really doesn't have a lot to do with the "artist". Most of the work of producing a hit is done by engineers and producers these days. If you can't write songs, there are plenty of teams that will write one for you.
Now, here's the tough part to understand, mentally: they don't need "the best" person to turn into a star. They just need "a person". It's not necessarily a meritocracy. They just need somebody. And thanks to autotune, being the best singer doesn't really give you a leg-up over other merely adequate singers.
Yes, if you blow up huge, you can gain some power over your career, but honestly, that is maybe 2 or 3 artists or bands a year who get to that point. And then, the bad news is that with power comes responsibility. Once you take control of your career, you have to keep it afloat. Remember that Dixie Chicks album they released in the past 4 years? Yeah, me neither.
This aspect of the music industry is unique. In the movies, you have to be able to act, for the most part. (To have a long career, anyway.) In sports, with few exceptions, the best will continue to advance and the rest fall by the wayside.
In the music industry, they only need a person who appears to be singing.
Another reality is that the industry is largely driven by 14 year old girls. If you don't appeal to them, it's nearly impossible to blow up big. See previous paragraph that starts with "First..."
My friend Tom castigates me for being too lazy to go out and find the good bands that are recording and making great music, today. The reason I don't is that I really don't have time to listen to 500 albums to see if one of them is good.
That used to be the role of the labels and of radio. But now, what happens is that the label decides who they want to promote. They go to these companies called "Independent Promotion" companies and pay those companies a few hundred thousand bucks to see if they can get the record a couple of spins at the various radio stations.
The radio stations will play stuff that's being independently promoted because the radio stations own the independent promotion companies. Yes, you will only get your stuff played on the radio if somebody pays the radio station a few hundred thousand. That person, or label, will only do it if they're pretty sure you're going to blow up huge. They figure you're going to blow up huge if you're very good-looking and you made a record that appeals to 14 year old girls.
And contrary to appearances, there are only two radio stations in America: Clearchannel and Cumulus. The FCC changed the laws on radio station ownership. Used to be every city had a bunch of radio stations that tried to get an edge on the other stations by discovering good music the other guys weren't playing. That ceased to exist, at all, in the 90s.
That having been said, it's not all bad news. Those are just things to consider if you have aspirations to blow up huge in the music industry. It's an obstacle course to get there, and even if you fit the bill 100%, in the end, the record label will narrow it down to a handful of candidates and essentially chose one of them at random, with no rhyme or reason to why they picked one person over another.
If you want to make money in music, though, it isn't impossible to do. I know a lot of folks who make money in areas not related to recording and performing. I taught guitar at the same place that Chuck Rainey taught bass. (If you don't know who he is, watch a Steeley Dan documentary on Netflix sometime. The guy played with everybody.)
If the idea of teaching bass at a music store when you are 50 years old appeals to you, then hey, this is the industry for you. He did make more money than me. I think I made like $16 an hour and he probably made something like $25.
Other folks I know opened music stores. Most of them made little to no money. The employees stole from them. The tax man had his way with them once a year. It was a retail job selling cheap, crappy musical instruments. The guys working at Guitar Center made more money.
Then, there are the guys I know who were very creative. They opened up their own recording studios. They came up with awesome tribute acts. They did pretty well for themselves, actually.
However, those guys were organized, focused and very, very business-minded. Personally, knowing what I know of them, if they'd started life as garbage men, they'd own waste disposal companies right now and be doing just as well if not better.
Then, there's the guy who wrote "code monkey" and he made like half a mil a year for a while. Social media is pretty powerful and if you can go viral, you can make a decent pile until the next thing comes along.
It's not that I want to discourage anybody from pursuing anything. Just that the reality of the music industry is very, very far removed from the glamorous surface. When I think of people like Kevin Gilbert, I stand back and think that on my very best day, I would not have had enough talent to wipe down the guy's guitar strings. He had a major record deal. He was good-looking. He was insanely talented. In the end, he had enough money to live on (almost all due to songwriting credits on Sheryl Crow's first album), but the whole rock star thing eluded him.
Personally, what I think ate him up is that the record labels didn't throw all that money into making him a star. He watched as the labels created George Michael... hell, he watched as they created Milli Vanilli. He worked with Madonna and saw how a nearly completely talentless hack can be the queen of the music industry if the label puts the money behind her. Even all that wasn't what broke him.
What broke him was when his girlfriend, a former Michael Jackson backup singer, who he hired as a fill-in keyboard player for his band's tour and introduced to his buddies, recorded an album that A&M records threw their entire weight behind.
The first single fizzled. The second single fizzled. The label stood by her and kept throwing money into independent promotion. The third single, written by her, Kevin and his friends, "grew legs" and the album, Sheryl Crow's "Tuesday Night Music Club" (named after Kevin and his friends' weekly jam session) went on to sell ten million units.
Why her? Not him? Who the hell knows. The label picked her, not him. Pretty much the beginning and end of story right there.
So, my advice would be to stay in school. Get a bachelor's degree. Afterwards, if you want to spend four years hitting the clubs in LA trying to make it big, more power to ya. However, just realize that for all but a statistically insignificant few, that ride, however fun it may be, ends pretty quickly. Pretty much you'll know your fate by the time you hit 30 years old. That means you'll have to fill the next five decades with something else.
In the mean time, nothing keeps you from playing, writing and thanks to modern technology, from recording. So, my advice: spend your life savings on at least one channel of badass preamps and record the **** out of your awesome ideas.
Here's one manufacturer of high-end preamps:
http://www.baeaudio.com/pages/products/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=204&Itemid=29
And here is my one crowning masterpiece composition, recorded with copious amounts of help and saintly patience by my good friend, Michael Papatonis, who owns Greek Isle Studios in Cleveland. (Yes, it's obvious that I wasn't likely to make it as a vocalist):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRKENXcVFuE
Here's a great planet money podcast on how stuff gets on the radio:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/07/11/137705590/the-friday-podcast-manufacturing-the-song-of-the-summer
I never was, or am, much of a musician. I started learning too late in life to ever really be any good. However, there was a pretty big chunk of my life where being a professional musician was something I truly wanted to pursue. I studied music in college (sight singing, ear training, music theory, applied classical guitar, etc.) I taught music (both guitar and bass... if they had wanted, I was desperate enough I'd have taught accordion too) at a couple of music stores in the Dallas Fort Worth area.
The last paying gig I had was getting $45 to accompany two sweet old ladies singing a Bobby Vinton song at a Seventh Day Adventist Church. I noodled around with a little band project with two of my best friends in college. I sort of outgrew them and started working with some other bands here and there. At a crossroads, I left Texas and came back home when my grandfather was diagnosed with cancer.
For years, I had pretty much daily regrets about that decision. Music is something that will always be one of my greatest loves in life. Somebody once asked me how anybody could enjoy practicing an instrument. I told them that if I had enough money, that is all I would ever do. I would literally never do anything else. I love it so much that, at an emotional level, I usually can't bring myself to take my guitar out of its case because I can't deal with the emotions of having to put it away after an hour or two, and the though of going a few days without playing again (because I have to earn a living), is too depressing to deal with.
Clearly I have some issues with regard to music. Haha!
That having been said, yeah, I'm not much of a musician. However, I am a businessperson, or at least somebody with some knowledge and experience in business. I'm also a student of history and a guy who needs to know how things work.
So, here is what I know about the music industry. Yeah, I'm not an industry insider. If you really want to know the insider's perspective, the best one I ever read was written by Courtney Love. This is a live link to it:
http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/
That's the boots on the ground view. I'll give you the 20,000 foot view. This is something to consider if you're going to make major life changes or sacrifices to try and pursue a career in music.
First, the biggest and best way to get a huge career in the music industry will be based on your looks. Yes, your physical appearance. What? You don't want to be in the market segment of Justin Bieber? Look at the bands you like. Not very many homely looking guys in those. And the few that you can think of probably hit big prior to the 80s. The 80s, in case that doesn't sound too far away, were 3 decades ago. Video did, indeed, kill the radio star. And even bands like Zeppelin, the Beatles and the Who had good looking members.
But you don't want to be big? You just want to make music? Here's the thing. Thanks to modern technology, you can make phenomenal music in your home.
But you want to make money doing this? Go back to the paragraph that starts with "First..."
So, you're good looking. Can you sing? It has literally never been more true that you don't need a great singing voice to sing pop. Trouble is, it's very, very difficult to get anybody to take you seriously if you don't sing at least pretty well.
So, you can sing? Then you need to be able to write songs.
The fun part sorta happens there. Even bands that aren't very good can usually find places to play out. And yes, if you're a guy who likes women, that's a great way to find some.
But what about the money aspect of the industry? I am sure that people can make money in the music industry. However, I'm equally sure that most of them make less money than accountants.
The music industry just needs a celebrity. In much the same fashion as Kim Kardashian is on TV, a record label just needs a celebrity to sell records for them.
These days, the rest really doesn't have a lot to do with the "artist". Most of the work of producing a hit is done by engineers and producers these days. If you can't write songs, there are plenty of teams that will write one for you.
Now, here's the tough part to understand, mentally: they don't need "the best" person to turn into a star. They just need "a person". It's not necessarily a meritocracy. They just need somebody. And thanks to autotune, being the best singer doesn't really give you a leg-up over other merely adequate singers.
Yes, if you blow up huge, you can gain some power over your career, but honestly, that is maybe 2 or 3 artists or bands a year who get to that point. And then, the bad news is that with power comes responsibility. Once you take control of your career, you have to keep it afloat. Remember that Dixie Chicks album they released in the past 4 years? Yeah, me neither.
This aspect of the music industry is unique. In the movies, you have to be able to act, for the most part. (To have a long career, anyway.) In sports, with few exceptions, the best will continue to advance and the rest fall by the wayside.
In the music industry, they only need a person who appears to be singing.
Another reality is that the industry is largely driven by 14 year old girls. If you don't appeal to them, it's nearly impossible to blow up big. See previous paragraph that starts with "First..."
My friend Tom castigates me for being too lazy to go out and find the good bands that are recording and making great music, today. The reason I don't is that I really don't have time to listen to 500 albums to see if one of them is good.
That used to be the role of the labels and of radio. But now, what happens is that the label decides who they want to promote. They go to these companies called "Independent Promotion" companies and pay those companies a few hundred thousand bucks to see if they can get the record a couple of spins at the various radio stations.
The radio stations will play stuff that's being independently promoted because the radio stations own the independent promotion companies. Yes, you will only get your stuff played on the radio if somebody pays the radio station a few hundred thousand. That person, or label, will only do it if they're pretty sure you're going to blow up huge. They figure you're going to blow up huge if you're very good-looking and you made a record that appeals to 14 year old girls.
And contrary to appearances, there are only two radio stations in America: Clearchannel and Cumulus. The FCC changed the laws on radio station ownership. Used to be every city had a bunch of radio stations that tried to get an edge on the other stations by discovering good music the other guys weren't playing. That ceased to exist, at all, in the 90s.
That having been said, it's not all bad news. Those are just things to consider if you have aspirations to blow up huge in the music industry. It's an obstacle course to get there, and even if you fit the bill 100%, in the end, the record label will narrow it down to a handful of candidates and essentially chose one of them at random, with no rhyme or reason to why they picked one person over another.
If you want to make money in music, though, it isn't impossible to do. I know a lot of folks who make money in areas not related to recording and performing. I taught guitar at the same place that Chuck Rainey taught bass. (If you don't know who he is, watch a Steeley Dan documentary on Netflix sometime. The guy played with everybody.)
If the idea of teaching bass at a music store when you are 50 years old appeals to you, then hey, this is the industry for you. He did make more money than me. I think I made like $16 an hour and he probably made something like $25.
Other folks I know opened music stores. Most of them made little to no money. The employees stole from them. The tax man had his way with them once a year. It was a retail job selling cheap, crappy musical instruments. The guys working at Guitar Center made more money.
Then, there are the guys I know who were very creative. They opened up their own recording studios. They came up with awesome tribute acts. They did pretty well for themselves, actually.
However, those guys were organized, focused and very, very business-minded. Personally, knowing what I know of them, if they'd started life as garbage men, they'd own waste disposal companies right now and be doing just as well if not better.
Then, there's the guy who wrote "code monkey" and he made like half a mil a year for a while. Social media is pretty powerful and if you can go viral, you can make a decent pile until the next thing comes along.
It's not that I want to discourage anybody from pursuing anything. Just that the reality of the music industry is very, very far removed from the glamorous surface. When I think of people like Kevin Gilbert, I stand back and think that on my very best day, I would not have had enough talent to wipe down the guy's guitar strings. He had a major record deal. He was good-looking. He was insanely talented. In the end, he had enough money to live on (almost all due to songwriting credits on Sheryl Crow's first album), but the whole rock star thing eluded him.
Personally, what I think ate him up is that the record labels didn't throw all that money into making him a star. He watched as the labels created George Michael... hell, he watched as they created Milli Vanilli. He worked with Madonna and saw how a nearly completely talentless hack can be the queen of the music industry if the label puts the money behind her. Even all that wasn't what broke him.
What broke him was when his girlfriend, a former Michael Jackson backup singer, who he hired as a fill-in keyboard player for his band's tour and introduced to his buddies, recorded an album that A&M records threw their entire weight behind.
The first single fizzled. The second single fizzled. The label stood by her and kept throwing money into independent promotion. The third single, written by her, Kevin and his friends, "grew legs" and the album, Sheryl Crow's "Tuesday Night Music Club" (named after Kevin and his friends' weekly jam session) went on to sell ten million units.
Why her? Not him? Who the hell knows. The label picked her, not him. Pretty much the beginning and end of story right there.
So, my advice would be to stay in school. Get a bachelor's degree. Afterwards, if you want to spend four years hitting the clubs in LA trying to make it big, more power to ya. However, just realize that for all but a statistically insignificant few, that ride, however fun it may be, ends pretty quickly. Pretty much you'll know your fate by the time you hit 30 years old. That means you'll have to fill the next five decades with something else.
In the mean time, nothing keeps you from playing, writing and thanks to modern technology, from recording. So, my advice: spend your life savings on at least one channel of badass preamps and record the **** out of your awesome ideas.
Here's one manufacturer of high-end preamps:
http://www.baeaudio.com/pages/products/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=204&Itemid=29
And here is my one crowning masterpiece composition, recorded with copious amounts of help and saintly patience by my good friend, Michael Papatonis, who owns Greek Isle Studios in Cleveland. (Yes, it's obvious that I wasn't likely to make it as a vocalist):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRKENXcVFuE
Here's a great planet money podcast on how stuff gets on the radio:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/07/11/137705590/the-friday-podcast-manufacturing-the-song-of-the-summer
Sunday, January 13, 2013
The Bizarre Life
I used to think I had a hard life. Over the passage of years and travels of miles, I know now that this isn't really true. My difficulties, in the grand scheme of things, have been minor. Sometimes a little perspective goes a long, long way.
It's been a hard fall down the ladder of success that I had climbed. In first half of 2009, I was at the peak. I had pretty much everything I ever wanted in life. I had nearly every material possession I had ever desired. I was even talking to the folks at Cessna about buying an airplane.
Most importantly, I had my son. If I were to write blog posts from now until the day I die, I could never fully express just how much I love him and how wonderful he is. It is as though I willed him into existence selecting everything I wish I would have been in life. He's handsome, funny, smart, hard-working, compassionate, athletic... they type of kid who loves all and in return is loved by all.
Now, it's almost all gone. I have had precious few mercies in the past four years. The one good turn I have had is my job. Getting a job I love is a pretty big thing. It makes life difficult with the long drive, but I'm more fortunate than many. So many people without jobs, and so many slogging along in jobs they hate.
Still, the indignity and incongruity of this situation is hard for me to bear sometimes. I sink into foul moods and wonder why in the world it seems that I'm always the one who is tasked with making the most when given the least. I've had to sit by while I lose both the houses that had been so easy to afford just a few years ago. Meanwhile, others close to me have been given homes or had their mortgages paid for them.
I've lost my business when I treated my employees well and by all measures was steering it as well as possible given the current business climate. The weather, the divorce and the economy amounted to a perfect storm I just couldn't get past. Others not far away had the weather it took to keep things afloat. Lean times are not uncommon in that business, and if you're unlucky enough to have enough lean times in a row, you're going down. Near as I can figure, 4 other franchisees around me have thrown in the towel in the past year. The weather was the biggie. You just can't fix disasters when the weather doesn't produce any.
Strangely, my biggest opportunities these days are in war. I have skills and connections and military rank that would allow me to help right my floundering financial ship if I could get overseas to Afghanistan. Fortunately for the world, Iraq has closed down and Afghanistan is due to be completely over by 2014. So, there's really nothing left to save me.
In a way, I feel betrayed by the promises that were made to me in my youth. Again, I didn't have it bad in the grand scheme of things, but it didn't take a genius to figure out that I was a kid who got the raw end of the deal. The assurance was that as time progressed, that the hardship I faced earlier would equate to success later. When I was in my 30s, I realized what a lie that was. The fortunate kids ended up being fortunate adults, but without all the angst and fear.
Ultimately, a day doesn't go by where I don't beat myself up pretty bad for having a knack of always choosing option A when option B was the right choice.
So, here I am. Almost 50 years old and starting essentially from scratch. Time to take inventory. Time to look around. I have a good job that I really like. I have the best son I could ever imagine. If the universe makes bargains, then I guess I can live with this one. I'd rather have my son than all the wealth of the world. That's really the only important thing in my life.
I can figure out the rest as I go.
It's been a hard fall down the ladder of success that I had climbed. In first half of 2009, I was at the peak. I had pretty much everything I ever wanted in life. I had nearly every material possession I had ever desired. I was even talking to the folks at Cessna about buying an airplane.
Most importantly, I had my son. If I were to write blog posts from now until the day I die, I could never fully express just how much I love him and how wonderful he is. It is as though I willed him into existence selecting everything I wish I would have been in life. He's handsome, funny, smart, hard-working, compassionate, athletic... they type of kid who loves all and in return is loved by all.
Now, it's almost all gone. I have had precious few mercies in the past four years. The one good turn I have had is my job. Getting a job I love is a pretty big thing. It makes life difficult with the long drive, but I'm more fortunate than many. So many people without jobs, and so many slogging along in jobs they hate.
Still, the indignity and incongruity of this situation is hard for me to bear sometimes. I sink into foul moods and wonder why in the world it seems that I'm always the one who is tasked with making the most when given the least. I've had to sit by while I lose both the houses that had been so easy to afford just a few years ago. Meanwhile, others close to me have been given homes or had their mortgages paid for them.
I've lost my business when I treated my employees well and by all measures was steering it as well as possible given the current business climate. The weather, the divorce and the economy amounted to a perfect storm I just couldn't get past. Others not far away had the weather it took to keep things afloat. Lean times are not uncommon in that business, and if you're unlucky enough to have enough lean times in a row, you're going down. Near as I can figure, 4 other franchisees around me have thrown in the towel in the past year. The weather was the biggie. You just can't fix disasters when the weather doesn't produce any.
Strangely, my biggest opportunities these days are in war. I have skills and connections and military rank that would allow me to help right my floundering financial ship if I could get overseas to Afghanistan. Fortunately for the world, Iraq has closed down and Afghanistan is due to be completely over by 2014. So, there's really nothing left to save me.
In a way, I feel betrayed by the promises that were made to me in my youth. Again, I didn't have it bad in the grand scheme of things, but it didn't take a genius to figure out that I was a kid who got the raw end of the deal. The assurance was that as time progressed, that the hardship I faced earlier would equate to success later. When I was in my 30s, I realized what a lie that was. The fortunate kids ended up being fortunate adults, but without all the angst and fear.
Ultimately, a day doesn't go by where I don't beat myself up pretty bad for having a knack of always choosing option A when option B was the right choice.
So, here I am. Almost 50 years old and starting essentially from scratch. Time to take inventory. Time to look around. I have a good job that I really like. I have the best son I could ever imagine. If the universe makes bargains, then I guess I can live with this one. I'd rather have my son than all the wealth of the world. That's really the only important thing in my life.
I can figure out the rest as I go.
Sunday, December 30, 2012
Is That Really How People Feel?
I feel like a real oddball sometimes. And by "sometimes" I mean pretty much every moment of every day. Sometimes I really can't say I understand people. I feel so totally out of step that I just don't feel like I belong.
I was watching "Louie", which is Louis C.K.'s sitcom, and he said a line that seemed to resonate with the audience. The gist of it was that a parent looks at their kid and at the same time, feels the conflicting emotions of, "I love you" and "I wish you had never been born."
I can honestly say I have never felt like I wish my son had never been born. Hey, I'm not saying this for swagger effect. I'm the first person to acknowledge the darker sides of human nature, especially when they manifest themselves in me, and I'm almost biologically incapable of not-admitting to them if they're comic in nature.
My son? Has been, hands-down, the best thing that's ever happened in my life. I'll even go so far as to say that being a father is, truly, the only significant thing I've ever done. The rest means nothing. The year on a Special Operations Team in the 5th Special Forces Group, the Ironman Triathlon, the MBA from Case, everything I ever thought I was proud of, that I ever thought was an accomplishment, is dwarfed by the absolute sheer magnitude of being a father. It is the most rewarding thing in my life. I suspect I will never have another thing in my life that is nearly as significant.
Do other parents feel this way? Enough of them that this is something that resonates comedically? I can't ever even regret marrying my ex-wife because we had my son together and he is just perfect. I would not change a thing about him. He is a wonder and a joy.
Another glimpse like this was similar, but it involved a mother who was walking behind her children, who apparently were being very difficult, and flipping them off behind their backs. The general gist was that the mothers who heard about the episode had no negative judgement and the consensus was that they all had felt exactly this way at one point in time or another.
Again, never felt that way. Granted, my son is not a teen, yet, but neither were the little kids in the flipping off story. I can understand being frustrated, but flipping off your own kids? Would you flip off your co-workers? Would you flip off your relatives? Maybe some people would. I wouldn't.
The last episode like this was another comedian, Bill Burr, who said something to the effect of, once in a while, you just look at your significant other and you could just kill them. Wow. The audience cracked up. Apparently, this is another idea that resonated. I have not had a great marriage. In fact, it ended in divorce. But I never looked at my spouse and was so angry that I wanted any harm to come to her. There were plenty of times when I was so angry I wanted out of the marriage, but good lord!
I just don't get it. The ironic part of all this is that I spent a lot of my life wondering if I was a sociopath. Not so much as a adult, but as a kid, I can remember not being particularly empathetic in situations where I thought I probably should have been. I think I was fortunate to have joined the Army when I did because you are thrust into a giant cross-section of humanity and forced to interact with people from all walks of life.
I went from having, at most 2 or 3 close friends to having a bunch of good friends all the time. I started to feel connected to the world.
I guess I believe that I'm not alone in this. That I'm not the only person who seems to lack these rather odd, antisocial urges that seem to be common, at least if stand-up comedians and mommy bloggers are to be believed.
At least I can only hope so.
I was watching "Louie", which is Louis C.K.'s sitcom, and he said a line that seemed to resonate with the audience. The gist of it was that a parent looks at their kid and at the same time, feels the conflicting emotions of, "I love you" and "I wish you had never been born."
I can honestly say I have never felt like I wish my son had never been born. Hey, I'm not saying this for swagger effect. I'm the first person to acknowledge the darker sides of human nature, especially when they manifest themselves in me, and I'm almost biologically incapable of not-admitting to them if they're comic in nature.
My son? Has been, hands-down, the best thing that's ever happened in my life. I'll even go so far as to say that being a father is, truly, the only significant thing I've ever done. The rest means nothing. The year on a Special Operations Team in the 5th Special Forces Group, the Ironman Triathlon, the MBA from Case, everything I ever thought I was proud of, that I ever thought was an accomplishment, is dwarfed by the absolute sheer magnitude of being a father. It is the most rewarding thing in my life. I suspect I will never have another thing in my life that is nearly as significant.
Do other parents feel this way? Enough of them that this is something that resonates comedically? I can't ever even regret marrying my ex-wife because we had my son together and he is just perfect. I would not change a thing about him. He is a wonder and a joy.
Another glimpse like this was similar, but it involved a mother who was walking behind her children, who apparently were being very difficult, and flipping them off behind their backs. The general gist was that the mothers who heard about the episode had no negative judgement and the consensus was that they all had felt exactly this way at one point in time or another.
Again, never felt that way. Granted, my son is not a teen, yet, but neither were the little kids in the flipping off story. I can understand being frustrated, but flipping off your own kids? Would you flip off your co-workers? Would you flip off your relatives? Maybe some people would. I wouldn't.
The last episode like this was another comedian, Bill Burr, who said something to the effect of, once in a while, you just look at your significant other and you could just kill them. Wow. The audience cracked up. Apparently, this is another idea that resonated. I have not had a great marriage. In fact, it ended in divorce. But I never looked at my spouse and was so angry that I wanted any harm to come to her. There were plenty of times when I was so angry I wanted out of the marriage, but good lord!
I just don't get it. The ironic part of all this is that I spent a lot of my life wondering if I was a sociopath. Not so much as a adult, but as a kid, I can remember not being particularly empathetic in situations where I thought I probably should have been. I think I was fortunate to have joined the Army when I did because you are thrust into a giant cross-section of humanity and forced to interact with people from all walks of life.
I went from having, at most 2 or 3 close friends to having a bunch of good friends all the time. I started to feel connected to the world.
I guess I believe that I'm not alone in this. That I'm not the only person who seems to lack these rather odd, antisocial urges that seem to be common, at least if stand-up comedians and mommy bloggers are to be believed.
At least I can only hope so.
Saturday, December 22, 2012
Avoid Student Loan Debt like the Plague!!!
When I was young, I feared student loan debt at a level that might have approached a genuine phobia. Back then, you'd hear about students accumulating outrageous amounts of debt. Sometimes as high as 5 or 10 thousand dollars! Good lord, college might have gotten you a better job back then, but not THAT much better!
I joined the Army, which at the time offered a program called VEAP (basic summary, it was absolutely the worst GI-bill type program since WWII. It offered a paltry monthly stipend and that was it.) Thanks to scholarships and an ungodly amount of work at both jobs and a small business I ran, I graduated with my bachelor's degree and no debt at all. Even more remarkable is that it took me six years to get a bachelor's degree.
As I progressed through life, I saw something interesting. People who were willing to go into debt were able to do things I couldn't do. They went to better schools. They finished in four years. They went to graduate school. They got great jobs. They paid off their loans.
When you consider the fact that I spent 4 years in the Army, it took me ten years to get my bachelor's degree. Now, not all of that was due to finances. There was a lot of aimlessness, transferring schools, changing majors in there, too. But there was also the fact that its hard to maintain a full-time courseload while working 30 or 40 hours a week, too.
Did I have it all wrong all along? For years, I thought I did. I went to law school for a year last year. I even got a half-ride scholarship. I figured that student loans couldn't be all that bad, so I took out what I could.
I've since dropped out of law school. I work in a field tangentially related to law and business. A lot of the folks I work with are recent law school grads who are dealing with up to seven years student loan debt, not just one.
My opinion: generally speaking, people who avoid student loan debt will come out far ahead of people who do not. Because I work in the public sector, my co-workers will have any unpaid balances forgiven after 10 years in the career. However, without that, their student loan debt would be a crippling burden for more than half of their working lives.
I am the first to admit that a lot has changed since I first went to school. When I left High School, I tried a little community college in California. The total cost of attendance was about $10 a credit hour. When I got out of the Army, I attended a small liberal arts school in Texas. Nobody I knew there paid the sticker price, but if you did, the total cost of attendance was about $2,500 a semester. That was for a private school education. These days, a state school in Ohio will cost about $10,000 a year in tuition, alone.
That's a pretty big sum of money for a high school graduate with few employable skills to their name. I realize that not all people have families of means who can help them get through school. Sometimes it really is just on the shoulders of a young person to figure out how to pay for this stuff.
Is it even possible to get through school without accumulating a mountain of debt? Yes, I believe it is. Or, at a minimum, it's possible to graduate school with very little debt.
For a young person looking for a plan, I'd offer the following:
First, community college credits transfer to big-name schools the same as if you'd taken the credits at the big-name school. So, 2 years of credits from your junior college, that cost you a total of $2,000, will transfer into a school like Dartmouth where the credits would have cost $80,000.
If you can, live with relatives. Minimize your expenses. Take Summer classes and get 2 years of education in just 15 months. Even if you have to take out student loans to pay for all of it, you're talking taking $2,000 in loans, versus at least $20,000 at a state school and nearly six figures at some exclusive private schools.
Then, transfer. There are other advantages to a community college as well. For one thing, if you did poorly in High School, community college is a great do-over that can still get you accepted into Stanford. The other is, community colleges have a lot more degree options for people who like to work with their hands. You can study everything from nuclear reactor technology to diesel engines. While your friends are making $45,000 as brand-new district attorneys with $150,000 in student loan debt, you could be making $100,000 a year as a welder in South Dakota after a 2 year welding certificate.
Other genuine career-options for people with 2 year certificates and degrees:
For determined students on a budget, community colleges aren't just an option, they're a great one.
Second, the GI Bill is better now than ever. You get the equivalent of tuition and fees at your state's in-state tuition rate, plus a living stipend (free money to live on.) So, you can attend NC State, and have the GI bill pay for your apartment and groceries, too. The military still offers three-year enlistments. While in the military, you will be eligible for tuition reimbursement if you attend college part-time. (I was never able to. Some branches and jobs are more accommodating than others. Research carefully.)
You will also be able to take as many CLEP tests as you want for free. That's the college level examination program and the basic gist is that you take a test and get credits for a specific subject. For instance, I took two exams in American history and by passing them, got 6 credit hours in American History. Not all schools accept CLEP credits, so again, research carefully. One of my biggest mistakes was not attending the University of North Texas, which would have accepted 36 CLEP credits, versus attending Texas Wesleyan University, which only accepted 6. Graduating a year early would have been, by far, the better move financially.
For those who are not sure they want the rigors of military life, day-in and day-out, the Reserves have generous GI Bill benefits and sometimes have cash enlistment bonuses of up to $20,000. Obviously, any military commitment is a big deal, especially during a time of war. However, spending four years in the military has led to a lifetime of benefits from me, including VA loans to buy homes with, creditable years towards a federal retirement and money for college. You have to give a lot, but you get a lot in return.
Third, graduating early is a big fat hairy deal. A lot of your cost of attending college is the cost of simply living. If you're borrowing dorm money, etc., you're racking up debt at a phenomenal rate. You need roughly 4 years of academic work to graduate with a baccalaureate, but there's no requirement that it take you four years to get those credits. Attending in the Summer is not only a good way to graduate faster, the classes are usually easier to pull good grades in, if my experience is any indication. If you attend a High School that lets you take college classes, that's a great option as well. I've heard of kids graduating High School with an Associate's Degree. This means they can have their bachelor's in just two more years.
Your total cost of attending school includes both the direct cost and the opportunity cost. The opportunity cost is what you would have made by doing something else.
So, in this case, a simple illustration. First, a guy who goes to 4 years of school, borrowing all the way:
Tuition X 4 years: $40,000
Living Expenses X 4 years: $40,000
Total end-position after 4 years: -$80,000 (plus interest)
Versus somebody who went to 4 years of school, but attended Summers, maybe took 18 hours a semester or two, and finished in 3 calendar years, then got a job paying $30,000 a year:
Tuition X 4 years: $40,000 (the credits cost money whether he's taking them in summer or in regular school-year)
Living Expenses X 4 years: $40,000 (he will have living expenses regardless of whether he's in school or not)
Income from working in calendar year 4, versus being in school calendar year 4: $30,000 to the good.
Or:
-40,000
-40,000
+30,000
Total end-position after 4 years: -50,000.
So, those are just some general ideas. Take heart and avoid that debt. The interest on it is a mutha. It literally can be like paying a mortgage for a house you don't get to live in. I've made about a half dozen payments on the student loan debt for just one year of law-school (an amount of debt probably comparable to one year in undegrad since I had a scholarship) and I have yet to even pay off the INTEREST that has accumulated. That's just the interest that's accumulated in less than a year!
Now, some people will take on student loan debt, and it really won't hurt them. If you're in medical school, no whining, okay? You can afford $200,000 in debt if you're entering a profession where the median income for non-specialists is $200,000 a year. You're going to be a multi-millionaire, so shut the hell up about your finances. Likewise if you're a top graduate of a top law school. A new associate making $165,000 a year can handle a student loan debt of $150,000. Others, though, won't be so well served by getting into debt.
Most people, myself included, look back on their lives regretting a lot of the decisions they made and the attitudes they held as they were learning how to deal with the world. But on this one, I was dead right: avoid student loan debt like the plague. It is absolutely bad for you.
I joined the Army, which at the time offered a program called VEAP (basic summary, it was absolutely the worst GI-bill type program since WWII. It offered a paltry monthly stipend and that was it.) Thanks to scholarships and an ungodly amount of work at both jobs and a small business I ran, I graduated with my bachelor's degree and no debt at all. Even more remarkable is that it took me six years to get a bachelor's degree.
As I progressed through life, I saw something interesting. People who were willing to go into debt were able to do things I couldn't do. They went to better schools. They finished in four years. They went to graduate school. They got great jobs. They paid off their loans.
When you consider the fact that I spent 4 years in the Army, it took me ten years to get my bachelor's degree. Now, not all of that was due to finances. There was a lot of aimlessness, transferring schools, changing majors in there, too. But there was also the fact that its hard to maintain a full-time courseload while working 30 or 40 hours a week, too.
Did I have it all wrong all along? For years, I thought I did. I went to law school for a year last year. I even got a half-ride scholarship. I figured that student loans couldn't be all that bad, so I took out what I could.
I've since dropped out of law school. I work in a field tangentially related to law and business. A lot of the folks I work with are recent law school grads who are dealing with up to seven years student loan debt, not just one.
My opinion: generally speaking, people who avoid student loan debt will come out far ahead of people who do not. Because I work in the public sector, my co-workers will have any unpaid balances forgiven after 10 years in the career. However, without that, their student loan debt would be a crippling burden for more than half of their working lives.
I am the first to admit that a lot has changed since I first went to school. When I left High School, I tried a little community college in California. The total cost of attendance was about $10 a credit hour. When I got out of the Army, I attended a small liberal arts school in Texas. Nobody I knew there paid the sticker price, but if you did, the total cost of attendance was about $2,500 a semester. That was for a private school education. These days, a state school in Ohio will cost about $10,000 a year in tuition, alone.
That's a pretty big sum of money for a high school graduate with few employable skills to their name. I realize that not all people have families of means who can help them get through school. Sometimes it really is just on the shoulders of a young person to figure out how to pay for this stuff.
Is it even possible to get through school without accumulating a mountain of debt? Yes, I believe it is. Or, at a minimum, it's possible to graduate school with very little debt.
For a young person looking for a plan, I'd offer the following:
First, community college credits transfer to big-name schools the same as if you'd taken the credits at the big-name school. So, 2 years of credits from your junior college, that cost you a total of $2,000, will transfer into a school like Dartmouth where the credits would have cost $80,000.
If you can, live with relatives. Minimize your expenses. Take Summer classes and get 2 years of education in just 15 months. Even if you have to take out student loans to pay for all of it, you're talking taking $2,000 in loans, versus at least $20,000 at a state school and nearly six figures at some exclusive private schools.
Then, transfer. There are other advantages to a community college as well. For one thing, if you did poorly in High School, community college is a great do-over that can still get you accepted into Stanford. The other is, community colleges have a lot more degree options for people who like to work with their hands. You can study everything from nuclear reactor technology to diesel engines. While your friends are making $45,000 as brand-new district attorneys with $150,000 in student loan debt, you could be making $100,000 a year as a welder in South Dakota after a 2 year welding certificate.
Other genuine career-options for people with 2 year certificates and degrees:
- In some states, you can get an RN degree in 2 years. An actual full-blown RN, with median wages of over $60,000 a year and career opportunities in pretty much every county in the United States
- Most community colleges have MSCE programs where you learn to be, say, a network engineer with computers. Again, starting wages are excellent and job opportunities are some of the best in the country.
- Diesel mechanics, which you can learn in a 2 year program at many junior colleges, have median pay of about $40,000 a year.
http://www.bls.gov/ooh/installation-maintenance-and-repair/diesel-service-technicians-and-mechanics.htm
http://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/registered-nurses.htm
http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/network-and-computer-systems-administrators.htm
For determined students on a budget, community colleges aren't just an option, they're a great one.
Second, the GI Bill is better now than ever. You get the equivalent of tuition and fees at your state's in-state tuition rate, plus a living stipend (free money to live on.) So, you can attend NC State, and have the GI bill pay for your apartment and groceries, too. The military still offers three-year enlistments. While in the military, you will be eligible for tuition reimbursement if you attend college part-time. (I was never able to. Some branches and jobs are more accommodating than others. Research carefully.)
You will also be able to take as many CLEP tests as you want for free. That's the college level examination program and the basic gist is that you take a test and get credits for a specific subject. For instance, I took two exams in American history and by passing them, got 6 credit hours in American History. Not all schools accept CLEP credits, so again, research carefully. One of my biggest mistakes was not attending the University of North Texas, which would have accepted 36 CLEP credits, versus attending Texas Wesleyan University, which only accepted 6. Graduating a year early would have been, by far, the better move financially.
For those who are not sure they want the rigors of military life, day-in and day-out, the Reserves have generous GI Bill benefits and sometimes have cash enlistment bonuses of up to $20,000. Obviously, any military commitment is a big deal, especially during a time of war. However, spending four years in the military has led to a lifetime of benefits from me, including VA loans to buy homes with, creditable years towards a federal retirement and money for college. You have to give a lot, but you get a lot in return.
Third, graduating early is a big fat hairy deal. A lot of your cost of attending college is the cost of simply living. If you're borrowing dorm money, etc., you're racking up debt at a phenomenal rate. You need roughly 4 years of academic work to graduate with a baccalaureate, but there's no requirement that it take you four years to get those credits. Attending in the Summer is not only a good way to graduate faster, the classes are usually easier to pull good grades in, if my experience is any indication. If you attend a High School that lets you take college classes, that's a great option as well. I've heard of kids graduating High School with an Associate's Degree. This means they can have their bachelor's in just two more years.
Your total cost of attending school includes both the direct cost and the opportunity cost. The opportunity cost is what you would have made by doing something else.
So, in this case, a simple illustration. First, a guy who goes to 4 years of school, borrowing all the way:
Tuition X 4 years: $40,000
Living Expenses X 4 years: $40,000
Total end-position after 4 years: -$80,000 (plus interest)
Versus somebody who went to 4 years of school, but attended Summers, maybe took 18 hours a semester or two, and finished in 3 calendar years, then got a job paying $30,000 a year:
Tuition X 4 years: $40,000 (the credits cost money whether he's taking them in summer or in regular school-year)
Living Expenses X 4 years: $40,000 (he will have living expenses regardless of whether he's in school or not)
Income from working in calendar year 4, versus being in school calendar year 4: $30,000 to the good.
Or:
-40,000
-40,000
+30,000
Total end-position after 4 years: -50,000.
So, those are just some general ideas. Take heart and avoid that debt. The interest on it is a mutha. It literally can be like paying a mortgage for a house you don't get to live in. I've made about a half dozen payments on the student loan debt for just one year of law-school (an amount of debt probably comparable to one year in undegrad since I had a scholarship) and I have yet to even pay off the INTEREST that has accumulated. That's just the interest that's accumulated in less than a year!
Now, some people will take on student loan debt, and it really won't hurt them. If you're in medical school, no whining, okay? You can afford $200,000 in debt if you're entering a profession where the median income for non-specialists is $200,000 a year. You're going to be a multi-millionaire, so shut the hell up about your finances. Likewise if you're a top graduate of a top law school. A new associate making $165,000 a year can handle a student loan debt of $150,000. Others, though, won't be so well served by getting into debt.
Most people, myself included, look back on their lives regretting a lot of the decisions they made and the attitudes they held as they were learning how to deal with the world. But on this one, I was dead right: avoid student loan debt like the plague. It is absolutely bad for you.
Friday, December 21, 2012
Do We Really Have That Luxury?
I've known for a few days that I probably should say something about the firearms debate that is taking place after the mass shootings Newtown Connecticut. As a life member of the NRA and a proponent of the right to keep and bear arms, I am squarely in this controversy, whether I want to be or not.
I understand the anti-gun sentiment in the aftermath of this shooting. It defies logic to say that guns are not part of this problem. Not just this problem, but a whole lot of other deadly problems, too. Suicide in the US is most frequently done with a firearm, to the tune of about 15,000 people a year. Violent crime claims another 10,000. That's 25,000 deaths a year where firearms are involved.
Do things need to be done about guns? You bet. The question is, what, exactly, should we do. What results do we hope to achieve? If we really want to solve this problem, it's going to take a multi-faceted approach. We don't have the luxury of only examining the parts of this problem that we already have preconceived notions about, while trying to exempt the parts of the problem that we identify with.
Firearms proponents will immediately point out in the aftermath of a situation like this, that if somebody else had been armed, that the shooting spree could have been shortened. This response seems to draw a great deal of condemnation from those who are simply disgusted by gun-violence.
Allow me to ask this question, though. In the Newtown shooting, the principal of the school saw the shooter and ran at him headlong. The consensus appears to be that she was trying to attack him. To disarm him, perhaps. Mostly, she was trying to do something to him, physically, that would prevent him from harming those little kids.
If you ask me, there's Medal of Honor courage, and then there's a step higher, which is what this principal did. I can't imagine the level of bravery and selflessness that would be required for a person to attack a heavily armed man with nothing more than your bare hands. To run straight at him. To know that you have only about a one-in-a-million shot, but that saving yourself by running away is not an option at all.
As we know, unfortunately, she never got to him. She was shot and killed rather easily.
So, my question is this: Imagine if she'd been armed. Or ask yourself this: in those heroic, yet futile moments as she charged at the attacker; during that time when she knew that she absolutely had to do anything she possibly could to stop him in his tracks; even if it meant losing her life; would she have even killed him if it meant saving the lives of the students? At that precise moment, what would she have given to have had a gun in her waistband?
Or, imagine if right next to the fire alarm, there were an active-shooter alarm that she could activate. That alarm not only blared within the school, but immediately sent an active-shooter notification to the police department. With the utmost respect, I am saddened to say that her sacrifice really accomplished nothing. If she had been able to run to an alarm? Could have meant a police response that was one or two minutes faster.
Imagine if, strewn throughout the school, there were half a dozen active-shooter responders who were tactically trained. People who had to go through periodic mental health assessments. People who had to regularly qualify with their weapons. People who, when they heard that alarm, had the same reaction the principal had: that they had to act immediately to stop some very evil person from hurting the kids.
Except imagine that they were not going to try and assault him with their bare hands. Imagine if they were armed.
Is the idea of "more guns in school" so crazy, now? It's not "guns in schools" that are the problem. Schools all over the country have both police officers and armed guards in them, now. It's not the guns of the protectors we need to worry about.
Nor is a proliferation of guns in schools the problem. The problem is isolated incidents of very bad people bringing guns into a school. The problem isn't that there are 50 shooters in a school. The problem is when there's only one and he is intent on hurting the kids.
Right now, the tagline for the gun-control folks is, "Guns in school are the problem. More guns in schools is not the solution."
Well... to put a finer point on it, bad guys with guns in schools are the problem. Good guys with guns could be part of the solution.
To me it would make no sense to say, "Bad teachers in schools are the problem. More teachers is not the solution!"
Well... yeah, but more GOOD teachers is absolutely part of the solution. To ignore the difference between bad and good teachers is foolish. To ignore the difference between armed good guys and armed bad guys is absolutely stunning in its depth of stupidity.
Now, the other issue that's coming up is mental health. Just as quickly as some dismiss the idea of protective weapons in a school, others immediately dismiss the idea that mental health is an issue. But let's be frank, here. A mentally ill person shot up Gabby Giffords. A mentally ill person shot up the theater in Aurora. A mentally ill person shot up Virginia Tech. A mentally ill person shot up Newtown.
Mental illness and firearms are a very, very bad combination. I am told, and have no reason to disbelieve, that mentally ill people undergoing treatment are no more violent than people in general. However, mentally ill people not being treated have a greater possibility of being violent. To me, a person who is one missed dosage away from being violent has no business owning or keeping firearms. People who live in a house with a mentally ill person have no business having them, either.
Whatever laws are keeping us from identifying people who have conditions that could lead to violent behavior need to be changed. If that means amending HIPAA, so be it. If that means amending doctor-patient confidentiality laws, then that's what we need to do. If the public wants to be protected from avoidable dangers, we have a right to know who is dangerous and restrict their access to firearms.
Now, on the positive side of the equation, for the first time in my lifetime, I'm hearing dialog about committing more resources to mental health. If that's part of the solution, we should be pursing that, too, and the benefits would be widespread throughout society.
However, ultimately, if we're talking about mass shooters, the argument seems to be: mentally ill people cannot responsibly be trusted with firearms, therefore nobody should be trusted with firearms. I don't see that it's reasonable to give everybody the same level of rights as a mentally ill person.
Lastly, schools need to change the way they do things. Right now, the trend is to turn schools into little prisons. One entry point, one exit point, highly controlled. Is that really the answer? Maybe to some security threats, but not to a mass shooter. If every classroom had an exit to the outside, the prospect of walking from room to room shooting people would be entirely different.
Unfortunately, I think active-shooter drills are going to become part of the school day, just like fire drills. What to do? Get out into the open and RUN. Kids like to do that, anyway. In just ten seconds, a kid can put themselves out of the effective range of a minimally trained shooter with a handgun and in a minute the best pistol shots in the world would have difficulty hitting them. Moving targets aren't easy to hit with a rifle. It can be done, but if experience is any indication, these shootings aren't being done by Navy SEAL at the peak of their powers. They're done by sociopaths with little to no actual tactical training.
Huddling kids in a corner? Not a good idea. Anybody can rack up fatalities when your target is 10 feet wide and 10 feet away from you.
The debate on armed teachers is red-hot right now. It's as controversial as any I can ever imagine. Rest assured that more schools are going to allow teachers to have weapons. I hope that they require intensive training and screening, and that teachers are just as adept at handling an active-shooter as they are responding to somebody who needs CPR. In the ideal world, they'd need certification and training. In my ideal universe, they'd get a modest pay premium to compensate for their off-hours spent in training and practice.
So, to solve this problem, really, it's going to take fixing it from several angles. First, we need to limit access to weapons. We need to make the penalties for illegally acquiring a weapon severe. We need to make gun sellers responsible if they sell a gun without running a valid background check, and that goes for private transactions, too.
We need to know who the mentally ill are, though, to make sure that they are at the top of the list of people who cannot legally acquire weapons.
Lastly, we need to acknowledge the reality that all the prevention in the world may fail. However, we can mitigate the damage of a shooter in our schools by allowing teachers and administrators the right to defend themselves and their kids.
We are all absolutely heartbroken about the events in Newtown. There will be action taken. My only hope is that it is effective at stopping the next shooter, instead of merely being emotionally an satisfying way to lash out against guns.
I understand the anti-gun sentiment in the aftermath of this shooting. It defies logic to say that guns are not part of this problem. Not just this problem, but a whole lot of other deadly problems, too. Suicide in the US is most frequently done with a firearm, to the tune of about 15,000 people a year. Violent crime claims another 10,000. That's 25,000 deaths a year where firearms are involved.
Do things need to be done about guns? You bet. The question is, what, exactly, should we do. What results do we hope to achieve? If we really want to solve this problem, it's going to take a multi-faceted approach. We don't have the luxury of only examining the parts of this problem that we already have preconceived notions about, while trying to exempt the parts of the problem that we identify with.
Firearms proponents will immediately point out in the aftermath of a situation like this, that if somebody else had been armed, that the shooting spree could have been shortened. This response seems to draw a great deal of condemnation from those who are simply disgusted by gun-violence.
Allow me to ask this question, though. In the Newtown shooting, the principal of the school saw the shooter and ran at him headlong. The consensus appears to be that she was trying to attack him. To disarm him, perhaps. Mostly, she was trying to do something to him, physically, that would prevent him from harming those little kids.
If you ask me, there's Medal of Honor courage, and then there's a step higher, which is what this principal did. I can't imagine the level of bravery and selflessness that would be required for a person to attack a heavily armed man with nothing more than your bare hands. To run straight at him. To know that you have only about a one-in-a-million shot, but that saving yourself by running away is not an option at all.
As we know, unfortunately, she never got to him. She was shot and killed rather easily.
So, my question is this: Imagine if she'd been armed. Or ask yourself this: in those heroic, yet futile moments as she charged at the attacker; during that time when she knew that she absolutely had to do anything she possibly could to stop him in his tracks; even if it meant losing her life; would she have even killed him if it meant saving the lives of the students? At that precise moment, what would she have given to have had a gun in her waistband?
Or, imagine if right next to the fire alarm, there were an active-shooter alarm that she could activate. That alarm not only blared within the school, but immediately sent an active-shooter notification to the police department. With the utmost respect, I am saddened to say that her sacrifice really accomplished nothing. If she had been able to run to an alarm? Could have meant a police response that was one or two minutes faster.
Imagine if, strewn throughout the school, there were half a dozen active-shooter responders who were tactically trained. People who had to go through periodic mental health assessments. People who had to regularly qualify with their weapons. People who, when they heard that alarm, had the same reaction the principal had: that they had to act immediately to stop some very evil person from hurting the kids.
Except imagine that they were not going to try and assault him with their bare hands. Imagine if they were armed.
Is the idea of "more guns in school" so crazy, now? It's not "guns in schools" that are the problem. Schools all over the country have both police officers and armed guards in them, now. It's not the guns of the protectors we need to worry about.
Nor is a proliferation of guns in schools the problem. The problem is isolated incidents of very bad people bringing guns into a school. The problem isn't that there are 50 shooters in a school. The problem is when there's only one and he is intent on hurting the kids.
Right now, the tagline for the gun-control folks is, "Guns in school are the problem. More guns in schools is not the solution."
Well... to put a finer point on it, bad guys with guns in schools are the problem. Good guys with guns could be part of the solution.
To me it would make no sense to say, "Bad teachers in schools are the problem. More teachers is not the solution!"
Well... yeah, but more GOOD teachers is absolutely part of the solution. To ignore the difference between bad and good teachers is foolish. To ignore the difference between armed good guys and armed bad guys is absolutely stunning in its depth of stupidity.
Now, the other issue that's coming up is mental health. Just as quickly as some dismiss the idea of protective weapons in a school, others immediately dismiss the idea that mental health is an issue. But let's be frank, here. A mentally ill person shot up Gabby Giffords. A mentally ill person shot up the theater in Aurora. A mentally ill person shot up Virginia Tech. A mentally ill person shot up Newtown.
Mental illness and firearms are a very, very bad combination. I am told, and have no reason to disbelieve, that mentally ill people undergoing treatment are no more violent than people in general. However, mentally ill people not being treated have a greater possibility of being violent. To me, a person who is one missed dosage away from being violent has no business owning or keeping firearms. People who live in a house with a mentally ill person have no business having them, either.
Whatever laws are keeping us from identifying people who have conditions that could lead to violent behavior need to be changed. If that means amending HIPAA, so be it. If that means amending doctor-patient confidentiality laws, then that's what we need to do. If the public wants to be protected from avoidable dangers, we have a right to know who is dangerous and restrict their access to firearms.
Now, on the positive side of the equation, for the first time in my lifetime, I'm hearing dialog about committing more resources to mental health. If that's part of the solution, we should be pursing that, too, and the benefits would be widespread throughout society.
However, ultimately, if we're talking about mass shooters, the argument seems to be: mentally ill people cannot responsibly be trusted with firearms, therefore nobody should be trusted with firearms. I don't see that it's reasonable to give everybody the same level of rights as a mentally ill person.
Lastly, schools need to change the way they do things. Right now, the trend is to turn schools into little prisons. One entry point, one exit point, highly controlled. Is that really the answer? Maybe to some security threats, but not to a mass shooter. If every classroom had an exit to the outside, the prospect of walking from room to room shooting people would be entirely different.
Unfortunately, I think active-shooter drills are going to become part of the school day, just like fire drills. What to do? Get out into the open and RUN. Kids like to do that, anyway. In just ten seconds, a kid can put themselves out of the effective range of a minimally trained shooter with a handgun and in a minute the best pistol shots in the world would have difficulty hitting them. Moving targets aren't easy to hit with a rifle. It can be done, but if experience is any indication, these shootings aren't being done by Navy SEAL at the peak of their powers. They're done by sociopaths with little to no actual tactical training.
Huddling kids in a corner? Not a good idea. Anybody can rack up fatalities when your target is 10 feet wide and 10 feet away from you.
The debate on armed teachers is red-hot right now. It's as controversial as any I can ever imagine. Rest assured that more schools are going to allow teachers to have weapons. I hope that they require intensive training and screening, and that teachers are just as adept at handling an active-shooter as they are responding to somebody who needs CPR. In the ideal world, they'd need certification and training. In my ideal universe, they'd get a modest pay premium to compensate for their off-hours spent in training and practice.
So, to solve this problem, really, it's going to take fixing it from several angles. First, we need to limit access to weapons. We need to make the penalties for illegally acquiring a weapon severe. We need to make gun sellers responsible if they sell a gun without running a valid background check, and that goes for private transactions, too.
We need to know who the mentally ill are, though, to make sure that they are at the top of the list of people who cannot legally acquire weapons.
Lastly, we need to acknowledge the reality that all the prevention in the world may fail. However, we can mitigate the damage of a shooter in our schools by allowing teachers and administrators the right to defend themselves and their kids.
We are all absolutely heartbroken about the events in Newtown. There will be action taken. My only hope is that it is effective at stopping the next shooter, instead of merely being emotionally an satisfying way to lash out against guns.
Saturday, December 15, 2012
2013 the Rebuilding Year
They used to have an expression in pro sports when I was a kid. When a team was just absolutely horrible, with no chance of success, they'd say they were in a "rebuilding year". In theory, that meant that they were writing off the current season, but were executing moves that would make the team stronger in the future. In reality, it usually just meant that the team was terrible, with no real prospects of getting better.
For me, 2012 was the year of destruction. So many things just crashed and burned. Some of the events were interconnected. Some weren't. It was as though everything bad that could have happened, did, though, all together.
I do try to keep perspective. I'm healthy and my son is truly a joy. As long as those things are true, it's hard to say that things are bad.
The difficulty with everything in your life crashing is that it doesn't happen in a series of instataneous, discreet events. It happens in a cascade of slow-motion train wrecks that you're powerless to stop. You just have to sit back, watch it happen, and look forward to the day when you can pick up the pieces and move on.
In the next few months, though, a few of those train-wrecks will be over. I'll have closure and resolution and can start moving forward again. I won't say the worst of it is over, but its getting there.
I have plans and contingencies from this point forward. For the most part, I am relatively sure (at least as sure as I can be) that things will be okay. Regardless of how things play out from here on out, I have ways to get through. Not all of them are pretty. Not all of them are optimal. None of them are easy. But I have a way to get through.
I also got some good news this week. I hit my diamond level on Best Western Rewards. I stay at a hotel when I'm in Dayton. It is actually cheaper than getting an apartment and/or room-mate and it comes with odd conveniences. The hotel staff all recognize me on sight. It feels strangely like my home when I'm down there.
I try to stay positive. It's not always easy. I am basically rebuilding from scratch, but in a way, that's not so bad. Some folks are really in a deep hole with no real plan to get out. The biggest difference for me is that I have hope, now. I have something to work for and towards. I have something to aspire to.
As long as I have that, I'm usually happy.
For me, 2012 was the year of destruction. So many things just crashed and burned. Some of the events were interconnected. Some weren't. It was as though everything bad that could have happened, did, though, all together.
I do try to keep perspective. I'm healthy and my son is truly a joy. As long as those things are true, it's hard to say that things are bad.
The difficulty with everything in your life crashing is that it doesn't happen in a series of instataneous, discreet events. It happens in a cascade of slow-motion train wrecks that you're powerless to stop. You just have to sit back, watch it happen, and look forward to the day when you can pick up the pieces and move on.
In the next few months, though, a few of those train-wrecks will be over. I'll have closure and resolution and can start moving forward again. I won't say the worst of it is over, but its getting there.
I have plans and contingencies from this point forward. For the most part, I am relatively sure (at least as sure as I can be) that things will be okay. Regardless of how things play out from here on out, I have ways to get through. Not all of them are pretty. Not all of them are optimal. None of them are easy. But I have a way to get through.
I also got some good news this week. I hit my diamond level on Best Western Rewards. I stay at a hotel when I'm in Dayton. It is actually cheaper than getting an apartment and/or room-mate and it comes with odd conveniences. The hotel staff all recognize me on sight. It feels strangely like my home when I'm down there.
I try to stay positive. It's not always easy. I am basically rebuilding from scratch, but in a way, that's not so bad. Some folks are really in a deep hole with no real plan to get out. The biggest difference for me is that I have hope, now. I have something to work for and towards. I have something to aspire to.
As long as I have that, I'm usually happy.
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