People I know, and on occasion myself, seem to feel guilt at having lived good lives. By this I mean a relatively easy life. I have never known hunger in my life. I have always had a roof over my head, and a nice roof too. I have never not gotten anything I needed. Please note I did not get a lot of things I wanted, but I was never denied anything I ever really needed. I got a good education from the time I was a young child. My parents, although somewhat distant, were involved in my life. This involvement sometimes, and sometimes often, involved punishment of the physical kind, but I managed to come out of it relatively unscathed. I was able to continue my education past college and into graduate school thanks to my parents and the U.S. Army.
I have friends who tell stories of their parents working their entire lives in steel mills in towns that where almost subsidiaries of the steel company. My friend worked in the steel mill every Summer while he went to college at an Ivy League College and then went on to law school. He had a different life than mine, but was probably even more successful for it. He earned everything he ever got, nothing was given to him, whether it was something he want or needed. I think he probably has a greater respect for material things than I do, in all honesty.
Good life guilt has lead me to spend the greater part of my life dedicated to being worthy of my good life. I have been a public servant and public employee my entire adult life. I have used the education, training and experience that has been given to me to make the world a better place for others. My friend earned his good life having lived a hard one. I, on the other hand, am working to be deserving of the good life I have had and have now. I am not sure if there is a measure of who got the better deal, so to speak, but, in the end, I think that we are pretty well even.
One day I will retire, I hope, and I will be able to look back on my life and identify, with some particularity, persons that are better off for the fact that I am alive. I will use this to justify my good life when the time comes for me to be judged.
Friday, March 25, 2011
CHANGE IS ALWAYS BAD !!
There are those, and they walk among us, that truly believe change is always bad. The terms new, different and exciting cause them severe gastrointestinal distress for some reason. Change sometimes involves a bit of risk. You have to put yourself out there and take a chance on being wrong. So what you have to do is make a determination of the risk/reward ratio. Those of us that have been administrators often call this cost-benefit analysis. You weigh the risks against the rewards and you figure out if it is worth it, but more on that later.
Change can cause discomfort. New, different and exciting can sometimes be the cause of fear; fear of the unknown. You do the best you can to figure out the benefits of a change, but you cannot always be right on in your determination, and often there are the dreaded "unintended consequences." You had no idea that unintended consequences would occur, but once the change is implemented, you discover, sometimes rapidly, sometimes slowly, that there are results that you did not anticipate. If you listen to the conservative politicians and believers, the reason the economy took a dump was the fact that the liberals in Congress decided to change the rules regulating mortgages. Liberals have long believed that everyone should be able to own a home and dictated, by legislative fiat, that mortgages had to be given to certain minority groups, in a certain percentage. Ultimately, this resulted in persons that could not afford mortgages getting financed for mortgages on which they could not possibly make the payments. Time passes and poof, they default. This happens all at once, the residential real estate market takes a huge crap on the economy and we get "The Great Recession."
An excellent example of this is a girlfriend I used to have. She refinanced her home at 120% of the market value at the height of the market; the assumption being that the homes would continue to appreciate at the over-heated rate they had for the previous several years. In order to be able to make the payments, she amortized the payments over 50 years (she was in her mid-40's at the time...you do the math). This was the only way she could afford the payments, and she used the money to pay off her car and her credit cards, etc. This succeeded in financing her debt over 50 years instead of the usual 5 for a car (again, you do the math, 4% for 50 years vs. a higher interest for only 5 years). Oh, did I mention that this was an adjustable rate mortgage? Well, the rate adjusted up and she had to do everything she could to make the payment, including getting a second job. She teeters on the brink of losing her home...oh well. I am a little distraught only because I, being the nice guy I am, and being able to at the time, loaned her the money to make a down payment. This is money on which I have not seen payments in a couple of years, but she was able to buy a new Harley...oh well. In many cases, this same thing happened and people lost their homes to foreclosure. The real estate market crashed and burned and still lies in a heap of rubble as I type, but again, I digress.
I will not argue the point as to whether the conservatives among us are correct or not, but, if true, I will say it is an excellent example of unintended consequences. We decide to make sure all minorities can share in the "American Dream," regardless of whether they can afford to make the payments on their new homes and, as a result, we get an economic downturn the likes we have not seen in 80 years. This does not consider the fact that the mortgage foreclosure has devastated these people's credit even further into the future than it might have been before.
Many years ago, as part of a military project, I was doing what we called "hearts and minds" work in a far-off foreign land. One of the things we were doing was to train the farmers how to use things like fertilizer, rotate crops and till hillsides to avoid erosion. It was what we called Peace Corps work too. Each time we tried to get the villagers to do anything different, their reply was always the same, "But we have always done it this way." There was no rational reason for not doing things differently. There were no unintended consequences, just an irrational desire to not change because "we have always done it this way."
In spite of the rather ominous example of unintended consequences, change is not always bad. Change can lead to a more efficient and effective way of doing things. Change can bring about the ability to get more done, do things faster or with less effort. Change can bring about a change of image from old fashioned and stodgy to progressive and enlightened; you know, modern, but in a world in which change is feared and to be avoided at all possible costs; where change is bad, change will never occur. Things will stay the same and they will not get any better, until change is forced upon "them" by an outside entity, or progress marches on and over those that stand in the way.
Cowards are persons that fear change, any change, but should know better. However, they are not tribes of under-educated, third-world fiefs or serfs in a feudal system. The cowards are those that tremble at the mere thought of doing things differently; they think that if things stay the same, they have nothing to fear. They hide from progress and they wallow in the behavior of the past, governed by their fears, their insecurities and their false perceptions. Cowards do not realize that change is not only necessary; it is inevitable, just as progress is inevitable. They do not understand that they will suffer the fate of the Dodo if they do not change and accept change, for progressive thinkers will take charge and replace them in the blink of an eye. The cowards will be left trembling in the wake of change, having no idea what has happened to them, decrying their fate, a fate they truly deserve.
Most things can be done better as technology improves, as new methods of accomplishing a task or process are developed, so change is not always bad. However, just because we can change it, does not mean we necessarily should; to paraphrase Dr. Ian Macolm in Jurrasic Park, "You were so busy patting yourself on the back that you could, you never bothered to ask whether you should." We have spent so much time in our society changing things for the sake of change; we have screwed up a lot of things that never needed fixing. My personal belief is that the education system in this country that focused on reading, writing and arithmetic, did not need to be changed. We changed it because we could, not because we should. We had to justify the employment of all sorts of bureaucrats that justify their existence by changing things for the sake of changing things. Sometimes you have to look at things from the position of, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." There are changes that need to be implemented, where things aren't working, but the cowards won't and that is a damn shame.
Change can cause discomfort. New, different and exciting can sometimes be the cause of fear; fear of the unknown. You do the best you can to figure out the benefits of a change, but you cannot always be right on in your determination, and often there are the dreaded "unintended consequences." You had no idea that unintended consequences would occur, but once the change is implemented, you discover, sometimes rapidly, sometimes slowly, that there are results that you did not anticipate. If you listen to the conservative politicians and believers, the reason the economy took a dump was the fact that the liberals in Congress decided to change the rules regulating mortgages. Liberals have long believed that everyone should be able to own a home and dictated, by legislative fiat, that mortgages had to be given to certain minority groups, in a certain percentage. Ultimately, this resulted in persons that could not afford mortgages getting financed for mortgages on which they could not possibly make the payments. Time passes and poof, they default. This happens all at once, the residential real estate market takes a huge crap on the economy and we get "The Great Recession."
An excellent example of this is a girlfriend I used to have. She refinanced her home at 120% of the market value at the height of the market; the assumption being that the homes would continue to appreciate at the over-heated rate they had for the previous several years. In order to be able to make the payments, she amortized the payments over 50 years (she was in her mid-40's at the time...you do the math). This was the only way she could afford the payments, and she used the money to pay off her car and her credit cards, etc. This succeeded in financing her debt over 50 years instead of the usual 5 for a car (again, you do the math, 4% for 50 years vs. a higher interest for only 5 years). Oh, did I mention that this was an adjustable rate mortgage? Well, the rate adjusted up and she had to do everything she could to make the payment, including getting a second job. She teeters on the brink of losing her home...oh well. I am a little distraught only because I, being the nice guy I am, and being able to at the time, loaned her the money to make a down payment. This is money on which I have not seen payments in a couple of years, but she was able to buy a new Harley...oh well. In many cases, this same thing happened and people lost their homes to foreclosure. The real estate market crashed and burned and still lies in a heap of rubble as I type, but again, I digress.
I will not argue the point as to whether the conservatives among us are correct or not, but, if true, I will say it is an excellent example of unintended consequences. We decide to make sure all minorities can share in the "American Dream," regardless of whether they can afford to make the payments on their new homes and, as a result, we get an economic downturn the likes we have not seen in 80 years. This does not consider the fact that the mortgage foreclosure has devastated these people's credit even further into the future than it might have been before.
Many years ago, as part of a military project, I was doing what we called "hearts and minds" work in a far-off foreign land. One of the things we were doing was to train the farmers how to use things like fertilizer, rotate crops and till hillsides to avoid erosion. It was what we called Peace Corps work too. Each time we tried to get the villagers to do anything different, their reply was always the same, "But we have always done it this way." There was no rational reason for not doing things differently. There were no unintended consequences, just an irrational desire to not change because "we have always done it this way."
In spite of the rather ominous example of unintended consequences, change is not always bad. Change can lead to a more efficient and effective way of doing things. Change can bring about the ability to get more done, do things faster or with less effort. Change can bring about a change of image from old fashioned and stodgy to progressive and enlightened; you know, modern, but in a world in which change is feared and to be avoided at all possible costs; where change is bad, change will never occur. Things will stay the same and they will not get any better, until change is forced upon "them" by an outside entity, or progress marches on and over those that stand in the way.
Cowards are persons that fear change, any change, but should know better. However, they are not tribes of under-educated, third-world fiefs or serfs in a feudal system. The cowards are those that tremble at the mere thought of doing things differently; they think that if things stay the same, they have nothing to fear. They hide from progress and they wallow in the behavior of the past, governed by their fears, their insecurities and their false perceptions. Cowards do not realize that change is not only necessary; it is inevitable, just as progress is inevitable. They do not understand that they will suffer the fate of the Dodo if they do not change and accept change, for progressive thinkers will take charge and replace them in the blink of an eye. The cowards will be left trembling in the wake of change, having no idea what has happened to them, decrying their fate, a fate they truly deserve.
Most things can be done better as technology improves, as new methods of accomplishing a task or process are developed, so change is not always bad. However, just because we can change it, does not mean we necessarily should; to paraphrase Dr. Ian Macolm in Jurrasic Park, "You were so busy patting yourself on the back that you could, you never bothered to ask whether you should." We have spent so much time in our society changing things for the sake of change; we have screwed up a lot of things that never needed fixing. My personal belief is that the education system in this country that focused on reading, writing and arithmetic, did not need to be changed. We changed it because we could, not because we should. We had to justify the employment of all sorts of bureaucrats that justify their existence by changing things for the sake of changing things. Sometimes you have to look at things from the position of, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." There are changes that need to be implemented, where things aren't working, but the cowards won't and that is a damn shame.
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