Were These All Accidents?

There were four events this week that inspired my column. I won’t necessarily tell about them in the order they happened, but they could all have the same outcome.

First, on July 7th, 39-year-old Shannon Stone reached over the railing at a Texas Rangers game to catch a souvenir baseball thrown into the stands by Texas outfielder Josh Hamilton, after the outfielder had retrieved the foul ball off the bat of Oakland A’s hitter Connor Jackson. Stone tumbled over the railing and fell 20 feet to his death while his 6-year-old son watched from his adjacent seat. It is truly a sad story.

Then, the very next day, Sergeant Hackemer, aged 29, who had lost both legs and suffered brain injury in an IED explosion in Iraq in 2008, was riding a roller coaster at Darien Lake Amusement Park near Buffalo, New York with his 20-year-old nephew. The Ride of Steel reached speeds of 50mph and a height of 208 feet. At the very top of the ride, Hackemer came loose from his harness and tumbled out of the front row of the car to the ground below. He died instantly. His two young daughters were in the park with him, but were not on the ride.

On Monday, July 11th, Keith Carmickle was attending the Home Run Derby at Chase Stadium in Phoenix. He, his brother and some friends were seated by a railing and were attempting to catch the home run balls. Keith, whose age was not given, stood on a narrow 18-inch-high table next to the rail to try to catch a ball. He missed the ball and tumbled over the edge with a drop of 20 feet to the ground below. Luckily, his brother and friends were able to grab his legs and shorts and pull him back from the abyss. He reported no injuries and was allowed to remain at the stadium.

All of these closely related incidents/accidents occurred in a four-day period, and all of them could and probably will result in lawsuits. Regardless of the outcome of those suits, some lawyers will make big bucks, some undeserving people will probably be awarded huge compensation, and some reputable businesses will suffer damages and or bad publicity.

I have no sympathy for any of these three people. They all knowingly took risks that come with that kind of ignorant behavior. I don’t believe any of them deserves any award for their stupidity.

In the case of the disabled soldier, he knew what he was doing, and he had a supposedly responsible adult with him who should have had better sense than to allow him to ride. There is some controversy over whether of not the attendant initially refused to allow him on the ride. Regardless, we don’t know his state of mind, but it is possible that he chose an assisted suicide with a big payoff for his heirs. Choosing the front row of the first car would support that possibility. It is likely that a jury will have to decide who is liable.

Oh yes, there was a fourth incident/accident that occurred. It was my own.

On the day after Independence Day I went into a cardio-vascular clinic for an outpatient procedure called atrial ablation. In it, a laser-tipped catheter is inserted in the saphenous vein in the upper thigh and fed up to the atrium of the heart. Then a small laser burst burns some tissue in the right atrium and forms scar tissue that interrupts an out-of-control pacemaker to bring the heartbeat back to normal sinus rhythm. The procedure was performed to stop atrial fibrillation, or atrial flutter. The procedure was successful, and I was in and back out within eight hours.

The problem occurred during the procedure, but didn’t manifest itself until several days later. I developed a leakage from the femoral artery that was apparently caused by a small nick from the catheter. My cardiologist admitted that was likely the cause and he apologized for the unintended pain and discomfort. He sent me back to the clinic for an ultrasound to determine the extent and apply remedy. The technician/nurse located the leak and attempted to seal it with heavy pressure applied directly to the site for about 25 minutes. (That is one of those cures that is almost more painful than the malady) Unfortunately, it didn’t work, but a vascular surgeon was consulted and he determined that the leak would self-seal in a few days.

I am currently waiting for that relief while doing my best Walter Brennan impression. I am scheduled to go back for ultrasound again this Monday, and if the natural seal has not occurred, I’ll get a shot of Thrombin to create a seal that will stop the bleed.

I know that I could probably get a lawyer and go to court over my pain and suffering and any added expense that the follow-up causes.

However, it is not my nature to be vindictive. I dislike our current justice system with a passion that is only surpassed by my general dislike for lawyers. I trust my cardiologist and believe he was doing his best for me when the accidental wounding occurred. And I don’t like lawsuits, mainly because most of them are frivolous and unnecessarily damaging to good people and institutions.

I will not be taking any action against the doctor or the clinic. Am I weird, warped or just plain foolish? Well, I leave that to you to judge, but I am the wounded party, and I agree with that Nietzsche saying, “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Of course, I do hope that, unlike Nietzsche, who went mad shortly after he wrote that to disprove his own statement, I make a full recovery and my heart continues to function normally.

A Question of Timing

I was reviewing some of the many photos I’ve taken on my travels throughout the United States and I realized something very important. It is something that I’ve left out of almost all of my extensive planning for the road trips I take. The missing ingredient is timing.

Whenever I travel, I try to schedule at least three stops per day at some historic, natural or architectural attractions. Oh, I do get to most of the ones I’ve put on the itinerary, but I can’t begin to recount the number of roadside wonders that I’ve arrived at before they are open or after they’ve closed for the day.

Well, I might not be able to recount them all, but here is a partial list of those great things I’ve had to sadly go past without seeing them all because I arrived there at the wrong time of the day, or week, or year.

Point Reyes Light was a destination that I had visited previously and I wanted to take my wife, sister and brother-in-law to see it on our trip to San Francisco. If you’ve never visited it, the lighthouse sits on a rocky spit of land that juts out over the Pacific Ocean. To reach it you have to walk down a staircase and path over the spine and the steep path is about a quarter mile in length. The view on either side or looking back down the coast is absolutely stunning, and the lighthouse itself is a beauty, perched about 200 feet above the water.

We had been at a family reunion in San Jose over the weekend. On Monday the four of us started by crossing the Golden Gate Bridge and went up into the headlands above there. Then we took in Muir Woods and drove over the Pacific Coast Highway to Point Reyes. We arrived at around 1 PM, and hiked from the parking lot about 400 yards to the gift shop and stairway. That was when we discovered that the lighthouse is closed on Mondays. We couldn’t even go partway down the spine to see the view, but had to content ourselves with looking at the path and lighthouse from above.

The Leggs Inn, an eclectic restaurant located on the Lower Peninsula of Michigan was a destination on the Michigan trip I took in 2010. I had heard good stories about the food and the atmosphere inside the restaurant, so I was primed for a visit.

My traveling companion, Tom, and I started out from Traverse City after breakfast and drove to the town of Charlevoix and then on to Petoskey. We spent some time scavenging on a rocky beach for the famed Petoskey Stones – didn’t find any – and then continued up through Harbor Springs to Cross Village, home of The Leggs.

We arrived at the restaurant at about 10 AM only to learn that it didn’t open for another hour. We thought we had killed enough time to get there for an early lunch. The place was locked up tight, and even after we had spent some time driving through the small town, it still wasn’t open. We just couldn’t spend any more time there, since we had other places to visit, including a ferry ride over to Mackinac Island. Alas, The Leggs would have to be scrubbed from our itinerary.

I later found out that I had also missed the Hobbit Houses of Charlevoix, which likely would have consumed that extra time, but may have eliminated some of our time to visit Mackinac Island. I might have to return to that area sometime and see everything with a longer stay in the area.

The Garden of Eden in Kansas is another of those weird roadside wonders. This one is in the center of the town of Lucas. It features a lot of stone figures and stone trees, and I mean concrete stone. The man who built the Garden of Eden way back in the early 20th Century is one of the featured attractions, as his glass enclosed and preserved corpse rests inside for viewing. Yes, he is displayed on his funeral bier inside the strange house.

I really wanted to see everything in the Garden of Eden, but we arrived there just past 5 o’clock on a Sunday, and the place was closed for the night. If you look at a map of central Kansas, you’ll see that Lucas is off the beaten path, so the side trip was a complete waste of time.

The Looff Carousel is a huge and fully operational carousel that is located in Crescent Park south of Providence, RI. It is housed inside a specially built round building, and you can ride it for a very reasonable fee, 75 cents. That was our intent when Judy and I visited there in May of 2011.

This time we arrived on a Thursday afternoon. You would think we would be there at just the right time of day and week. You would be wrong!

The sign on the door to the building indicated that the Looff Carousel is only open on weekends. I suppose that makes sense, since they probably need a lot of riders to keep the place going, and weekends are the only time the kids are free in May. Boy, I sure was disappointed to have to miss even seeing the carousel. The building was locked up with nobody around at all.

Folks, it really does pay off to read up on places you want to visit before you go. It’s a lot easier to alter plans by a day or even a few hours in order to avoid the heartbreak of not getting to see the attraction after you’ve traveled that far to do so.

Have I learned from my experience? Well, apparently not, because the span of time from the first to the last of those descriptions was fourteen years (1997 to 2011). Much as I like to think of myself as a seasoned traveler, I still make some terrible blunders in my planning.

Do We Celebrate The Wrong Independence Day?

We in America all receive numerous email messages around this time of year relating to our celebration of the 4th of July, or Independence Day. I received one this week that stood out, not because it was more patriotic than the others, but because it seemed to contradict them.

The email message was titled, “John Adams writing about the 4th of July.” Of course, John Adams, our second president was a very important figure among the Founding Fathers. Therefore, his writings had to be important and sacrosanct.

Here is the exact quote from a letter to Adams’ wife, Abigail:

The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more. You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not. (The Book of Abigail and John: Selected Letters of the Adams Family, 1762-1784, Harvard University Press, 1975, 142).

I don’t know about you, but I did a literal double take when I saw that date at the beginning of the quote. Why would John Adams consider July 2, 1776 to be our Independence Day? So I did some research and here is what I found.

It turns out that the above quote was taken from a letter John Adams wrote on July 3rd, after the Continental Congress voted in the affirmative on a resolution by Richard Henry Lee calling for independence from Great Britain. That vote took place the day before on July 2nd.

Here is his resolution of July 2, 1776:

Resolved: That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.

After the vote tally, a committee was appointed to draft the actual statement. It consisted of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman and Robert Livingston. They in turn appointed Jefferson to draft the document.

While John Adams was penning his letter to his wife, Abigail, Thomas Jefferson was penning a more important document that would eclipse the events of July 2nd. He was drafting the Declaration of Independence, which he presented the following day for reading and signing. Thus July 4th became the true day of independence.

Richard Henry Lee, the person who first wrote and proposed independence, wasn’t even present two days later when the Jefferson document was signed. He had gone back to his home in Virginia. He did, however, sign later. Eventually he became the president of the Second Continental Congress and later a senator from Virginia in the United States Senate. His name has never been closely associated with the Declaration of Independence and he faded into obscurity in history.

As to the true date of our independence, I can understand why it became July 4th instead of July 2nd. It’s a lot harder to say “The Second of July” than it is “The Fourth of July.” The latter expression just kind of rolls off the tongue.

So now you’ve had a history lesson that I hope will motivate you to think about the true meaning of Independence Day and how far we’ve come from that fateful day 235 years ago.

God bless America!

Scamming the System

A little over a year ago I wrote a column detailing how I was cheated out of getting the First Time Buyers credit for purchasing our new town home. The real estate dealer, who was coincidentally the wife of the builder, raised the selling price by just a little less than the amount of the credit. Therefore, I bought the property at an inflated price and the credit I claimed at tax time only compensated me for a small part of that inflated cost.

The only reason I caught on to the scam is that my wife went across the street to see what the same model of town home was selling for after the First Time Buyers Credit expired. The newly built ones were priced several thousand dollars less than ours had been. That immediately lowered the value of our place by that amount, so we lost our refund credit entirely.

I refer to that scam now because there is a similar one taking place right now, but it isn’t in the housing market, but in the automobile market, another troubled sector of our weak and failing economy. I only learned of it a few weeks ago. The news was contained in an article I probably sent to you titled, Greed is Good as a Tax Credit by John Ransom. (The actual title of the article, which I admit I altered so that my left-leaning family and friends would read it, is, Dems: Greed is Good as a Tax Credit)

In that article Mr. Ransom cites evidence that, among other scams that cheat the system and steal from the American Taxpayer, many General Motors car dealers – it might not be ALL, but a huge majority - who sell the new Chevy Volt hybrid car are creating their own scam.

The dealers title the cars as they receive them, claim the $7,500 credit available for any buyer of these $40k+ cars, and then turn around and sell them as ‘used’ cars with low mileage – in some cars, only 10-30 miles on the odometer – at full Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price. Of course, the purchaser of this ‘used’ car thinks it is new, but is not eligible to claim the credit. He or she might not find that out until tax time when the credit is disallowed.

The GM Volt scam has two consequences. The first is that unscrupulous dealers are cheating the purchaser and ultimately, the taxpayers. You probably already know that car dealers are among the most distrusted of all sales people. The second is that is enables all interested parties, including the Obama Administration and the “eco-freaks,” to claim that the Volt is so popular that Chevrolet can’t make them fast enough. After all, new ones aren’t available on the car dealers’ lots, only slightly used ones.

Disregarding the fact that the $7,500 credit is being paid to the wrong people through fraud, the second consequence is just another lie we’re being told to support the contention that our economy is in the recovery phase.

Ask any of those millions – I believe the number is over 4 million, possibly as high as 6 million as I write this – who are unemployed and have been so for two years or more. They will tell you that their economy certainly isn’t in the recovery phase.

I’m not making any judgments, just reporting the facts. Can you live with them?

The Pledge of Allegiance

(This is a repeat of a column I first wrote and published in June of 2007, but it is as relevant today as it was then. In fact, I received another of those bothersome emails just this week.)

Last Tuesday was National Flag Day. I hope you displayed your flag properly and paused at some point during the day to honor our flag. Perhaps you even recited the Pledge of Allegiance. If so, did you include those two inflammatory words, “under God” in your pledge?

I PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE TO THE FLAG,
OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,
AND TO THE REPUBLIC FOR WHICH IT STANDS,
ONE NATION, UNDER GOD, INDIVISIBLE,
WITH LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL!

I’ve received the email promoting “Under God” at least a hundred times. I’m sure you have too. I’m getting tired of seeing it in the subject line, and I delete the message ASAP. It’s not that I’m not patriotic, because I am, but I find the whole controversy over the words is focused on the wrong ones. The whole pledge is a sham.

Do you know that the Pledge of Allegiance was written by a socialist named Francis Bellamy in 1892 for a popular family magazine of the time, Youth’s Companion? The owners of the magazine used it—and the 500,000 kids who subscribed to it—to sell flags to schools, and they were successful beyond their wildest dreams; over 26,000 schools bought them. Until that time, flags were rarely seen in front of or in the schools.

The original words to the pledge were, “I pledge allegiance to my flag and to the Republic for which it stands – one nation indivisible – with liberty and justice for all.” This was the first nationalistic pledge in our history. The man who wrote it was in favor of nationalizing most of the American economy and he hated our capitalistic system. They didn’t call it communism back in those days, but that’s what it was he wanted. Reverend Bellamy also wanted to use the words “fraternity” and “equality” in the pledge, but he decided that the words were too radical and omitted them.

The first known public recitation of the Pledge Of Allegiance was at the Columbus Day ceremony commemorating the quadricentennial anniversary of his discovery of the New World. The publishers of Youth’s Companion, arranged with the National Education Association to have the national public schools observe the day with the use of the American Flag. They also got Congress and President Benjamin Harrison to announce a national proclamation making the public school flag the center of the Columbus Day celebrations for 1892. (Margarette S. Miller, Twenty-three Words Printcraft Press, Portsmouth, VA 1976 pp. 63-65)

The original pledge was recited while giving a stiff, uplifted right hand salute. That was criticized and replaced with the hand over the heart during WWII because it resembled the German salute that went along with “Heil Hitler.” The words, “my flag” also were changed to, “the flag of the United States of America” because it was feared that the children of immigrants might confuse “my flag” for the flag of their homeland. Congress and President Eisenhower added the phrase, “under God,” in 1954 at the urging of the Knights of Columbus. (Christopher J. Kaufmann, Knights of Columbus Harper and Row, NY 1982 pp 385-386)

Only two nations in the world have and use a “pledge” to a flag, the United States and the Philippines, and the latter took on a pledge when the Spain ceded the colony to the U. S. at the conclusion of the Spanish-American War in 1898. The pledge custom was retained after Philippine independence was granted in 1946.

Think for a moment about the words. Do your eyes well up and do you get a lump in your throat when you recite them, like they sometimes do when you hear or sing the National Anthem? Of course not! They are just a series of monotone words that—now admit it—cause us to reflect more on the controversial additions than the meaning itself. Some even omit those two words.

The words of the Pledge of Allegiance are recited everyday in schools and at most official public meetings. However, if most of us knew the strange and disreputable origin of these words, regardless of their import today, we might not be reciting the pledge at all, let alone the words, “under God.”

(Portions of this text were borrowed from the Internet document The Strange Origin of the Pledge of Allegiance by John W. Baer.)

Strange Convergence of Events

I’m going to tell you a true story that has a mystical slant. You might call it coincidence. Some might even say it was fate, and I really don’t know how or why this occurred, but occur it did. It still gives me goose bumps today to recall it.

My maternal grandmother was born in 1878. She was (as grandmothers usually are) closer to me than my mother. She also had a sense about her that she knew secret things about us kids that she just shouldn’t have known. For instance, she could always find our hiding places for our ‘secret’ objects and she would know about things we had done out of her sight. Of course, she was a direct descendant of one of the Salem Witches, so we always knew from where her powers came.

Grandma McKeever lived to a ripe old age, was approaching her 99th birthday and was living with her daughter – actually my mother was her niece, but that’s another story – in Buffalo, New York when I moved my family from Buffalo to Omaha, Nebraska in May of 1976.

In the fall of the next year, I was called back to Buffalo as a witness for the prosecution in a trial. That was due to the fact that I had been the agent-on-duty when the defendant had picked up a package from our freight department at work. Unbeknownst to me at the time, that package contained pornographic materials, which became the focus of the jury trial two years later.

I was served with a subpoena in Omaha to appear at court expense in Buffalo to testify. This was in October of 1977, and I went back to Buffalo as ordered. I did decline the court offer of hotel and expenses, however, since I wanted to visit with Mom and Grandma, and I certainly preferred home cooking to restaurant food. I stayed at Mom’s house for the two days of my testimony in the trial.

My part in the trial took up Monday and Tuesday, so I had some quality time to visit at the house those evenings. I left Buffalo for Omaha on a Wednesday morning, but my homecoming was short-lived.

On Thursday evening I received a call from Mom that Grandma McKeever had passed away that day. I was back on a plane for Buffalo the very next day for the funeral.

It was truly amazing to me that I was able to have one last visit with my beloved Grandma McKeever just a few short hours before she died at the age of 99. It would not have happened except for that trial, which had been delayed several times.

Call me superstitious – I am also a descendant of the Salem Witches – but I’ve always wondered if there was some intervention that caused the convergence of events that enabled me to have that one last reunion.

It has been nearly thirty-four years since the passing, but I can still envision a strange smile on her face as Grandma McKeever bid me goodbye that last time. What a gift!

New Age Conservation

I’ve recently returned from a road trip to New England, and while I found everything up there to be very scenic, there was one aspect of the great deciduous forests that disturbed me. They were choked with undergrowth and fallen trees and branches and leaves. Those conditions invite forest fires, and once started, they burn uncontrollably for weeks and even months.

I have to admit that I didn’t go into the forests in the lower New England states, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts, but in the other three, Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire, the forests were littered with nature’s debris.



I couldn’t help comparing the sight of those forests to the ones I visited in the Black Hills of South Dakota a couple of years ago. One of the neatest sights there was the stacks of debris every 100 feet or so throughout the forests. And the floor of those forests was clean of any brush. Tree trunks were visible all the way to the ground, and there was very little flammable material in between those trunks.

We have a forest area within a few miles of my home, which is also cleared of all undergrowth, and the floor of it is clean and fireproof. If all forest areas looked like this, we wouldn’t have the huge fires that have plagued the Southwest, and especially West Texas this year. (They are in their fifth straight month of drought over there.)




Obviously, some people had worked pretty hard and long to accomplish this cleanup, and it was still in progress, since the stacks hadn’t yet been collected for disposal.

This is just a guess on my part, but I suspect some of that underbrush gets put through a wood chipper and recycled back into nature as mulch, while part of it is used to create good hiking and biking trails in those same forests.

So, what is my point? Where could we ever get enough volunteers to clean up the forests in New England like they did in South Dakota or here is Georgia? You are perfectly correct to ask those questions, but I have an answer.

We currently have unemployment in the country above 9%, and congress has recently passed yet another extension of the unemployment insurance payment to people who have been out of work for over two years. Since the states quit paying after only 26 weeks, that means that you and I have been footing the bill since then with out federal tax dollars.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look as though the jobless will find any work soon, and I’m sure you’ve read or heard the same reports as I have that continuation of payments provides a disincentive for many people to even seek gainful employment. I heard this week that if we counted the people who are not even actively seeking jobs, the true unemployment rate would be about eleven-and-a half percent. That represents a couple of million slackers.

Add to that the number of fraudulent claims that are apparently being filed by people who are actually working “off the books” and collecting benefits too. Frankly, we are paying way too much taxpayer money and getting absolutely nothing in return.

My solution is to require those able-bodied people on extended unemployment benefits - say anything beyond thirty-nine weeks - to take part ten days a month in a mini-CCC work group. (Don’t know what CCC stands for? Google it, and learn!) They would work 5 days a week with a weekend off between work periods. During those two weeks the group will participate in the forest cleanup within fifty miles of their home.

I’m certain that there is a model in South Dakota that could be followed to set up the work group. I’m also sure that there will be a lot more self-motivation among the unemployed to find a new job to replace the one they lost, even at a lower wage. There’s nothing like a manual labor job to spark initiative to escape it.

Please, those of you who usually respond or comment on my columns, don’t tell me about how politically incorrect this would be. After all, it only requires about one-third of their time and effort to “earn” their ‘free” benefits. That payment is not covered by the unemployment insurance premiums after the first twenty-six weeks.

I also am taking into account that there would have to be some purchases of equipment and maybe even clothing to outfit the workers. I’m confident that the investment in that infrastructure would be rewarded when fewer people collect the unemployment after they find a replacement job.

I suspect there are some details I’ve left out of the formula – I’m not a businessman or an entrepreneur, after all – but it is a means of utilizing all that excess labor we seem to have for the public good.

In case you’re wondering, I do intend to present this idea to my congressman and both of my senators for their consideration. Wouldn’t it be interesting to have a program that FDR started way back in the Great Depression rekindled (a pun, in case you didn’t catch it) by the Republicans?

Your comments are welcome with the exception I specified above.