How Things Used To Be

How Things Used to Be

You hear people say it all the time. "Those were the days", they say. When you're young you don't think you'll ever say it. That's probably because, when you're young, you don't understand what the phrase means. I recently started saying, "Those were the days". I also recently turned fifty, so I guess the phrase means more to me now than it might have some years ago. I think of the phrase when I think of how different things used to be.

There were days I remember when I was in school. The teachers had no problem keeping order and discipline in our classrooms. Kids who misbehaved were disciplined by sitting in the corner, or if the infraction was serious enough, they were sent to the Principal for a firm application of his fraternity paddle. Kids didn't continue to act up in schools and parents didn't sue the schools for disciplining their children. This took place in a rural society where little boys were not expelled for trying to kiss little girls and almost all of the boys carried pocket knives because both of those things were pretty much expected. Teacher strikes were things that happened in the big cities. My academic career was never interrupted for a teacher's strike until after I finished junior college. The biggest difference is that back then actual learning was possible for the kids who cared to apply themselves. Those were the days.

I start to think of those days when I look at our churches. There were very few churches of over 1,000 members then. Even the least popular churches were at least forty percent filled on an average Sunday, but that still only represented about 100 to 250 parishioners in the bigger churches. The most common question about religion back then was, "Where do you go to church?" Today the question is, "Do you go to church?" Were we more devout back then? I don't think so, but there seemed to be more consciousness of morality then and more of a sense of propriety. Those were the days.

I think of those days when I go into the outdoors, as well. Then, rivers were safe to wade in cutoffs and tennis shoes. Now the same rivers we used to wade and fish in Northeastern Illinois are polluted to the point that they smell like a container of floor stripper. Then, you could go fishing in a park and people would generally have the courtesy to keep their voices down when they walked by the place where you were fishing. Now, children are taught that they have an inside voice and an outside voice and that the outside voice is allowed to be as loud as they can make it, which they do whenever and wherever they get outside. Maybe our wildlife isn't really disappearing as quickly as we think. Maybe they just don't like our outside voices. Fishing was also a different sport then. People went fishing as a pastime or to put food on the table then. There was no thought of making tens of thousands of dollars for catching more fish than somebody else over a couple of days. Fishing was fun, not a job. Those were the days!

I think of those days when I try to take my family camping. Back then, with a tent, a car and few bucks a night, you could camp your way to just about anywhere. Try finding a tent spot now in most campgrounds in America. They are almost non-existent. Camping doesn't mean camping anymore. It means parking. Campgrounds have become RV parking lots, the tent spots replaced with gravel, cement or asphalt pads to keep the air conditioned mobile cabins from becoming mired if it should rain. On one particular trip, our family got our routine of pitching camp honed to the point where we could set up the tent, put the bedding in place and have supper cooked within twenty minutes. Then we would drift off to sleep with only our sleeping bags and the floor of the tent between us and the ground. Dawn would usually find us awake, enjoying the cool and peaceful surroundings as bacon and eggs sizzled over our campfire. Nothing has ever tasted better than those breakfasts. Those were the days!

Do I mean to say that I think we should return to those days? I don't think it's possible . First of all, America isn't the same now as it was then. There was more of a sense of innocence then. I think people were more courteous then. I think our society considered right and wrong less ambiguous concepts then. But then again, as I have been saying, those were the days!

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A Job or A Snow Job?

There is a big problem confronting job seekers today. Many of the advertisements in job sections do not actually lead to someone interested in hiring workers. A growing percentage of them lead to a "business opportunity". What is meant by the term business opportunity is a company that sells franchises or kits or access to information so that the gullible can supposedly make a six-digit salary by working 10 hours or less per week. There are many who will say that we should know that these offers are too good to be true. They are easy enough to figure out once you start to get the actual information. However, these companies are getting more and more secretive with the information one would need to find out that the job in the ad is actually a come on for multilevel marketing or an outright scam.

There are some certain signs that a business engages in ripping off people they are supposedly trying to "hire". Do they have an infomercial on TV constantly? Do they promise six-digit salaries or ridiculously low investments of time or effort? Does the person leading the program claim to have become a millionaire by using this "system" that they now wish to share with you, for a fee of course?

Of course, if we look at the cause and effect of these signs, these programs start to fall apart strictly on the basis of logic. Infomercials have to pay for air time, which is not cheap. Somebody has to be bringing in an awful lot of money to keep these programs on TV. Nobody is going to pay anyone over $100,000 per year for working part time at something they just learned how to do. It may work that way one time in five billion in Hollywood or Wall Street, but almost any millionaire you research will turn out to be somebody who worked long and hard to learn their craft and they continue to work long and hard at it. Furthermore, real millionaires who make their money through their knowledge and hard work don't need your money, and they aren't about to tell anyone outside their own organizations how they did it, either.

One company advertises constantly for people to sell their products. Claims are made of tremendous incomes and work schedules that should represent the maximum number of hours a person watches TV in a day, not the number of hours they work in a week. Along with the initial fees for signing up for their opportunity, you will need to pay them $39 per month for a website that is exactly like the website they provide to every one of their other salespeople.

There is a way to fix this problem. Newspapers and internet job boards could start posting the business opportunities separately from the actual jobs. The dividing line should be simple. Does a job seeker have to pay a fee of any kind to work at the position you are advertising? If so, then it is a business opportunity, not a job and the ad is for something you are trying to sell, not for a person you need to hire. Of course this would require integrity on the part of our nation's newspapers and the people who run internet job boards.

By the way, there is one procedure that is very effective in the internet age for sniffing out scams and rip offs masquerading as viable jobs. Simply put the name of the company into a Google search along with the term rip off or scam. You can usually gauge by the quality and quantity of hits that come up whether or not you would want to be associated with a particular company. This becomes somewhat more complicated when some these companies go to great lengths to mask their company names or to change their names when they stop getting enough people signing up. That makes it even easier in one way. Never sign up or even continue to talk about signing up with a company that won't even tell you their name. Is there no indication of the company name on the website they sent you to so you could get "more information"? If you're still on such a site after more than three minutes, you're late for the door.

Anyway, it's doubtful that these practices will change anytime soon. Companies such as these are responsible for a major portion of the advertising income for televisions stations and newspapers. It would probably require some sort of legislation to get these practices stopped but that would require legislators to pass laws curtailing advertising which brings income to media outlets they depend upon to get properly quoted and hopefully elected. Here we go requiring integrity of people again when there is money involved. If only the people who ran these ads would show some integrity, maybe we could answer ads in the job section with some hope of finding an actual job.

Verbal Camouflage

Aren't you amazed that we, as a country, have continued to allow our lawmakers to engage in a horribly manipulative practice while they supposedly work at making law and administering the country's budgets. A lot of you are asking yourselves just exactly which of the many shady practices found on Capitol Hill might be the focus of this piece. Might it be lobbying?

No, lobbying is a much more blatant abuse than the one I am thinking about. Franking? That is also very open greed and not as clandestine as the practice that currently concerns me. No, probably the worst practice we allow our lawmakers to engage in is the practice of attaching riders to bills that have nothing to do with the purpose of the bill to which they are attached. This practice is responsible for more pork than all the slaughterhouses in this country combined. Pork is not the worst of it!

There are lawmakers who use the rider as a political weapon. Suppose you are a member of Congress and your constituents back home really want you to get a law passed making it illegal for school bus drivers to use cell phones while the bus is under way. This seems like a good idea, so you draft a bill and you get some support and you get your turn to speak and you present your bill. Now the problems begin. The bill must go through committees. This is where the riders start to show up.

Some other members of Congress see every bill as a vehicle that may get their pet projects approved, so they start attaching riders to your bill. This is especially pronounced if the original bill represents a good idea or at least something that has a good chance of being voted through because nobody would want to be seen voting against it. This last concept is what makes the rider such an effective political weapon.

Suppose there is a situation in which you would want to embarrass your political opponents. You know, a situation like it's a day that ends in Y. Perhaps you might look at a bill such as the one I proposed above and you think up a rider that you know is so odious to the opponent's party that they will all vote against it, even at the cost of losing the original bill. Once the votes are recorded, you can smugly point across the aisle and claim that the other party wants school children to ride in buses driven by people madly text messaging away. This is called the Two-Party System. It is also the reason that so little gets accomplished in the chambers of our government.

The problem that should be glaringly apparent to those of us who vote these people into Congress is this; this system can only be used in this way by someone who doesn't care at all if sound legislation gets passed, as long as they get their way!

What can we do about this problem? Would a line-item veto do the job? I don't think so. There are two big problems with the line-item veto. The most obvious one, with all due respect to our current Commander-in-Chief, is that he, as well as those who came before and those who will follow him, are creatures of their parties. By the time they achieve our nation's highest post, the in-fighting is completely inculcated and the responses are so automatic as to be nearly involuntary, like a knee jerk reflex.

The other problem is that the line-item veto leaves all the responsibility on the President. The Checks and Balances system is supposed to leave the responsibility on the President to stop bad laws with the veto. It was not set up for the President to spend inordinate time cleaning up sloppy laws. Giving the President a line-item veto would be like saying that a bunch of boat builders should feel free to deliver boats with barnacles all over their hulls, which the CEO of the boat company is then expected to scrape away. Obviously no business would ever seek to operate in such a way, so why expect it of our government?

Shouldn't we expect our lawmakers to start crafting quality laws without all the barnacles, er, riders, on them? Maybe the problem is that they have to work so hard. With only about 200 working days per year, at least ten of which are usually taken up by voting themselves a raise, how can they possibly give good hearings to all the bills that are proposed every year? The answer is, they can't!

Maybe the answer is in two laws. Only two laws are needed to put the whole mess right. I know there are lots of ideas for laws. A law to bring back the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Project Administration has gotten a lot of discussion in circles I have been part of. There would be a lot fewer homeless people on the streets and the government would be getting some worth for its money. A lot of the people currently on food stamps and SSI could be put to work. Some folks in Minneapolis might like a new bridge.

No, the two laws necessary to fix Congress would have to do with the lawmaking process. First, we need an end to riders. Riders have never accomplished anything but injecting pork into our budget and unnecessary legislation adding to our already over-regulated society. We have laws for all kinds of garbage that the Framers would never have begun to try to regulate. That brings us to law number two for keeping the lawmaking process under control. We need a law that limits the number of laws each member of Congress can propose per year. This would do a number of good things.

First, bills would get more discussion, both in the chamber and in committee, before coming up for a vote. Additionally, there would be less need for riders because all the members would get an equal chance to propose bills. Of course one bill would need to be added to the quiver of the Speaker of the House, this being the budget for the following year. That might just about do it. A lot of people will say that this is an idealistic, naive solution. History says that there were leaders of many other countries who said the same kinds of things about the founding of the United States and the leaders who brought it about. Maybe these are the kinds of ideas we need more of today.