A love affair – with your money

A long time ago, when I was a much younger man, I fell in love and decided that I wanted to get married. And of course when I proposed to my intended bride I had a diamond ring in hand to legitimize the proceedings.

With me being a student and of very limited means at the time, the ring contained only a very, very small diamond, but I was honoring the engagement ring tradition as best I could. Everybody knows that a marriage proposal has to include a diamond ring or it’s not a real proposal, right?

It was something that I really didn’t give much thought to at the time, and I’m sure I assumed that the engagement ring tradition must have stretched back for many generations. It turns out that assumption was quite wrong, and that the link between diamonds and “true love” is actually the product of a genius marketing campaign that took place a lot more recently than I would have imagined.

As late as the 1930s diamond engagement rings were mostly seen a luxury enjoyed only by the very wealthy. In fact, the market for diamonds at that time was anything but robust. Large deposits had been discovered in South Africa, and the De Beers Company (which has long held close to monopoly power in the diamond market) found itself sitting on a big pile of shiny rocks that most people felt they could easily live without.

That, of course, would never do. And so they decided to unleash the power of marketing on an unsuspecting public. They hired N.W. Ayer and Son, the first advertising agency in the US, to disabuse Americans of the notion that their lives could have meaning without diamonds.

The agency got some of the big shots in Hollywood to start sporting their product. Newspapers began running stories on how diamond rings symbolized romance. They even sent lecturers into high schools to embed the link between love and jewelry into impressionable teenage minds. The master stroke came in 1948 when a copywriter at Ayer (ironically a female who remained single all her life) came up with the now-ubiquitous slogan “A Diamond is Forever.”

The campaign succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. In the span of a few decades, marriage proposals and diamond rings had become inextricably linked and De Beers’ profit margin grew from $23 million in 1939 to $2.1 billion in 1979. And by 1988, a young man like me looking to take a wife had nary a second thought about obeying the dictates of De Beers and N.W. Ayers.

Spying the man behind the curtain like this always makes me a little uncomfortable. I have to wonder how many of the things I unthinkingly follow as long-standing cultural traditions are actually carefully manipulated schemes deigned to control my behavior and separate me from my hard-earned cash.

The whole concept of Valentine’s Day immediately comes to mind. And the gift-giving frenzy portion of the Christmas tradition was undoubtedly dreamed up in some company’s boardroom as well. Really anywhere you encounter the idea that there is a “tradition” that dictates that affection should be expressed via the purchase of goods is probably something that was invented on Madison Avenue and was likely unknown to your great-great grandparents.

Don’t get me wrong – I am a fan of capitalism and advertising is an important part of the system. It’s just that there is something creepy about realizing how big companies can manipulate our collective consciousness in regards to things like love, family, and tradition in such a calculated manner.

I’m beginning to understand why people get more cynical as they get older. Unbridled optimism only seems to grow tall in a field of blissful ignorance. And as the De Beers obviously realized, it is best fertilized with a healthy portion of, well, you know.

You can’t upset me sonny, I’m old

Given the fact that I find myself getting a little older just about every day, I’m always on the lookout for something that passes for good news about aging. This week I came across a story about a study that was conducted recently at the Duke University Medical Center that might, depending on your interpretation of the results, qualify as a blessing of advancing age.

The study had some older folks (average age 70) and some younger folks (average age 24) look at some photographs, some of which had disturbing images. Later they hooked the test subjects up to brain monitors and asked them to recall the unpleasant images.

They found that when the young people brought the negative images to mind the emotional center in their brain was very active, but the older folks used the frontal cortex (where the higher level reasoning and problem solving occurs) to recall the same images. So the researchers concluded that a younger brain tends to react more strongly on an emotional level to negative experiences than a more mature brain. But why would that be the case?

The study hasn’t provided an answer to that question as yet, but I have a few theories based on my own life experiences. I can think of two reasons why a person gets less worked up about the bad things in life as they get older: experience and perspective.

To be young is to constantly find novelty in life. The first time you get your heart broken, or get fired from a job, or face the death or serious illness of a loved one, it is an earth-shaking experience. After these things happen once, twice, then three times, the earth shakes a little less each time it happens. By the time a person reaches their 70s, a number of bad things have happened to them and it simply doesn’t rock their world like it did when they were younger.

Another reason we may get less and less emotional about adversity as we get older is an evolving perspective about what is important in life. To a young person aging and death are far-away, almost unreal concepts. But to a person over 70, mortality has become a familiar companion who has made his presence well-known in your consciousness.

How does that affect your reaction to life’s little tragedies? Well, once you realize that aging and death actually apply to you, many of the things that once seemed like serious problems tend to lose their emotional punch. You begin to really understand the import of the old “what difference will this really make when I’m dead and gone?” line of thinking.

A mature person realizes that there are a very few things in life worth getting upset about. The death or serious illness of a close friend. A major terrorist attack in your home country. Your house burning down. Those are real problems worth shedding tears over. But how many of those things are likely to happen to you in a typical day?

So your car won’t start, or someone made a snarky comment at your expense, or you’re having a bad hair day. If you’re 25, any of those things might be enough to put you in a bad mood. If you’re 75, you are probably thankful that you lived to see today, and you aren’t about to let some minor inconvenience spoil your appreciation of this fragile gift of life that has been bestowed on us.

It’s called wisdom, and it’s generally something that can only be purchased with time. Still, even young people might want to keep in mind that time worrying is usually time wasted. And trust me - you don’t have as much time as you think you do.

The burden of judgment

This week I did something I’ve never done before – I served as a member of a jury on a criminal trial. I have been called for jury duty a number of times over the years but was never picked to sit on a jury. I guess I figured I just wasn’t the type of person that defense and/or prosecution lawyers wanted deciding their cases, so I was a little surprised to hear my name called.

But this time it was called, and I thought I might relate some of my thoughts on the experience for your reading pleasure.

- This was my first visit to the “new” Houston County court facility and I have to say that it is a huge improvement over the cramped, aging structure in downtown Perry that I visited in my previous calls to jury service. There was plenty of parking outside the building and the inside was spacious and climate-controlled, luxuries not afforded to visitors at the old facility. Hats off to everyone who helped make this new and much-improved courthouse a reality, including the judge who issued a court order to light a fire under our local government to get to work on it.

- I would have to say that every employee I had dealings with during the process of serving on a jury – guards, bailiffs, lawyers, judges, and everyone else – were capable, conscientious, polite, and even entertaining on occasion. I have never had a better experience interfacing with any branch of our government.

- I have a very different perspective on our legal system after being involved with it so directly. Of course I was familiar with concepts such as a presumption of innocence until proven guilty and the right to have one’s fate decided by an impartial jury, but it’s quite another thing to see them put into practice by real live flesh and blood people. I am more grateful than ever to live in a country where the state does not have the right to deprive its citizens of their freedom until they have proven they have just cause to do so to a group of people who don’t have a personal interest in the outcome.

- Our justice system was designed by some very smart people and I don’t believe it could be improved very much. However, even the best system breaks down if all the people involved are not competent and motivated to do their jobs. When people rave about how our justice system is “broken” they are placing the blame in the wrong place. When the system fails it is because somebody somewhere dropped the ball.

- As far as my experience in the jury room goes, it was more stressful and nerve-racking than I could have imagined. There is a great deal of responsibility involved in playing a part in deciding whether or not another human being gets sent to prison. And on top of that, you have to come to a unanimous agreement with 11 other individuals on just where the truth lies in circumstances where there will almost certainly be some room for doubt on either side.

Frankly, I understand better than I did before why a lot of people would prefer to avoid jury duty if they can. However, as the judge reminded us at the beginning of our service, we have to ask ourselves if it was us or a close friend or family member who was on trial, or who had been a victim of someone who was on trial, would we think it was worth someone’s time to listen to the evidence and render a fair and carefully considered decision on the charges in question? And if the answer to that question is yes, is it fair to expect other citizens to take up that burden is we aren’t willing to do the same when we are called?

The ever-evolving concept of marriage

It’s been more than two weeks since America elected its first African American president, and the excitement is still running high. But that wasn’t the only major story to develop on Election Day. A hotly contested ballot initiative to squash gay marriage in California was also approved, and gay rights supporters are not taking the defeat quietly.

Perhaps they should have seen it coming. Numerous states (including Georgia) have put “Defense of Marriage” amendments to their constitutions on the ballot in recent election cycles and they generally pass by solid margins. It seems clear that a majority of Americans are not ready to extend full marriage rights to gay couples, though that majority does appear to be shrinking, especially among younger folks.

Supporters of the California initiative advanced their case using an argument that has become ubiquitous in these campaigns. Marriage has been a sacred bond between one man and one woman since the dawn of human history, they say, and those who seek to extend marital recognition to gay couples are on a crusade to tear down this pillar of our moral foundation.

It’s a powerful argument, but as we all should have learned in our high school social studies classes, it’s not a very accurate one.

The fact is that the restriction of marriage to one man and one woman is a relatively recent social convention. For a very long time, the standard practice in many societies was for marriage to be a sacred contract between one man and as many wives as he could afford to support. For examples of widely practiced polygamy one need only crack open the Old Testament, where it is reported to have been practiced by many important spiritual figures and is never expressly condemned or forbidden.

But some would argue that polygamy is an ancient practice that has rightly been tossed on the scrap heap of history and that marriage has been recognized by right-thinking persons as a one man/one woman proposition at least since the founding of our great nation. And that is true, but even in the US it is misleading to say that the concept of marriage has been a static one.

Until a Supreme Court decision in 1967 struck them down, numerous states (including Georgia) had laws on the books that made it a crime for white people to marry anyone outside of their race. The fact is that even in America, and even in relatively recent times, the concept of who should be allowed to marry has evolved over time, and most of us would even agree that is a not a bad thing.

But is it time for marriage to be radically redefined once again to accommodate same-sex couples? Frankly the libertarian in me wonders if that is really the question we should be asking ourselves. Maybe the question we ought to be asking is whether or not it is a good idea to rely on the government to decide which unions God does or does not sanction.

I wonder if it is time that we draw a bright line between the civil and the religious aspects of marriage. Maybe a couple looking to build a life together should have the option to engage in a strictly civil union, or be joined together in a religious ceremony, or to do both – separately.

That would leave the debate over which unions God does or does not sanction to the church and the individual, and the debate over which unions the state should recognize to the government and the voting public. It seems like a logical solution to me, but it is probably a non-starter because it fails to appeal to the irrational, emotional side of people that usually takes over all decision making faculties around election time, and at most other times for that matter.

And so, I now return you to the competing chants of “We demand our civil rights!” and “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!” that will surely entertain you in the months and years to come. Enjoy.

Local governments know how to spend big too

I have recently come to the conclusion that I could never be a successful politician. There just seems to be a stark difference between the way I see reality and the way the people who run our government see it. And that is particularly true when it comes to financial matters.

Being the simple, non-sophisticated type that I am, I would naturally assume that when you are managing the budget of some municipal body you’d use a lot of the same principles that you’d use to manage a family budget. I would be careful that I was not spending a lot more than I was taking in. I’d research major purchases thoroughly before committing funds to them. And when tough times hit, I’d tighten my belt and learn to get by on less money to avoid digging myself into a bigger hole.

But that kind of small-minded thinking obviously has no place in government. It’s easy to see that at the national level as evidenced by the eye-popping deficits we run each year, but there are good examples of how local politicians like to “make it rain” with our tax money as well.

This week Houston County residents passed a referendum that will raise our property taxes to fund a new hazard warning system. The new tax is expected to generate about $1.8 million, a figure that was initially calculated as what it would cost to purchase sirens that could be heard by 95% of county residents. However, some time ago it was decided that a system that depended on sirens alone would be inadequate, and currently there is no definitized plan on exactly what the county is going to purchase with that money.

Had I been in the loop on this, I would have suggested that the government decide on exactly what kind of system they were going to buy and how much that system would cost before I proposed any tax increase. What is the old saying about buying a pig in a poke? But we’re trusting types in Houston County, and we obviously don’t mind handing over our money in hopes that our representatives will find something good to spend it on.

For another example of forward-thinking economics we turn to Centerville, where the city government held the first of a series of meetings this week to explain to citizens why they think it would be a good idea to raise their property taxes a whopping 27 percent.

Many angry citizens filled council chambers to express their displeasure with the potential tax increase, which comes at a time when citizens are suffering the effects of the worst economic downturn in a generation. Patient city leaders calmly explained to their constituents that even though city is not currently running a deficit they need more money from them to fund things like infrastructure improvements and “promoting downtown businesses.”

Puzzled business owners who attended the meeting seemed confused by the concept of promoting business by raising property taxes on businesses, and many attendees strongly encouraged city leaders to look for ways to cut costs in lieu of raising taxes on cash-strapped citizens. I personally live in Centerville, and based on my non-scientific polling of average citizens I’d say that sentiment is pretty widely shared.

And that’s just too bad. Centerville residents need to catch the same spirit that voters who approved the disaster warning system obviously tapped into. It’s the spirit that says to government, “take my money - I trust you’ll find something good to spend it on.”

Personally, I don’t think I could adequately represent people who are that generous with their money and that trusting of their government to spend it responsibly. Maybe a lot of my neighbors feel the same way. After all, when was the last time an incumbent got turned out of office around here?

Does socialism equal happiness?

I got quite a bit of feedback from my last column, the one in which I mourned the apparent demise of our great nation. I came very close to rewriting that piece because I thought the tone might have been overly pessimistic, but apparently lots of other people are feeling the same way I am right now. I think we’re all looking hard for a silver lining to the cloud that is hanging over us and we’re just not finding it.

A few of the people who wrote to me wondered what I might do if the country really does go into the tank and stays there for the duration. Would I give up and search for greener pastures in some other country? In my case that’s very unlikely for a lot of reasons, at least in the short term, but it is an interesting question to ponder. If you decided to leave America, where would you go?

Since I’ve never actually travelled outside the United States, I have a hard time coming up with a reasonable answer to that question. But I’m not the type of person to let a lack of knowledge and experience stop me from expressing an opinion on a subject, so I decided to take a look at the various surveys that have been done in recent years that ranked countries based on the relative happiness of people who live there to see if any of them stood out.

One country seemed to keep coming out on top in most every “happiness index” I could find. According to the vaguely scientific polling I was able to compile, the happiest spot on the planet is Denmark. Now if you’re like me, your knowledge of Denmark can probably be summed up by saying “that’s somewhere in Europe, isn’t it?” But if this is as close as we can get to heaven on earth, maybe we should look into this country a little more closely.

Right away I have to warn you that if “socialism” is a dirty word to you, you aren’t going to like Denmark. They believe in very high taxes and lots of big government programs there. The average “Joe the Plumber” in Denmark ponies up about half his income to the government. That’s the bad news. The good news is that education (all the way through college), health care, child care, elder care, and a whole lot of other goodies are provided for every citizen.

That’s all well and good, but of course like any socialist country there’s a price to be paid for all that “evening out.” Everybody has enough, but nobody has a whole lot. People don’t go to Denmark to seek their fortune. They really have a different way of looking at life in a place like that.

I believe that for someone who was born and raised in America it would be hard to get used to a way of life that is that laid back. America has always aspired to greatness. From the very beginning, people came here to do big things. They came to found churches, to make their fortunes, to achieve.

I believe that spirit is still alive today, and that is what is making our present situation so hard to bear. We’re not used to managing our expectations. A fall is always much worse when it comes from a great height.

Nevertheless, it appears that we may be on the road to being a lot more like Denmark. If we elect a guy who wants to “spread the wealth around” and who believes that health care is a “right”, it is likely that we’ll be moving a lot closer to that socialist ideal of a government that is very large, very expensive, and very involved in every aspect of the lives of its citizens.

I just don’t know if it’s going to make us happy.

The sun begins to set on another great civilization

If there is one thing that is becoming increasingly clear in this season of election year politics and financial catastrophe it is this: the Great American Experiment is rapidly drawing to a close. Representative democracy was a nice idea on paper, and we made a pretty good run of it, but ultimately it seems to be unsustainable.

Its basic flaw has become obvious – it invests too much trust in human nature. The individuals who drew up the plans for our form of government were a unique collection of intelligent, self-sacrificing souls who sought to create a nation that would encourage all its citizens to live and work as they saw fit without interference from their government. They had witnessed firsthand how the human spirit is constricted and deformed by an all-powerful, self-serving form of government and they wanted to show the world a better way.

I believe they would have been astounded by how well their plan succeeded. People have been flocking to our shores for over 200 years because it’s hard to keep it a secret when you create a place where people can build a good life for themselves by the sweat of their brow and even worship God in whatever manner they choose without fear of getting their head chopped off. Most of us don’t appreciate how unusual that opportunity is, but few people who have lived on this earth have ever experienced it in the abundance that we have.

And now, I fear, we are members of the generation that will see that dream come to an end. For some time we have demanded that our government provide us with a cure for all our ills, and anyone who advanced a claim that he could cure those ills was rewarded with a plush seat in the halls of power. The price for those cures has proven to be much too steep, but we have long since abandoned the long view in these matters.

People weren’t saving enough for retirement, so the government created a mandatory retirement program. Older Americans and the poor could not afford health care, so the government created a mandatory health care program to take care of them. They also created programs to “fix” the education system, the environment, the housing industry, and on and on. Billions of dollars (much of it financed with deficit spending) is spent each year to solve every crisis, and every new crisis (the War on Terror, hurricane relief, big business “bailouts”) demands a new solution and more money that we don’t account for.

Watching the presidential and vice presidential debates is severely distressing for anyone who believes that our biggest problem is our own failure to shoulder sacrifices and accept responsibility for our shortcomings. The Democrats proudly carry the standard of government in the role of a compassionate Big Brother and the Republicans give lip service to their long-dormant principles of small government even as their actions brand them as hypocrites. (Note how quickly the GOP’s principled stand on the $700 billion bailout of the financial industry crumbled as another $100 billion in pork was added to buy enough votes to pass. Of course it worked. It always does.)

No matter who wins the election in November, the course of the nation is already set. The government will continue to try and spend its way into our hearts until the deficit falls over and collapses on top of us. At that point the consequences of our collective irresponsibility will begin to dawn on many more people, but there won’t be much we can do about it then except to take our place next to other great civilizations that have collapsed after rotting from the inside.

A bad case of election year apathy

Usually when we’re this close to a major election I use this space to praise a candidate I favor or (more often) to slam one that I think is especially deserving of my wrath. But not this year. I hate to admit it, but I feel so disconnected from the political process and the direction our country is heading at this point that I can’t generate much interest in this election or in any of the people who are running for office.

I think the massive failure of our financial system and the government’s “let the taxpayers bail us out, again” response to it has proven to be the last straw for me. I believe we are traveling down a path from which there will likely be no turning back, and at the end of this trip I fear that we will not recognize the country we are living in.

If you’ve read any of my previous columns, you already know that the federal government’s out-of-control spending and our crushing national debt has long been a major issue for me. So you can probably imagine my dismay in the wake of this recently announced plan to dedicate nearly a trillion more dollars that we don’t have to bail out a bunch of big corporations that have been run into the ground.

Frankly, I can’t even wrap my mind around the kind of thinking that leads a supposedly intelligent, well-educated group of adults to conclude that this is a wise course of action, but really this is a fitting final chapter for an administration whose mantra has always been “spend, spend, spend…and by the way here’s a tax cut.” And it wouldn’t be Bush program unless it included a little nose-thumbing directed at the US Constitution. Consider this quote from the treasury secretary’s draft proposal for the bailout plan:

“Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”

Go back and read that again. What that is saying, very plainly, is that the secretary of the treasury would have absolute authority to spend $700 billion of your money as he sees fit and would be answerable to absolutely no one. Period.

What country are we living in here? It can’t be the United States of America, can it? To be sure, it is not the country that our founders envisioned. They came up with an excellent plan, and so long as we followed it we were, I believe, as close to an ideal place to live as the world has ever seen.

But that nation no longer exists, and the Constitution does not seem to be any sort of obstacle to those who wish to manipulate our finances and personal lives as it pleases or benefits them. Neither of the two major parties has shown any inclination to arrest that trend, and thus neither of them deserves my vote.

Is this the end of American Dream? Are we truly witnessing the final phase of the “Great Experiment”? Perhaps, but I hope not. I believe there is some possibility that the storm that has begun raging on Wall Street and in Washington DC (one that I believe is going to get much worse in the coming years) could, at long last, convince a majority of Americans that our government is truly broken and in need of an overhaul.

I don’t think that such an overhaul is going to occur while our government is in the hands of those individuals pleading for your vote during commercial breaks from “Dancing with the Stars.” We need change all right, but all we are getting from Republicans and Democrats is more “nanny state” nonsense wrapped in different packages. And I just can’t distinguish the lesser of evils anymore.

Who is really holding the glass ceiling in place?

The nearly-successful campaign of Hilary Clinton and John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate have put the issue of the proverbial “glass ceiling” back on the front burner of the nation’s consciousness. Women are closer than ever to climbing to the top rung of power in our country and we are all being forced to confront any gender bias we might be harboring.

That bias might just show up in places where you wouldn’t expect it. Numerous polls have shown that women are more likely than men to express reservations about voting for a female president. It’s enough to make you wonder just whose hands are holding that glass ceiling in place.

And politics aren’t the only place where women may have some issues with other women in positions of authority. There are signs of disturbance in the workplace as well.

A new study done by Scott Schieman and Taralyn McMullen at the University of Toronto and published in the September edition of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior suggests that women are generally happier working for male bosses than female bosses.

Thousands of men and women who worked for either male or female bosses had their stress levels monitored in the survey, and the results showed that men experience about the same level of stress whether they are working for a man or a woman. Women, on the other hand, reported experiencing far more stress when working for female bosses.

The study offered no explanations as to why that would be the case, but I have my own theory, and since you’ve come this far you might as well read on and see what it is.

Stress is closely related to our emotional state, and men and women are very different creatures when it comes to how we deal with, and are affected by, our emotions. Women are much more complex than men in many ways, and that is certainly apparent when it comes to how we relate to other human beings on an emotional level.

Men, for example, generally deal with interpersonal conflicts by seeking to avoid them if possible or at least resolve them quickly and move on. Women, on the other hand, tend to demand more satisfying resolutions to disagreements and do not seem to be able to let go of conflicts nearly as easily as men.

What does that have to do with bosses and the work place? Well let’s face it – work is often an inherently stressful place. And if there is any sort of friction between you and your boss, the stress can quickly intensify.

Men tend to let such conflicts come and go rather quickly and forget them soon afterward. Disagreements between men and other men are resolved so quickly they can usually be measured in seconds. Conflict between men and women is somewhat more complicated, but most often the man either gives in or gives up, and the woman generally realizes the futility in a one-sided argument and moves on.

When two women are in the picture, conflict resolution is anything but simple. You have two emotionally complex creatures, one in a position of power over the other, who may hold on to disagreements over long periods and fight many subtle battles that never truly get resolved. No doubt it can become exhausting and frustrating.

Does that mean women shouldn’t work for other women? Of course not. It’s just an aspect of human nature we have to be aware of and deal with as best we can. Women work together and accomplish great things every day, and usually manage to avoid killing each other or having a stroke in the process.

And one day in the not-too-distant future I am sure we will see a woman in the White House. But she should probably choose a man as her running mate. That job is stressful enough as it is.

Pull up your pants, son – you’re in Warner Robins

I realize that I’m a little late to the party on this one, but some issues are so important, so crucial to the public interest and our way of life, that they must not be allowed to pass without comment. I am referring, of course, to the passing of the sagging pants ban by the Warner Robins city council last week.

The ordinance that was passed on a 4 -2 vote makes it illegal to be nude in public (who knew that wasn’t already against the rules?) and also makes it a crime to let one’s britches sag more than 3 inches below one’s beltline. And all across the city, young men who spent lots of money on fancy boxers they planned to show off with a “sag” wailed their disapproval.

Much has already been said about this momentous piece of legislation, and the council has received a lot of flack on these pages for outlawing what basically amounts to a questionable fashion choice. Some people have even questioned the council’s mental faculties, especially given that a call for a ban on cell phone use while driving, a practice that has been shown to endanger people’s lives, wasn’t even given serious consideration at the same meeting.

I for one am also unhappy with the ordinance, but not for the reasons most of its detractors are.

Council was correct in banning the sag - the look is an affront to both decency and aesthetics. My problem is that once they made the decision to take a stand on proper attire, I think they should have gone all the way with it. They missed a golden opportunity to implement a strict, city-wide dress code that could have made Warner Robins the best-dressed city in the USA.

Wouldn’t it be nice to live in a city where everyone dressed modestly and appropriately at all times, and where offenses to the gods of fashion were consistently punished with fines and prison time? Call me a dreamer if you will, but the bold move by the Warner Robins city council has inspired me.

In their next meeting, I propose that they consider adopting a more ambitious ordinance mandating proper attire within the city limits. And to give the new rules some teeth, they should establish a brand new branch of the city police department to enforce them. All around the International City tacky dressers will learn to fear the iron fist of the Warner Robins Fashion Police (WRFP).

Here are my suggestions for some additional rules that should be added to the city dress code for the WRFP to enforce:

- Tight and/or revealing clothing should only be worn if you have the body to pull it off. Unless you have the body of an Olympic athlete, it is best for all concerned if the finer details of your physique are left to our imagination.

- T-shirts with slogans on them should not be profane or inordinately stupid. Any guy who wears a shirt that says “I can’t help it if your girlfriend won’t stop staring at me”, for example, is a danger to himself and others and is in need of correction.

- If you are wearing shorts and socks at the same time, the socks must be white. (People over the age of 65 would be exempt from this one.)

- If you are a 12 year-old girl you must dress like a 12 year-old girl, and not a 21 year-old girl who might possibly be a street walker.

- This isn’t exactly clothes-related, but it needs to be a law nonetheless – no comb-overs! Once and for all guys, get it through your head – you aren’t fooling anyone.

- Unless you are a resident of Texas who is visiting the city, the wearing of cowboy boots with a suit is not permitted. (Sorry, Mayor Walker!)

Running into middle age

Like most people, I find that I am getting older every day. And like most people, I’m not too thrilled about it. Unfortunately I don’t have a lot of say in the matter, so I am learning to cope.

I think when I passed 40 the reality of aging really began to set in. I don’t consider myself to be “old” just yet, but I can now see senior citizenship on the horizon. There’s no changing reality of course, but I decided that it was time that I put more focus on my health so that I can increase the odds that I will age gracefully.

The most significant thing I have done along those lines is to start exercising regularly again. It had been at least 10 years since I had a regular exercise routine when I made that resolution, but when I started a new job this year that included free membership at a gym I decided that it was time to get back into it.

Back in the 70s and 80s I was caught up in the jogging craze that swept the country. If you’re my age or older I’m sure you remember how popular it was back then. A lot of us could be seen wearing warm-up suits and headbands as we trotted alongside the shoulder of the roads in our neighborhood. I was running up to five miles 3 or 4 times a week at the time and I actually enjoyed it.

So naturally when I thought about exercising again I wanted to include running as part of my routine, but I wondered if I might be too old now for that sort of thing. Would I have a heart attack after the first half-mile? Would my knees give out within the first month? Would water aerobics be a more realistic regimen for a man my age?

I decided that the best way to find out would be to give it a try, so I went out and bought a new pair of running shoes and hit the indoor track. After about two months of running three times a week I’m happy to report that both my heart and my knees are holding up just fine.

And this week I came across a news item that made me feel very good about my decision to get back into running. A study from Stanford University School of Medicine seems to indicate that people who run regularly in their middle years are more active and have fewer disabilities than non-runners when they reach their 70s and 80s and are they are also 50% less likely to suffer an early death. Even knee-related problems were more common for relatively inactive test subjects than for people who ran for exercise on a regular basis.

This study is just latest in a long string of them that suggests that regular vigorous physical activity is the closest thing there is to a fountain of youth. The most significant cause of disability as we get older is not the passing of time, but inactivity. People who exercise regularly do feel the effects of age, of course, but the declines are far more gradual than they are for sedentary people.

I realize that it gets harder to do just about everything as you get older, and exercise is certainly no exception. But as we need to keep in mind that if we don’t push ourselves to get off the couch and move around we will be spending more and more time confined to that couch and eventually we won’t be able to get up from it without assistance.

None of us can cheat the aging process, but our actions have a significant effect on how we look and feel as we travel down the road of time. I for one plan to keep on running as long as my body cooperates. And maybe in 30 years or so I’ll be ready for that water aerobics class.

Timmy and the Magic Money Machine

On a recent trip to our nation’s capital I went on a tour of the some of the major buildings where our federal government conducts its business including the Supreme Court, the Capitol Building, and the White House. At the end of the tour, our guide (an affable fellow named Ted) asked if we had any questions.

It turns out there was a precocious young man in the crowd named Timmy who looked to be around 12, and he had some rather interesting questions for Ted. The following is how their conversation went, to the best of my recollection.

Ted: Now are there any questions about anything we saw on today’s tour? Yes, young man?

Timmy: Yeah, how come we didn’t see the Magic Money Machine?

Ted: The what?

Timmy: The Magic Money Machine. I asked my Dad where the government gets the money for all the things it spends it on every year, and he said they must have one of those.

Ted: (Chuckles) No young man, your Dad was pulling your leg. The government actually has to collect money from its citizens, the taxpayers, to finance all the neat things it does for us.

Timmy: Oh, I see. (Thanks for making look like an idiot, Pop.) So that’s how the government decides how much to tax people, then? By how much it spends each year?

Ted: Oh heavens, no. The government spends a lot more money than it collects in taxes most years. It’s called “deficit spending.”

Timmy: It sounds like we’re getting back to that Magic Money Machine thing again.

Ted: Not exactly. The government actually has to borrow the money from investors and pay them interest on it.

Timmy: Hmm. So each year the debt keeps building up? And the interest we have to pay on that debt keeps going up too?

Ted: Yep.

Timmy: But isn’t that kind of…stupid? If you keep doing that, you’ll eventually have more debt than you can keep up with, and the interest payments alone will be more than you can handle.

Ted: That’s true. But it’s even worse than that. We also have huge entitlement programs called Social Security and Medicare that pay benefits to retired people. We’re about to see a huge wave of people hitting retirement age, and we’re going to have a lot less people working and paying taxes and a lot more people clamoring for these government benefits. No one knows how the government is going to stay afloat financially when that happens.

Timmy: You’ve gotta be kidding me dude! How can that happen? Isn’t it illegal or something?

Ted: Nope. There’s nothing in the Constitution that constrains the way Congress handles our finances. The only limit on their spending habits is their own consciences. Which is to say there is no limit.

Timmy: How do these people SLEEP at night? Can’t they see how badly they’re screwing the country?

Ted: Have you seen the people who run things around here, son? Most of them are over 50 and they aren’t likely to be around when the financial time bomb finally explodes. They’re leaving it for your generation to deal with. And they keep getting reelected, so they figure the voters must feel the same way they do.

Timmy: WHAT!?!? What is WRONG with you people? (He had turned red and was glaring at the adults in the crowd, most of whom were avoiding eye contact.) Why do you keep electing people who are hosing your children and grand children with these hare-brained financial decisions?

At this point most of the adults in the crowd had started to slink away and Timmy’s embarrassed parents were tugging at his arm, trying to drag him off. But I stood there, transfixed by his youthful indignation, and he noticed me staring at him.

He pointed at me and said “Well, what have you got to say to the younger generation, Mister?”

I just shrugged and said “Hey, don’t blame me kid. I vote Libertarian.”

Is Barak Obama a marked man?

It’s not unusual to hear supporters of Barak Obama admit, usually in a low voice, that they are worried. They are worried about his safety. Racism is still alive and well in America, they say, and it’s not hard to imagine some nut job taking a shot at him sooner or later.

I wish I could say that those fears are unfounded, but I can’t. I believe people are generally a lot less closed-minded on matters of race than they were a few decades ago, but I don’t think we will ever completely stamp out bigotry. It’s an unfortunate but undeniable part of human nature.

But according to some observers, racists aren’t the only ones who may have it in for Mr. Obama. (If you’re a Barak fan and you’re also a natural worrier, I suggest you read no further.) He may have some dangerous enemies most of us haven’t even thought about yet – Muslim extremists.

You’ve probably heard that Obama was born to a Muslim father, a man from Kenya who was not really involved in his life. Obama claims that he has never been a Muslim himself, and I’m inclined to take him at his word. However, that may not make much difference to some of the more conservative practitioners of Islam.

According to some interpretations of Islamic doctrine (and you know when it comes to religion there is always more than one point of view) a man who is born to a Muslim father is automatically a Muslim himself. For life. If he chooses not to practice Islam when he is an adult that does not mean he was never a Muslim, it means he is an apostate. And of course the penalty for apostasy is death.

And so we have to face the possibility that our future president could be seen as something much worse than an infidel in the eyes of the eyes of some Muslims. That might not, obviously, be a good thing in terms of Mr. Obama’s personal safety.

It also might not be a good thing in terms of our relations with Muslim countries. It has been assumed in some quarters that replacing the evangelical Christian we currently have in the White House with a liberal Christian with a Muslim-friendly name and family history would automatically ease tensions between the US and the Muslim world. Perhaps not. Perhaps an America led by a man who had abandoned the faith he was born into would inspire even more condemnation than we are already experiencing.

I don’t think anyone can say how these sorts of things will work themselves out with any certainty. Human beings, and the governments they spawn, are quite unpredictable by nature, and much depends on circumstance and the personalities of people as they interact with one another.

The big question is - should we let this sort of thing influence whether or not we vote for Obama? Given all the challenges our country currently faces, can we really afford to elect a president who might spend his time in office dodging bullets and causing even more friction between us and the Islamic world?

I submit that we had better not start thinking like that. Barak Obama has every right to be where he is and to do what he is doing. In America we believe in freedom of religion, and if someone has a problem with that, they are the ones with the problem. They are the ones who need to “change.”

I’m not an Obama supporter and I don’t plan on voting for him in November. But that has nothing to do with fear for his safety or worry over how he might be perceived in the Muslim world. We’re supposed to be electing a leader after all, not a spokes-model or a goodwill ambassador.

Leaders look forward, not back over their shoulders. We should all try and do the same.

An Independence Day quandary

In America we have set aside this day to celebrate our independence, and hopefully we will all take a little time to consider how blessed we are to live in a country where we enjoy such a great degree of personal freedom. I expect that with this being a presidential election year we are all a little more mindful than usual of our rights and responsibilities as citizens of this great country, particularly our right and responsibility to elect our own leaders.

Deciding which candidate to support is a lot greater chore for some of us than it is for others. Polls have shown that about one third of the population nearly always supports the Democratic candidate and another third usually support the Republican, regardless of who the parties put on the ticket.

But that is not quite the whole story. A very small percentage of US voters hold some allegiance with third parties, parties that usually don’t get a lot of attention next to the well-established and well-financed Big Two. But they are out there – the Libertarians, the Greens, the Constitutionalists - wild-eyed idealists standing up for their principals in the face of overwhelming odds.

For the most part, the third party system is usually passed over as a mere curiosity on the political scene. The actual number of votes they accumulate (assuming they can actually get on the ballot) usually peaks at no more than a few percentage points, if that. But in a very close election, a third party candidate can play a spoiler role. It is widely acknowledged, for instance, that George Bush would most likely have lost in Florida in 2000 if Ralph Nader had not been on the ballot in that state, and that would have changed the outcome of the entire election.

Nader is running again this time around, but he does not appear to be generating enough buzz to be much of a factor in this election. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a potential spoiler in the field. This year that role could be filled by Mr. Bob Barr, a former Republican congressman from Georgia who is carrying the banner for the Libertarians this year.

If Barr can siphon off a few disenchanted conservatives from John McCain in some closely contested states, he could swing the election to Obama. And Barr’s home state of Georgia is one in which he could draw enough support away from McCain to make a difference in the outcome.

That puts me in something of a difficult situation. Although I do not belong to any particular party, I have long felt an affinity for the libertarian view of “hands-off” governance, and I have pulled the Libertarian lever in the voting booth a number of times.

If my only consideration was picking the best candidate for the job, I would almost certainly vote for Barr. But reality being what it is, I have to consider the fact that the odds against his being elected are exceedingly long, and in a sense a vote for him could arguably represent a vote for my least desirable candidate (Obama). That isn’t a factor I can completely ignore.

But neither can I ignore the huge disappointment I feel for what the Republican Party has become. There was a time when they strove to be the party of small government and personal freedom, but that time has obviously passed. Today Democrats and Republicans both believe in large, intrusive federal government with virtually unlimited power. They merely have different opinions on which sections of the Constitution should be trampled on the heaviest.

So, do I vote for the candidate who most closely shares my views, even though he has no realistic chance of winning, or do I hold my nose and vote for the “lesser of two evils”? I guess in the end the decision will rest on just how much separation I see between those two “evils.” For now, the jury is still out.

The incredible shrinking newspaper

If you’re anything like me, your reaction to the newly “redesigned” versions of the Monday and Tuesday editions of The Telegraph which debuted a few weeks back was probably something along the lines of - “where’s the rest of it?”

I’m sure many readers were dismayed to find that their paper had been slimmed down to only two sections on those days. I was particularly disappointed to learn that the editorial section, which formerly consisted of a full page of columns and another page of letters to the editor, had been squeezed down a single page. But the worst was yet to come.

When Sunday rolled around and I pulled out the comics, I found that once again something was definitely missing. The regular six pages of funnies had been reduced by a third. All the same comics were still there, they had just been downsized to take up less space. They were now so compact that my over-40 eyes could not make out some of the text.

I was not pleased. It reminded me of the time a certain snack food manufacturer decided to cut costs by selling a smaller amount of potato chips in the same size bag at the same price. The whole thing seemed a little underhanded. It seemed like they were hoping that we wouldn’t notice the change, and therefore not change our buying habits. I understand that sometimes business realities demand that prices be raised, but I’d prefer that such changes were made in a more straightforward manner.

Nevertheless, I am not angry with The Telegraph or their parent company for making these changes. I know that the newspaper industry has fallen on hard times in recent years and they are desperately trying to stay afloat in an environment of rising production costs and falling revenues. Although I’m not an employee of the paper and therefore have no insight into how these kinds of decisions are made, I’d be willing to bet that they looked at a lot of different options for dealing with their financial woes and decided that a little nip here and tuck there was the best way to make their product a little more profitable without alienating too many customers.

Will it work? It’s hard to say. I am sure that some subscriptions will be cancelled over this, but I expect a lot of readers will do what I did – grumble a little about how they don’t like the changes but still leave their subscription in place. For now, at least.

I know that a lot of people have abandoned newspapers completely and now get their news from the Internet. It’s understandable, because you can get all the all the news any time of the day or night with a few strokes of the keyboard. And most of it is free. Still I find that there are things that I like about getting an old-fashioned newspaper delivered to my house every morning.

I spend a great deal of time staring at a computer monitor every day in my job, and my eyes appreciate the change of pace that scanning the newsprint provides. And you can’t beat a newspaper for convenience and portability. I can take it with me wherever I go, and I don’t have to worry about finding a power outlet or a Wi-Fi hotspot. Plus it won’t break into a hundred pieces if I drop it.

So I hope The Telegraph stays around for a long time, and I hope that is doesn’t have to continue reducing its content to stay afloat. But if they do have to make any more reductions, they should definitely stay away from those features that give the paper its unique identity and intrinsic value. Like this column, for instance.

American car companies try to shift gears, quickly

It’s amazing how some things can stay the same for so long that you’re sure they’ll never change until, rather suddenly, they do. One good example of that is the current radical shift we’re seeing in the car-buying habits of the average American.

It seems we’ve all given lip service to worrying about fuel economy when we’re shopping for cars since at least the Carter administration. But in reality it has never been a primary motivator for most of us.

Certainly there have always been spendthrifts among us (and I admit that I’m one of them) who have looked very hard at the MPG rating for every car they’ve ever thought about buying. But it seems that until very recently most Americans wanted their cars to ride high, have lots of room inside, and respond quickly when they punched the accelerator. And if getting all that meant visiting their friendly neighborhood filling station several times a week they were willing to make that sacrifice.

But it’s different now. Gas prices have gone up so high so quickly that a solid majority of Americans seem to have been suddenly shocked out of their gas-guzzling stupor. People are suddenly very serious about trading in their oversized SUVs for smaller cars that will carry them a lot further between fill-ups. Circumstances have forced us all to become gas-hawks.

Maybe the biggest victims of our sudden change of heart are American car manufacturers. After many years of making good money selling us those big, gas-guzzling monstrosities we love so much they have been caught flat-footed by the dramatic change in buyer preferences. Many jobs are going to be lost as a consequence of what is happening and the very survival of the big three American car companies is now in doubt.

That is not to say that they aren’t trying to change. GM in particular has generated some buzz in the industry with an “almost” fully electric car called the Volt that they are planning to bring to the market in 2010. Not long ago the Volt was just a concept car that GM trotted out during auto shows to show how serious they were about developing the “car of the future.” But now they realize that they may not have a future if they don’t get something on the market that can compete with Toyota and Honda in the fuel efficiency department, so the Volt has been fast-tracked.

GM says the Volt will be able to travel up to 40 miles on battery power alone, and beyond that it will sip a little gas to recharge its batteries and get you down the road another 600 miles or so before needing a recharge. That means it will beat the pants off the hybrids that are on the road right now, and you will be able to recharge the battery by plugging it into a regular wall socket in your garage.

The catch? Well, the key to the Volt’s superior performance is its fancy lithium-ion battery, and those things don’t come cheap. The expected price of the little hatchback has been estimated to be anywhere from $30K to $40K, or perhaps even more. No one really knows what the target price will be at this point, but it is highly likely it’ll be a lot more expensive than other cars that are similarly sized and appointed.

Perhaps by that time gas will be so expensive that we’ll be willing to make the investment in a car that stretches a tank of gas so far. At the very least, give GM some credit for trying to stay relevant.

Let’s hope that it’s not too little, too late. I’d hate to see another big American industry go the way of the dodo.

No easy way to die

This week was a bad one for many convicted murderers in the United States. On Monday our Supreme Court denied the appeals of three death row inmates who were trying to argue that execution by lethal injection constituted cruel and unusual punishment.

The ruling ended a months-long moratorium on executions being observed around the country as states waited to see if the prevalent method of execution would pass constitutional muster with the Court. It did, by a convincing 7-2 margin, so presumably death row should be getting a little less crowded in the near future.

Probably a big factor in the decision was the fact that the method of lethal injection at issue has been devised with the goal of ensuring the quickest and most painless death possible. The three-drug cocktail administered during the procedure is supposed to 1) send the subject into a deep, deep state of unconsciousness, 2) completely paralyze the body, including the lungs, and 3) stop the heart. Although there is certainly no pleasant way to die (or kill), it seems the lethal injection method might be about as peaceful a demise as one could hope for.

But not everyone agrees. Critics point out that if the first drug is administered incorrectly the second drug could subject the prisoner to a “waking paralysis”, and the third drug, which stops the heart, is likely to be very painful to a conscious subject. The possibility does not seem so farfetched when you consider that the individuals administering the drugs are generally not medical professionals. (Few doctors are willing to violate their Hippocratic Oath, even in the interest of law and order.)

Perhaps it is an encouraging sign that we care enough about even the most wretched members of our society to at least have a debate about how to carry out their sentences in the least painful way we can devise. History shows us that most societies that have practiced capital punishment have not gone out of their way to make the convicted criminal comfortable. Quite the opposite, in fact.

For the most part, the more colorful ways of executing people (burning at the stake, crucifixion, etc.) have largely fallen out of style, and even the more repressive governments in modern times tend to favor more “humane” forms of execution, relatively speaking.

Here in the US we have gradually cycled through a number of methods over the years, each intended to be more civilized than the last. From hanging, to firing squads, to gas chambers, to electric chairs, to the current three-drug “cocktail”, we have tried to make capital punishment as quick and painless (for both the criminal and the observers) as possible.

But we may not be done with the fine-tuning just yet. Another suggested method that has been circulating for almost a decade is called nitrogen asphyxiation, wherein the subject is terminated as a result of breathing pure nitrogen. Nitrogen is an odorless, colorless gas that makes up 78% of the air we breathe. As such, a person who was breathing pure nitrogen would sense nothing unusual or suffer in any way, but would eventually lose consciousness and expire because his body was being deprived of oxygen.

In theory, at least, the individual would not experience any unpleasant sensations during the procedure, i.e. no feeling of suffocation or physical pain. The other big advantage would be that it would require no medical skill to administer the “lethal dose” of nitrogen – someone would simply have to put the breathing mask on the prisoner’s face and let him breathe from a tank of pure nitrogen.

I am sure that eventually we will come up with even more advanced ways of ending human life, such as instantly vaporizing individuals so that there is no pain, no awareness, not even a body to haul away afterwards. I suppose that technology marches on, in all areas. Whether or not that is ultimately a good thing is another question, for another time.

Only one word fit to describe the 2008 Georgia legislature

Fail: to disappoint the expectations or trust of; to miss performing an expected service or function for; to be deficient in; to leave undone. – Merriam Webster Dictionary

Any of the preceding definitions of the word “fail” would suffice to describe the performance of Georgia’s state legislature in 2008. By any objective measure, our elected representatives simply didn’t get the job done this year.

Leaders in the Republican-controlled house and senate had four major goals for the 2008 legislative session: to come up with a new water use plan, to reform the tax code and provide major tax relief to Georgians, to resolve the crisis in the funding of the state’s trauma care network, and to find a way to pay for much-needed road improvements throughout the state.

By the time the dust had settled last week, only one of the four items had been successfully addressed and, just as it did last year, the legislature adjourned in a frenzy of childish name-calling and finger-pointing. It seems that our governor Sonny Perdue and his close ally Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle (who presides over the Senate) don’t get along with Speaker of the House Glenn Richardson, and the entire lawmaking process has been more or less held hostage to their feud for the last two years.

Last year the warring parties butted heads over a tax cut that Richardson proposed and Perdue termed fiscally unsound. This year the disputes centered around taxes as well, but they seemed to grow even more personal and petulant.

It all started last summer as Richardson barnstormed the state with an ambitious plan to eliminate all property taxes and replace them with new sales taxes on goods and services. He received a great deal of flack from members of city and county governments and local school boards who would have lost the authority to raise their own revenue under the scheme. The public at large seemed cool to the idea as well, probably because it seemed to represent nothing more than a shift in the methodology used to relieve us of our hard-earned cash.

Ultimately Richardson’s plan died a painful death early in the 2008 session, and the race to come up with new ideas for tax reform was on. The House eventually settled on a proposal to eliminate property taxes on cars while the Senate wanted to cut income taxes. No compromise was ever reached, and plans to fund trauma care and road improvements, which were tied to the tax cuts, also went up in flames.

Richardson is attempting to lay all the blame for this fiasco on Casey Cagle’s doorstep, and he has encouraged Georgians to clamor for Cagle’s removal from office. Cagle claims it was the House leadership that refused to budge. It’s hard to believe that these guys belong to the same party, isn’t it?

If you’re a parent, the bickering probably reminds you of siblings who can’t get along and insist that the other party always starts the fights. I’m sure a lot of Georgians feel like I do and would like tell both men that we don’t want to hear who “started it” and then send them to time out until they learn to get along. Maybe we should just send them to bed without their earmarks.

These men need to remember that good legislators look after the needs and interests of the people who elected them and that compromise and negotiation are a necessary part of the lawmaking process. Their failure to do so reflects poorly on every man and woman in the house and senate, but especially on the men at the top who seem to be the root of the problem. They have embarrassed themselves and the state of Georgia.

Richardson stands for reelection this year. Cagle’s term ends in 2010. Both are rumored to have aspirations for higher office. We can only hope that there are some better choices available to us.

Lean times ahead?

The other day I was watching a movie based on the life of famous depression-era folksinger Woody Guthrie. One of the things that stood out the most to me about the movie was its stark depiction of how harsh life was for many Americans during the Great Depression.

Those of us who did not live through that trying time can scarcely appreciate just how bad things were, but seeing the fear and desperation depicted so vividly on screen did make a lasting impression on me.

Imagine losing your job and having no prospects for finding another one. Imagine losing your home and being forced to live in your car, which is a tight fit seeing as how it also contains all your worldly possessions. Imagine losing all your savings as well, and not having enough money in your pocket to even feed your family.

All of that and more happened to people just like you and me 70 years ago, right here in America. Our economy has had its share of ups and downs since then, but we haven’t come close to experiencing that sort of catastrophe again. Yet.

Right now we appear to be on the leading edge of a nasty recession. The cost of many basic necessities, including food and gasoline, has been skyrocketing. Unemployment is on the rise. People caught up in questionable mortgage deals are losing their homes, and the banks that sponsored those deals are not in the best shape either.

All of which may lead the average citizen to wonder – just how bad could all of this get? Is there a chance that we could be heading for another depression?

The honest answer is that no one knows for sure. Economic systems are closely tied to human behavior, and we all know that there is no sure way to predict that with any confidence.

However, most economists believe that another Great Depression is unlikely because of lessons learned during the last one. Back then, the Federal Reserve actually made a bad situation much worse by raising interest rates and tightening the money supply. Today the Fed’s playbook calls for a much different response to economic downturns.

So far it seems to have worked. But of course, there is no guarantee that they will be able to keep our chestnuts out of the fire forever.

There are reasons to be concerned. Near the top of that worry list, according to many economists, is our massive budget deficit and the ticking time bombs of Social Security and Medicare, set to blow up in our faces as the Baby Boom generation enters retirement.

We have no precedent for dealing with the financial situation that lies before us. How will a government that is already awash in such a financial crisis deal with the natural down cycles of our economy, like the one we are experiencing now? Will they be able to deal with them at all, or will we tumble helplessly into another depression?

Again, no one knows. But wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t have to find out? Wouldn’t it be nice if we faced up to the greatest threat to our future economic prosperity before we fly over that cliff?

Yes, it would be nice, but it doesn’t seem likely to happen. We are much too busy spending money that we don’t have. We have open-ended wars to fight, natural disasters to recover from, and so many worthy projects in so many congressional districts that absolutely must be funded.

We are heading into uncharted territory, and the road ahead looks pretty ominous. This might be a good time to sit down with an old-timer and get some pointers on how to survive the lean times. It’s a skill few of us are proficient in, but it may be coming back into style.