Job Security--An Oxymoron?

I scanned through an article last week that purported to assure young job seekers as to which trades and professions were likely to be secure in the coming work life. Several were in fields about which I claim no expertise as to their possible longevity. Two, however, stood out.
Teaching and medicine. Someone may tell me that what I know about these two fields is only true for Western Michigan. Somehow I doubt that. I know this—when you get established enough in the teaching profession to earn substantially more money than the starting wage, administrations will begin to move heaven and earth to get you to retire, replaced by someone much cheaper.
One teacher acquaintance of mine, who is eligible to retire—but his wife is seriously ill and needs to stay under the medical plan for the still employed, tells me that he barely steps out of his room without having the principal asking, “What can I do to convince you to retire?”
That’s not true security. A math/computer teacher I know (and really like) who is a true nerd—but knows how to teach his high schoolers to build competitive robots—just got bumped out of his job and considers himself fortune to be teaching math to first and second graders. (He, of course, bumped another teacher out of her job.)
School librarians have become a rarer species around here than Tyrannosaurus Rex. Some school libraries are closed permanently except for the occasional individual teacher who borrows the key and brings a class in for a specific project.
Others are still open but run by low-paid and untrained para-pros. I had a long talk with one such person—originally hired to tend challenged kids with physical needs. She said, “I can check out books and reshelve them, but I know nothing of ordering them or directing a student to what resources he might need.” Many high school libraries around here run this way.
I talked to the professional librarian who still runs our district’s high school library last night. She also maintains much of the computer systems throughout the school, so she’s busy and useful. She seriously doesn’t think she’ll have that job next year.
They’ll put in a much cheaper para-professional and let her bump some other English major out of a job. She has enough seniority that she’ll survive, but she LIKES being a librarian. She has a graduate degree in library science. You know and I know the next cuts will be teachers.
If you want to talk about the proverbial cloud “no bigger than a man’s hand”, what happens when some of these districts figure out that a computer on every desk with lessons taught on line might just be cheaper than paying all those salaries and benefits?
Tale about the joys of being a buggy whip maker! If I can think that thought (already some courses are being taught on line), so can the people who write the cheques and select the curricula. This may happen all that many years from now.
Let’s take a quick look at the medical business. In Muskegon and Grand Rapids, the two major hospitals in both cities have consolidated in the past few years. (Consolidation often means two people vying for one job. It has around here! Of course, one leaves.) In both cases the hospitals were in financial trouble—and consolidation kept them open. All of which suggests that maybe—health care reform or no—this country cannot afford as many health care professionals. (Watch what’s happening in the once untouchable auto industry.)
The only house around here that I am aware of being sold because of job loss belonged to a young, competent health care professional. He was a physical therapist. They didn’t fire him; they just cut his hours back and back … and back. (That also means no benefits.)
A lot of people who made and tended horse carriages a little over a century ago thought their jobs were secure too. So did American shoe makers and TV manufacturers. My unhappy thought is, NOTHING out there is secure. Too much change, too little money.

Islam, Fort Hood, and All of US

Last week a Muslim major walked into a roomful of unarmed troops at Fort Hood and opened fire to lethal effect. He was a United States Army major. The people he was killing were fellow members of that same army, brothers in arms.

Therefore let those fight in the way of Allah,
Who sells the world’s life for the hereafter,
And whoever fights in the way of Allah, be he
slain or be he victorious, we shall grant him a
mighty reward. The Woman: 4.74
The Koran

The major wasn’t immediately lucky enough to go to his mighty reward. A mere woman (from a Muslim point of view) cut him down with four bullets even after he wounded her. Both are in the hospital; she to loud acclaim; he, neither victorious nor slain.

Colleagues of the major recall him protesting against being posted to Iraq—where, as he said, men in his uniform were killing Muslims. One again refers to the Koran to see how heinous a crime this had to be in the major’s mind.

Allah only forbids you [to make friends] respecting those
who made war upon you on account of [your] religion,and
drove you forth from your homes …. Whoever makes friends
with them, these are the unjust. The Examined One: 60.9
Allah does not love the unjust. The Elephant: 105.2
The Koran

It might not take a great stretch for a devout Muslim to see our attack on Iraq as a war on Islam and, certainly, thousands of Iraqis have been driven forth from their homes—to Jordan, Syria and even as far as the United States. To the devout, who take it seriously, that would mean simply wearing an American uniform would make one the “unjust”, unloved of Allah.
For the devout Muslim who takes the above passage from the Koran literally, that would make friendship with Americans completely impossible. One can only imagine how conflicted this officer, who by all accounts was a believing Muslim, felt wearing an American uniform—and being on the verge of a posting to a war in Iraq that an American president had called a “crusade”.
The Imam at the mosque he attended suggests that in his conversation the major made this confliction disturbingly clear. I doubt very much whether Major Hassan is alone in his feeling that by close association with America he was becoming unloved by Allah.
For over a decade the news has been full of stories of young American Muslims who traveled to Pakistan (or possibly other Muslim nations) to be trained to kill what we would prefer to go on thinking were after all their fellow Americans.
An army wife at Fort Hood put this sentiment clearly as she face a TV camera, “I just wish his name were Smith.” It would be easier to believe an American “Christian” simply went berserk rather than having to believe a fellow soldier was moved by his faith to kill us.
If the latter were true, whom then can we trust? At what point might any Muslim’s faith become real to him and, like the major, might he suddenly choose not to be among the unloved of Allah? A desire not to be on the bad side of one’s deity is understandable—and if you take the verse seriously--actually quite rational.
Christians are expected to be ready to die for their faith. Why not Muslims? Unbearable thought to the bereaved in Fort Hood? Perhaps we should be a little more willing to think it.

How About a Bigger, More Useful Army?

I read something the other day—that as many as 75% of America’s kids are ineligible for military service. Reasons: poor education, overweight, criminal records. They simply cannot pass the pre-induction tests that the military requires before you put on the uniform.
That brought back to memory several kids I knew in my teens who simply weren’t making it all that well in school or in life. In a case or two, a judge gave a kid a choice: army or jail. I recall a chap who opted for the marines rather than having to admit to paternity.
For these guys, the military was a haven of last resort (there were no wars while I was in high school or college). Some of them turned out quite well after a three year tour of peeling potatoes and standing guard duty. The army didn’t feel it was being hurt, either.
Apparently that option is gone today for a lot of kids who could really use it. As I was thinking about it, an idea I had way back then came back to me. Why not make military service universal, for fat and skinny, for poor students and good ones, for non-violent criminals in lieu of a life of crime, which they would be taught by spending time in prison?
This idea came to me while I was dodging the draft—an exercise that was perfectly legal under the 1948-1973 draft law; it merely required a few side steps and a little calculation. For much of that time the monthly draft call was only about 3,000 kids a month.
Everybody knew that his “Greetings from Uncle Sam” were due about precisely two months after one’s twenty-second birthday. After that you had to rely on being in grad school, holding certain jobs (like teaching) or getting married and having a child.
I did all of those things—like some kind of two-step dance. It limited your freedom of action—none of this touring the world after college. “You’re in the army now… .” No staying single while you established a career or just enjoyed yourself. “You’re in the army … .”
One of my friends got a little careless with his grad school application and spent two years in Alaska peeling potatoes. He was just dumb—but he felt so bitter over being one of the few who came up “it” that he never really got over it.
Going in the military was a matter volunteering when you had no better option or being inept enough to get caught. Until Vietnam heated up, draftees were just guys who missed deadlines and couldn’t keep their dates straight. It wasn’t hard to stay out.
At the same time, we had a nation full of kids in poor health, poorly educated, or slipping into a habit of B&E’s, criminal rowdiness and so forth. “What,” I thought, “would be wrong with drafting EVERYBODY (like they do in some European nations), male AND FEMALE (the way they do in Israel)”?
Nobody would feel screwed just because he happened to get tagged. It was part of living; you expected it like you did driver’s training or at least two years of high school. What a marvelous opportunity to get your hands on every kid in the country—and not let him or her go until their health problems were dealt with, until they could read and write, until they had their heads knocked hard enough that they finally realized certain criminal behaviors were simply unacceptable!
We spend billions on the military—and they spend years training men and women to do everything from run computer systems to shooting huge cannon. Why not use some of those billions to overcome deficiencies caused by poor education, bad hygiene and lousy choices?
That could make our military—at war and peace—worth any money we spent on it! Why not! (I’m aware that many officers and non-coms would sputter at the mere thought of taking on what they saw as a babysitting job—but is training raw civilians to become proficient killers on land, sea and air any easier?) Again, why not?
Anybody got a better idea for the millions of kids who are too fat, too uneducated, or who already have criminal records?

School Days In Recession

Last May the school district in which we live held an election to see if it could keep the mileage it had gotten passed years before. They pointed out that the computer technology they were using to teach with was at least eight years old. That’s an eon in computer generations.
They also said they needed to replace some fifteen year old furniture and to buy some new texts. They lost by 67 votes. With the reduced mileage, they went into major economy mode—some classrooms lacked the paper necessary to print enough spring exams.
Halls are darker. Teachers’ work stations in the faculty area have cut back on so many light bulbs it is honestly a bit hard to see if you are marking papers or reading. The award winning choirs are working with very old sheet music, madly erasing notations after each concert.
This past Tuesday the district set up the machines and called for a second vote on the same millage. It passed. A second proposal (new millage) for improving athletic fields and facilities went down to defeat. Hard pressed suburban parents were willing to keep what the schools had going—but drew the line at a dime of new money.
This is not an inner city district. This is a district that is proud of its schools, its musical organizations, its athletic teams. It was willing to put up millions little more than a decade ago to build an entire new high school building—with probably the finest theatre facilities in Western Michigan.
A few years after that, they built a brand new football stadium and turned the old one into a soccer field. Normally these people are willing to spend money on their school—a goodly percentage of their kids are college bound, lots of AP classes (which give college credit).
Now each teacher has a list of all the devices and lights (and window blinds) that must be shut down or turned off at the end of the day. This year they’ve reduced the miles run by school buses—crowds of kids walk to main intersections instead of being picked up in front of their houses.
(In case some of my fellow geezers have lost track, it has been deemed immoral and unconstitutional to make any child walk half-a-mile or so to get to school. I think we’re headed back to the distances we walked when we were kids. High gas prices, fewer drivers to pay … .)
(Obviously, when they consolidated districts like this in the 1960s and began busing students for miles each way, no one was imagining a day when we might no longer be able to afford all the buses, all the drivers and all the gas… .)
Another little economy—about four years ago the high school stopped offering Michigan’s mandatory driver’s training at a reduced rate. Now you take it from private instructors for about twice what the school used to charge—now, well over $300 dollars.
A number of kids are no longer driving at sixteen—making buses all that more necessary, since both parents often work. Mom and dad haven’t got the $300 for training. They make the kids wait until eighteen, when they no longer need to take the course. A necessary economy, but what does it do for driving safety?
Reports like the one that came out today—that unemployment has reached 10.2%--cannot make anyone feel that the day when money is no object in American education is liable to return any time soon. Faculty will go on turning out lights, kids will walk ever farther, and fewer and fewer kids will have a textbook available for them to take home and study.
It’s little facts like these that tell you the recession is still biting hard.

Nuremberg Strikes Again

An Italian court has just convicted—in absentia—twenty-three American diplomatic and military personnel for kidnapping a suspected terrorist just a month before we invaded Iraq—February 17, 2003. The terrorist suspect was a chap with the wonderful name of Osma Moustafa Hassan Nasr. The court found the Americans guilty of kidnapping the man and handing him over to the Egyptians for a little serious interrogation.
Such kidnappings are called “extraordinary renditions”. The modus operandi is simple. You see a man you think is a terrorist walking down the street of a city where he feels safe (Milan) and you grab him, ship him off to a US base and from there to someone who will try to convince him to talk, in this case, Egypt.
To Italian eyes this appears to be simple kidnapping, and it violates their law. The fact that the Italians were working up a case of their own against Nasr—or that lots of Italians were working with the 23 Americans—or that Egypt still finds him troublesome enough that they would not let him out of the country to attend the Italian trial—mattered not.
Most of the Italians were acquitted. Two were convicted. The CIA station chief, who masterminded the operation with Italian help, was acquitted on grounds of diplomatic immunity. At least one of the other 23 is suing the State Department because she wasn’t granted diplomatic immunity.
So the convicted Americans are liable to have international warrants outstanding for them—and have been advised not to leave the country. Human rights groups from all over are delighted to finally have a conviction against American citizens for one of the extraordinary renditions—which our current CIA chief has testified will continue as needed.
Whether it was politically astute to kidnap a man we had reason to believe was out to do us real mischief is one thing. Whether we should have placed the umbrella of diplomatic immunity over our operatives at the outset is another issue.
But the real issue here, it seems to me, is that this conviction falls into the same category as Obama’s Peace Prize. It’s a way of slapping America’s face because purely because they dislike one facet or another of American foreign policy.
They slap George W. Bush’s face by giving his successor an award he has done nothing to earn. They give Bush another slap by convicting American operatives that their own police forces were working with at the time. The question of whether Nasr is actually guilty—or actually was tortured by Egyptian jailors—is left completely unproven. It is irrelevant.
The real target of the trial was never the 23 perpetrators. It was the policy of the American government—which scares the living daylights out of Europeans because of their own huge Muslim populations. Anything America might do to rock the dangerously overloaded boat must be slapped down at once!
(How ironic that only days after the conviction an American Muslim, a major in our own army, opens fire and kills a dozen GIs at Fort Hood in Texas. Begin to see why the Italians, the French, the Germans, with their huge Muslim population are so frightened?)
The supreme irony lies in the fact that we have given us the moral and legal weapon to flagellate us for almost anything we may now do to defend ourselves and our interests—the Nuremberg precedent. We created a court in 1945 that had no standing in law, whose judgments would have been tossed out in any American appellate court—since the injured parties acted as judge and jury.
Quite aside from Nazi brutality and horror, that is a precedent that is liable to come back to bite us over and over and over. In war, almost nothing is ever done that isn’t illegal in someone’s jurisdiction. The Nazis were unbelievably vicious, but it should startle and worry us to see American officials convicted for defending their country from what they believed was a credible threat on similar grounds that the Nazis were convicted for.
Precedent can be a two edged sword.

Obama--A Year Of Little Consequence

Okay, so the Democrats lost in New Jersey and Virginia. (They only won in the Congressional race in upstate New York because the Republicans were silly enough to chase away the one Republican who could have won for them.
Which is to say, regardless of Obama’s other problems and anything else I have to say today, the Republicans retain an infinite capacity to cast away victory for defeat. Ideological purity may satisfy the virulent, but it won’t win elections—say, in 2010.)
There is no question—even if the exit polls couldn’t get people to admit out loud that they are unhappy with Obama—that people are becoming disappointed. Compare his year as elected president (he won overwhelmingly a year ago today) with FDR’s.
First of all Roosevelt kept his mouth SHUT between election day and inauguration day. He not only said “there is only one President at a time”, he acted like it. Obama seemed to be trying to be co-president from November 4 onward. He almost appeared to be an unappointed member of Bush’s cabinet. A little silence then could benefit him today—by talking too much he made this recession his baby two months before he took the oath.
When Roosevelt did take office, he landed running. Some of the things he did didn’t really help all that much, but his style was such a contrast to Hoover’s and his speeches so much better, people actually felt like there really was some change going on.
What has Obama done about the economy (number one issue in exit polls) that Bush didn’t do first—with Obama sitting co-pilot? The American people simply have not seen the change that Obama the candidate talked about so often.
I really don’t think the American people had any idea who or what they were actually electing. They missed a very obvious fact. Think back on every speech you’ve ever heard Obama make—they are absolutely passionless.
Electing Obama was a bit like being attracted to a handsome fellow, well educated with an interesting resume’ and then finding out that in bed he was cold, lifeless and without any obvious feeling. His speeches are larded with stammers and hesitations.
They have all the fluency of a man who thinks and thinks and thinks—to whom action is an alien and uncomfortable mode. He is the very caricature of a professor rather than a man of action—either in court or business or politics.
Exit polls suggest persons who’ve been married for year, haven’t seen anything yet of what they thought they were getting married for—but are not yet willing to admit a mistake and ask themselves, what on earth am I doing with this chap or lady?
So the voters in Virginia and New Jersey (that’s especially the young and the independent) either stayed away from the voting booths or they voted, “Phooey”. These two groups were Obama’s strength a year ago—not yesterday.
People want at least something of what they got from Franklin Roosevelt—speed, decisiveness and action. Obama doesn’t sound or act like a man to whom any of that comes naturally.
He’s smarter than FDR—no question. No one would EVER say of Obama, “Second class intellect; first class temperament.” Maybe that’s one of his big problems. By the time unimpassioned thinkers get to acting, the problem has either gone away or overwhelmed them.
Now if the Republicans can just gag people like Palin and Limbaugh, they have a decent chance next year. That is, however, such a huge if. It may be the Democrats only real hope.

Hillary--Too Much Mouth?

Hillary said it out loud. What she said about Pakistan was absolutely true. They have backed off from taking strong action against the tribal and Taliban strongholds on the Afghanistan frontier. The only question is: when is it better not to tell the truth?
The Pakistani no doubt had good reasons. They are not a politically stable nation. Military coups and even assassinations play too big a part in their political life. No Pakistani government has felt strong enough to show the utter ruthlessness Abraham Lincoln showed to his political enemies (in the North) during our own Civil War.
Lincoln, as we recall, suspended Habeas Corpus (and as much of the rest of the Constitution as he felt the need to) and slapped anybody in prison who was even suspected of whispering, “Go Rebels.” Pakistan hasn’t had the nerve to treat its radical Muslim radicals the same way.
Since those same radicals are making a fetish out of killing American soldiers in Afghanistan and jumping back across the border to safety, understandably an American Secretary of State would feel the way Hillary spoke. Was she constructive?
Unstable itself, Pakistan may well have had at least four good reasons not to mix it up too fiercely in the past. 1) Better the radicals fight and get shot by Americans than by Pakistani troops—after all these are people who can drag out a blood feud for generations.
2) The mountains around there—as Americans who fight in similar terrain across the border can tell you-- are just about impassable. The inhabitants of those hills have given bloody and good account of themselves against everybody from Alexander to Genghis Khan to the British Empire and the Soviets. It’s not a fight you willingly pick.
3) These guys may well be more dangerous fighters than the troops in Pakistan’s army. In other words, take them on and run the real risk of losing. Lose and then how long does your government last? Had I been a Pakistani leader recently, I might not have taken the risk either.
4) These Muslim radicals are handy proxy forces to turn loose on India over Kashmir every so often. Then the Pakistani government can honestly say, “Who, us?” and watch India get shaken up as bombs blow up in the streets and all that sort of fun.
But, recently, (perhaps for internal reasons we know little about) the Pakistani army HAS taken on some of these radicals—with decent success for the moment. We still depend on them as a supply line into land-locked Afghanistan. And every militant shooting at a Pakistani soldier isn’t shooting at us. That’s a nice relief, if only for the moment.
So why did Hillary pick this time, right now when Pakistan is actually shooting, to remind them—quite insultingly—of their shortcomings? What she said, a lot of American officials have wanted to say for the better part of a decade, no doubt. But, why NOW, when they’re actually doing at least a bit of what we’ve always hoped they would do?
I’ve thought about this for a week or so, and I’ve finally come to a possible conclusion. For all of her smarts (and she has them in spades AND no trump), Hillary may be a bit of a loose cannon. Useful at times as a cabinet officer, but no one you’d want in full charge.
I’ve had that sense for years. Look at the baggage she brought in to the White House back in 1993—the investments she had made, a mysterious suicide, some of her contacts and allies. There is always a hint of bad judgment to her.
I’m not an O’bama fan, but we may be a lot better off having him hold the actual reins of power than having his rival, Hillary, in the Oval Office. He at least, perhaps to a fault, tends to reflect before he speaks. (One way to look statesmanlike is to pick subordinates to have the loose lips.)
Again, just a thought.