Making Choices

One of the biggest concerns when making a decision that represents a major change in life is obviously how it effects both yourself and your family. The biggest decision we ever make in our lives is the one we make upon the realization that we alone are responsible for our own choices. Before you ever make any decision of import, you have to first recognize it inherently lies within your own make up the ability to make such a choice.

Many people never reach that point in their lives. While many people wake up one morning with the idea that they can indeed decide for themselves what to do in their lives, many more people probably never make it to that point. It is still not uncommon to come across people who have never left their birthplace or childhood home. They are born, raised, live, and eventually die in the same place. Often these people never make a conscious choice to do so. Rather, the inability to make a choice of life altering consequence is abrogated in exchange for a continuity and ease. It is often easier to make no choice and simply accept what comes to a person without effort.

I am not trying to say that people who never leave their place of origin are all universally incapable of making a life changing decision. The fact is often those people have come to the individual choice that their life altering decision is to indeed remain close to their origin. But the examples offered by many people who never make a major life altering choice are cases such as not wanting to risk making the wrong choice.

It is a big deal to choose to leave home for college for example. The choice to get married. The choice to move from one state or region to another. The choice of leaving a family business for a far flung dream. In these examples, you have a case where the alternatives are often easier and often require no effort on the part of the person making them.

By way of example I offer my sister in law. She and my wife are close in age. They grew up in Warner Robbins, Georgia. Very small military town with little else in the way of culture or uniqueness apart from service industry jobs and the occasional high school football game. Do not think that I consider living in a small town to be silly or provincial. Rather, understand that what I am trying to impart here is her adoption of a small vista by default. There isn’t much to the town except a single street with strip mall after strip mall filled with services that focus on the military community. There are indeed great people who live there by choice. But my sister in law lives there not by choice, but instead she lives there by default.

Yes, her parents live there. Yes, she still lives with some of her friends she grew up with. But when she had the opportunity to make a choice to expand her vista she neither chose to implicitly attempt to expand them or limit them. In a sense life just happened to her. She chose to go to a small college and live at home with her family because she didn’t even consider applying anywhere until it became obvious that her sister who did choose to leave home was becoming a successful college student far from home. She even chose her profession by default.

Many of her choices were not choices at all but rather emulation of her sister on a small scale. She bought a house when my wife did. She bought a car when my wife did. She became a nurse because my wife did. She even planted roses and put up a fence because my wife did. What is really creepy is when she found out that my wife and I were announcing our engagement at Christmas, she went from being the world’s best spinster to not only having a boyfriend, but also being knocked up in the space of two weeks. What is even creepier is she found a man with the same last name as mine.

But I digress. My point in bringing her up is that she is a prime example of a person who has never actually thought about, planned or in any way managed her own choices. The emulation of my wife’s choices by her sister is pathetic ultimately because my sister in law wasn’t making these choices out of personal striving but rather to maintain parity on some level with her sister.

Now compare that to how my wife did things. She chose to leave home because she realized that the world view of her family and by extension her little town was insular at best. She took the huge risk to leave home and rely on herself. She chose to be a nurse in a very difficult arena, namely intensive trauma care. It is very different from being a simple floor nurse. It is also something that you must intentionally try to get the credentials for. My wife chose to buy a house because she wanted to have something to show for her efforts while she decided what she should do next in her career.

Of course she didn’t plan on me or Alex coming into her life. But ever since I have known her, the degree of thought and the depth of planning she takes towards all things in our lives is profound. When we discuss her family and her sister, it is often with regret. The regret is that they assume incorrectly that we plan for nothing and they resultantly say and do things that make our choices seem inferior.

Fact is at this point we let the results of our choices speak for themselves.

Obviously, and especially, in the last few months we have had to make many choices of great weight since the fire. And in those choices almost every one of them were ultimately decided by how it will effect our son. For us, the consideration of either my wife’s parents or my own are simply not an issue. It would take too long to adequately explain why they are of minimal importance. The fact remains however, that when we make a decision our own parents aren’t a concern.

Without giving you a list of things we decided to do and not do, I will instead offer you the guidelines we used. The first was whether our choice would enable our son to have more options than we had with our own lives. The second was would the choice give him stability to be able to independently choose his own path in life. The last was would the choice make our family stronger both now and in the future.

It really was that simple.

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Pack Rat Genes

I love this subject because it hits close to home for myself and my family. 

My father, the emotional hippy with the silver spoon who never quite got used to the real world and turned his inheritance into millions, has made it a habit since his divorce from my mother to resistantly hang on to every single worldly good that he has ever bought. If he bought it in the last twenty two years, and it hasn't been drank or eaten, odds are he still has it. And to be honest it is a lot of junk. Aside from two automobiles which were totaled in accidents, everything else still exists. 

On the one hand he has the space to store such things in. He has a house he lives in with an unfinished basement that is over 1,600 square feet. And in that basement, he has amassed piles of "stuff". And 90% of that stuff he has down there is some wizz-bang consumer product that supposedly makes life grand. Except he never uses them, its just cool to have them and tell your friends you have them. 

For example, you want a twenty five horsepower log splitter? No need to go out and buy one, when you can borrow it from "Uncle Dave". Never mind the fact that Uncle Dave simply bought it because it was on sale at a membership warehouse, even though he has no trees left on his property and has gas logs in his fireplaces. Dave has it and if you catch him at the right time when he is being a big chieftain to his friends, he will let you borrow the machine. 

And my father has tons of such items in his basement. If you need a like new BOSE DVD/CD Digital entertainment system he has it downstairs in its original box. He replaced the original BOSE system on a whim because it might have been damaged in a lightning strike and his homeowners policy was paying for it anyway. Looking for a biscuit joiner for your carpentry needs? He has a Porter Cable version in its box which was used maybe twenty times, 10 years ago. Looking for an ATARI 5200 or a SEGA Genesis with every optional component ever offered for them? You guessed it. He still has them even though I bought him an XBOX when it came out on the market.

If it was just his basement, in one house it wouldn't be as dramatic a case of pack-rat hoarding as many other people have. But it gets worse because he has two houses with two basements- and the second house has a bigger basement than the first. It also happens to be a house where once something gets there, it stays forever. Case in point, the kitchen cabinets that were intended to go in the "cabin's" kitchen. Constructed offsite, and then shipped and delivered up the side of the mountain these cabinets cost over $50,000.00. The problem was that these cabinets were exactly 1" off in every single dimension. If they had been installed the counters would have overhung the base cabinets by 2". The suspended cabinets would have stopped 1" higher from the counter-top. Get the picture? At any rate, my father pitched a hissy fit with Lowes Home Improvement and threatened to retract the entire construction project from them meaning a loss to Lowes of over $250,000.00. Lowes caved in, got him an entire replacement set of corrected cabinets, installed them for free, and then paid him $5000.00 for his inconvenience and told him he could keep the original cabinets as well since it would cost Lowes too much money to haul them back down the mountain.

Six years later, the mound of cabinets still take up a substantial part of the 2000 square foot basement. What is worse is the entire cabin is stocked with furniture, kitchen stuff, clothes, electronics. etc. that have been transported from his main house to the cabin. It is only because the cabin is so damn big that you can't easily notice that it is simply the catch all of rejects from his main house.

Piles of stuff abound at his main house. If it is a horizontal surface- it is always covered with something. His closets are stratigraphied compilations of men's fashion of the last forty years. His closets are jammed full of excess stuff, culled from the horizontal surface piles, His attics are piled with boxed stuff culled from his closets. Admittedly, most of this stored stuff is not junk. My father is a salesman's joy. If he goes into a store to buy something, he will tend to buy the latest, greatest, deluxe, all options applied name brand product on a cost is no object basis. 

But there is a serious drawback to my father's purchase habits. Namely, he has the latest and greatest stuff mostly to put on display and awe his friends and family. So six months after he has bought something, he replaces it because it has lost a large degree of its charm as being a trend setting product. My father is the guy who goes out every six months and gets the latest cell phone. In some cases, his stuff gets a second life as a shunted replacement at the cabin. The twelve person hot-tub with integrated media center was sent to the cabin so that it could be replaced with a twelve person hot-tub with integrated media center and aroma therapy at his main house. His professional line Allclad cookware went to the cabin when it was replaced by Calphalon  cookware. The thing is over the years he has repeatedly bought stuff to replace stuff he already had simply because it wasn't cool anymore.

My mother is a secretive pack-rat. Her household is remarkably static in terms of content and appearance. There is little recognizable clutter piled around the house. But this appearance is deceptive because it is a mere armor plate attachment to her true nature. Hidden in closets, basements, and attics are crammed excesses of stuff that have almost no reason to be kept. For example, my mother has but one junk drawer. But in that junk drawer are items that have not seen daylight in decades. One of the most amazing things is she actually has a drawer for drained batteries. She never recycles or throws into the trash batteries that have ceased working. They just transition from whatever battery powered device they originally came in, to a drawer in her kitchen hutch. She solves the storage space dilemma by either never buying a replacement battery for the device or simply refuse to buy items that take batteries.

Her level of pack rattery is almost pathological. At one point she offered my son a pacifier- mostly to prove to my wife and I that all babies must have a pacifier. What was truly amazing about this pacifier was that by her own admission, the pacifier was originally intended for my youngest brother. Meaning that somewhere in her house there is a drawer full of twenty year old baby care items, just waiting for the opportunity to be exposed to my two years old son. Am I wrong in finding it pathological that a mother would keep an unopened package containing a baby pacifier for twenty years? It is not like she anticipated that I would get married and have kids any time that was remotely attached to when she purchased it in the first place. And by the time she figured out my middle brother was gay, you would have thought she would have at least dumped the pacifier. But no, she kept it for twenty years!

On the plus side, she still has that hippy mentality towards consumerism. She just doesn't buy a lot of stuff. She repairs, reuses, or puts up with what she has. For example she has an ice maker on her fridge that has been broken for over a decade simply because the feed line is blocked. She hasn't repaired it because she assumes it will just get blocked again. Lucky for her, she still has the same ice cube trays she had forty years ago when I was a kid, and no one had ice cube makers. She has a nice halogen inductive stove. And for the last four years she has needed to replace it because the glass over one of the elements has cracked. More accurate description is the thing has cratered and spider-webbed. She did have someone out to look at it. And he told her the obvious issue was that it needed to be replaced, but it wouldn't make sense to repair it because the new glass would cost more than a brand new stove. In my mother's frugal practicality she now uses the other 4 heating element surfaces. Its only a matter of time before the damn thing explodes.

My father suffers from consumerism run amok compounded by the advantage of extra storage capacity. My mother suffers from anti- consumerism coupled with a profound inability to recycle or dispose of stuff any normal person would immediately do. My in-laws are an extreme case of combining the worst elements of my own parents- and then kicking it up a notch.

Seven years of contact with my in-laws has allowed me to watch true professional pack-rats at work. When I first met them as the boyfriend of my wife, they had recently moved into a nice two-storied Cape Cod home. I have watched, with a detached humorous horror as they have proceeded to transform that house into the most ingratiated parody of an homage to Fred Sanford. Like my father, my father-in-law goes for the consumerism of the latest wizz-bang item on the market. He has one of every conceivable tool. He has every single purpose kitchen gadget ever made. Like my mother, my in-laws have yet to meet a purpose or reason to ever trash or recycle anything. To make matters worse though, they do not have the hidden space to store their excessive possessions. Also compounding the problem is the fact that my mother-in-law is the absolute queen of bargain shopping.

If it is on deep deep closeout, my mother-in-law will buy the entire remaining stock. Some people have a spare fridge or freezer in their garage to store bulk purchases of frozen foods. My in-laws have two. The only thing preventing them from having a third coffin case freezer is that there is literally no place to put one in their two car garage. It happens to be a great place for junk instead of cars. My mother-in-law will find something on deep closeout and buy it whether she needs it or not. She buys because it is on discount. She buys multiple copies of the same item because it is too good a deal to pass up. Like my mother, she has things in reserved storage that are simply too precious to give up. One recent favorite purchase I observed her as making was the six boxes of cheese crackers that she bought at Big Lots. Crammed into the top shelf of her pantry, the boxes are essentially inaccessible to someone of her hobbit stature. I had handed them to her when she asked me to and had noticed that the top shelf was a cornucopia of boxes of the same thing. She freely offered the information that she had so many of the same item because she had bought them for forty nine cents each. I happened to look at the freshness date on the box. It was from last year.

Then there are the toiletries and healthcare products. Toothpaste is obviously one of the most sought after commodities of our culture. She has possibly forty unopened boxes of it on a shelf in her upstairs bathroom. Added to her Fort Knox supply of toothpaste are hordes of Band-Aids, disposable razors, rubbing alcohol, toothbrushes, and every kind of off market brand lotion you can imagine. I am not kidding. Between the vanity cabinets under the dressing room counter, the counter under the bathroom sink, and the double bi-fold door towel closet there is enough off branded, deep discount, amazingly out of date toiletries, healthcare and grooming products to stock a decent sized drugstore.

But beyond my in-law's shopping excesses is the apparent need to keep everything. The difference between them and my mother is that they have completely run out of closets, attics, and hiding places for their quantity of stuff. For example on their second floor they have three full sized bedrooms, each with closets, a room intended to be a home office, and the aforementioned bathroom. In each room the shear mass of stuff is staggering. The room intended to be an office is instead a place for permanent piles of stuff. Stuff piled from floor to ceiling and so packed are these columns of stuff that light from the dormer window is excluded and no human can pass through no matter how small they are. When the dormer windows had to be replaced, the man doing it told my father-in-law that unless he emptied out that room it would be impossible for the repairs to take place.

Of course this factor infuriated my father-in-law because he didn't see why an exterior structural repair would require an interior access. The situation remained static for several months. Then he finally decided that something would have to be moved out of the room. For the next few months we heard snippets of complaint as he told of his trials and tribulations of having to remove items from the office so that his dormer window could be replaced. The interesting thing was that he mentioned, early in his cleaning process, that there was a set of encyclopedias and matching yearbooks. He asked if we wanted them and we had told him that we would be glad to take them off his hands. As time went on, he began mentioning these encyclopedias more frequently. And each time we said we would be happy to take them off his hands.

Finally, it hit us as to why he was offering them to us. In exchange for the encyclopedias, which were somewhere as yet undiscovered in the room, we would first have to dig out the other junk to get them. Thankfully, we live two hours away and had a newborn infant at the time which made such an engagement of our time an impossibility. The two hours trip down, followed by the two hour trip back with an infant in the back seat just to empty his office of junk didn't seem like something worth doing for fifty years old encyclopedias that may not have even been in the room at all. Eventually, he saw the light and did the dirty work himself. But then he started complaining that he had nowhere to store seven copier paper boxes worth of encyclopedias and it was implied that it was now our fault that he had a storage issue to deal with in his domicile. Of course we didn't point out that twenty years worth of Better Home & Garden stacked from floor to ceiling might have more to do with his space issues than the fact that we had offered to take seven boxes of books off his hands.

The nature of my mother-in-law's purchase habits means that obstensively everything she buys is intended for Christmas. And since they are gifts, they have to be stored somewhere. But like a squirrel and acorns, she often forgets not only what she has bought, but also how many and where they are inside her house. It is not unusual for her to give us shopping bag after shopping bag of "gifts" at Christmas and during the months that follow. And almost universally, these cornucopias of "gifts" are deep discount closeout items that almost no one either needs or wants. For a proper perspective on the contents of these "gifts" imagine that you are inside a WalMart that is fully stocked with items that didn't sell in any of the other stores in the WalMart Empire. Further imagine that of these items for sale, you are only allowed to buy those items which are on the deepest discount possible. Say 90%. And of these items, imagine that you must buy exactly four of each one. In seven years of being "gifted by Judy" that is the only criteria that I can come up with which seems to explain the contents of these bags. I am no longer surprised when I get a bag containing Fiddle Faddle snack mix and toothbrushes. What does surprise me is the fact that she freely admits, often months after Christmas that she found a gift bag intended for one of us that she forgot to remember what year it was from- and "Do you want it now or just wait until next Christmas?"

My father-in-law also has a storage shed on his property. Which contains junk. A building that was supposed to be a greenhouse which now contains construction junk left over from his storage shed. He even has a wonderful plastic film and PVC pipe wigwam sized structure that is a temporary <> greenhouse. Which contains dead plants and a riding lawnmower- also dead. The plastic and PVC greenhouse was constructed when he realized the garage was so full of junk that his plants wouldn't have room or sunlight enough to be over wintered inside. And since the real greenhouse was full of bricks and lumber, the PVC greenhouse was born. It proved inadequate to the job, and the plants still reside in their planters, dead as doornails. I remarked to my wife that it wasn't a greenhouse but rather Dr. Mengele's Wigwam of Flora Experimentation. It never occurred to him that a plastic and PVC wigwam greenhouse wasn't the solution. The solution should have been to empty his garage, or even his greenhouse.

So by family examples and most likely genetics, my wife and I should be the most extreme pack rats ever produced. But we aren't.

Partly it is because we are inherently more practical than our parents. Part of this is due to the fact that we are not rolling in cash. We tend to buy smart and we try to buy once. Our consumer traits aside, the reality that we can become as bad as our parents is embarrassing. The reason I even stopped to write this today is because my mother-in-law called again to find out what "characters does Alex like?" which in Judy-speak means "I found an outlet where the least popular toys of the past decade are warehoused and I want to know if Alex wants the Mickey Mouse branded flip flops or the Dora branded personal hygiene wipes." And to which I always reply, "Alex needs nothing in the toy, clothing, or room furnishings department. And until he is old enough to talk, and tell me what he wants, I am not going to go out and buy more stuff to add to the stuff he already has."

The fact that she has called three times in the last 36 hours for the same reason pretty much explains what I and my wife are up against.

Some things we have done to prevent the pack rat gene from asserting itself now follow.

Things that go in attics are things that get used every year, are costly to replace if you buy them every year, durable, and/or are durable goods that will be needed for use in a plausible future, would be costly to replace, and do not loose their functionality with age.

Items in our attic. Christmas decorations. Halloween Decorations. Antique chairs and tables in excellent condition with family importance. A brand new mountain-bike. New in the box tiffany lamps, which have yet to have a horizontal surface available to put them on. Spare roof shingle packages. Spare flooring tiles. Replacement wood flooring.

And those items are spread between two attics. 

Things that go in the garage.

Tools. Car repair parts/ spare engine parts. Yard tools including a lawnmower. And, of course, two cars.

In common area closets, There are things like household care appliances. IE the Dyson and a hardwood floor polisher.  Also one closet has gift-wrapping/bows for presents. And of course one closet also has dog and cat food storage. The hallway closet nearest the entrance is a coat closet. Kinda pointless where we live, but if someone does visit and has an umbrella and a coat they need hung, we have a place to do it. 

Other than that, our common area closets are empty.

In personal closets, you keep the obvious. Clothes and shoes. That's it. 

Obey the need for a junk drawer. Everyone needs one place inside the house where things you routinely need get stored. Be not ashamed of this drawer. It solves many problems.

Things that you need to routinely remove from your house.

Newspapers. Don't horde these things for one great trip to the recycle bin. Read it- then place it in the street side recycle bin- or take it to work and recycle it there.

Magazines. Pop-culture magazines are worthless the week after they are published. News magazines are worthless in a week too. Aside from maybe National Geographic or Smithsonian almost no magazine has any worth to you after a month has passed. Recycle them. The only exception to this rule is if you get some sort of accredited professional journal. Even then after a year, if any of the content is still valuable clip it out and toss the rest.

Paperwork/junk-mail that the post office sends you. Get a filing box. Write the year on it. Each week, go through everything you got in the mail and keep only those things which have any potential usefulness to you. IE keep the receipt portion of your bills, communications with government agencies, warranty receipts, medical records, and personal correspondence and cards. Each year, get a new box for five years. Filling it as you go in the same manner. In the sixth year, open the original box and keep only the most important and still valid government communications and whatever personal correspondence you deem worthy to keep forever. Toss the rest. Repeat until you die. When you die, your heirs will have all the needed financial and personal records required to settle your estate. It will be only the most current five years. And in a separate box they will have your personal correspondence to remember you by.

Gifts. And I am using this term very generously. Gifts include things that not only would you never buy it for yourself, but also those gifts which you can't even begin to use in the first place. You get them and stuff them in a closet, or under a bed, or throw it in a garage or attic. Don't give a rat's ass if the person who gave it to you ever notices that it is gone. Odds are not only will they not notice you no longer have it, but also the item you got probably was given to them as an unwanted gift in the first place. Its the fruitcake concept writ large. Rumor has it that centuries ago some idiot made a million fruitcakes and sent them as gifts. Thing is fruitcake is so inedible its really better described as a curse upon your house. That being what it is, every year people re-gift the fruitcakes. Now imagine how happy a world we would have if people simply would throw the damn things out. No one would have to wrap another fruitcake and our houses would have less stuff in them. If you get the hot chocolate mixer from your boss, stop off at the Salvation Army Depot on your way home from the office party and donate it.

Household supplies. Especially cleaning supplies. Exactly how many almost empty bottles of Windex do you need? Give yourself some storage space by using up each bottle completely and then only replace the last bottle after it is really empty. You have a container of silver polish with only a trace amount left in it? Don't waste it, use the last little bit to clean off a spoon and then ditch the now empty container. Apply that approach to every cleaning chemical you have. If its been a year since you used the product, odds are it isn't a viable cleaning agent anymore and you are wasting your time even trying to use it. Throw out the old chemicals.

Toiletries. You do not need three toothbrushes, two tubes of toothpaste, three bottles of aspirin, and four packs of disposable razors. Pay attention to what you actually use in a month. If you didn't use it, and it isn't part of an emergency first-aid kit ---you do not need it. Dump it.

Clothes. Have you worn it in the last two years? No? Take it to the Salvation Army.

The final thing we do is that we live by the six month rule for the common area closets and junk drawer in our house. Every few months, and at least once in every six months, the common area closets and junk drawer get cleaned out. If you put something in a closet six months ago, and never took it out, odds are you don't need it. If you do this routinely eventually cleaning out even the biggest closet takes ten minutes to do. Take the worthless to you stuff to the Salvation Army and get a tax write off you do need.

Anyway thats my story of having pack-rats for parents and how my wife and I resist the temptation to fill our closets with junk. Or as complete a version as you are going to get right now.

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Core Views

1. I am for gun control. Meaning that guns should require a traceable license. That guns should be available. That owners should be trained in their proper uses. That owners should be devoid of criminal history. That owners should be free from medical impairments related to sound judgement. That urban areas should be considered zones where possession of hand and sub-machine based weapons requires further regulation. That gun clubs and hunting clubs are a protected type of association. That arms dealing must be fully regulated and have a paper trail that is available to law enforcement.

2. I believe abortion is ethically and morally wrong. I also believe that abortion cannot be made illegal in our society because of the multiple interpretations by society as to what makes a human life. I think it is prudent to make laws that restrict abortion as a means of routine birth control, as well as severely limit reasonable justifications for allowing abortions in the second and third trimesters. 

3. I agree that the government should act to support the daily needs of its citizens during exceptional hardships such as natural disasters. I also think government should provide for temporary assistance during exceptional economic pressures. I think that in cases of individuals being in persistent indigent support, such people should essentially become wards of the state and stripped of voting rights as long as the state provides for their every day needs. I strongly hold that family and social networks should be the primary care takers of people otherwise unable to care for themselves. 

4. I have no problem with gay civil unions. I do have a problem with such unions being equated to traditional marriage because a gay civil union has zero biological possibility of producing children nor would such a union be subjected to the legal penalties routinely associated with divorce.

5. I'm for taking the surplus mines from WW 1 and WW 2 that we are currently spending millions on to store and destroy and instead place them as a belt along our southern border. It will save the cost on storage and demolition of the mines, be cheaper than a fence, and eliminate the creation of drug tunnels as well as stop the illegal crossing of our border. It also could be done in a matter of weeks vs a matter of years in the case of fence construction.

6. I am against capital punishment because it goes against my religion to conduct lethal punishment if there is an alternative means of permanent incarceration. The Catholic Church does provide that there can be justified capital punishment cases, but it stresses that alternatives are almost always preferable.

7. I think Social Security will collapse on its own. Those who are foolish enough to never consider their financial future and leave such things to government capacities deserve no sympathy. Social Security is currently a political tool used by politicians to tell foolish people not to worry because the government will erase responsibility for providing for yourself.

8. I believe the government should promote individual ability to provide for his own life needs by staying almost completely out of the picture except in exceptional circumstances such as natural disasters or military invasion.

9. Government should be small, with state and local government being prime in terms of civilian conduct. Federal government should be powerful enough to administer trade and commerce, enforce treaty commitments, defend the Republic, and protect Federal Constitutional rights on a national level.

10. I also believe in freedom of religion vs not freedom from religion. We have a pluralistic society where everyone can and will be offended by other groups. This means we have to all have a great degree of respect, acknowledge that religious symbols are present in different forms across many cultures. To require our complete removal of any religious symbol from all public view or contact is unethical and also would reduce public interaction to such extent that society would effectively fragment into enclaves of religious intolerance. 

11. I am for a well regulated private economy, beholden to performance capital needs. I also believe that monopolies should be free to become dominate provided they can persistently meet government performance regulations. The right   of individual ownership and private property is basic and irrevocable without just compensation.

12. I support MLK's viewpoint that people should be judged on their ability- not on their color, family, or ethnicity. The law should allow for free access to all in terms of employment, schooling, and access to government contracts. Those who choose to give opportunity to less able people because of color, family, or ethnicity would quickly find themselves at a competitive disadvantage compared to other organizations who seek people based on superior ability.

13. I think the government needs a national archive, as well as representational art, science, and history museums. I also think NPR is a good thing.

14. Government would engage in research in science- including space. However true commercial based space development should be private sectored. 

15. The war in Iraq is a small theater in our current war. Withdrawal is not an option. 

16. School vouchers work.

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Real Space vs. Cyber Space

It is funny but I think that what you see of me here and on Ornery is who I really am. I tend to just "listen" on Hatrack because much of the discussion tends towards pop culture, or issues that I simply don't follow very closely like movies or current music. In real life if you start talking about this type of stuff, my eyes glaze over and it becomes obvious pretty quickly that I really am not listening too well. I simply don't care about Brittany Spears or whatever happens to be the latest cover-page of People magazine. Mostly however, it is just that I know so little about popular culture that I essentially have nothing to say. People ask who is your favorite actress and I am thinking Greta Garbo or Vivian Lee or some long gone actress instead of the latest starlet that played the blonde bimbo in the latest Hollywood movie. I constantly need to be reminded by my wife who is who in the latest shocking celebrity scandal.

I also tend not to engage much in a large group in real life. I have a huge problem keeping names matched with faces, so often times I need to meet someone several times before it becomes permanently ingrained. Needless to say that is a really embarrassing problem in real life. On Hatrack no one realizes that I even have such a problem. I'm not timid or afraid of large groups of people, it is just that I seldom have anything to say which would be of much interests to anyone else. Unless of course you happen to hit subjects I do know something about.

Bring up Anthropology, history, football, Formula One, or politics and you will wish you hadn't because I'll talk your ear off. But in real life, aside from football, not many people willingly talk about history, anthropology, or even know about Formula One. And politics is simply not polite conversation at a cocktail party. 

I think who I am on Hatrack, in real life, and on Ornery are the same person. It hasn't been a deliberate decision to make it that way, but that is how it turned out. In fact in real life, my nickname really was/is Redskull. 

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How to get into College

1. In general, high-school guidance counselors really do not know much about colleges and universities, except for the local and state schools. And possibly their Alma Mater. Take advantage of senior skip days, and in some cases junior skip days set aside explicitly to visit college campus or university facilities. If your child does not get any visitation days officially from his high-school, then write him a note for a medical excuse. I cannot stress enough just how important visiting a campus is. Whether it is simple preference or even finding out glaring differences between reputation and reality, a campus visit with parents-in-tow can be a real eye opener. Try to schedule visits during the Fall or at least when a college is running at full steam with a maxed out student body bustling to and from classes and activities.

Send applications to as many schools as you can, even those where you have very little interest in attending. The reason for this is that going through the application process multiple times will help you key in on what is deemed important universally as far as the college admittance review processes go. Also if you expect to need financial aid, begin the process now. Fill out all the federal forms. It can sometimes take 24 months to adequately complete the process. Private lending processes are somewhat shorter, however their loan costs tend to be higher. 

If you envision your child working even part time to help defray tuition costs, and you will need even moderate financial help from federal sources, by all means DO NOT CLAIM YOUR CHILD on either your state or federal income taxes as a dependent after they turn 15. Because of federal and state laws regarding Perkins Loans and Pell Grants, even if a child is fully emancipated from his parents at age 18, if they have been claimed as a dependent by either parent the previous three years, eligibility for federal Student Loans and Grants is determined by parental income and resources instead of the actual resources of the student. After age 24, the Federal Loan and Grant determinations assume any student is solely responsible for his our her tuition costs and they no longer care what the parents make. 

This issue repeatedly causes problems for students coming from divorced parents, where one parent claims the child as a dependent, yet the non custodial parent provides financial support. When the child goes to apply for Federal Aid, he assumes only his custodial parent's income will be used to determine eligibility, yet when all is said and done, both parent's household incomes get added together, usually resulting in a denial of aid because it is assumed the incomes of both divorced households can pay for the tuition costs. So if your child is headed to college, and you claimed them as a dependent, and you will need financial aid, help your child get the aid as grants instead of loans, or deferred loans instead of delayed loans. Go back and re-file your previous three years of tax returns without your child as a dependent, and have them re-file theirs as individuals, claiming themselves. The difference to your eventual cost can be staggering if you follow this advice. 

2. You go to a liberal arts or university to do one thing; LEARN HOW TO LEARN. You go to junior colleges and technical schools to learn specific skill sets or trades. It is a big difference. If you go to college expecting it to simply be a punch card process where you go for 4 years and then graduate to an office cubicle or other such guaranteed job, then you are going for the wrong reasons. 

3. My personal advice? Take Latin in high-school or Advanced Trigonometry, but not both. If you are more attuned to vocabulary than arithmetic, then you would take the Latin. And if the reverse is true, take Trig. Realize that an extremely good score on one half of the SAT can buoy up a mediocre score on the other. As to the optional written test, it isn't optional. Get "The Elements of Style" by White read it and follow its rules to the letter. It will instantly clarify English grammar and syntax, and enable you to author a decent essay nearly every time on a college coursework level of standards. In my personal experience, I shrugged off the PSAT, and would recommend most people skip it these days. I took the SAT once, and was suitably prepared by staying out the night before, getting drunk beyond reason, and taking it with a hang-over of massive proportions.

4. Financial aid, see point 1 above. But I cannot stress enough that if you plan or expect to need any grants or loans at all during their education process, IMMEDIATELY CEASE claiming them as a dependent. MAKE SURE THE FILE A TAX RETURN. Your goal is to be able to prove by Federal Financial Aid standards that your child was and is fully emancipated from your support. This means they handle what limited financial income they have had independently from yours. That you have allowed them to claim themselves for their own tax purposes. If you follow my advice, even if you find that you have to pay a difference in taxes paid by re-filing previous years, you will still be more likely to get full grants. IE. Your child fully emancipated financially from you would likely get the full Pell Grant, vs your child as a tax deduction for you, while he gets a minimal Pell Grant or none at all. Sure you get $2000 by claiming him as your dependent, but by doing so you totally screw yourself out of enabling him to get $7000.00 in Pell Grants a year. 

5. Scholarships often get tied to what school he attends. Aside from an athletic or an artistic performance scholarship, most scholarships that are merit based will become apparent once they are already students. Needs based scholarships are usually made part of the offered financial aid package. You don't need to waste time surfing the Internet for secret scholarships devoted to Irish left-handed dyslexics. If you are going to get a performance based scholarship, the colleges will come to you with the offer. If once you are at college, you decided to go after a scholarship, your department professor or such will be more than willing to make you aware of their existence. To be honest, on most mid-sized college's quads, you will often see flyers advertising scholarships all the time.

6. Course-load. Take the number of classes that everyone else does per semester once you are in college. And for your freshman year NEVER take the Freshman Trifecta 101 English, 101 Math, 101 Biology/Chemistry/Physics. These are weeder classes. Taken in combination they can be deadly. Take instead the first 2 semesters or quarters any 100-300 level class that sounds interesting to you. Ignore what your academic advisors say the first few semesters. They see every freshman as a variable to be plugged into a pre-determined road-mapped formula. Part of their perspective is that they should encourage weak students to bow out of college quickly. Therefore they hit freshmen up with a couple of quarters of trifecta, resulting in many students giving up and going home. 

As for high school, well that depends on if you have any flexibility at all in the coursework. Often the choice is between college bound vs not college bound. If you are college bound you take X number of English, X number of Math etc. It pretty much leaves you very little free space. In terms of A.P. coursework, some colleges acknowledge them with full credit, some allow you to substitute them for pre-requisites, and a growing number are offering nothing at all for your A.P. work other than a check mark on the application process. In general, take the hardest courses offered from the teachers everyone thinks is the hardest. If all his friends are taking a really popular, yet easy course with the favorite teacher, see if there is a harder course taught by a teacher everyone else fears because she rides students into the dirt.

My popular teachers in high-school I can no longer  remember, but my Latin and AP History teachers still appear in my nightmares.

7. Remain UNDECLARED for at least 1 year. What 18/19 year old kid really has a clue as to what interests them enough to last the remainder of their life? It could take a couple of years to even figure it out. Make the process organic. Take what interests you first to see if you really like it. Only then get on a pre-determined Major field of study.

Other advice.

Choose schools suited to your child's learning style. If he is not quite ready for the freshman class that numbers in the thousands and has classrooms taking place in huge auditoriums featuring lectures by desktop video, then by all means do not encourage him to go to the state polytechnic university with a student body of 50,000. Whatever school he goes to, ask the admissions office for alumni contacts so that he can interview people who went there. Ideally once he has finalized what school he can afford financially and academically, the best addition to an application is a letter of introduction written by an alumni from his target school.

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Common Sense

Common Sense. A pair of words that have such arguable meanings. Unlike most word pairs, the ideas and concepts that they represent are often undefended assumption. What is common sense to one person is foolhardy to another. To finalize an argument by an appeal to common sense is to usually loose the argument. What is unique about this word pair is that although it can be a subjective indefinite, it can be exampled and turned into an objective definite. On a web site devoted to extracting ornery details, common sense often becomes an objective definite.

While many appeals to common sense have been made over the last year’s political cycle, most have been of the type which define the word pair in terms of the subjective and indefinite. Campaign statements by both parties have appealed subjectively to their supporters. This has allowed partisans of both political parties to appear to be agreeing to something obvious. It has usually been the case that their common sense appeals have little factual evidence which would allow their statements to approach objectivity or definitiveness. What in the world is the undecided voter to do?

Unfortunately our republic now finds itself captive to a campaign process which results in lowered expectations. It is not a fall from some Golden or Silver Political Age. It is rather a change in the tools that are available to voters which would allow them to collectively apply an objective understanding to the political process. Consider this small point, aside from his supporters, does anyone else really believe that Senator Kerry has firm values? Or for that matter, other than Senator Kerry’s supporters, does anyone else really believe that President Bush has values so firm that they are completely inflexible?

How can an electorate, less than two weeks away from an election, find itself in a position of believing one candidate to be virtuous for not being firm, while his opponent is unvirtuous for being firm? And it is not just a problem that afflicts Senator Kerry’s supporters. Bush supporters firmly believe that he is an excellent administrator surrounded by wise consul. Yet, at the same time they cannot recognize that some of his top advisors could be cookie cutter copies of each other as far as ideology is concerned? If the rules of common sense appeal are to become objective, we must recognize that at this late stage in the electoral process our collective common sense appeal for either candidate is largely subjective.

Electing a person to office based almost exclusively on subjective opinion is ultimately foolhardy. It is exactly what we are preparing to do. We have seen arguments by Democrat and Republican leaders and campaigners that make the photo op, sound byte, and style as being the key factors to the ultimate electability of their candidates. Substance is horridly lacking in these key factors. Any attempt by any agent to ascertain the concrete and objective has either failed to elicit a response from the various campaigners, or resulted in such a weak objective fact that it is easy for the electorate to dismiss the fact as unimportant.

Consider for a moment what the campaign issues have been so far. War on Terror fought with military generalists vs War on Terror fought by military specialists and legal prosecution. The best interest rates and highest home ownership in sixty years vs. worst job losses and highest consumer debt ever. Homeland Security Agency creation and Patriot Act vs. anarchy on our borders and civil liberties in jeopardy. United Nations multilateral diplomacy and conditional Security Council responses vs. Unilateral enforcement of United Nations endorsements and Oil for Food scandals. Historic elections in Afghanistan vs. Taliban resurgence. We could go on. The point is that on all of the issues as they have developed, we still have yet to be able to compare objectively what the plans or intents of the candidates are.

For example both candidates intend to send more troops if required, continue carrot and stick diplomacy to get legal custody of suspected terrorists, and support the troops with whatever they need and bring them home only after a stable democracy comes into existence in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ok so they both agree on that. Furthermore they both agree that multilateral approaches to the rebuilding of both countries is important. In the case of Afghanistan both candidates want more from our allies. In the case of Iraq, one candidate has commitments from thirty countries for billions in aid and development packages, the other says that is not enough. 

The sad fact is that neither candidate has put down, even in broad brush strokes, any objective statement of how our military occupation will end. In fact what both candidates have endorsed is nothing more than the plan that existed before either country was invaded. Bush has not come up with anything new and Kerry has not come up with any alternative. Yet both parties proudly proclaim that their candidate has the only common sense solution to this issue. Logic dictates that since both have claimed the same policy as being their own, yet claimed their opponent’s policy to be impossibly flawed, that the policy is indeed flawed and neither has any answer to the problem. That would be the objective conclusion. Instead we have both sides declaring that its common sense that their candidate has the only workable solution.  Certainly this issue of political policy planning by the candidates lives in the same realm as a certain emperor who wears the finest in invisible clothes.

The sad fact is that every possible issue of substance has been avoided by both candidates. Saddam was either a threat or a revenge target. Kerry either did nothing for 20 years, or was a statesman leader to be envied. Kerry was either a self describe war criminal or an ardent protester against American policy. Bush was an AWOL drunkard or a decent officer who far exceeded his service time commitment.  Do we as an electorate even recognize that we have focused on such trivial issues that, even if they do have some objectivity, they still focus on items that ultimately result in subjective choices that are removed from factual consideration of executive official policy potentials?

Both candidates love taking slivers of data from government reports out of context. Kerry touts the fact that the economy has lost 3 million jobs.  Bush touts  his adding of 1.3 million private sector jobs. Both men are absolutely correct. Both are also absolutely wrong because they are simply parroting data out of context. We have lost 3 million jobs in the private sector however, we have added over 1.3 million private sector jobs as well as additional government jobs to leave a net loss of just over 500,000 jobs. But even that is misleading, because most of the newly created jobs are not considered since they are the result of small business. What is even worse is that many of the reported jobs that have been created are the indirect result of government contract spending. Kerry is factually wrong in trying to imply that the economy is a wasteland of lost jobs. Bush is factually wrong in trying to imply that the economy is a vibrant oven of job creation. Objective review would be that we are down 500,000 jobs, that many jobs are somehow related to increased government spending, that many uncounted jobs have been created, and that the economy is facing a drain on growth that is directly attributable to the economic influences of a war time economy. 

That would be common sense. We have an economy which is inaccurately measured but demonstrably effected by war time constraints. Where have the questions been that address this issue? We have unemployment rates even lower than those of the Clinton Administration. Interest rates lower than the Eisenhower administration. Actual real wage growth of 2% a year. Home ownership, including minority home ownership is at record levels. In a non war time economic environment such factors would add up to a staggeringly healthy economy. In reality, our economy is neither as crippled as Kerry claims, nor as stellar as Bush claims. Regardless of your political views, objectivity should easily guide you to the conclusion that neither candidate has offered any solution to the problem. Kerry would increase spending and raise taxes, Bush would maintain tax cuts and raise spending. It sounds more like party planks than solid ideas.

When it comes to the above policy issues, as stated in this commentary, many readers will declare them to be simplistic distillations. I agree that they are, but only because neither candidate has attempted to challenge himself with any degree of objective disclosure in regard to how he identifies, defines and proposes solutions to the nation’s problems and aspirations. After spending months going over Senator Kerry’s web site and its lack of any such objective disclosure and also investigating President Bush’s actual record and its probable future developments, I have come to the conclusion that neither candidate expects objective common sense from the electorate.

Common sense. Or rather a complete lack of objective reality. Am I to believe that Senator Kerry can raise taxes, increase spending by over a trillion dollars for four years and also bring the several trillion dollar debt we already have back to a balanced budget? President Ford may have had WIN and price controls, and President Reagan may have had Supply Side Economics and Voodoo on their side, but compared to Senator Kerry’s economic plan at least they had some common sense objectivity behind them. Ford’s plan was to control consumer consumption via price controls and producer side regulation under the assumption that if consumers paid a consistent price and producers were shielded from inflation effects then the post Vietnam War economy crash could be controlled. Reagan’s plan was if you drastically restructured the tax tables and let investors invest in growth, then the net revenues returned to the federal government would offset the reduction of taxable liability. In both cases their plans were sound enough to work, and did work, in spite of both economic plans being effected by other factors. In Ford’s case there was no way he could have countered the looming OPEC crisis or his own election defeat. Reagan’s economic plan worked exactly as advertised, but he then added a military spending buildup which offset the revenue gains.

But look back on the economic plans both put into place. They stated what they were, why they expected it to work, and how implementing the solution they proposed would solve the economic problems. In either reality or theory, Senator Kerry’s plan could never work, that is why he has avoided hard numbers backed by hard details in any of his speeches to date. If you want to attempt to find any specifics and you take the Senator’s challenge to look at his plans on his web page, you will find quickly that there are no details just promised outlays for all of us. Should we be suspect?

So does this mean President Bush has an economic plan? Like Kerry, go to his campaign site or even his official presidential site and you will soon find that his promises are as vapid as the ones on his competitors web site.  President Bush’s plan seems to be historically unprecedented low inflation, interest rates and unemployment and predictions of job growth that have so far lagged significantly behind promised levels. Are we to somehow expect that if Bush continues to maintain current economic indicators at the current levels that he too can increase spending and maintain lower taxes while generating aggressive job growth and cut the deficit? Common sense objectivity would indicate that his plan is as flawed as his challengers. 

The point to this is that whether it is economic, military, education, geopolitic, or environmental policy, neither candidate has offered anything of substance that would allow objective judgment. We cannot definitively say either candidate would enact anything specifically. It is also completely our own fault.  At no time in this election cycle has there been any groundswell of interest by the electorate demanding exact details and specific policy explanation.

Instead we have situations such as Bush deciding to plan to have two more brigades deployed to Iraq, but we don’t know any specifics. Kerry counters by saying he would flood the Iraqi theater with 50,000 additional troops, but we don’t know the specifics in his plan either. Why has no one asked Senator Kerry exactly how he plans to suddenly have 50,000 troops available? Would it be a redeployment like President Bush’s plan, or does he plan on volunteer enlistments, a draft, or even, mercenary soldiers to somehow reach 50,000 new pairs of boots on the ground? Who knows? We have been so absorbed in the spin mastery of both political parties, that no one has though to ask the obvious of Kerry... “Where are the 50,000 troops going to come from?” Instead the Republicans harp the cord that Bush already has the exact amount requested by his commanders, but that Bush will send two more brigades. Why has no one asked the common sense question... “If your commanders have all the troops they need, why then are you preparing to send in more?”  We haven’t asked it because we have been more focused on the Democrats harping on the cord that a large round number increase is needed to counteract the failings of Bush’s deployment.

Common sense, based on objectivity would demand that we ask how in the world both candidates even defined the problem at all. Instead we have two candidates who share what amounts to the exact same policy. Bush states Kyoto is bad science but we will continue to enforce our current federal environmental laws. Kerry states Kyoto is dead and that we aren’t enforcing our environmental laws aggressively enough. Did either of them ever even look at the environment to see what the possible problems are and then define policy solutions? In the case of the environment, it appears that neither man has even given much thought at all to the possibility that a problem exists beyond the possible need for sound bytes concerning global warming or timber harvesting. President Bush arranged for funding of alternative fuels, specifically hydrogen fuel cell development. Kerry concurs and states he will fund it even more. So both men are committed to funding hydrogen fuel cell development? Why? Is this an important program? Is there some reason why both men believe this to be a solution to a problem? What problem is this even expected to solve? Objectively all we can determine is that both men will continue funding research into hydrogen fuel cell alternatives. Where is the difference between them?

If there is any thought behind the support of nearly any item that passes as political policy goals of these two candidates,  you would be hard pressed to find it to be based on specifics and facts.  Exactly how can we be expected to determine the differences between the candidates if neither has provided details of their policy goals. Senator Kerry lays claim to being the champion of the poor and unionized, while Bush claims the businessmen and patriots. Is that any basis for deciding who the next president should be? 

Have we been provided the specifics which would allow objectivity? Surely we have been given snippets of fact and detail in the speeches and interviews. But no where, even when candidates declare that they are making major policy speeches, have they come out and explained what the policy problem is, how they individually define it, and how their policy would solve the problem.  How in the world is a candidate solving a problem when all he states is subjective. For example Senator Kerry has stated he would fully fund the Pell Grants that went unfilled last year.  

Listening to this claim, we are left with the subjective common sense perception that Senator Kerry will fully support Pell Grants. Makes sense doesn’t it? But consider the fact that there is a disproportionate number of qualified students who would get a Pell Grant if they would just fill out the complicated paperwork. The College Board found that the biggest problem with the entire government student aid program is the shear complication involved in applying for it. Fifty percent of those students who are qualified for federal student aid do not receive aid simply because they forego the complicated application process. Although Congress allocated increased funds, the funds went unclaimed. Could these be the same unfilled grants Senator Kerry was referring to? Did they go unfilled because they were not funded, or because students and parents simply did not have the patience or time to invest in the paperwork which leads to the grants? Could the real problem be the process by which the funds are disbursed, rather than there being no funds to disburse? Neither media nor ordinary citizen has even thought to point out the real nature of the problem and demand a better, and more objective policy statement from Senator Kerry. Even his opponent has yet to question him on this particular issue, because if he did question it he might have to explain why he has yet to come up with a solution to the paperwork involved with college aid. In the early 1990’s it took almost 14 months for my Pell Grant process to complete, I doubt the process has streamlined in the last 10 years. Although Pell Grants are fully funded by Congress, many grants are not made due to paperwork requirements. Has either candidate answered the simple question that the reason grants go unfulfilled is not because of funding? 

The common sense we have been left with through the election process is almost exclusively subjective. The candidates have adopted a practice of making subjective platitudes. Both promise solutions, but fail to disclose the basis for those solutions. The Republicans have curiously turned this fact into an argument against Senator Kerry by claiming he is a flip-flopper. What they have actually identified is that Kerry is good with making subjective and flexible promises which are nonspecific in nature. Politically astute, this strategy lets Kerry craft a subjective appeal to common sense concerning his policy plans without having to ever objectively state or even define his policy plans. The Republicans recognizing the fact that Kerry has no specifics that can be countered with objective fact, have enabled themselves to challenge Kerry’s plans by simply pointing out the obvious. Kerry’s policy plans can mean multiple things at multiple times because he has used no objective fact to back up his policy plans. They call it flip-flopping. The sad fact is that the Republicans are suffering from the same exact disease, but the Democrats have yet to realize it.

Republican policy plans have been almost as equally devoid of objective fact as Kerry’s are. The slight difference is that President Bush has almost four years of policy in place. You can investigate Bush’s past performance. However, the election is about the next four years. When questioned about policy for the next four years, President Bush either restates what he has done already, or makes subjective policy promises of the same type as Kerry. To the partisan supporters of either candidate the blind acceptance of subjective policy plan promises is  common sense. Even when both candidates have identical policy plans, both sides supporters are amazed that the challenging side doesn’t recognize the common sense of the  candidate. How could a Bush supporter not support Kerry’s common sense plans? How could Kerry’s supporters not recognize Bush’s common sense?

The answer is that while the supporters are not willing to objectively investigate their own candidates positions, they will apply an objective investigation to the opponents. In effect both presidential candidates’ supporters have pointed out that the arguments and promises made by the opposing side are not common sense based on objectivity. This has lead to the ongoing problem this election cycle of a candidate dismissing his opponent’s policy plans by pointing out that the plans have no detailed support, and then the candidate presents his policy plan without any detailed support.  For example senator Kerry declares that the tax cuts under Bush are unaffordable and that Kerry will fix the problem by rolling back the tax cut. He repeatedly and proudly claims that only people making $200,000 a year would be affected by this repeal. Bush counters by stating that he would maintain the tax cut to ensure the health of the economy. 

All the claims concerning the tax issue are simply subjective sound byte platitudes. IRS figures indicate that if Kerry did rollback the tax cut to the previous threshold a lot of people would be paying a lot more in taxes. If you are single and make $146,751 a year, Married filing separately and making $89,326 a year or married filing jointly making $178,651 a year, under the Kerry rollback you would be paying more in taxes in 2005. Kerry has repeatedly stated that his rollback would only affect those earning $200,000 a year and has offered no other details or plans other than simply rolling back the tax threshold to its previous level. Objective common sense indicates in this case that a lot more people would be effected by Kerry’s plans in addition to those making $200,000 a year. How does President Bush challenge this plan of Senator Kerry? He makes an equally blanket statement that he will maintain the tax cut because it is good for the economy. Has anyone provided data that proves this to be true? More important, why has neither candidate challenged their opponent with objective details which indicate flaws in their opponent’s plans? Why is the media not acting as our watchdog and forcing either candidate to answer the blatant objective flaws their plans contain?

If it is so repeatedly easy to dissect the policy plans of either candidate, why has our media or even the general electorate not questioned the subjective natures of what the candidates present? It is a combination of two things. First, neither candidate can afford to alienate core supporters by fully defining their policy plans. Second, neither candidate wants to risk being perceived by the general electorate as a technocrat. 

If President Bush came out with a fully defined ecological policy, and included specific program funding, defined problems, specific solutions, and defined goals he would surely run afoul of some of his core business supporters. By being specific, not only would he be expected by the general electorate to be accountable, but he would also be vulnerable to detailed analysis by his supporters and opponents. If Senator Kerry had facts and figures embedded in his policy goals, and his campaign policy speeches were filled with CBO, GBO and think tank derived theory and estimates, exactly how many people would care to listen to a speech which amounts to the equivalent of a college symposium on a particular policy plan? Knowing the churlish hostility of much of the general public towards anything that smacks of academia, why would any candidate risk being declared the successor to college professor Woodrow Wilson? Complex language and theory will bore your supporters to tears. Simply and repeatedly stating “My opponent is a bad choice, so vote for me.” is a lot easier on both the voter’s intellect and attention span.

With so few days left to go in the campaign cycle, very little has been defined between the two major candidates. The only real differences are what each candidate supports in relation to abortion, stem cell research, rolling back the Bush tax cut and same sex marriage. Considering that we are a nation involved in a war, and have only a mediocre economy, the defined differences between the two candidates are almost exclusively trivial. The fact that they have yet to really define the remaining differences between them should leave us trembling in fear. Bush is for tort reforms, and so is Kerry. What is the difference between them? The same goes for appealing to the United Nations in regard to multilateral engagement. Does anyone truly think John Kerry would ignore a terrorist attack, or Bush would invade a country because of a family grudge? Common sense tells us neither would be the case, yet if we were to trust the partisan definitions of the two candidates, Kerry acting only with United Nations authorization, and Bush unilaterally leading us against nations hostile to his family is the only defining substance between their two policy plans. Without any real substance to their political arguments, we have been left with scant objective definition of who they are, and have bought wholesale the subjective policy plans they have passed off to the media and voters as common sense.

We have a campaign of subjective common sense. Who is to blame? Firstly, we must blame ourselves because collectively we have placed style, appearance, and sound bytes above objective questioning and qualification. But given the fact that as a whole, our education in civics and government political processes and functions has dropped sharply in the last twenty years, we can hardly be surprised that for the most part we are collectively too poorly educated to aggressively and to accurately ascertain the merits of candidates seeking political office. We could also blame the mass media, but again their collective performance is a function of our lack of civic and political process education.

Simply put, it is remarkably unprofitable to offer exacting analysis, penetrating investigation, and uncompromising challenging of political candidates. Newspapers have diminished in number and have faced flat or declining readership, surviving by reducing hard news coverage and adding content intended to entertain the reader rather than inform. Radio has adopted the call in talk show hosted entertainment format. Partisan in nature and relying heavily on the entertainment value of the host personalities the content tends to appeal to specific demographics deemed important by advertisers, and is usually subjective rather than objective. In a sense listeners to such shows, whether it is a liberal or conservative host, already have determined their own political views and are listening more for the entertainment value of the show rather than gaining objective information concerning the candidates. Local television coverage of even regional political issues is scant unless its during an election cycle. Even with local PBS stations broadcasting national programs concerned with politics, local political programing is usually limited to a few televised candidate debates. Coupling the relatively weak market penetration of PBS broadcasts, and the limited actual coverage of political candidates the local television coverage of candidates is appallingly low.

Cable television coverage of candidates is not much better than other outlets. While most cable channels do occasionally have some form of political coverage, it is often contextually related to the overall programing style of the channel. Flashy post production, youth oriented “Choose or Loose” programing on MTV is informative but hardly meets the criteria of being exacting, penetrating  and uncompromising challenging as it reviews candidates and their policy plans. What cable has been exceptional at accomplishing is creating what amounts to a hourly news cycle. Particularly with the news and business channels, the need for programing has resulted in the hunger for new or updated trends when it comes to political candidates. 

In this type of environment, candidates seldom receive concentrated coverage. Instead of interviewing candidates directly or even simply telecasting their campaign appearances, the candidates are presented by proxy. Party functionaries, editorialists, and pollsters are the main form of contact that a viewer has with either candidate. Each news segment consists of a news reader asking questions that wind up in eliciting a response that consists of that day’s political party talking points. Because of the need to repeatedly update the news cycle, the news reader never risks challenging the candidate's representatives out of the fear that if they are challenged too strongly they might not return for another session of talking point exposure.

The result is that we as an electorate, get compelling discussions as to who is more likely to support a candidate. Is the NASCAR fan more likely to support Bush, or do black voters support Kerry. These types of softball interview questioning provide nothing of substance. Yet each cable news outlet does nothing to change their processes, and instead presents the parade of talking heads as if it were a valid tool for helping to define candidates and their policy plans. If it was a valid tool, the electorate would have an impressive pool of objective information concerning the candidates. Since we have such a scant representation of objective differences placed into evidence concerning the candidates, it has become apparent that constant coverage of the candidates by cable news outlets to fill the hourly news cycle is just as failed as other media forms.

Network news coverage is even less viable. Out of a half hour of slotted broadcast time, just over twenty minutes is available for reporting. Most coverage nightly consists of brief reports lasting two minutes or less and one or two expanded segments. With such brief length of time available, only superficial coverage is provided. In a sense, what the cable news outlets attempt to cover in an hour of telecasting, the network news broadcasters condense into thirty minutes. Like their cable competitors, substance and objective details are painfully absent. Add to this the apparent editorial bias of ABC and CBS, and it is little wonder that the resultant newscasts are viewed skeptically by many who watch the evening broadcasts.

Of course there is always the unfiltered outlet represented by CSPAN. Devoid of editorial content, but with a schedule dependent on the whims of congressional and senatorial sessions, coverage of campaign appearances is fragmented at best. A speech could be in progress and be preempted in mid sentence. Judging from he Neilson ratings CSPAN’s ultimate impact is almost infinitesimally small. It could be argued that in the case of CSPAN, most of its viewers are likely to be some of the best informed voters, but unlike the majority of viewers watching the rest of the broadcast spectrum, it is only the hard core political observers who are likely to expose themselves to CSPAN’s coverage.

The most hyped media source, the Internet, lends itself to some of the most and least intelligent coverage of candidates. Regardless of how objective or subjective internet coverage is the content is so widely dispersed that consolidation of objective data requires skillful manipulation of the various data sources. Frankly, the level of skill required is beyond the level of many people. To use the Internet effectively requires a steep learning curve that includes understanding basic technology, understanding how to use filtering tools, and finally actual access to the Internet. Hard as it is to believe, our society still has a huge segment of the population that has no Internet access and a large percentage that does have access has only the most novice ability to use the Internet. Even if good objective information exists, the likelihood that Internet users will find the information is low. While the idea of the Internet fundamentally changing how voters judge candidates has been theorized, it is still a voting resource that depends on future maturation.

Is it fundamentally the fault of the American electorate that we have allowed subjectivity to determine common sense. Our failing to demand objectivity from the candidates is a strong condemnation against our abilities to exercise our civic duty responsibly. However the ultimate responsibly for the lack of objective and definitive understanding of the candidates rests with the candidates themselves. And of the two candidates, the one that bears the most responsibility for this situation is John Kerry.

Since wrapping up the nomination Kerry has at no time endeavored to reveal what his policy goals are, how they are different in details from his opponent, what the defined goals of his policy are, and exposed himself to objective investigation by supporting his policy plans with fully developed objective content. At no time has he challenged his opponent to fulfill the same lacking endeavor. Since he is the challenger, it is his responsibility to demonstrate effectively exactly what is different between himself and the President. As a challenger seeking change, he must define his planned policies to such an extent that they are detailed and supported. That would allow the electorate to judge the merits Senator Kerry has. Unfortunately all he has done is repeat subjective statements about his abilities. 

Are there differences between the two candidates? Yes, and it does not take too much effort to discover them. However, since his challenger has focused on the subjective, and the president has been able to avoid objective comparisons between the two, the differences that have been made apparent to the electorate tend to deal with trivialities. Can the electorate make decisions based on the few objective differences that have been made clear, for example Bush is against and Kerry is for abortion? For some voters that is enough of an issue to decide how they will vote. But, if the majority of the electorate are awaiting laundry lists of objective policy goals and plans from the candidates, counting on the candidates to supply such objective details is an exercise in futility.

So before you go out and vote, consider your common sense. Is your common sense the result of the subjective claims and counter claims of the candidates? Are you one of the lucky voters who focuses on a single issue which makes  the need to investigate other issues pointless? Or are you one of the voters wise enough to look for the objective and definite before exercising your common sense?  

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