Category Archives: employment

Inspiration

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We need a break from the heavy and depressing things we have been addressing lately. We need some inspiration.  Unconventional inspiration.

Journalists sometimes seem to have a warped sense of humor. It’s a contrariness that good reporters have to have because we must deal with so much righteousness, often self-righteousness (especially when we deal with politics).  We also have to deal with some things that are so incredibly serious that, as Abraham Lincoln once remarked, “Gentlemen, why do you not laugh? With the fearful strain that is upon me day and night, if I did not laugh, I should die.”

None of us often has a “fearful strain” upon us, although our times present great opportunities for it.  But all of us at some time have broken a dark scenario with a joke.

Think of the last memorial service or celebration of life you attended. The ones I have attended have been more light-hearted than mournful.

Your faithful correspondent has never been impressed by companies that post beautiful pictures on walls or in offices, the pictures accompanied by some drivel that is supposed to be uplifting.  That is why he had a series of counter-uplifting posters at his desk that did a different kind of uplifting.

This one is from a company called Despair Incorporated. Its website informs visitors:

“No industry has inflicted more suffering than the Motivational Industry. Motivational books, speakers and posters have made billions of dollars selling shortcuts to success and tools for unleashing our unlimited potential. At Despair, we know such products only raise hopes to dash them. That’s why our products go straight to the dashing.”

For many years, I secretly harbored but never carried out the ambition to steal into my company headquarters under the cover of darkness and replace motivational posters with Demotivational posters from the folks at Despair—such as this one which goes to the very heart of the issue:

One of the founders of this company is E. L Kirsten, who has a Ph.D., (which might stand for perverse humor director) and once was a professor of organizational communication. He got his degree from Southern Cal,

He has a book:

The book, like the company products, satirizes the motivational poster industry. A promotion for it says:

Motivation. The Futile Quest.

Motivation has become a multi-billion dollar industry, courtesy of the patronage of corporations and the noble intentions of Executives who lead them. At the heart of this colossal confederation of inspirational speakers, platitudinous posters, parable-filled management books, and increasingly complicated incentive programs lies an alluring promise: that with enough encouragement, empowerment, and esteem, employees will become productive and loyal, to the benefit of both their employers and themselves.

Yet, in spite of the staggering expenditures on packaged esteem, polls show that worker morale has reached critical lows, with a majority of employees even claiming to hate their jobs. How is this possible? And more importantly, what can Executives do about this crisis of employee dissatisfaction?

In this revolutionary new management book, Despair, Inc.® founder Dr. E. L. Kersten plumbs the depths of employee discontent to find its root cause. Though most live lackluster lives filled with wasted opportunities and trivial accomplishments, employees grow ever more certain of their enormous worth and glorious destinies. Why is this so? Because most are the products of a narcissistic age, the spiritual casualties of a grand social experiment gone terribly awry.

Ironically, managers attempting to motivate employees by increasing their self-esteem only compound the very problem they seek to solve. Reinforcing employee delusions of grandeur only increases their irrational sense of entitlement to the wealth, stature and privilege that justice dictates be reserved for the truly accomplished and inarguably worthy: namely, Executives.

With The Art of Demotivation former professor and current executive Kersten offers not only a comprehensive analysis of the problem but a prescriptive solution; one grounded not in the fantasies of infinite human potential so often advanced by the motivation industry, but in the grim realities of a broken world. Managers who seek a productive, loyal workforce must first liberate employees from the prison cells of their narcissism by forcing them to confront that which they expend enormous energy to avoid:
their true selves.

There are three editions of the book. One, the Chairman edition, goes for almost $1200—actually at the bargain price of $1,195, a price fully in keeping with the company, uh, philosophy.

We mention all of this NOT to be giving this company a lot of free advertising. We’re just doing it to keep from being hit with a copyright violation.

But we do think these posters perform a valuable service to some places that take themselves far too seriously. These are some of those days when, as a friend of mine once observed, “The people in Washington have it backwards.  They take themselves seriously but not their jobs.” These posters would make great billboards there.

It’s sold out.  Why are we not surprised?

And for those who like the Disney theme song—-the first three notes of which are a big part of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind:”

I love these things.

Let’s wrap this up with a couple of others that I don’t recall seeing among the Despair products. There are other internet sites that have their own offerings. They lack the sophistication of Despair but that doesn’t mean they can’t provoke a smile or a snort or even a laugh.

I think we have arrived there today.

The contest

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The legislature and the Secretary of State are involved in a urinary contest and the only people getting wet are 22 public servants who have been caught in the middle of the streams.

And I am personally in a state of high urinary agitation because of this match.  I was president of the Friends of the Missouri State Archives for nine years and remain on the board. I was there when the organization was founded many years before that. I have used the archives extensively for the Capitol books I have written or am waiting to be published. I have used the archives for other projects as well.  Some of those who’ve gotten the axe are on the staff of the state library, which also has been an important resource for my work dating to the 1970s.

In a few days, the Friends will hold their annual meeting. At least, I think they will.  The person who does a lot of the planning was one of those given a few minutes to collect their personal items from their desks before they were escorted out of the building.

Losing your job is one thing. Being humiliated by being thrown out of the place where you’ve worked for many, many years is an insult.

But who cares about who is being hurt?  The Secretary of State and some Senators who should have worked things out as grownups don’t seem to.

All that I care about, and that many people who rely on these two services should care about, is restoring these people to the important work they do, whether it is working with citizens at the front desk or whether it is the behind-the-scenes sorting, cataloging, and filing that is necessary for a huge archival facility.

As usual, sorting out whether these cuts are legitimate or whether they are a grudge contest played out by senators who remember Secretary Hoskins’ involvement with a Freedom Caucus that virtually enslaved the legislature for three historically unproductive years, or whether it is a misunderstanding of fiscal policy is difficult to determine from our distance.

Whatever is going on here, there are more than twenty people who are hurt by it who do not deserve to be treated as they have been treated.

One good thing is that the legislature is meeting in special session on budget matters and can fix this—and be quick about it. Spitting at each other across a fence isn’t going to do it.

These people can get their jobs back; we have heard of some who are just short of reaching retirement eligibility, which makes this situation even more deplorable.

An adult needs to get the legislative and bureaucratic perpetrators of this petty dispute together and straighten this out. Who should that be?

Governor Mike Kehoe needs to be the adult in the room.  Being the state’s adult is an unwritten qualification for the job. These 22 people are his constituents, and many of them have been even closer constituents, dating to his days as a state senator.

There’s a big round table in the governor’s office that is one of the original pieces of furniture when the building was constructed before World War I.  That table has seen a lot of deals worked out around it.

It’s time for the Governor to convene a meeting around that historic table not to make policy with the big names of government, but to restore jobs and dignity to the 22 littler people who deserve far more respect than they’ve been given.

 

The Meritocracy

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We are waiting to see the day the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion do two things.

  1. Proclaims Black History Month will not be recognized.
  2. Eliminate the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Black History Month began as “Negro History Week” in 1926 at the urging of one of our nation’s greatest Black historians, Carter G. Woodson, and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, with Woodson saying it was important to the cultural survival of Blacks within the broader White society.  The week was observed in the February week when the birth of Abraham Lincoln was celebrated.

He commented, “If a race has no history, it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated. The American Indian left no continuous record. He did not appreciate the value of tradition; and where is he today? The Hebrew keenly appreciated the value of tradition, as is attested by the Bible itself. In spite of worldwide persecution, therefore, he is a great factor in our civilization.”

The Black United Students group and Black educators at Kent State University proposed in 1969 that the week-long celebration become Black History Month.  The first observance was in 1970.

President Ford endorsed it as part of the national Bicentennial celebrations in 1976.

But with the arrival of the second Trump term, Black History Month appeared to be on somewhat shaky ground.  One of the first things Trump did when resuming office was to sign an executive order ending “all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government.”

Within a matter of days, agencies were circulating memos, many of them announcing in terms similar to the line used by a Justice Department memo, “These programs divided Americans by race, wasted taxpayer dollars, and resulted in shameful discrimination.”

To the surprise of some, Trump did sign a proclamation recognizing Black History Month at the start of February calling on American citizens and public officials to “celebrate the contributions of so many black American patriots who have indelibly shaped our Nation’s history.”

EEOC:

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission exists but President Trump has rendered it useless, as he has the National Labor Relations Board.

Acting quickly after resuming office, he fired then-Chairman Charlotte Burrows, a Biden appointee who became the first chairman ever fired by a President. He also canned Commissioner Joycelyn Samuels, one of his own appointees from 2020, leaving only two members of the five-member commission. Trump appointee Andrea Lucas was named the acting chair. She is identified as a strong opponent of DEI programs, which she says promote reverse discrimination. The also is known as a critic of legal protections for transgender people. Her term expires July 1.

Failure to reappoint her or to name a successor will leave only Kalpana Kotagel on the commission.  Kotagel is an African-American employment attorney appointee of President Biden. Her term expires in 2027, potentially leaving the commission with no members.

Kotagel is doomed.  She’s the kind of person Trump loves to hate. As a private attorney, she specialized in DEI cases, particularly involving the Equal Pay Act of 1963, and has represented clients in other civil rights employment actions. Four years ago she worked with the Transgender Defense and Educational Fund when Aetna Insurance Company granted access to breast augmentation surgery for male policyholders who underwent surgery to become women. She also is a member of the Advisory Board Office of Equity and Inclusion at the University of Pennsylvania.

Trump criticized the EEOC in his first term as ineffective and took no steps to make it so. The commission’s staff has been cut by more than 40% by Congress.

About the same time he was ravaging the EEOC, Trump fired National Labor Relations Board General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, a Biden appointee, and Democratic board member Gwynne Wilcox, leaving the NLRB also with just two members and three vacancies, thus unable to do any business.

In place of these and other programs created to insure qualified people have equal chances to become employed, Trump trumpets the meritocracy, saying people should be hired on the basis of merit, not race or other factors. But he has dismantled the agencies that were established to make sure that everybody was considered on their merits.

And he has celebrated the month by firing a lot of Black American patriots—including, just last week, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—who are shaping our present.  Someday our present will be someone else’s past.  We hope those of the future are harsh in their judgments of our present and the President who is making it.

Let the Ethnic Cleansing Begin—Part Two

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We painted a rather pessimistic view in our last entry of our retread President’s plans for the largest deportation effort in our history. We looked at a Mother Jones article from a few months back that tried to gauge what the difficulties would be if he carries through with his plan.

The article displayed concerns about grave economic consequences of deporting 11-million people. Most of the adults in the group would be forced to leave their jobs behind, producing a crisis in the chicken plucking, roofing, and agricultural industries.

Here’s how to deal with this:

During his campaign, the incoming President asserted that these brown people from the south and the (probably) predominantly white people form the north—all of those thieves, killers, rapists, robbers, insane people, and major drug carriers, you know—were taking jobs away from Americans. Late in the campaign, speaking to a special group, he emphasized that these jobs were “Black jobs.”

You might remember from his June debate: “They’re taking Black jobs, and they’re taking Hispanic jobs, and you haven’t seen it yet, but you’re going to see something that’s going to be the worst in our history.”

Hispanics taking Hispanic jobs?   We’ll let him try to make that logical some other time, which might be one of the few times he has done that.  But what about “Black jobs?”

If I were an African-American, I might take great offense at his assumption that there are certain jobs set aside for Black people. I thought our civilized America had pretty well gotten beyond that, but maybe he was too busy bankrupting his latest business venture to notice.

Incidentally, did he ever check the citizenship status of the cleaning staff at his hotels, clubs, and other properties? And what color were those jobs?

Well, not to get toooooo snarky—

The Hispanic people that he seems to have a hate/love relationship with do the farming, roofing, hotel cleaning, and healthcare jobs that include, as one source put it in our last entry, “emptying bedpans.” But if we export the Hispanics despite them having “Hispanic jobs,” then Black people seem to be the correct substitute, especially since those folks took black jobs to begin with.

But before we jettison all of these brown rapists, drug smugglers, etc., we can make them build the wall on our southern border that Mexico was supposed to pay us for building. We’re still waiting to hear that the check has cleared.

NBC had a story this summer reporting that Black workers often are overrepresented in government and health care work. There are eight Fortune 500 companies already headed by black executives, and Black people cause a problem for this scheme elsewhere. Under the first Trump administration, black unemployment dropped to 5.3%–in September 2019.  Under Joe Biden, it dropped to 4.8% in April 2023.

But that’s good news because the Army and the National Guard won’t have to round up a real big bunch of people to fill vacancies in Black people’s Black jobs. That’s good news because he won’t have enough federal military or state national guard units to round up all of the Black people who will be told to fill in for the rounded-up Hispanics.  Federal law tends to oppose that sort of thing anyway—-although the Trump Supreme Court might refine that provision.

Oh, wait! We DO have enough troops to do all of this. We just bring home soldiers helping protect our NATO allies and our sailors whose ships are protecting Israel from Iranian rocket attacks, and sailors from the ships protecting Taiwan, and troops keeping peace or holding enemies at bay in other places.  He doesn’t seem to think many of them belong out there anyway, so that’s not an employment gap he needs to worry about filling.

But then, who will replace all the Black people who are going to replace the Brown people thrown out of the country?

The solution is too easy.

Round up all the homeless people and make them fill in for all the Black folks who will regain all the jobs the brown people took away from the black people who will get their jobs back when we get rid of the Hispanic people who risked everything to come to this country to get jobs, many of whom sent some of their earnings back to other people in their home countries .

Now, all of those people who sent money home from America will be no longer sending money back home that helps their national economies. Instead, they will become a burden to those counties that we consider our allies.

Getting back to the homeless—

There are studies that show many of the homeless have mental problems but they can’t be treated because Ronald Reagan killed President Carter’s Mental Health Systems Act that continued funding federal community mental health centers. In a matter of weeks after he took office, Reagan changed things to give states block grants which haven’t made up for the loss of the Carter program. So we have a lot of mentally-ill homeless people among us and it’s easier to complain about them than do something about their problems.

But if we can take these folks, even those with mental health issues, round them up, get them off the streets and then distribute them out for mental health care duties now handled by Hispanic and Black people, everything’s fine.

Elon Musk wants to slash government spending by billions of dollars so don’t look for any mental health help for the homeless folks that will be rounded up to complete this restructuring of our economy.  The buck has to stop somewhere.

But who is going to help those who have taken the remaining job openings that have trickled down after the Hispanic deportations?

Simple.

Our retread President tells all those countries for which he wants to inflict tariffs that if the armies in those other countries round up enough of their people and make them emigrate to the United States, we won’t have a problem.  Unfortunately, our immigration people might be so busy getting people out of the country that they won’t have time to check the legality of those coming in.

But there it is.  All the bases are covered.  America will be great again.

No charge.  No awards expected.

A lingering issue remains, though.  Will the Army and the National Guard be committed equally to rounding up Canadians, Frenchmen, Italians, Germans, and Swedes—among others—who probably are in this country illegally, too?

And then once we’ve got all of immigrants out of the country, who’s going to protect the rest of us from the Wampanoags, whose lands were taken by the Pilgrims who came here seeking religious liberty for themselves but not for Baptists and other unacceptable people who they considered the equivalents of our rapists, drug smugglers, criminals and crazy people, when the Wampanoags and other nations demand the interlopers get out of places such as Mar-a-Lago?

Let the Ethnic  Cleansing Begin—Part One 

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Our retread President has promised that deportation of 11-millon undocumented aliens will be started on his first day in office. A number of economists or economy-watchers say the consequences could be severe. But that is immaterial to the incoming Commander/Demander in Chief of our country.  Others have raised serious humanitarian questions about the policy. But nobody has ever accused our incoming President of having any humanitarian interests except for his own, which are closely tied to his personal wealth.

Today we are going to start describing a plan that will mitigate any economic or diplomatic damage resulting from this deportation efforts. We expect no recognition from the incoming administration for these helpful ideas. However, if an invitation were extended to attend the State of the Union speech during which it would be announced that our necks soon will be decorated with a Presidential Medal of Freedom, we would not object.  Much. We are offering this advice at no cost, something that will please Elon Musk, the wealthiest man in the world who seems to have a plan to reduce government spending no matter what the cost.

Some might find this plan slightly off-the-wall. Or entirely so. But somebody has to provide some insight into how to deal with this issue and your faithful scribe will jump into the breach.

Mother Jones magazine, which some people dismiss as a liberal rag, took a hard look at Trump’s proposal a few months ago.  The incoming president has blamed foreign drug cartels and gangs have “invaded” the United States and have established a foothold at an apartment complex in Colorado, a claim contested and/or debunked by the town mayor and residents of the apartment complex in much the same way that leaders of a town in Ohio deny there’s any cat-eating going on there. Regardless, the “invasion” deserves a forceful response from this country.

The incoming President also has asserted that brown people from Venezuela and other countries that have emptied their prisons and lunatic asylums are killers, rapists, fentanyl importers, and probably don’t wear clean underwear every day.

Mother Jones describes a lot of problems with 47’s plan (actually he’s the 45th person to be President. He’s the second one to have two different administrations):

The magazine  says it’s going to take 95,994 chartered flights to get the 11-million people out of the country and going to wherever they will be  unloaded.  Projected costs, spread through 20 years because you can’t do this in two weeks would be $300-Billion.

Who would profit?  Private prison companies such as CoreCivic and the GEO Group were paid $1.5 billion by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to run immigration detention centers in 2022. They’ll improve our economy by building new facilities and hiring a lot of people to guard the women and children—and men—at new lockups.  A GEO Group subsidiary, BI Incorporated, got a five-year deal to produce ankle monitors and phone tracking apps worth $2.2 billion to ICE and will do quite well making 11-million more of these shackles. CSI Aviation has a $128.3 million contract for daily transport flights that they’ll have to increase, again pumping more money back into economy.

And this business expansion will offset the loss of jobs elsewhere in our economy.

There probably will be inconsiderate and ungrateful lawyers who will sue the government if the 1798 Alien Enemies Act is used to justify the deportations.

This might be the time to invest in a critical industry: hardware and home improvement companies. All of those detention camps will require a lot of posts and poles and wire and plywood buildings for the large facilities for undesirable Canadians, Mexicans, etc. A spokesman for the American Immigration Lawyers Association likens such camps to Soviet Gulags.

If there aren’t enough people in our regular military services who are guarding Taiwan, and South Korea and other pressure points in the globe and a decision is made not to lessen those protections, then nationalizing the National Guard is a possibility, he says. Fine and dandy but the Posse Comitatus Law forbids the National Guard from doing civilian law enforcement jobs.

Let’s face it, establishing military guard posts at every road in and out of all of our states is going to take a lot of people making sure no undocumented aliens can seek safety in a different state from their illegal homes here.

The article suggested we brace ourselves for big increases in food costs, decreases in important segments of the workforce, cuts in housing development, and cuts in some health programs.

The magazine quotes an agriculture and economics professor at the University of California-Davis who estimates food prices for hand-picked products will go up 21% because the deportations will eliminate half of the hands doing the picking. The survey also estimates 25% of the people who process our chicken, turkeys, pork, and fish are undocumented aliens. And it says we can look for a doubling of the price of milk if the people doing the milking are shipped out.

Illegal migrants are not eligible to collect Social Security. But they pay about $13-Billion a year into it. Undocumented immigrant households paid $35.1 Billion in state and federal taxes in 2022. That’s a pretty big economic hole. We’re waiting to see the plan for dealing with that.

It’s estimated about 350,000 undocumented immigrants work in health care, two-thirds of them in providers or in supporting positions. Rebecca Shi, who heads the American Business Immigration Coalition says, “They are the people that pick our crops, prepare our foods, clean our hotel rooms and empty our bedpans.”

This roundup also could affect the roofs over our heads. A study indicates one third of the crews that are whizzes at installing new roofs on our homes and businesses are potential deportees.  The construction industry already is short an estimated half-million workers.

But don’t worry.  The incoming President knows who will replace all of these workers.  If he doesn’t, we’re going to tell him in our next installment.

It might seem bizarre and crazy.  It isn’t.  It’s just the new normal.

Support your local bureaucrat

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Governor Parson last week recommended a pretty healthy pay increase for state employees.  It’s a much-needed step for a much-underappreciated group of people.

Bureaucrats.   You know, those shiftless people who wrap everything in red tape when they’re not standing outside the front door of a state building, smoking.

Truth be told:  I’m married to a former bureaucrat.  She doesn’t smoke. She never took a state paycheck while frustrating taxpayers with poor service.  She never had anything to do with red tape. She was one of thousands of people who spent their days in cubicles performing everything from mundane tasks to examining situations that would be dangerous to public health and well-being.  She shuffled a lot of paper.  She created a lot of paperwork.  She was a necessary small cog in a very big wheel of a system designed to serve a public too easily bamboozled by opportunistic power-seekers who believe their best road to importance is attacking people such as her.

She left her cubicle behind several years ago to manage a bigger but far less lucrative project: Me.

We hope the legislature acts quickly on the governor’s recommendation of an 8.7 percent cost of living increase.  But his generous gesture constitutes a problem for some in our political world who cavalierly rattle on about shrinking government.  It also presents a problem for those who are eager to cut taxes so they have something to brag about in their 2024 campaigns.

The estimated cost of these salary increases is $151.2 million and that’s only the start.  The number will grow as time passes and more people find state salaries attractive enough to replenish a diminished state workforce—particularly in fields such as prison guards and mental health workers and social services workers, three fields—among many—that require courage and compassion many would find difficult to summon in those professional circumstances. The number also will grow as other increases are approved.

As welcome and as necessary as this expenditure is, it also should temper the enthusiasm of some to reduce the state’s ability to finance it today and properly to augment it tomorrow, lest it lead to layoffs in poorer economic times that will lessen or cancel the progress they create.

These proposed raises fly in the face of those who base their popularity on the time-worn concept of “shrinking government.”  Doing nothing has produced pretty good results for them, although it might be difficult to explain when constituents want to know why they can’t get services government should be providing but can’t get because of too many empty cubicles.

The Missouri Budget Project says the lack of more decent pay has resulted in the decline of state government jobs by 13.2 percent between February 2020 and June 2022. Governor Parson says there are 7,000 unfilled positions in state government and employee turnover is unacceptably high.

Those are numbers of which the “shrinkers” might take pride.  And now, here comes their conservative state leader trying to undo much of the hard-won results of their successful efforts to starve the beast. His common-sense proposal is a challenge to those who think effective and efficient government is possible only if fewer people run it and they’re content with being under-rewarded.  They’re just bureaucrats, you know.  Twenty-first century Bob Cratchits.

One of the goals of the suggested pay increases is to improve recruitment and retention of workers. Oh, Lord, that must mean he supports Big Government!!!

No, he doesn’t. He’s pushing for effective government and we can’t have effective government if we don’t have enough people to do the jobs that effective government requires.  And we can’t get—and keep—enough people if we (us taxpayers) aren’t responsible enough through our representatives and senators to pay them a more-worthy salary.

So, legislators, support your local bureaucrats.  And don’t follow up with something rash that will later set back whatever progress is attained through the governor’s recommendations

Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene

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The names might ring a bell for some of our readers.  “They” wrote books that have sold millions of copies and are still being published after more than a century.

For a short time, Franklin and Carolyn were the same person.   His name was Leslie McFarlane and I came across his second autobiography during a recent visit to a bookstore in Michigan.

Did you ever read or hear about The Bobbsey Twins?

Your grandfather or great-grandfather might have read  the Tom Swift novels or The Rover Boys, or perhaps novels featuring the heroics of Dave Fearless or the sleuthing of The Dana Girls. I have some copies of The Radio Boys. There also was a companion series, The Radio Girls. All were among the 109 juvenile fiction book series published by the Stratemeyer Syndicate which hired writers and gave them story outlines and paid them small amounts to churn out books, the best known of which are The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. 

Their contracts required that they never admit they were ghost writers of any of these books, using names assigned them by the syndicate.

McFarlane wrote 22 of the adventures of Frank and Joe Hardy and the first four spinoff volumes of Nancy Drew called The Dana Girls.

The book I picked up in Michigan is Ghost of the Hardy Boys. If you grew up reading any of the syndicate’s series, you’ll enjoy reading McFarlane’s story—which is far more than the story of the Hardy Boys stories.   His writing about the small Canadian town where he grew up and his stories of his early jobs with small-town newspapers are wonderfully written.

Not even his son knew he had written that shelf of books in the family bookcase. McFarlane, who considered his authorship just a job, never paid attention to what happened to his books after he wrote them and did not realize until the closing years of his life the significance of his efforts.

(I read several of the Hardy/Nancy novels but the real juvenile fiction author of my youth was Fran Striker, who created The Lone Ranger novels.  I have all of them about ten feet from where is have written most of the literary gems such as the one you are now reading.)

McFarlane struck a chord with your book reviewer a couple of times when he wrote about writing.  Here are a couple of excerpts:

When my young wife told her friends that she had married a writer, their good wishes sounded more like condolences…One good woman said, “God help you, my dear!” with compassion. We thought it amusing at the time. Later we realized what she meant.

Writers are not good husband material. (I am not qualified to speak for the husbands of female writers.) Not because they are worse characters than men of other occupations. They aren’t. Not because they are impractical and untidy. They are. Not because their income is chancy. It is. But they are always underfoot…Who can blame her if she envies her sisters whose husbands clear out every morning and stay the hell out until dinner time, returning with fascinating accounts of their adventures in the great world, of the installation of a new water cooler and how he told off the assistant manager? My life has been blessed by two remarkably happy marriages, each happy because of a woman who had the cheerful courage and devotion to put up with an existence calculated to drive most wives to a psychiatric hospital or divorce court…

The other day someone asked my friend, MacKinlay Kantor, when he planned to retire. Our paths in life have differed vastly but we both are of the same age, began on small-town newspapers, made a living from the pulps, and are still writing. “Writers,” replied Kantor, in a voice that came mighty close to a snarl, “never retire.  Real writers, that is.” And we wouldn’t have it any other way. It is a survival course that never ends for any of us. I will be freelancing until someone draws the cover over my typewriter for me for the last time.

I wish more people were writers.  Of their own stories.  Many people are intimidated by the thought, never sure “where to start,” thinking a story has to begin at the beginning.

Hogwash.

A story just has to begin. Earlier or later accounts will fill in the before-and-after holes. All life stories are worth telling. It is unfortunate that the main accounts of the lives people have lived are woefully inadequately summarized in the last newspaper article that will ever mention them.

Some people who retire worry about what they will do without a job and the social contacts that are part of employment.  The answer is simple.

Become a writer.  Write about the things you know best.  And the one thing you know best is yourself.  Abandon any pretense of modesty. Enroll in McFarlane’s “survival course that never ends for any of us.”

Descendants you will never meet will meet you.  And they will be enriched by what they read.

I was enriched by reading about Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene and discovering how much more they were than a couple of names.

 

Outgrowing Ourselves

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Picked up a copy of The Pathway the other day to read while I was having lunch at Chez Monet, which has moved back into the capitol basement to run the cafeteria.  The newspaper is a publication of the Missouri Baptist Convention.

The lead story told me that a bill in the state senate “threatens the First Amendment rights of Missouri Christians.”  Since I consider myself one of those, I thought I should learn about this threat to me.

The bill is the Missouri Non-Discrimination Act. It would ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. “It masquerades as equal treatment for all, but it results in unequal treatment for people of faith like Colorado baker Jack Philips and Washington florist Baronelle Stutzman, Christians in business who seek to live out their faith in the marketplace.”

The article is critical of MONA and its federal counterpart, the Federal Equality Act, by extending prohibitions against discrimination in hiring or lodging based on race, national origin, and age.

The publication complains the bill would “penalize and discriminate against everyday Missourians for their beliefs about marriage and biological sex.”

This is a ticklish area because there are those who suggest non-Christians are behind such words. Then there are Christians who believe they MUST be behind those words.

The conflict results in some proclaiming that others can’t be Christians if they don’t support this kind of language. Or that some can’t be Christians if they DO support it.

And then there are some who question the Christianity of those who would argue about that.

—which bring us to a fundamental question of whether Christianity is an inclusive faith or an exclusive faith, a Big Church Faith or a Little Church Faith.

The article says, “MONA’s implications threaten our core convictions based on Scripture about our Creator God…..”

I confess that I sometimes wonder how to balance an omnipotent Creator God with a God who seems to make a mistake in creating someone who is gay or someone who does not identify with their birth gender.  Isn’t an omnipotent God immune from making such mistakes?

Or are we really all God’s children?  How can all of us be God’s children if some of us are gay and gay people are to be treated differently by Christians because it turns out not all of us are God’s children after all, or so they suggest.

I gave you only part of the sentence a minute ago.  The full sentence says, “MONA’s implications threaten our core convictions based on Scripture about our Creator God, family, marriage, sexuality, community, decency and religious liberty.”

Is it possible for a family with a gay child to really be a Christian family?  Can a gay or transgender person practice Freedom of Religion or does their gender identity impair their ability to be followers of the Christ?  Are they, at best, second-class Christians if they are Christians at all?

There have been times in our history when good Christian black and white people could not marry and even to be seen together was risky because others subscribed to “convictions based on Scripture.”  It offended Christian decency and was some kind of an insult to a community (small “c”).

Maybe there’s something wrong with me when the simple words of a hymn many of us sang as children keeps going through my head.

“Praise Him, praise Him, all ye little children, God is Love, God is love; Praise him praise Him all ye little children, God is love, God is love.”

When the Disciples rebuked Jesus for touching infants that had been brought to him, he told them, “Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the Kingdom of God.”

He also told the disciples, “Unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Given a chance to follow their natural impulses, children of all races, creeds, and nationalities will play together without judgment.  One might grow to be gay. Another might grow up to be transgender.  But that makes no difference when they are children involved in the innocence of play.

It’s too bad that we have to grow up and require laws that make us play nice together—or to separate us on the basis of some exclusive righteousnss or other.

Sometimes I think we are born as children of God.

And then we outgrow it.

Alright alright alright

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—-As potential next Texas Governor Matthew McConaughey says.

Governor Parson is going to ask the legislature next year to give salaried state workers a 5.5% pay raise and pay hourly workers $15 an hour.

The governor proposes; the legislature disposes.  We’ve all heard that.  So proposing is one thing. Accomplishing something is something else.  But this is a good move.

The state minimum wage is now $11.15.   And salaries for our state workers consistently have been among the bottom five or six states.  Openpayrolls.com calculates the average state employee last year made $28,871, 56.2% below the national average for government employees.

The minimum wage boost would affect about 11,000 state workers.

A review of state employee salaries five years ago by the data-mining study organization, Stacker.com ranked Missouri 47th out of 51 with the highest and the lowest salaries in the same general field—education.  With the average monthly salary of state and local employees then, the average monthly pay for all state and local employees was $3,746. The highest paid industry was listed as “Education,” where the average higher education monthly pay was $6,796. The lowest monthly salary then was in elementary and secondary education: $2.394.

Myron Cohen, a comedian who was a frequent guest on Ed Sullivan’s “Toast of the Town” show, used to tell the story of a fellow who came home from work early and found a naked man in his bedroom closet.  “What are you doing in there?” he is asked.  “Well,” says the naked man, “w-well…..everybody has to be somewhere.”

Somebody has to be at the low end of everything, including state employees.  Missouri has been content to be that “somebody” in too many categories for far too long.  The governor’s proposal is not likely to raise Missouri’s state workers very many notches on the poorly-paid lists.  But a pay raise of about five percent for hourly workers and 5.5% for salaried employees will be a big jump for our friends and neighbors who don’t deserve the disdain they often feel when they disappear each day into the offices and cubicles where the business of a 6.1-million member corporation called Missouri is run.

Unfortunately, there are reports of legislatures in several states that are seeing all of the federal COVID relief and infrastructure funds pouring in and they have started thinking of cutting taxes instead of realizing the advantages that come from the one-time infusion while maintaining competent levels of service under current taxing levels.

We hope Missouri’s legislature will not adopt the same attitude—-although we know there are those who will continue the state’s tradition of taking steps that make it harder for the state to pay for the promises it has made to its citizens for services and programs.

Just this once, let the deserving folks in cubicles have a little financial elbow room.

 

 

Sell Sell Sell

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(Selling encyclopedias one summer in college was not profitable enough to encourage a career in sales. But knocking on strangers’ doors in strange towns and convincing four in ten to let me in to give a presentation—making a sale to one of the four—did teach about selling myself, especially selling myself to people I did not know and who had no reason to want to know me.  Dr. Frank Crane offers his thoughts on—–)

SALESMANSHIP

Every young man should some time in his life have experience in salesmanship.

Selling goods is the best known cure for those elements in a man that tend to make him a failure.

The art of success consists in making people change their minds. It is this power that makes the efficient lawyer, grocer, politician, or preacher.

There are two classes of men. One seeks employment in a position where he merely obeys the rules and carries out the desires of his employer. There is little or no opportunity for advancement in this work. You get to a certain point and there you stick.

Such posts are a clerkship in a bank, a government job, such as letter-carrier, a place in the police force, or any other routine employment requiring no initiative. These kinds of work are entirely honorable and necessary. The difficulty is, they are cramping, limiting.

Some day you may have to take a position of this sort, but first try your hand at selling things.

Be a book-agent, peddle washing-machines, sell life-insurance, automobiles, agricultural implements, or peanuts.

You shrink from it because it is hard, it goes against the grain, as you are not a pushing sort of fellow. And that is the very reason you need it.

Salesmanship is strong medicine. You have to go out and wrestle with a cold and hostile world. You are confronted with indifference, often contempt. You are considered a nuisance. That is the time for you to buck up, take off your coat, and go in and win.

A young lawyer will gain more useful knowledge of men and affairs by selling real estate or fire-insurance than by law-school…

Get out and sell goods. Hustle. Fight. Don’t get fastened in one hole. Take chances. Come up smiling. So the best and biggest prizes in America are open to you.

Selling things, commercialism, business, is not a low affair; it is a great, big, bully game. It is a thoroughly American game, and the most sterling qualities of Americanism are developed by it, when it is carried on fairly and humanely.

There is incitement in it for all your best self, for your honesty, perseverance, optimism, courage, loyalty, and religion…

I mean to cast no slurs upon faithful occupants of posts of routine. They have their reward.

But…don’t look for a “safe” place. Don’t depend upon an organization to hold your job for you. Don’t scheme and wire-pull for influence and help and privilege.

Get out and peddle maps. Make people buy your chickens or your essays. Get in the game. It beats football.