Tuesday, July 28, 2009

The Dreaded Day Has Arrived

Maybe not for you, but for me the day of reckoning has arrived. After successfully eluding the dreaded condition for the better part of a working adult life, today I file for unemployment. 'Tis a terrible door through which I walk, but hey, I'm not the only one. And I must approach this condition with an appreciation that it could be much worse. At least I'm not being terrorized from my home by militant rebels. Nor am I suffering through chemotherapy, sitting on a crashing plane, living on the west bank, or entering a gas chamber.

Being put out to pasture may not be so bad; it's just that I had hoped it would happen at age sixty-five, not fifty-eight. After twenty-five years as a carpenter, then a career change to become a teacher, and two years of part-timing while attending education classes. followed by two more years of jumping through hoops while hovering on the edges of American education, it appears that my bid for educator status was ill-timed. Apparently I didn't make the cut. The Great Meltdown of '08 has overtaken my good intentions and well-laid plans. Or was it my own failings and eccentricities as a human being?

Anyway, at least our three kids are raised and educated, and my wife is working productively as a nurse (although she complains about the drug-seekers and the alcoholics who are milking the system), and I have a roof over my head.

Maybe I'll be a farmer before I die, and grow my own food so I won't have to pay for it, but I don't think my 58-year-old back can take all that hoeing and weeding. I suppose my grandfather did it long ago but that was a different time and place. Am I making excuses here? Crying in my milk? Evading reality? Maybe. Let me know what you think.

Our 1.5 acres is mostly wooded, so there's not enough sun to sustain a garden. I tried growing shiitake mushrooms once a few years ago, but as it turned out I didn't have the thumb for that enterprise. But hey, I'm happy to be an American in 2009, and not a Chinese teacher wannabe in the 1960s, being herded out to the countryside by Mao's cadre of young bucks to spend long hours toiling in a rice paddy to achieve cultural revolution.

Although we are now enduring a cultural revolution of some sort. The times they are a-changin'. And I am grateful that I'm not mired in Albert Camus' existential dilemma, concluding that the most important decision in life is whether to commit suicide or not, as someone pointed out on Diane's NPR show yesterday.

No, it's not that bad. I suppose I'll just wake up with the sun tomorrow and walk through that awful door of unemployment one step at a time, like however many thousands of dazed Americanos have done, are doing, and will do. I'll play my part in the Great Recession. The current debate about health care and the public option becomes a moot point for me. I'll take what I can get. I had hoped to teach the next generation how to deal with what life throws at us. But I still have a few lesson of my own to learn.

Thank God I married a nurse, and she's a good one too. Perhaps, as I walk through that dismal government-agency door this morning, I'll be whistling that old Dean Martin tune, Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime. And I'll be singing the best line: "If I had it in my power, I would arrange for every girl to have your charms (and employment skills). Then, every minute, every hour, every boy would find what I found in your arms..." Thank God I married a faithful one, and she loves me too.

Maybe if Camus had been faithful to his wife he wouldn't have had to grapple so fiercely with the suicide question. Oh, but of course I'm oversimplifying the problem, as most Christians are known to do.

Would you like fries with this entry?

Carey Rowland, author of Glass half-Full

Friday, July 17, 2009

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Chimerica thoughts

Having just returned from two weeks in China, here are a few differences I have noticed between the USA and China.

~Chinese people are thin. Americans are generally much plumper.

~Chinese economy is running on an open throttle. American economy is stalled. I think this is because their economy was crippled for so many years with communist smallthink, aka great leap forward and cultural revolution. After Mao's death, reformers such as Deng Xiaoping and others were able to crank the economy up with a dose of capitalistic freedoms. These new programs are now hitting their stride at an optimum time during the collapse of western economies due to widespread credit abuse.  But the Chinese still haven't figured out yet, or understood the need for, constitutional protections for freedom of speech, religion, and assembly. Ultimately it will be their undoing unless they can lighten up their governmental compulsions to keep tabs on everything that everybody does, instead of tending to the larger issues.  The communist party is nitpicking their people to death. How long the good Chinese people can endure this control-freak mentality in the governing party in an age of expanding electronic communication is anybody's guess.  

~99% of all human hair in China is black. I mention this only as an indicator of relatively low cultural diversity. In America, we have a wide range of hair colors, from blonde to black and everything in between.  We are a melting pot of world ethnicities, whereas China is a melting pot, so far,  of Asian ethnicities only.  The Han and Manchu groups seem to be the two dominant groups. Uighars of Urumqi in the northwest, for instance, are resisting the intrusion of Han influence  into that area. The Hans, some of  whom have immigrated to the northwest from the middle of China, are generally well-educated and have been traditionally a ruling ethnic group for thousands of years. Class differences due to education levels are the main factors here, as well as Han inside-track to communist party hierarchy.  Hierarchy is big in China; I think it goes back to the Confucian heritage, which emphasizes the state or whole of society over the individual. Everybody has a place in the big picture, so to speak, and that supposedly makes everything hunky-dory. Of course, it really doesn't work out that way; communist party spent all those years micro-managing idealistic egalitarianism into ancient culture that had been only recently released (1911) from monarchy.  In America, our emphases have been upon individual freedoms. Admittedly, we've had our problems with ethnic conflicts too. The difference is we have constitutional structures for working these issues out. And although these issues take time to resolve in America, they do get worked out eventually, I believe.

~After viewing three Chinese metropoli from the air--Shanghai, Beijing, and Chengdu--the sight of Atlanta from the air, with its green carpet of trees and relatively clean air, made quite an impact on me, because the air over Chinese cities is very smoggy.  Thank God for our American EPA.  I hope the Chinese can get a handle on this problem of air pollution--particulates, sulfur dioxide, carbon emissions, etc. The governments have recently undertaken new programs for planting forests and greenways. These progressive, prudent measures may ultimately outperform our inclinations toward similar workings in America. But they need the green, oxygen-for-carbon-exchange tree canopies even more than we do, especially in the cities, because they have so many more people than we do. They've been in the same place for thousands of years, whereas most American immigrations have crowded into our continent in the last five hundred years or so.  I suppose that if the expansion of "civilized cultures" (European)  had happened a couple thousand years ago instead of from 1492 AD onward, then we would have the same population density (and hence environmental) problems as China with its 1.3 billion people. 

~The two national parks we visited in the mountains of Sichuan province were stunningly beautiful, and well-managed with great sensitivity to the crystal-clear waters and cold, clean air. 

~Bottom line for me after two weeks in China is: it's a fascinating place; I hope they can get their wild-west growth bridled with effective environmental stewardship. They sorely need it. China was nice, but

~God bless America, land that I love.

Carey Rowland, author of Glass half-Full