Sometimes, I feel as if every decision of my life has been wrong. I question going to college when I had the opportunity to run a fairly successful business my father owned. Instead of a mountain of student loan debt, I could possibly still have that business. I question attending Memphis. I question studying writing. I outright regret attending graduate school. All of these decisions have hampered my professional career and left me little more than a second class citizen in a nation that only rewards greed and corruption.
I married the wrong woman and then compounded that mistake by staying in the marriage much too long. I love my children and wouldn’t trade them for anything, but the marriage was a mistake and has hampered every aspect of my life to this day. I also regret how I handled my divorce, conceding way too much and leaving myself with too few rights as far as my children are concerned. I also regret not taking the first two years after the divorce, staying alone, and healing.
I question my decision to teach for Tusculum, to teach period, but especially for them. Simply put, they are a terrible school that treats their faculty like dirt. I regret wasting my youth on them. I also question my decision to return to education after I had escaped. WSCC is a good school, but I’m no longer happy teaching and wish I had done something else.
I question my decision to self-publish. I can’t really say it’s amounted to anything other than a few good friends and a handful of good memories. Financially, it was a disaster. Given the opportunity to go back, I probably wouldn’t do it over.
In short, just about every major decision of my life has been wrong in one way or another. I feel like a fool of the grandest scale and also feel like I can’t trust my own judgment.
The NFL lockout is a pretty good metaphor for where we are as a nation. While billionaires and millionaires squabble over how to divvy up a $9-10 billion pie, the majority of us are struggling to keep gas in our cars. It’s shameful to think that we are so far out of balance and so disconnected as a society that we’ve ended up in this situation. Without us to buy their product, their revenue will dry up, but instead of looking at the bigger picture, both sides are focused on protecting their short-term interests without seeing the long-term ramifications.
To take it a step further, however, the owners seem to have disdain for the players. In this case, the players are the labor, and currently, Corporate America views labor as a nuisance and an expense, rather than a valuable asset. Without the players, the owners have nothing to sell, but instead of protecting their product and ensuring quality, ownership seeks to cut benefits, weaken the union, and maximize their profits. To me, that’s backwards thinking. The owners should recognize the value these workers add to their companies and maximize profits through the product they sell. Labor is not disposable, and customers are not guaranteed.
To a degree, I can understand the players’ position. They put their bodies on the line every day in practice and every game. They are the ones who fill the seats and generate the revenue, so they want fair compensation for the profits they generate. However, the fans are the ones buying the tickets, purchasing the merchandise, and watching the games on TV. Most of us earn a fraction of their salaries despite working jobs that are much more important to the nation as a whole. While we make hard choices about healthcare and retirement and food, they live lives of luxury and excess. It’s hard to sympathize with their desire for more when at the end of the month I’m rolling change for lunch money.
This us vs. them mentality between management and labor is truly at the heart of all of our problems as a country. The divisiveness of this issue permeates every aspect of our society. Until we heal this rift, our problems will continue to grow. Until both sides learn that they are really on the same side and are dependent on each other for sustenance, nothing will improve. Without labor generating their profits, billionaires can’t exist. Without management making wise, long-term decisions, labor has nothing to do. And without customers who have both the desire for and the ability to purchase their products, neither side has anything.
So there’s a lot going on in the world today. Between riots and massacres in the Middle East, surging oil prices, and labor disputes here in the Midwest, it’s easy to feel as if everything is coming unraveled. There’s a feeling of panic in the air that’s hard to dismiss. I feel it all around me, like an unspoken tension hanging in the room. Some are scared that it’s the end of days, that Mayan or Biblical prophecies are coming true and that all we are seeing right now is a precursor to Armageddon.
Personally, I don’t believe that’s so. I believe we’re simply in a transitional period between eras, and all of this turmoil and tension is a side effect of one era ending and another beginning. The age of oil is dying. For many years, the argument against alternative energies has been that economically they are too cost prohibitive and oil is too cheap. Now, the pendulum is shifting the other direction. Oil is simply becoming too expensive and too tumultuous to sustain. Those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo are trying desperately to maintain their grip on power, but the tide of change cannot be undone. Their regime is coming to an end.
I don’t fear the dark days ahead. Many years ago, I made peace with the fact that our society was going to implode. You simply can’t sustain a democracy when the majority of your population can’t thrive in your economy. You can’t sustain an economy when the majority of the jobs pay poverty level wages. The supply side guys always seem to forget to look at the other side of the equation. It’s supply and demand, and without both, the system grinds down. Without a vibrant consumer class, there’s no one to buy what the supply side produces, and I’ve never quite figured out why that concept is so hard for some to figure out.
I also believe that we are about reap what we have sewn as a society and a culture. Instead of embracing discipline, intelligence, and rational thought, we’ve chased greed, superficiality, and superstition. We spend ten minutes on the morning news discussing Justin Beiber’s haircut while our infrastructure crumbles. Anyone else having images of Nero with his fiddle? While athletes and entertainers rake in millions, we pay police officers, firefighters, and teachers substandard wages, yet scratch our heads as to why nothing works as it should.
And now education is under heavy siege once again. I’ve heard thoughtful, intelligent friends of mine say that they don’t believe their tax dollars should go to education because they either homeschool or send their children to private schools. Why should their tax dollars go to a system they don’t even utilize, they ask. Sure, on the surface they aren’t using the system directly, but I’d be willing to bet that when they hire someone at work, they expect that person to know how to read and write. When they go to a grocery store, they expect the cashier to be able to count back correct change. The role of public education isn’t just to educate your children. It’s to educate everyone so that we have a skilled workforce, one that can compete and innovate and reinvent the economy.
The only change I can make and the only real impact I can have is with myself. I have the power to create this farm and be part of the solution. I’ve held back the tide for as long as I can in education, fighting the good fight to pass along my knowledge and love of language. I simply don’t have it in me to take yet another pay decrease or take on even more responsibilities. My plan is in motion, and I’m not looking back.
Today, we received two donations for the farm–one from an anonymous donor and one from Joel Gates of Green Gates Entertainment. Joel has long been a supporter of these Ramblings, and we’re very grateful to have his endorsement for the farm. Please, check out his blog and thank him for me.
Big Owl's Tree 