A Buried Debt

If we were to all make a list of the most despised occupational groups on the planet, it is a safe bet that certain groups would show up on the majority of those lists. They would show on such a large majority of those lists, in fact, that we could almost call them universally despised. I would go so far as to say that, if we made a composite list, the top three would be lawyers, telemarketers, and bill collectors (not necessarily in that order, but it is certainly a possibility). My personal "favorite" would be a hybrid of numbers two and three: the phone calling bill collector, especially the ones who use a computer to make their phone calls so they can't even determine if they are calling or talking to the right person.
Amusingly enough, those bill collectors often have a legitimate claim. Even then, though, their arrogance and heavy-handed manner still usually makes them the lowest form of slime on the face of the Earth. We have all but legitamized the knee-breakers of the past and set them lose upon the population. I came across a news story the other day that demonstrates this fact in prime fashion.
Roco and Laurie Crimeni of New York have been plagued by calls and letters from bill collectors looking to collect on credit card debts. There are two major problems with these collection attempts: 1. The debt is owed by their son, not by them. 2. Their son is dead.
Yes, folks, the bill collectors are harassing them about debts owed by their dead son. Is it any wonder why this is such a hated group?
The son, Vincent, left no estate or assets and, according to his parents, all of the debt in question was exclusively in his name. The collectors have been told by phone, by letter, and by lawyer that Vincent Crimeni is dead, yet still they call. Ordinarily, I am not a big fan of lawsuits, but I am seeing ample grounds in this case.
Here is a simple message to the bill collectors: Roco and Laurie Crimeni do not owe you a dime! When a person dies, it is only common sense that his or her debt dies as well. If there is an estate then there is certainly reason to collect what can be collected from that estate but, when there is no estate, the collector is simply flat out of luck. Someone else does not magically owe you the money just because they happen to be related.
I honestly do not know exactly what the laws say on this matter but I also do not care. If they say anything different than what I have said here then they are wrong, morally, ethically, and by any sense of legal justice. A person who did not sign on for a debt should not ever be legally obligated to that debt and the mere fact of giving birth does not equate to signing on to a debt once that child has become an adult.
Going after the parents for the debt of adult offspring is tantamount to bullying and extortion. Going after those parents in their time of grief when that offspring is dead is like pulling the wings off of butterflies or lighting cats' tails on fire. It is cruel and inhumane and any child caught doing so should be severely reprimanded.

Hooterless Hooters

It is no secret that I believe that lawsuits are out of control and that our whiney, "I can have anything I want" population has reached a point of shame that is disheartening, to say the least. People looking back through history at this time right now will shake their heads and laugh at what people today thought was important enough to sue over or feel alarmed at how amazingly self-indulgent the people of the late 2oth and early 21st century were. I hope they will, at least. That will mean that something that can truly be called human survived and that we, maybe, got past this period of idiocy.
I hate to admit it, but the current winner for my Wall of Shame for stupid lawsuits hails from my original stomping grounds. Nikolai Grushevski, of Corpus Christi, Texas, has sued the restaurant chain Hooters, claiming that they denied him a job purely because he is male. On the surface of it, the claim is false because Hooters does have a number of jobs that use male employees. Bartenders, cooks, hosts, even managers all include male employees. Grushevski, however, specifically wanted to be a waiter and, of course, we all know that Hooters does not employ male waiters. It is rather implicit in the name of the place.
According to Grushevski and people like him (this is actually not the first time such a lawsuit has been filed against Hooters), this is sexual discrimination. They say that waiting tables is not a gender-specific job and gender should not be used as a hiring criteria. Grushevski even claims that he applied for this position because it is one of the better paying jobs in town. Having grown up around Corpus Christi, I find that claim hard to believe - there are a number of waiter position in the Corpus Christi area that would both pay better and receive higher tips - but it isn't even relative to the suit. Is Grushevski claiming that a bartender at Hooters would make less than a waitress?
Having been a waiter in south Texas, I can dismiss Grushevski's money claim out of hand. Male waiters in south Texas do not, on average, make nearly the tips that female waitresses do (I state this having been one of the highest tipped waiters in my area at the time) and a male waiter at Hooters would make pretty close to zip because he would have offended a significant portion of the customers just by being there.
That last part, however, is the important part. Hooters has spent years building up a particular brand image, and doing quite well with it. In this particular case, the job of Hooters waitress is as gender-specific as the job of Chipendale dancer. Women - most women, at least - do not go to the Chipendales expecting to see female dancers and men, on average, do not go to Hooters expecting to see male waiters. Is that discrimination? Absolutely not! There is nothing that prevents anyone from running a complimentary female dancers group (in fact, there are plenty of them) and there is nothing that prevents anyone from running a complimentary restaurant with scantily-clad male waiters.
Comparisons have been made to such ground-breaking discrimination issues as allowing women to be firefighters or men to be nurses, but the comparisons are not valid. We are not talking about businesses catering to specific customers in those cases. It would be ludicrous to open a second firehouse to hire only female firefighters (though there could definitely be a calendar and Playboy spread in the idea) and a dying person does not care who is helping so long as the helper is capable of the job.
It isn't about the vagaries of the law or the fine-tuning of social consciousness. It is about common sense. So long as the variety and options continue to exist in the wider spectrum, there is nothing wrong with a business using their own brand image requirements for hiring. An advertising campaign looks for a specific appearance in the people they hire for specific advertising jobs. Is that discrimination? The Hooters girls are Hooters biggest advertising campaign and Nikolai Grushevski needs to just go submit applications elsewhere.

Not Washed Away

Just for the record, the flood is over, the water is gone, and we didn't wash away. All things considered, it was not nearly as bad as predicted, though there are still people in need of help and support. However, your friendly host here is not one of them. We came through unscathed. Thank you for your thoughts and concerns and now, on with the show.

Washed Away

Mother Nature is thumbing her nose at my part of Washington again, so I don't know how much I'll be able to blog for the next few days. We're looking at some serious flooding only two weeks after record-level snowfall so the local infrastructure is stretched rather thin. I don't expect any serious problems here at home, but we're stockpiling water and batteries just in case. I'll stay in touch as I can.

Truth In Advertising

I have a question that has puzzled me for quite some time and if any of you even think you might have an answer, I would be much obliged for the input. Why is it that those people who claim to be delivering moral messages do not feel bound by any notion of truth or honesty? I'm sure I've commented on this more than once at various times in the past and concerning various groups and messages, but it has dawned on me that it is a trend that is more than a little alarming.
One of the most obvious examples is that organization that goes by the misnomer of truth.com. Not only do they fail the basic manners test (Does anyone know of an advertiser who tries harder to be rude, disgusting, and tasteless?) but they make a double mockery by calling themselves "truth" while spouting constant lies. I'm sure there are those of you (especially the non-smokers) who are just sputtering at me right now. "They point out that smoking kills! That is not a lie!" No, that is not a lie. I, a smoker, freely state that. Why, then, do they abandon this honest high ground with their hyperbolic commercials? If you think I am exagerating, start jotting down their death numbers whenever you see one of their commercials. It shouldn't take long at all to realize that not one of those commercials agrees with another when it comes to numbers. The reason for this is simplicity itself: there are no hard numbers. Medical research has failed to reach any consensus on exactly what role smoking plays in "smoking-related" deaths and no one has any real clue how many people a year die as a result of smoking. The fact of the matter is that most of those "smoking-related" deaths also include so many other poor health or bad risk factors that no true numbers are even possible. That doesn't stop the good people at truth.com from throwing out those numbers as though they alone had the hard facts.
Environmentalist are another group of moral preachers who have a less than favorable relationship with the truth. This is another area where there is so much research and so little hard consensus that you would think anyone with a rational commitment to morality could not possibly utter any more direct statement than "we do some things that we should not do but we do not know exactly what impact those things have." Instead, we have prophets of doom who want to tell us exactly what we are doing wrong and exactly what we must do to fix it. Again these people do begin with a moral high ground. There are things that we are doing wrong - Poluting the planet makes no more sense than fouling your own bed! - and there are things that we know that we could do better. There are many things that we do not know, however. Take Global Warming, for instance (and while you're doing so, please do not overlook the fact that they have craftily changed the name to "global climate change"). Thirty years ago the boogyman was the next ice age (we were, according to the same so-called scientific consensus that the press is throwing around today, long overdue) but now, in such a short amount of time, we are cooking the planet through our own behavior. Short of all-out thermonuclear war, I am hard pressed to conceive of any way that we could change the entire planet in so short an amount of time. Never mind that the actual predictions are a measly 5-10 degrees over 100 years. Never mind that even those numbers do not account for continuing scientific advancement that may or may not offset such changes. [For comparison purposes, it was widely believed in the 70's by certain people in the scientific community that we would be seeing global famine and catastrophe by the 1990's caused by overpopulation if we did not take drastic steps immediately. Not only did we not take those drastic steps, our population actually increased faster than those people feared and yet, no global famine or catastrophe occured. The reason for this is that our scientific advancement progressed at the same accelerated rate and we became able to feed people at more and more efficient rates. The same principle could quite likely apply to the current "imminent crisis".] Never mind the fact that those numbers are coming from the very same people who cannot accurately be depended upon to predict tomorrow's weather! According to the loudest voices in the environmental movements, we are all doomed (and evil to boot) if we do not take exactly the steps they decree immediately.
I will let one more example stand for the whole.
If you receive email forwards as often as I do, you have no doubt seen the dire warnings of the removal of religious liberties from public places. They are removing God from our schools (never mind the long list of federal laws expressly protecting religious liberties on school campuses, from equal access to church related student groups to religious exceptions to various school activities). They are removing God from the public square (never mind the federal laws that expressly require equal access there either). They are removing God from our politics (never mind the religious litmus test that every president we have ever elected has had to pass). They are removing God from television (never mind the fact that TV stations are privately owned and can show almost anything they want assuming there are enough viewers to secure advertising and that the programs do not violate certain decency standards, standards that have been established by the same religion groups passing these emails, oddly enough). I do not deny that there have been over-zealous individuals who have done (or tried to do) every one of these things but they have been slapped down in every case by the same laws that these emails claim are removing your liberties. If you are Christian, there is no concerted effort to remove your religious liberties and, in this country at least, never has been.
This is a small list of examples to which I am sure we could all add many, many more. Most of the people who pass around these falsehoods are honest people who simply believe what people they trust have told them to believe. The fact that lies are being spread by honest people does not, however, stop them from being lies. It only means that honest people need to be more diligent in the efforts to verify the information they pass along as fact.

Remember The Alamo

Why is it that preservationists always seem to feel required to go psychotically overboard in their preservations? Aside from that, why is it that the preservation instincts are triggered by certain names and not by others?
In a place called Locust Grove, Virginia those questions are being acted out right now. Wal-Mart is looking to build a new store in a location that is about a mile from the protected and preserved Wilderness Battlefield, an important Civil War memorial. The preservationists, for some reason, believe that this proposed location is too close to the battlefield and want to stop the Arkansas-based retailer from building. Mind you, there is already a bank and a strip mall in the same general area so what, exactly, are the preservationists trying to stop? Are they afraid of building near the site or are they merely afraid of this particular building?
As a man who grew up in south Texas and is rather more intimately attuned to an earlier break-away conflict, that of the Texas Revolution, the one thing that comes instantly to my mind is the Alamo. If there is any location that is more sacred to that state's history than this small mission in San Antonio you would be hard pressed to prove the point. The memorials at San Jacinto and Goliad are certainly close (San Jacinto was the location of ultimate victory and Goliad, like the Alamo, was a part of the battle cry that roused the Texans to that victory) but the Alamo is arguably the only battlefield from that war that has captured the imagination of the entire nation. It was, in many respects, a Texan reenactment of the famous battle of the 300 Spartans, with much the same results. It was, in short, a massacre of people who were fighting for their lives and their freedom waiting for reinforcements that would never come.
And where is that sacred shrine to be found? Almost downtown in one of the largest cities in the state. One of the largest cities in the country, in fact. If you were to vist Alamo Plaza today, you would find strip malls, banks, and retailers of various flavours sharing its streets. Not a mile away, but across a small park. Last time I was there, there were even tawdry little tourist traps in the same neighborhood.
Yet none of this has diminished the honor, the beauty, or the sacredness of the Alamo. I have taken people not from Texas, not versed in the meaning of that building to the Alamo and they instantly felt it's presence upon entering. Everything that is outside, everything that is not of its memory disappears when you step onto that hallowed ground.
I have a feeling that the preservationists in Virginia aren't really fighting to preserve a memory in this particular fight. They are fighting against a retailer they have decided they do not like. If it were otherwise, why are there already businesses in the location they are fighting? If they are truly concerned about the integrity of the Wilderness Battlefield then all I can say to them is one half of the battle cry from San Jacinto: "Remember the Alamo." You'll find that truly sacred sites are more difficult to diminish than you might believe.

And A Happy New Year

We have come to a new year and, hopefully, new hope. I must admit that I am not exactly holding my breath but then that is not exactly my nature. I am not a breath holder.
If you were to divide the world into optimists and pessimists, I would have to sit on the outside and watch. I am neither optimist nor pessimist but I am also not what most people call a realist, since that is usually just a cynical way of saying pessimist. Optimists are easily cut down when the world inevitably throws a curveball and pessimists couldn't build a better world if you handed them an instruction manual with full-color, three dimensional illustrations. If we are to truly ever have a chance of making one year better than the one that preceded it, we must put aside the ideas of Do Gooders and Doom Sayers alike.
On the one hand, we must be willing to admit when something is bad, when something is wrong, when something is contrary to our ideal. Note I did not say different from our ideal. Different and contrary are not necessarily the same. If we are going to improve anything we must first recognize that something needs to be improved then we must be willing to do the improving. We cannot expect that everything we do "for the good" will actually result in the good. We cannot assume that because someone says they are for the good then what they do is good. We must be willing and able to see things as they are and work accordingly. There has never been a utopia on this earth and there has never been reason to believe that would be otherwise.
On the other hand, we cannot dismiss every possibility as failure before it has even begun. We have to be willing and able to recognize that things can improve and can be done right. The world is not going to hell in a handbasket and, despite centuries upon centuries of prophets of doom, we are no closer to destroying the world than ever before.
Our world is not great and it is not terrible. There are great spots and there are terrible spots, but spots do not make a whole. Take those spots that are great and use them as examples of what to do. Take those spots that are terrible and use them as examples of what not to do.
I said I was not a realist as the term is commonly used, but I am a realist as the word itself implies. Reality, what is, is the best teacher and reality teaches that everything can change and that change can go in virtually any direction. It is a new year but whether or not it is a happy new year depends on what we choose to do with it. We can waste time by denying reality through foolish optimism or destructive pessimism or we can face reality head-on and do what it dictates to make a happy new year.