Spinning My Wheels

Maybe we’ve progressed to one step forward, one step back.  Still, I don’t find this a particularly satisfying way to conduct a marriage.

We live in peace most of the time.  But that seems to be as good as it’s going to get.  Just when I start to think that maybe there will be something more…maybe we will rebuild our love for each other, or even begin construction on a new love that makes sense for who we are now…the whole rickety foundation of burnt bridges and thrown stones shifts and collapses.  And we are right back to living in peace.  As good as it gets.

We don’t have those knock-down drag-outs that had become our custom at the height of our entrepreneurial trial by fire.  Mostly because I won’t engage.  I can’t fight like that anymore.  And when I see one of those coming, I drop everything and back away tout de suite.  I’m becoming expert at speeding away from the scene of the potential crime.  In reverse.

But I hate going backward.  I hate not being able to gain any forward momentum.  I hate not being able to pick a spot somewhere beyond We’re-Not-Yelling-at-Each-Other-Anymore and say, “This is where my marriage is today.” 

Too much damage was done during those café years.  I have managed to leave the experience behind me, for the most part.  I can’t say I’ve made peace with it.  It’s more like I’ve simply cut it out of my life.  I’ve picked myself up, dusted myself off and kept walking without looking back.  Mostly because it’s too painful to look back.  But partly because I see those five years as a gigantic black hole in my life.  I’m sure I learned something from the whole thing, but I’m still—after three years—afraid to examine it all too closely.  Afraid I’ll get sucked back into that negative vortex in which I existed for most of that time. 

The one thing I have not been able to put behind me, not been able to dust off, is the damage to my marriage.  It’s the one relationship tainted by my colossal crash and burn from which I have not been able to walk away.  I live with it every day.  I can’t say I’ve tried like hell to fix it.  But I have worked as hard as I can to hold it together, to keep it from blowing up in our faces.  I keep thinking if I hold it together long enough, the fuse will burn out and there will no longer be any danger of an explosion.

On days like this, I understand that time has not yet arrived…          

The New American Currency

It could be that I suffered from terminal political naïveté during the waning decades of the twentieth century.  In the sixties and seventies,  even as a teen too young to vote, I believed that my voice—added to all the others of my generation demanding equality, environmentalism and an end to our forebears’ established bigotries—made a difference.  We clamored for change.  We swung our world in the direction of open-mindedness, acceptance and living in harmony with each other and with our planet.  We created change.  And the change was good. 

In my callow youth, I believed the changes we’d wrought would last forever.  The changes represented steps forward for humanity and our nation.  How could we keep from just…continuing to go forward?  No one believes the world will go backward.  Who could have guessed that the things for which we stood, the change we created, would weaken and crumble and blow away in the wind?  Or be trampled to bits by subsequent generations, our over-indulged children and grandchildren, who grew up believing themselves to be the center of the known universe?  And acted accordingly—materially, politically and morally.  We tried to pass the baton to our kids, but they were too busy talking on their cell phones and playing video games to grab it.  Whereupon we just dropped the baton in the cinders, turned around and headed for the exits.   

And so our nation has come to where it is today:  Americans have abandoned any pretense of—indeed, any germ of respect for—following a moral high road.  If an action doesn’t put more money in someone’s pocket, make our enemies (neighbors?) shake in their boots or titillate the senses to the point of near-insanity, we don’t go there.  Everything is extreme, over-the-top, hysterical and in-your-face.   Quiet courage?  We don’t give it a thought.  Nose-to-the-grindstone toil for the good of…someone else?  We have no interest.

There’s a term bandied about quite ubiquitously these days:  Political Capital.  Military strategies are funded with it.  Elections are structured for the purpose of collecting it; our national policy revolves around it.  Our government is founded upon the stockpiling and subsequent doling out of this ideological currency.

At what point did we drop our morals like a tanking stock and invest everything in politics?  What did we think “political capital” could buy us that our long and lovingly held moral standards did not?  Why did we—the ponderous throng of Post-war Baby Boomers—abandon our moral stock and throw our coins into the coffers of political capital?  And what is that ultimately going to buy us?

We had better figure it out, because moral bankruptcy is a fact of American life here in the 21^st century.  And I’m pretty sure there’s not a bail-out for that.                

It's Raining. Yay.

Those who do not live here cannot fully comprehend the gloom of the Pacific Northwest winters.  I remember back in 1975, making the obligatory Holiday Long Distance Phone call to my sister, who had moved to Oregon the year before.  We were sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner in suburban Chicago; it was probably 35 degrees outside and there was likely snow on the ground.  And my sister smugly informed us that it was 60 degrees and partly cloudy in Eugene.  Exclamations of amazement and jealous glances were exchanged around the table.

What my sister failed to impart, and probably didn’t even realize herself, as she’d only been in Oregon for less than a year at that point, was that while Oregon may have (relatively, and not always) “mild” winters, they come with their own set of challenges.  Days on end of oppressive gloom, torrents of rain from Pacific storms, landslides, flooding and power outages are our constant companions from October through April.  I know the East and Midwest are getting socked with snow and cold this winter.  But I have to say, at least they get to see the sun on a more or less regular basis.  All those jokes about “Residents are terrified by an unidentified object spotted in the skies over Oregon this morning…oh wait; it’s the sun…” and “Oregonians don’t tan, they rust”? They have their basis in indisputable fact.

Today is one such day.  Sideways rain, blustery wind, and at 9:30 AM, the sky has brightened all the way to a shade past twilight.  I come down the stairs in the morning making like Tinkerbelle lighting the Magic Kingdom—I turn on every light in the place as I make my way through the house.  It’s my only defense against the pervasive gloom.  Sure, it’s 53 degrees outside, but there’s no working or even going out-of-doors today, for more than just quick forays to the mailbox or to bring in the trash cans before they blow down the street. 

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the rain.  I really do.  And I love Oregon.  But sometimes, I wish that it wouldn’t rain quite so…enthusiastically here.  For three quarters of the year.  Sigh.           

  

Making Hay Off the Minimum Wage Debate

President Obama has called on businesses to act where our busted, dysfunctional Congress will not; he has taken the lead by offering federal contract workers a raise to $10.10 per hour.  Contrast this to the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hr and it seems like a lot, doesn’t it?  In fact, it’s almost a 40% pay increase.  Okay.  But let’s be frank:  Gross earnings of $400 a week doesn’t come much closer to putting you in a $700/month one-bedroom apartment than $290 a week. 

Do some simple math, people:  I have 50¢.  Dinner costs $1.00.  I’m going hungry.  Wait…I got a raise!   Now I have 70¢.   But dinner still costs a dollar, and I’m still going hungry.

Moral of this story:  let’s not get all puffed up and proud of these minimum wage hikes “all the way up to” $10 an hour.  It’s not enough.

Not enough to put a decent roof over the heads of your family, or put healthy food in your kids’ mouths.  Maybe just enough so that you don’t qualify for federal benefits anymore…

But beyond the president and some “brave” retailers getting good press out of a move that hardly even qualifies as a stop-gap measure, I was interested in what the retail spokespeople had to say when questioned about the “business sense” of investing more money in their staff.  The question itself was posed from a position of tacit accusation that paying people more money was a risky and unsound business practice.  That is, after all, the conventional wisdom upon which our economy has been going to hell in a handbasket since the union-busting eighties.

In an interview with Marketplace’s Adrienne Hill, Jack Calhoun, global president of Banana Republic, posited: 

“We thought it was a great opportunity to make a strategic investment in our employees.   Our front line employees that are really the most important aspect of our business.  These are the employees that interact with our customers every day in our stores…  It’s about attracting great talent and retaining great talent…because when we do that well we win as a company and our customers win.” 

 Well. Duh!

Imagine that!  A retail mogul at least paying lipservice to the concept that those who serve the public in a service business might actually be an important, if not THE most important, cog in the wheel.  That the faces of the men and women behind the counters are the faces of the company—at least, the faces with whom the folks who pay the bills (the customers!) will interact and will remember when they walk out the door.  Dare we hope that a 21^st century retailer is actually getting a clue that perhaps the face of an over-worked, underpaid, undervalued and under-trained cashier might NOT be the image you would like the public to associate with your brand?

I will cut Mr. Calhoun a little slack.  You won’t hear anyone at Walmart—the nation’s largest retailer and largest employer—spout this kind of retail apostasy.  (Oh, sure…Walmart will spend millions on ads to assure the buying public that Walmart associates are happy, healthy, valued, motivated, and movin’ on up.  But they won’t spend those same millions on the employees themselves.  Does anybody understand this line of thinking?) 

But Calhoun’s ah-ha moment is still only lipservice. 

Because a true philosophy of “investing in great talent” would result in workers being paid somewhat more than a sub-poverty-level family wage (2014 poverty level for a family of four is $23,850;  raising wages to $10.10/hr would result in an annual wage of somewhere around $21,000—about $1750/month.)  Yeah…you’ve forked over that big, fat 40% raise.  But in a country where rent prices average over $1200/month, your “great talent” now only has to figure out how to pay for food, medical care, clothing, auto expenses, utilities and all the other cash outflow necessary to life in our society, on $18 a day.

Let's all wish them good luck with that…