Not My Style

 A friend bought a Chevy SSR. The Chevrolet SSR (S uper S port R oadster) is a retro-styled retractable hardtop convertible pickup truck manufactured by Chevrolet between 2003 and 2006. He brought it home and all hell broke loose from his family. Two days later he was practically begging me to buy it from him. So I did.

My friend bought it back about two years later after he moved to Florida. A car like this belongs in a climate like Florida, and I was happy to see it go. I am not into flashy items and this screamed flashy. Was it fun? Yes, a few times when Debbie and I drove to the Dairy Queen.

What Could Go Wrong?

While driving on 1-35 I noticed Pyro City Fireworks in Eagleville, MO. It is a gas station that sells BBQ in the front and a fireworks store in the back. 

They do have a no-smoking sign on the building. I hope people pay attention to it!

Symbiotic

I was picking up license plates for a new car in Adel, IA and noticed a sign on a building across the street. The sign was for a bar with the prosaic name Hideaway Lounge. It was a bar, i.e., a business where people make a profit off other people’s chemical dependency.

But it was the other business that really caught my eye, a 24 hour crisis center. How ironic that a bar and a crisis center are co-located.

It is an obvious symbiotic relationship but is it mutualism, commensalism or parasitism?  An additional irony is the address: 911.

Please Sir…May I Have Some More?

When you feel the sting of the whip on your back does it matter if the whip is held by management or labor?  I have worked for many styles of management and to name a few: benevolent, respectful, absent, incompetent and evil. Regardless of the type of management, the whip was in play.

I was a union member (Retail Clerks Local 876 AFL-CIO) while working for a grocery chain in Michigan from 1969 -1976. This merely transferred some control of the whip handle from management to the union but the sting was the same.

There was some else, that was at first subtle, but over time was undeniable. The union rules required that the individual submits to the will of the masses and that was always the lowest common denominator. Initiative and hard work was “busting rate” and overtly punished. This inherently impacts an individual’s self-esteem and eventually devalues them to the status of a mere cog to be controlled – and always with a whip.

Now that I am self-employed I see that the whip is now transferred to the government and inflicted by a maze of laws and regulations.

Oh well, who is John Galt

Stereotypical R Us

Debbie and I had lunch at a coffee shop by the FAIR Plan office. It was not a Starbucks so I was curious if the customers were just as stereotypical as at a Starbucks. There were–just with less Apple products. Also nobody with thick-rimmed square-framed glasses holding tiny lenses with their hair pasted into a carefully created tousled look.

There was the aging (65ish) male hippie with a very long braided ponytail of gray-silver hair. Every coffee shop in the world has one of these guys.  His companion appeared to be less hippie-like as she had dyed blond hair,  plenty of makeup and dressed “business casual”. They scarcely spoke as they sipped their coffee.

A couple sat by a fireplace in separate armchairs in lieu of the more intimate sofa. I speculated they were on a first date. He had a loud voice that allowed anyone to listen in if so inclined. After hearing a few sentences it was apparent he was an “all about me” blowhard. He dominated their conversation and she made a good choice to limit this date to lunch.

This Land Is My Land…

I have noticed several stickers on cars that proclaim “NATIVE” inside a silhouette of the state of Iowa. I first noticed these types of stickers many years ago in Colorado. Then and now I find these stickers slightly tacky, a bit arrogant, certainly xenophobic, and perhaps racist. Just recently two of these stickers have attracted my attention.


The first was applied to the car at an angle. Nothing clever like putting it at a 90-degree angle to the left or right to signify a political leaning by the driver or the state. It was not upside down like a distress flag. It was just a sloppy job of applying it.

The other one was on a car with Iowa plates but the frame around the plate proclaimed the University of Nebraska Alum, the car was a late model Hyundai Santa Fe (made in South Korea) with a dealer sticker from Topeka KS. Way to support your “native” state!

I do have one good thing to say about the “NATIVE” stickers: They are a little less obnoxious than the stickers with the little boy urinating on the logo of a car company.

Fence Row to Fence Row

Over the last few weeks, I have been across parts of Iowa, Illinois, and Minnesota. In all three states, there were many fires where large piles of trees and brush were burning. 

The last time I saw this much clearing was when I first moved to Iowa from Michigan in 1979.  Back then farmers were encouraged by federal agencies to grow fence row to fence row.  Easy credit and low interest rates drove up the cost of farmland and many farmers leveraged their operations to acquire more acreage. This was followed by a bust that lasted over a decade and many families lost their farms to foreclosure. Many of these farms had been in the same family for over 100 years. 

I served on the Warren County Board of Human Services in the 1980s. I saw firsthand the extent of the suffering that the boom and bust inflicted on so many people.  There is a story in the D M Register that some Iowa farmland sold at auction for over $26,000 an acre last week. 

Maybe the bonfires in the fields are a warning to the wise to be careful about going into debt during a boom.

Parenting by Cell

I was in a doctor’s waiting room semi-patiently listening for my name to be called. On the other side of the room, a young mother was doing the same. Her children, however, were literally bouncing off the walls. 

After a few warnings to sit quietly went unheeded she dropped what appeared to be the ultimate threat to them; “Settle down or I am going to text your dad!”. It worked!

Anything for a $

The University of Iowa, nationally known as a top “party school”, has signed a multi-million dollar contract with Anheuser-Busch to guarantee its infamous standing. The contract will allow Anheuser-Busch to use the TigerHawk logo on retail displays, flags, caps, cups, and T-shirts.

The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). NIAAA supports and conducts research on the impact of alcohol use on human health and well-being. (It is the largest funder of alcohol research in the world.)  Here is what the NIAAA reports about college students drinking:

MOA RIP

Debbie and I had a long delayed getaway weekend starting the day after Thanksgiving.  We went to Minneapolis and stayed at a nice hotel across the street from the Mall of America (MOA).  A recent story in the news reminded me that I wanted to share our MOA experiences.  Here is the excerpt from the news item: “Authorities arrested at least nine people after a “series of fights” at the nation’s biggest shopping mall sent chairs flying and caused after-Christmas shoppers to flee, officials in Minnesota said Tuesday….Witnesses described a chaotic scene.”  Reports stated that up to 200 were involved in the fighting.

Bakeesh

Photo by Bob Conroy

On one of my trips to Lincoln I caught a postal worker doing a shake down at Culvers in Council Bluffs.  It was after the lunch rush and the counter staff was getting a little break.  I ordered my Butter Burger with fries and a coffee to go and waited while the staff chatted.  

The postal worker, a 50ish man with thin graying hair and an oversized belly, entered the restaurant and announces they had no mail today.  There was no immediate response from the staff so he asked if they had any outgoing mail and they did not.  He just stood there and finally one of the staff asked if he wanted to “try” the flavor of the day.  Two minutes later he was devouring a scoop of free custard.  

No money was exchanged and it had the look of a regular event.

Waiting for Katrina

In the days after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, Debbie and I, like millions of Americans, watched the images coming out of New Orleans with disbelief. We saw flooded neighborhoods, people stranded on rooftops, families crowded into shelters, and thousands of people who had suddenly lost nearly everything they owned.

It was difficult to watch from the safety of Iowa and not wonder what we could do to help.

At the time, Debbie and I both worked for GuideOne Insurance in West Des Moines and were members of the company's safety committee. The Polk County Health Department contacted GuideOne looking for four volunteers. Iowa was preparing to receive evacuees from New Orleans, and a planeload was expected to arrive in Des Moines. Debra and I volunteered.

For several days, local television had been showing preparations underway at the Iowa State Fairgrounds. The Varied Industries Building had been transformed into a massive reception and processing center capable of handling as many as 1,000 people.

When we arrived at the Fairgrounds, we first reported to a security area, where we checked in and were given identification tags. From there, we walked a few blocks across the grounds to the Varied Industries Building. 

It was an extraordinary sight. The building is enormous, but much of that enormous space had been filled with row after row of cots supplied by the Iowa National Guard. Acres of them seemed to stretch across the floor, waiting for people who might arrive with little more than the clothes they were wearing.

There were areas for registration, medical evaluation and other services. State and local agencies and volunteers were ready to receive people, determine what they needed and help them begin figuring out what came next.We checked in with Polk County and joined about 75 other volunteers and then we waited.

Earlier that day, a small group of evacuees had arrived by plane from New Orleans and had already been processed through the system. We understood that another flight might be coming, possibly carrying many more people.No one knew exactly when, or even if, it would arrive.

While we were waiting, a middle-aged couple walked into the processing center. They hadn't arrived on one of the organized flights. Somehow, they had driven all the way from New Orleans to Des Moines and had been directed to the Fairgrounds.

I still remember how they looked. They were dirty. They were exhausted. And more than anything else, they looked stunned.The man's shirt had blood stains on it. We never learned their story. We didn't know what they had seen, what they had experienced, where they had slept, or how they had managed to make the long drive from New Orleans to Iowa. A few forms were completed, and before long the couple was escorted to a hospital for evaluation and treatment. We were told that eventually they would be placed in a local hotel.

For me, that brief encounter made everything we had been watching on television suddenly very real. Katrina was no longer just pictures of flooded streets and desperate people hundreds of miles away. Two people who had lived through it had walked through the doors and stood only a few feet from us.

The rest of the evening was mostly waiting.Dozens of volunteers stood ready. Hundreds upon hundreds of empty cots waited across the enormous building. Medical personnel, government agencies, relief organizations and volunteers were prepared for an influx of people who had lost their homes and had nowhere else to go. But the plane never came.

At about 8:00 that evening, we were told that no additional evacuees would be arriving in Iowa that night and that we could go home. Our names were placed on a call list in case volunteers were needed during the following weeks. Debbie and I walked back across the Fairgrounds and went home.

We hadn't done very much that evening. We hadn't rescued anyone, handed out hundreds of meals or helped a family settle into a new home. Mostly, we had simply shown up and waited. Throughout the Varied Industries Building were people who had also simply shown up. Nurses, government employees, National Guard personnel, Red Cross workers and ordinary volunteers were standing by because strangers they had never met might need them.

The acres of empty cots were evidence of something more than preparation for a disaster. They represented a community saying, "If you need a place to go, we'll make room for you."  Most of those cots were never needed. And perhaps that was fortunate.