Columbus Day Update

Our internet connection has been intermittent (thank you, Earthlink) so I haven't posted in a while. Let's see - where were we when I last wrote something here?

The dishwasher had stopped working. Since then, the repairman has been to the house twice and the second time it was fixed. However, yesterday it started making a noise that was Clearly Abnormal for a Dishwasher, and we have stopped using it again.

We also didn't have internet access, because Earthlink had told us we could no longer have a DSL line. I am not sure what their current thinking is on that (Tom is the one who talks to them regularly) but we now have intermittent access. It will be on for a while, then it's off.

That also was the weekend of the Great Atlanta Gasoline Shortage. Although they said that things might not be completely back to normal until Columbus Day Weekend (which is now), the plastic bags covering the pumps disappeared pretty quickly - no thanks to Governor Perdue, whose response was to ask for oil to be released from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve; I guess no one told him that the problem was the refineries, not oil, but oh well - he was in Spain at the time when all this was happening.

That also was before the $700 billion dollar bailout proposal went through that was supposed to get the credit markets unfrozen. So Congress passed it last week, including giving the Treasury Department authority they didn't want to directly recapitalize banks, and the stock market kept going down all week and now the new Idea that Will Get the Economy out of the Toilet is directly recapitalizing banks.

Speaking of banks - our bank, Wachovia, is/was the fourth largest bank in the United States, and they went under sometime within the last week or two. CitiBank and Wells Fargo got into a tussle over the parts that were left that they wanted but Wells Fargo won. I was afraid we had more money in Wachovia than was covered by the FDIC (my mom's house in Oklahoma sold recently, and we had just deposited that check a couple of months ago) so right around the time Wachovia went under, I transferred some money to another bank.

I saw a patient on Friday who I hadn't seen before. The chart said he had significant mental health and substance abuse problems, and it looked from the chart like he had been homeless. But when I talked to him, he clearly described his symptoms and could tell me when he had had similar symptoms before, and what he had been treated with the last time. I told him his blood pressure was a little up, and he said it was because of all the stuff going on. What stuff?, I asked. Those guys running that company who got billions of dollars from the government, and then went on that week long spa vacation, he said. Oh, AIG, I said. Yes, he said, and went on to enumerate how much they spent on food and on spa treatments and whatever else they did.

In the meantime, the presidential candidates are arguing about who will cut taxes the most. It's not clear that anyone is prepared to ask us to do anything hard - if we just drill for more oil and keep those "Support Our Troops" magnets on our cars, it'll all be okay.

It's not okay, and doing more of the same is not going to make it okay. It would be nice if someone running for something would be willing to say that.

Welcome to the Third World

A couple of weeks ago our dishwasher broke. It is a GE Profile, with an illuminated shiny stainless steel interior and a brushed stainless steel exterior. Great design, from the aesthetic point of view, but it doesn’t work. A couple of months ago it was leaking and the repair guy came and replaced a gasket. That seemed to stop the leaking but then two or three weeks ago it stopped working altogether. The repair guy came back and said he would have to order the parts, but they are on backorder. He was back last week, with the parts, and worked on it some more, but it still doesn’t work. He is supposed to be back tomorrow – but of course gasoline is in short supply in the Atlanta metro area, so who knows if he’ll make it?

On Wednesday, our internet connection stopped working. (I am writing this off line, and will upload it when I get access to the internet.) Since then Tom has spent several hours on hold or talking with various Earthlink support people. Finally one of them called back Friday night and told him that the problem was that Earthlink had switched our DSL from one station to another and now we were too far from the station, so unless they can switch us back, well, we just can’t get DSL any more. It will take them 5 days to figure out whether or not they can do that - or maybe 10.

Of course, the U.S. economy stopped working a week or so ago too. I’m not trying to get a loan, but from what I’ve heard and read, the credit markets are frozen up because The Smartest Guys in the Room dreamed up devilishly complex financial instruments that were too complicated for anyone to understand, and no one said “no” – not the executives of the companies, who were making a bundle off this, or their Boards of Directors, or their auditors, or the regulators. No one said “no” and it doesn’t look like they even asked any questions. And now, Congress is talking about a $700 billion dollar clean up. That’s on top of Bear Stearns and A.I.G. Put it all together, and pretty soon, well, you’re talking real money.

Here in Atlanta, there is hardly any gasoline. Tom and I have been talking about what we’ll do if we have to get by on the ½ tank in the minivan and the ¼ tank in my car for, well, who knows long. Yesterday I went to the grocery store and shopped for the week. There are doctors’ appointments on Wednesday. Iain can walk to school, but what about the girls? Can they take the MARTA bus? Caroline went to a movie last night at Phipps Plaza – she walked to the MARTA station with two friends. We asked if the attendance was down at the movie for a Saturday night. Maybe a little, she said, but there were a lot of people on MARTA. I could work from home some of the time, if we had an internet connection, but we don’t (see above).

We are not big television watchers in my house, but we’ve been watching the local news the last day or so, trying to find out about the gasoline shortage. What’s going to happen on Monday morning, when people from this whole metropolitan area, including the MARTA-free suburbs, need to get to work but can’t because the tank is empty, or are afraid to, because what if they can’t get home? Who is going to go anywhere that they don’t have to go? Our state leaders have been notably absent from the airwaves, although I did hear Governor Perdue Friday evening asking people to not make trips that aren’t essential. Thanks, Governor Perdue, we already figured that part out.

None of this of course is anyone’s fault. It all just happened.

While Tom was out looking for gasoline, I was washing the dishes. Standing at the sink, thinking about the dropping reservoirs (it just happened that Atlanta has not made plans to assure a longterm water supply, while the metro area grew unfettered, without any plans on how to deal with a sustained drought) I was imagining the tap running dry.

But forget investment in new technology to get us out of our dependence on oil from countries that hate us, or investment in our young people, or investment in research – no, Congress is going to spend $700 billion in a hope of cleaning up after a bunch of guys with six and seven and eight figure salaries who have brought the U.S. economy to its knees.

It just happened.

More about Head Lice

We got the dreaded letter from the school a couple weeks ago. It wasn't the most dreaded letter ("Your child is infested with head lice") but it was the second most dreaded one ("A child in your child's class is infested with head lice"). Iain's hair is pretty long, and we've told him if he gets head lice we are going to cut it really short. I personally do not believe that this constitutes child abuse, but I'm not sure that that's how Iain sees it.

I got out the industrial strength lice comb, which we haven't used since the girls were much younger, and combed him out thoroughly. No bugs, living or dead, but I did find a couple of bits of blue-green stuff that Iain identified as duct tape. ("How did you get duct tape in your hair?") We are still on Level Orange alert, but hopefully have dodged the bullet (or the bugs) this time.

I know everyone has been anxiously awaiting an update on the head lice committee. I couldn't make it to the meeting (it probably conflicted with some other meeting I had to go to), but I have reviewed and commented on the proposed new policy - and we just got the word that it has been approved.

The new policy requires parents to sign something that says they have treated their child before their child can return to school. We hope this will help. We shall see.

A Place of Safety

What a week. Houston - America's 4th largest city - still has large areas without power, much of Galveston was seriously damaged, the Bolivar Peninsula was pretty much wiped off the map, and it doesn't even make the news.

On Sunday, before the week's market convulsions, we sang a song* that included the line:

Lead us to a place, guide us with Your grace to a place where we'll be safe.

The images that that line evoked at the time were of weather - wind and rain and rising water - and in the shadow of September 11, of opportunities lost, and what would really make us safe. I started a posting about that, but I didn't get very far.

Then on Monday the market dived, and with every passing day the scale and scope of what was happening became clearer and more frightening. At this point, only six days later, "a safe place" means a place where you can invest your money without exposure to mortgage-derived securities.

What we heard this week is that credit is suddenly tight in a way that threatens normal functioning of our economy. Businesses that are sound are having trouble borrowing, and things are much tighter for mortgages and car loans. Walking around the neighborhood, I see the houses under construction (almost all of them Large Houses that are Architecturally Different from Adjacent Houses) and wonder what all this means for the people who are building them.

Tom had a conversation with a builder who lived across the street until recently. He had been to his bank and had been told that he was the only builder that the bank did business with who had not defaulted on something. That was before the market dived, before the credit markets dried up.

So - here we are. A place where we'll be safe sounds really good. Leaders who could help us get there would be even better. And a strategy other than (or in addition to) prayer - well, that would be priceless.

*The Prayer, with Lead Us, Lord by Carole Sager and David Foster

Fired Up! at Fire Station No. 19

This morning Iain ran the 4th Annual Fired Up 5K race. Registration was set up inside Fire Station No. 19, and the fire truck was outside. I think a few of the fire fighters ran in the race, but most of them were standing around outside. There were also several volunteers from the Greenbriar Lions Club there, middle-aged African-American men and women, wearing yellow vests covered with pins and patches, helping people get in the right line during registration, staffing the finish line, helping with different tasks. I asked them where they met, and they said they met on Thursdays at Greenbriar. I told them that my father had been a Lion for many many years, and they asked if I'd ever been to a Lions Club meeting. I said I had and they smiled and invited me to visit their club. They make the rounds of community events, it sounded like - they told me what event they were working at next weekend, but I don't remember. This event supports scholarships for kids attending Atlanta Public Schools. Fire fighters - community volunteers - scholarships for kids to go to college - seems like a winner for the neighborhood.

This isn't one of the big 5K races - only a couple hundred people were registered, and with the beginning and ending of the race at the same place, the organizers didn't have that many people there to work the event. The runners went off a few minutes after 8:30 a.m., and then those of us who were waiting for runners to return had 16 minutes to wait for the first of them to cross the finish line. I helped put the orange cones in place that defined the lane the runners walked down, after crossing the finishing line, and put orange cones in place to keep traffic from turning on to the street from North Highland. (You never can tell what people will do. Someone pulled out of a driveway farther down Los Angeles while the runners were coming up the hill toward the finish line.)

Sometime after the runners left and before they started coming back, a man came over from the store across from the fire station on the other side of Los Angeles and told the yellow-vested Lions Club volunteer who was staffing the finish line that there were cars parked in the store's parking lot that shouldn't be there. She was very pleasant and said, "Go talk to them at the fire station." He said again that there were cars parked in their parking lot that shouldn't be there and that if people didn't move them immediately they would be towed. She smiled and said again, "Go talk to them at the fire station." So he left us and headed over to talk to one of the fire fighters.

I said to the woman in the yellow vest that if I had a retail business that just happened to be across the street from a fire station, and that fire station decided to sponsor an event to benefit children attending Atlanta Public Schools, I don't think my response to a few cars in my parking lot early in the morning would be to call a tow truck.

Iain came in with a time of 33 minutes and some seconds. Steve and I waited for him at the finish line and cheered for him when he crossed it. I walked back home at about 9:15; Steve and Iain stayed a little longer. At least by the time I left, no tow truck had arrived.

Remembering September 11

Seven years ago today, Tom was with the kids at the dentist. He called me and told me that a plane had just hit one of the World Trade Center towers. I assumed an accident, and a little plane; he called back not long afterwards to say that a second plane had struck the other tower. It wasn't long afterwards that I remember seeing the first tower collapse, on the television screen in a conference room in my office building. I remember later hearing that a plane had crashed in Pennsylvania, and someone in the office trying to call family in the state, and her fear, when her call did not go through. That night emailing an acquaintance who worked at the Pentagon (she was all right) and another whose office I thought was in lower Manhattan (he was all right too, although the offices were not).

I remember for a few days afterwards, the normally sullen, aggressive drivers among whom I have to make may way to work each day seemed a little less, well, sullen and aggressive. A little less likely to honk the horn for a moment's delay when the light turned green, a little more likely to let someone in who needed to change lanes. It only lasted a couple of days, though.

Before September 11, the newspapers had been full of lurid speculation about the congressman from California and a missing intern. I remember standing out in the street a few nights later, talking to my friend Carol, saying that I would be okay with being scared, as long as the public discourse sayed on to things that mattered instead of the kind of stuff that had been in play before.

Tom and I watched Charlie Wilson's War a couple of months ago, the story about how a Congressman from Texas got the U.S. Congress to support the covert war in Afghanistan against the Soviets during the 1980s. He could get Congress to appropriate ever increasing amounts to support the military action, but once the Soviets withdrew, there was no interest in building the schools that might have secured the peace. The movie ends with a great quote from Congressman Wilson, something to the effect that we won the war, and then we screwed everything up.

One of the books I am currently reading is Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. Greg Mortenson tried to climb K2, didn't make it to the summit, and on his way back got lost. He ended up in a village that didn't have a school, and decided that he would come back and build one there. I have not gotten to the part of the book where he actually gets the school built, but on the back of the book it says that over the next decade Mortensen built 55 schools " - especially for girls - in the forbidding terrain that gave birth to the Taliban."

Greg Mortenson is still building schools. According to the acknowledgements at the end of the book, it costs "$1 a month for one child's education in Pakistan or Afghanistan, a penny to buy a pencil, and a teacher's salary averages $1 a day." Contributions go to the Central Asia Institute, http://www.ikat.org/, in Bozeman, Montana.

It's been seven years. This year, I think I will remember those events of seven years ago not by flying the flag or by a moment of silence for those who died when the planes crashed, but with my checkbook. If you want to, too, here's the address:

Central Asia Institute
P.O. Box 7209
Bozeman, MT 59771

Primary prevention is almost always best.

Easy Ways to Save the Earth

Last night Tom and I heard Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist who wrote The World is Flat, at the Atlanta International School. Mr. Friedman's new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution - and How It Can Renew America, was just published. We bought the book and stood in line after the talk to get it signed, but I haven't started reading it yet. (This was the first book signing that I have ever attended where there were police officers there - we weren't that rowdy a crowd. Were they that concerned that people were going to cut in line?)

He gave a great talk. He talked about the big global trends - rapidly growing demand for energy around the world, climate change, oil-enriched dictatorships - that were shaping the future of our country and the rest of the world. It is very clear, he said, that we cannot drill our way out of this, nor can we conserve our way out - it will take radical change in policy to support a radical change in the economics of energy that could ultimately drive the innovation that could develop the new technology that is needed to solve the problem and lead the way to a future that is not dependent on us sending all our money to countries that hate us so we can burn their oil to power our country and destroy the planet.

He listed the book titles you can find on Google under "Easy Ways to Save the Earth" - there are a lot of them, and they are all wrong, because the things that need to be done are not going to be easy. They will be disruptive, painful, and scary. They will require focus and longterm vision and investment in the future that has been in short supply among the leadership of our country. What's needed is revolutionary change, not evolutionary change, and in revolutions, someone always gets hurt. Right now, all this talk about "green" is just rebranding; it's something the marketing people dreamed up. It's a party.

Which leads one to the obvious question, what can we do. The answer seemed to be get involved, demand that our country's leaders do a better job and actually address the real threats to our country. Of course, we have been replacing our lightbulbs with compact fluorescents, and I've got those cloth bags in the back of my car that I take with me to Kroger. I'll keep doing those things not because they are going to be the solution but because they will keep reminding me that we need a solution.