Free Market, My A..

Here is my medical history. I let myself get a little overweight and did not exercise like I should, so at the age of 63 I started a mild blood pressure medicine, Hydrochlorothyozide. Then, about a year later, to get my blood pressure down to where I was comfortable in the long run I asked the doctor for a little boost and he gave me a prescription for Lancinopril. I have taken both ever since, and I just turned 65.

My old medical insurance allowed me to get these two filled for about six dollars a month, together, at the local Walgreen Drug Store. Then upon reaching 65, I opted not to sign up for a drug plan since my medicines would be so inexpensive, I thought.

When I went to fill the prescriptions last week, I was hit in the face for a $34 bill for one month's supply for the two together at Walgreen. I basically told them where they could stick their pills. I came home and told Sarah that I was willing to die before I would pay that much for pills that are produced at probably about two to three cents apiece.

We called Walmart and found out that we could get a three month's supply of each for $10, basically what I was paying with insurance to Walgreen. We had the prescriptions changed over and Walgreen will also lose my wife's business which was much bigger than mine. We had already refused to buy even a bag of candy from CVS because they refused Sarah's drug plan.

I read some junk in the paper this morning about how we should let free markets work and keep government out of them. I could not agree more, but was it not government that stepped in to forcibly prevent workers from carrying on union actions that led to government protection of them? Was it not governments that propped up the financial system when it was in failure?

And, is it not government almost guaranteeing the ability of insurance companies to pillage the population by making them free of anti-trust regulations? Is it not government that makes it possible for drug companies to have so many different markets for their prices that they can charge ten cents for a pill here and eighty cents over there? In a truly free market, would people not be allowed to go to wherever the lowest prices are, even if they are in Canada?

NO LARGE CORPORATION DOING BUSINESS TODAY WANTS A FREE MARKET AND THEY ARE LYING THROUGH THEIR TEETH IF THEY CLAIM OTHERWISE.
Without government protection, propping up, subsidies, special tax rules, and a hoste of other benefits, these corporations would have to become competitive, and that is the last thing they want unless they are allowed to form monoplies. The whole Republican/Free Market connection is an illusion.

I happen to be taking two medicines that Walmart buys in quantity. If I did not, then I would be subject to a market place that is about as free as a dog on a short leash and tied to a metal pole. It is that way because nobody wants to compete any longer. Competition does not assure the very high ongoing salaries of the executives, so screw it, they want the government to give them the protection that we call socialism and communism if it is given to poor working stiffs or common people, but which we now have labeled free market when corporations are the beneficiaries.

Incivility Is Never Justified

"What do you hate about this country" the older man asked the son in law? This was not because of any action that the younger man had done against the United States. It was simply because the younger man had the gall to stand up for his beliefs. Those beliefs conflicted with those of the older man, and that and that alone was the gray beard's reason for his question.

It does not make any difference on which side of the current issues the two men have found themselves. Both of them know in their hearts that the other loves our country and would do nothing to bring hurt to it. But, political discussion today simply does not allow us to remain civil, I guess. We have to go after the other person's very core love of country in order to outdo anything that they might say.

The old man was being uncivil, and that is un-American in and of itself, for it is on civility and rule of law that we base the principles of the country. The act of accusing a political foe of hating our country is a statement by the accuser that he really does not understand the founding principles of the country. It does not show that he hates this country, but simply that he has replaced the concept of our country with the concept of his country, the very definition of incivility.

Thanksgiving at The Farm

Thanksgiving traditions are worth more than all the wealth of nations when they are built using solid families who understand their relationships to each other, their maker, and the land on which they grow. Sarah's family has built such a tradition on a little farm, just outside York, South Carolina. I have been a part of that tradition for 41 years, but it is much older than Sarah, even.
The Farm it is known as in the family and the only two people living there today are Sarah's oldest brother, Carroll, and her only living aunt, Nell, who lives in a mobile home in front of the house. The house has its own road, Arrow Road, that extends about one half a mile between two main roads. It is relatively isolated.
The Farm, and all the land was sold to the local electrical co-op several years ago, but they allow Carroll to keep living in the old house for a small monthly charge. He has a big garden and grape and blackberry bushes, but the old tractor does little work any longer except haul around the children on Thanksgiving.
Most of the cousins started their own Thanksgiving traditions when the farm was sold, so only Sarah, her sister and two brother, and all their families keep the long tradition going. But, there are a lot of children right now so it is not unusual to have upwards of forty people at one of the gatherings.
There were years when the total of people present would climb to sixty or seventy, but those days are long gone. The old dinner bell outside still rings for all to come to eat, as it has for all those years. The old kitchen still holds all the food that is prepared with a slow line going through.
My children love this tradition, and we were responsible for 11 of the attendees this year, Carroll 5, Becky 13, Don5, and Aunt Nell 3. Two of my daughter-in-laws could not attend. The kids chase the chickens and play with the dogs and ride the tractor. Us old people stand around and talk, and eat, of course.
This tradition probably has between five and ten years left. I doubt that the generation of our children can hold it together, but I would not bet on that. Because we have over three acres here, it well may move to our house some day. That would be great. The grandchildren only four or five already know that going to The Farm for Thanksgiving is a special event.

The State House(of Prostitution)

The more that I watch the political process, the more that I am sure that if one of my children or grandchildren proposed entering that world beyond the local level, that I would give them books of brain teaser games to take with them because there is nothing in partisan politics to tease the brain, stimulate the intellect, or challenge the thinking that all that money was spent early on in schooling to facilitate.

Watching various politicians "connect" to the people is like having a peep hole into a house in the red light district. If there is any such thing as people values, American values, democratic values, family values, apple pie values, or any of the other code phrases of the unthinking, then surely they get tossed on the beds of prostitution by the political class.

Sarah Palin is "Going Rogue" to connect. I still say that I wrote the best summary of her when I said that my good friend, Robbie Cannon, though he was assured by a Catholic priest that he was not smart enough, has more of a chance of making it into Hell than Sarah Palin has of being smart enough to be anything beyond a mom of several children; and we all know that either side of parenting, male or female, does not require a lot.

This morning, I find that those wonderful words spoken in support of the biomedical industry by both Democrats and Republicans were actually written by the....biomedical industry. I wonder who taught the congressmen to read. Watching a lady politician go from this meeting to that meeting last week, I wondered, does she not get tired of hearing pantyhose rub against pantyhose. Take a break lady and save the country, and me a lot of money that you are going to take from my pockets if you get what you want.

There are things that I wonder about. Does it really take all that beautiful hair, on the men no less, to win elections? Should they not be more concerned about what is under the hair? That was rhetorical!! Should we not change the old adage question to "Which came first, the politician or the corruption?" How much red, white, and blue paint does Sue Myrick use up in a year so that you will not notice the blackness of her heart and the dullness of her mind? How many roads will David Holye of Gaston County have built so that he can sell a farm to the state that just happens to lie in the path of the road?

Nevada is the only state that legalizes prostitution of the body. The other states only allow the non-carnel forms of prostitution and the politicians are those who jump to the front of the line and plead for you to take them, for they alone can make your dreams come true. A few thousand, and you are still searching for the satisfaction that a few thousand more will surely bring to you.

The Thread #9, Strong, Supportive Communities

No single idea has more punctuated my life experiences than the benefits of a supportive community. You never have and you never will hear me extolling the notion that we are self made people. I do not believe it in any sense because in order for that to have any validity, we would have to strip away the thousand of years of built up support which gave us a very high platform from which to start making ourselves.

It is also very false to assume that we all start off from, if not the same height of platform, at least platforms that are equivalent in terms of their ability to launch us into our life endeavors. No, if this is a race, then some people start off very near the finish line, or beyond it, and some start far back and behind great obstacles. In fact, for some, there is no race because those obstacles are all booby trapped, and one of them will be their undoing.

I very well understand that I was positioned well by my childhood to run a good race. Many factors went into that positioning, but one beyond immediate family really stands out in my mind, and that was the community of Weddington. Around the elementary school and the church across the road were the events that, all put together, gave the children a real boost. We were a part of something bigger than our selves or our families. The community picked up our education where our families left off and taught us things that our families could not.

There is little wonder that I came to see church as the best of all civic organizations.
As a matter of fact, I rather resented when religion got in the way of its being a great civic center. In the late 40's and 50's, Weddington Methodist Church was a beehive of activity, and it was there that the families of Weddington held those events that made being a child then and there so wonderful.

I will go so far as to say that there is no substitute for a supportive community. No parent or set of parents can or will construct an environment, free of community, that supplants the very active and supportive community that gives the individual the sense of being a part of that thing that is so much larger than themselves.

We are built in such a fashion that we are unable to be complete within ourselves. It is only through interaction with other humans that we are fulfilled in any sense. Men have honored this truth for eons. The self made man or woman does not exist, and where there is someone who claims to be such, he or she is nothing more than a self deluding individual. The parents who claim to be able to oversee and determine, in total, the education of their children are cheating their children out of their chance to understand their rightful place in the community of man.

Stories of people who are isolated in nature with only the animals as friends are stories of how those humans became like the animals, not about how the animals became like the people. The community always ends up being an expanded community of the teachers, the animals in these cases. Contrary to what some would say, these stories actually prove that without community, man is nothing, and that he will find his supportive community wherever he can find it.

As my life went along, I learned more and more that the religious aspects of my life had been largely contrived. I am no atheist or any such being. I can not wrap my mind around or accept the idea that I am capable of saying that there is no God. But, I still see the church as being at its best as a community of people who give support to and direction to the lives of the people that make up the community. I accept the existence of a God that is somehow in charge of the whole of the world and humanity in particular. I am willing to wait until my death to get to know this God as well as some claim to know Him here on Earth.

But, so long as I am here on Earth, and my mental capacities are only capable of telling me about this existence, I will spend my time and my efforts telling people that they are best fulfilled by being a part of a community of people whose main purpose is to give support and direction to all its members. That could be a church or it could be a combination of many things. If you choose to give up that support, you have only chosen to cheat yourself out of what should have been your birthright.

As I am expanding my knowledge of what became of the students I once taught, I am finding that most of them have chosen to seek that community through a church. That is not surprising, this is the South. But, I am also finding that the religiosity of the younger group, that is younger than myself, is much more pronounced than what was even considered in good taste in earlier years. I do dearly hope that the overt religiosity does not translate into communities where people are not allowed to grow as they feel the need to grow. Community that has indoctrination as a part of its program can be very destructive.

Out of healthy communities, be they church based or otherwise, come the range of human interests, talents, world views, professions and the gamut of what it takes for communities to be self sustaining and self correcting. If and when a community ceases to have the power of self correction, then it is no longer community, it is a prison for most of the people who are caught in its grasp.

Cliches, Reprinted from Waxhaw Exchnage

I said that I would on occasion reprint articles from my two years of writing for the local papers. Here is one that makes no sense, but makes a statement about something that really irritates me.

There is one thing that you can say for these political campaigns that we are now enduring, they are loaded with cliches. Even original statements become cliches in the time span of the campaigns because they are repeated so often. The Cambridge Dictionary defines cliche as a comment that is made often and therefore not original or interesting.

My English teaching son says that my generation is a generation of cliches. According to him, all our songs and popular culture are just long strings of too often repeated phrases. That being true, I wonder if we are responsible for the quality of the campaign rhetoric.

Well, if we are the problem, then to all of you who love to use your storehouse of these trite phrases and hang onto them as if they were gold, here is a tribute to the wonderful thought substitutes. In tribute to bad politics and worse cliches, I offer the following. I call it The Nonsense of 101 Cliches."

I am a member of the Grand Old Party and she is a tree hugger. I am a suit and tie man and she is a liberal pinko. I am a compassionate conservative and she is a flip flop irrational feminist. But, she was the light of my life.

Her eyes were as blue as the sky and twinkled like the stars. She was as delicate as a flower, a babe in the woods, but she had a bee in her bonnet. I told her, "you can not go home again, so she should stand by her man, keep her chin up, and never say die."

She asked, "Is you is or is you ain't my baby?" I replied by giving some red roses to the blue lady. That was the straw that broke the camel's back. She said that I could wait until the cows came home because she was headed for the other side of the mountain and greener pastures.

A good woman is hard to find and true love never runs smooth, but there goes my everything, my eternal flame, and a woman of great moral fiber. I am sick as a dog, and though the rank and file are behind me, I think that I was too far right of center on this one. I was taking part in a smear campaign against my one and only.

"Cry me a river" said the prophet without honor. All shook up, the same old song fixed me on the head of a pin. "My heart sighs for you, cries for you, dies for you," I yelled! The walls had ears and yelled back, "Climb every mountain."

I flew like the wind to her side. "You win again," I said. "Tomorrow is a new day and we can come together for the nation. Mi casa es tu casa. Let us celebrate our differences. Are you better off today than you were four years ago?"

"It is time for a change," she said, "and I am the agent of change. I have to break the gridlock in our relationship. I regret any pain that I may have caused. You have been out of sight and out of mind, and I have lost that loving feeling."

"Have you lost your marbles," I asked" She had been on the tips of my fingers and was my bridge over troubled waters. Now, I will count flowers on the wall. Oh, lonesome me!!!

I thought that she hung the moon, but now it is a blue moon. She was pie in the sky, fool's gold, and I had been in a fool's paradise. I could laugh it off, or I could cry tomorrow, but life is too short and she is long gone.

I will walk into the sun of a new day, ready to face the challenges of a new millennium. There will be no more blue eyes crying in the rain for me. I am here to serve the American people and we have to reach across party lines, but, it is the red, white, and blue, not the blue, white, and red.

I am a compassionate conservative and she was a tax and spend Democrat. I believe in family values and she is pro gay rights. I wanted politics as usual and she wanted to shake things up. The union was split and she was a lost cause.

She will be out of sight and out of mind. In the playground of my mind, I will be as free as a bird. Life is for the living, and you should have the time of your life in the prime of your life.

Two can live cheaper than one, but you must speak for yourself, believe in yourself, and pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. Be careful, however, for the toes that you step on today may be attached to the butt that you have to kiss tomorrow.

The polls tell us that time and tide wait for no man. I will bide my time and put my pants on one leg at a time.

I am a poorer but wiser man today. I can not pull a rabbit out of a hat, but I stop to smell the roses. I travel in the middle of the road now. The world is neither red nor blue. It is time to move forward.

While In The Canadian Rockies, Take Some Side Trips

If you take a trip to the Canadian Rockies, there are two side trips that you will not want to miss. Do not get me wrong. The trip up the Icefields Parkway from Banff to Jasper is nothing less than awesome. You could live a lifetime looking out at the vistas there and yet each time would be more wonderful that the last.

Yet, outside the park lies two experiences that you should not die without experiencing. The top one is Mt. Robson, the tallest mountain in the Canadian Rockies. Standing at the base, you look up about 8,000 feet at a monster of a mountain. In fact, the relief on this mountain, distance from where you view to top, is greater than any mountain there. It verticality for that long distance is what makes it so special. You are privy to a world where the base temperature where you are standing may be 70 degrees, but the top of the vertical cliffs are probably well below freezing. From the visitors center, you may hike whatever distance you choose, but the trails are steep.

The bottom picture is a picture taken from Rogers Pass in Canada's Glacier National Park in the Selkirk Mountains, just west of the Rockies Range. It is accessed along Canadian Route 1A from the Icefields Parkway, through Yoho National Park and through the valley between the two ranges.

Traveling from the valley floor to Rogers Pass, the cliffs are very vertical and you never have a good view of what is out there. To add to that, you pass through many avalanche tunnels that protect the road. It is not until you reach the pass and look back that you see this view. This is avalanche central and it is in this location that the Canadian government developed the use of howitzers to cause avalanches. Howitzer placements can be found throughout the area.

This area of the Selkirks is where a lot of avalanche deaths of skiers take place. A couple of years ago, there were two such incidents that took a total of 9 lives. Because it lies to the west of the Rockies, it gets much more snow than the Rockies. This particular view from Rogers Pass gives you some idea of what awaits a visitor to the Selkirks. They are Awesome

After losing a lot of time, trains, and lives, the Canadian Railroad finally built the Connaught Tunnel under Rogers Pass, a distance of 5 miles. Canada, unlike our country, really does its business by rail and the loss of time was a luxury they could not afford.

The Gentleman Agriculture Teacher

The fellow at the center of these two photographs, the gentleman in the plaid shirt, is Temple Hill. The lady next to him in the orange blouse is his wife, Blanche. Temple and Blanche live on some acreage in eastern Union County, north of Marshville. Until a few years ago, Temple kept beef cattle, but now, at age 86, he no longer keeps any animals or treats the acreage as a farm. He is staying off the day when he and Blanche give up the farm and move to some sort of assisted living center, and he seems to be doing a pretty good job of extending that time. To get to this luncheon, they had to drive a total of about 60 miles, around Charlotte to Dallas. This is a reunion of teachers at Dallas High School and North Gaston High School.

Temple was an agriculture teacher, which morphed into a horticulture teacher as the world changed. He is a gentleman of impeccable civility who could just as well could have been the greeter at a court of royalty. Never, never, has he ever failed to be the unassuming friend, that would be welcomed, anywhere that he wanted to place his hat.

But, Temple had his edge and he did not tolerate incompetence. This gentleman taught me how to play checkers, when I thought that I was good, by wiping me out in precious few moves. Then he explained to me, you attack down the center of the board, not on the edges.

And Temple had one little weakness. He made great wine and he wanted his friends and fellow teachers to be able to partake of the juice. He would bottle it, wrap each bottle in a secure bag, and send it around to the teachers using one of his students. When the kid came to the door with a brown bag and said that this was from Mr. Hill, you did not ask any questions.

I was always proud to call myself a member of this bunch of teachers. I am now learning through Facebook just how successful many of our students became. And even thought he did not teach what we called an academic course, Temple was as sharp a blade as we had. His knowledge, which he would always downplay, was phenomenal.

This is one more life friend that I have because of those years of teaching, and one of us will go to the other's funeral, I am sure of it. Whichever does not matter. I love that my path crossed Temple's path. I am a better man because of it.