Citizen Journalist of the South/Southeast

US Congressional Candidate Harry Taylor walked the entire parade route for the Fourth of July Parade.  He walked to make a statement.  Other candidates walked, but Harry wanted to put his actions where the talk was.   He feels it is time for our country to break its dependence on oil and he was setting the example.

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted on the blog.  There are quite a few reasons for that and several of them are very good.   I will be doing more now and hope to bring up some important discussions.   This has been a very eventful year.  Some of those events I could have done without.  I guess looking at the positive side, it could have been worse.

At any rate, I will be back and posting more frequently.   I plan to give the blog something of a new look too.  Hope to see you around.

One of the objectives of this diary is to explore ‘human’ issues that deal with families. Busting myths is another and today we want to talk about the ‘myth’ that all we need to do is get the ‘old coots’ off the road so the young folks can drive faster.

All of us have heard those in their teens, twenties, thirties, and upward say that ‘old people shouldn’t be driving because they “kill too many people”. That biased statement has always infuriated me even when I was very young. It is just a stupid statement and people who would otherwise call themselves ‘liberal’ would go along with it without even challenging it. It is hard to find good data but those who want to ‘prove their point’ always rush gleefully to Florida. Florida is a haven of seniors so they attempt to make a point that seniors are more dangerous. Then they proceed to make it in an area where if virtually anyone has a wreck they are probably over 50 (depending on your definition of senior) and would fall into that category. If Florida were filled with teenagers, it is almost certain there would be as many or more wrecks, so the effort to ‘prove the point’ is moot. The major difference would be that the teenagers have mom and dad to buy them out so the insurance won’t go up.

Now if you ‘think hard’ it won’t take long for you to recall the deadly wrecks that you hear on the news every day and very few of those are seniors. Yet, if one senior has an accident it is picked up by the media
and the networks run it and everyone points a finger with the ‘See I told you so. Get the old coots off the road and we won’t have so many fatalities.’

Last summer I was driving down the road, turned my signal light on and wham I was rear-ended. Just to make sure he got me good, he hit me from the rear the second time (he said he missed the breaks). If you use the ‘over 50’ definition, I’m an ‘old coot’ and I looked in the rear view mirror and yep, there was two teenage boys in mom’s SUV. So, I got out and looked at my car and there was quite a bit of damage (around $2500) we learned later. The first thing this well-trained ‘dodger’ asked was ‘Did you signal?’ ‘I certainly did. Let’s not go there. I signaled further than required.’ So, he said ‘You probably did, I wasn’t looking.’ I said ‘Where were you going?’ and he answered that they were heading home after having been to Best Buy looking at CD’s. Then he got honest and said he wasn’t paying attention as he should have been since they were having fun talking about the CD’s they’d seen Soon we got to the issue of not calling the police. He called his mother and she said they would pay. However, I had a risk if I didn’t call the police. Since I was only a couple blocks from home I called my husband to come up and see the accident since I felt I needed a witness. We gave the kid a break and his parents paid promptly, but I kept thinking that there was one less teenage accident on the books and if it were a senior citizen there wouldn’t have been the parents rushing to bail them out.

Let’s explore further what it is that the ‘young and restless’ objects to and how valid their objections are. One of the things you hear most often is ‘they drive too slow’. Wow! Driving too slow isn’t deadly unless some young thing drives up behind them while text messaging and rams them in the rear. Then, it may become deadly, but it wasn’t the ‘driving too slow’ it was the careless driving and probably speeding. Then, you hear ‘They’re retired, where the hell do they need to go?’ Well, they certainly aren’t rushing to the store to buy CD’s, but they may very well be going to the grocery store to buy something to eat, or to the pharmacy to buy medicine for their illness, or even to the hospital where they volunteer to help the parents of young people who were in the latest crash. Then you hear the ‘ultimate weapon’. “We need to get the old coots off the road. They don’t need to be driving.” Really! How wonderfully brilliant you are. If they don’t need to go to the grocery, store and wherever else they want or need to drive, what gave you the ultimate authority to make that proclamation? These are the same people who paid for the roads you speed on. These are the people who paid taxes for 40,50,60 years and literally footed the bills. Now you want them off the roads so you can go faster! Give me a break!

When that one doesn’t work you hear ‘Why don’t they get their children to do it for them?” Now, that one shows extreme immaturity. That show you don’t know how unlikely it is to get the ‘children’ (meaning adult children” to even come to see them much less take them to run errands and again it is simply to convenience you as you speed along. No, the ‘old coots’ may literally starve to death or die from their illness if they had to wait on someone to come and take them to run their errands. And, don’t even suggest that they ‘hire someone’ although you usually hear ‘they have money’ right after you hear that statement.

The bottom line is a little tolerance goes a long way. Sure some seniors have a wreck. Some ‘every age’ have wrecks. But, honestly how long has it been since you saw a senior zipping down the road, cutting in front of the car they just passed while talking on the phone, pushing the dog away from the McDonald’s they are unwrapping for the screaming kid while the radio is blaring? It just doesn’t happen. Neither do you see in the newspaper that the senior was DUI of Cocaine or other drugs. We can all use a little more tolerance in this world. And, to be perfectly honest, if you ‘take the old coots’ license, you are simply going to put more people on the road without license because everyone has to have the necessities of life. And, if you want to arrest them, then you get to pay for more jails because most don’t have the money to pay such trivial tickets. If the government wants to take my license, I will start a class action suit to get a federally funded chauffeur to take me where I need to go. Let the ‘young people’ pay this time. They won’t mind. Just be sure the chauffeur is young … and preferably cute.

This is an excerpt from a speech John Edwards made last fall and it is just as contemporary today.

Elizabeth Edwards (We don’t need to define her anymore as the wife of former Presidential candidate John Edwards.) who is a Visiting Fellow at Harvard gave a very enlightening speech there recently. She discussed a wide array of subjects from the influence of the media, Univerisal Health Care, and other vitally important subjects. While I can’t bring you the YouTube version, if you have about 53 minutes you’d like to spend in a very worthwhile manner, you may want to watch her speech which is available on the Harvard site.
http://www.iop.harvard.edu/Multimedia-Center/All-Videos/Elizabeth-Edwards

One of the things that Elizabeth said that impressed me was the fact that John McCain who wants such a limited health care plan and keep users paying for half of it, has never been off public health care in his entire life. He was born to a military family where he received health care, when he became of age, he went to military school where he received health care, then to Vietnam where he received health care, then as a veteran he received health care, on to the Senate where he received a tremendous health care plan and will continue to have several of those entitlements plus Medicare’s health care plan. How can this man possibly understand what it means to be without critical health care? It’s obvious from his total lack of concern for it that he doesn’t. We’ve been through the Bush years and we certainly don’t need a McBush. We must all stay informed.

Much of what is important in America happens ‘behind the white picket fence’. Years ago families used the white picket fence as a status symbol of ‘having arrived’ or living on easy street. Today we see fewer white picket fences and even fewer who have really ‘arrived’. The white picket fence also buffered the real world from knowing the deep secrets of the families. Most ‘secrets’ were kept within the family and while that is still true to a certain extent, many of the things that would have been ‘secrets’ then are such big and real world issues that they are often or even ‘sometimes’ talked about in public. The maintaining the secret status unfortunately offered cover for a great number of ‘sins’ ranging from spousal abuse to child abuse and even sexual abuse. There were many other issues that benefited from that unpenetrable screen. One of my missions here is to discuss those sociological issues from all sides to better understand their existence and their origin.

While the working poor rarely enjoys a literal white picket fence, they do live with the social one. It is always hard to acknowledge that you work for a living, try to meet the demands of society and support your family and you still aren’t able to provide adequately. Today’s USAToday has a story http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2004-06-08-low-wage-working-poor_x.htm of a woman having to make the hard choice between paying the rent on an apartment she (a single mom) shares with her brother and buying food or medicine or gas. She works full time as a hospital food service worker making $1200 a month and she calls it a ‘great job’. The jobs that once sustained America no longer provide enough to eek by. The federal poverty threshold for a family of four in 2002 was $18,392 in annual income.

The rise in low-wage workers is also a catalyst for activists who are waging campaigns to pass living-wage ordinances, which are local laws that require some businesses to pay employees more than the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour. The grass-roots effort is having an impact. So far, more than 120 ordinances mandating living wages have been passed. In San Francisco, a citywide wage of $8.50 an hour went into effect in February.

Philip Coltoff, who is chief executive of the philanthropic Children’s Aid Society says:
“This is a very interesting sociological change. We’ve created a new class of poor. There is this huge group of people who want to work, who are working, but it’s a form of being indentured,” Coltoff says. “America has always been built on the belief that you can do better, but we have shut down the ladder to the middle class.”

Another worker discussed in the USAToday story is from Washington State and works full time at a daycare center earning $9. per hour and earns 8.43 an hour caring for a disabled child. Her hours vary and healthcare insurance cost $71. The key is that her husband recently had open heart surgery and she is the sole provider. They live in a 30 year old mobile home and get their groceries at the local food bank. Both are diabetic, so they have some medical costs. She says they didn’t eat several days last week so they could pay their bills.

Wages have eroded and haven’t risen with productivity,” says Jared Bernstein, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute. “Many occupations that a decade ago afforded a living wage are now low wage.”

Unions are not as pervasive as they used to be, which means workers have less clout. Some economists say immigration has added to the labor force supply, causing downward pressure on wages. Immigration has reduced the average annual earnings of male workers born in the USA by $1,700 over the last 20 years, according to new research by the Center for Immigration Studies. The research indicates that immigration increases the supply of labor, which reduces wages.

“There’s no way of rationalizing a CEO making millions of dollars when workers don’t get enough to support themselves. Something seems wrong,” says Beth Shulman, author of The Betrayal of Work: How Low-Wage Jobs Fail 30 Million Americans and their Families. “Low-wage workers are subsidizing our lives. We can make better choices that really improve these jobs.”

While these and many others in America are virtually existing, and I believe something must be done to help, I think it is important from a historical perspective to analyze what brought us/them to this condition. Of course, our government made lousy decisions and corporations have been allowed to rob from the poor to keep their CEO salaries up.

There are also some other lessons that are important for us to learn from history. Many of these were single mothers and it is very hard for a single woman, even a highly educated one, to meet the stresses of child rearing alone. In today’s society we don’t have buffers of extended families. Most of these women didn’t appear to be highly educated either as their jobs were more of the entry level type. It is important for us as a society to stress to the youth today the value of education and the value of a two-parent family. When there are two parents working there is less likelihood that the children will fall through the societal cracks. Many people want children, but it is imperative that we somehow teach the cost of child rearing so they don’t let their emotions rule. We must all work to solve today’s crisis and we must take pre-emptive strikes to prevent them from recurring tomorrow.

I will never forget the night two years ago when my family was watching TV and a news flash came on about a local citizen who stood up during a local appearance of George Bush. At that time, Harry Taylor stood up and politely but firmly exercised his right to Freedom of Speech. Here is the news clip that we saw that night.

Now, Harry Taylor is back and he is running for Congress and expecting to defeat self-serving Sue Myrick in the 2008 election. Harry is a great American icon and will serve us well in Congress.

I am so proud that I was/am a John Edwards supporter. After seeing what the other ‘candidates’ are doing these days, I realize more than ever that I made the right choice. John Edwards stands for truth and that is what he stood for during his campaign. The other candidates and the news media attacked him daily. Now, they only have Hillary to kick around and she kicks Obama and he kicks her back and raises her one.

John Edwards may be out of this political campaign, but what he stood/stands for lives on. Some of his stronger supporters have developed a new BLOG site called EENRBlog which is a take off on something we did during the campaign. There was a nightly Edwards Evening News Roundup (EENR) on Daily Kos (including attacks from the Obama people over there). When Senator Edwards suspended his campaign, we wanted to keep the issues that meant so much to us alive. I know he would be so proud of the efforts of those who worked so hard there. SarahLane, one of the hardest working people I know and a wonderful person did the first major BLOG last night http://www.eenrblog.com/ She was fabulous. Check us out. We may just make you proud too!

My first requirement for any candidate whether Presidential or Congressional is to show me in writing their stand on Stem Cell Research and how they plan to adequately fund it. If they can’t show me that, they’re out the door. No vote. If they can show me that, I will evaluate them further on other issues. I have ONE primary requirement before they can ever consider receiving my vote. My husband is doing the same. If enough of us do that, we will win this battle!

One reason why we need Stem Cell Research http://www.stemcellbattles.com/