The Grounding of America

Last night I had an encounter with a seventeen year old girl. The incident should have been innocuous, but it epitomized the social-cultural demise of our society which in its stealth robs us of the freedoms the Founding Father secured.  As a pool monitor I enforce a laundry list of pool rules which protects the condo association, the property of the community, and the health and welfare of the residents who use the pools.  These are all the rules needed to defend against a law suits and to maintain the peace of the condo community. You can’t yell Marco Rubio – I mean Polo – and you can’t consume alcohol in the pool area.  Rule 6 states that children 14 years and younger must be supervised by an adult. An adult is any person who is 18 or older.  When two preteens showed up with a teen of questionable age, I approached the two younger kids (a tactical move  because they are less inclined to lie) who told me that their sister was seventeen.  I explained the rules.  The seventeen year old then explained to me that there never had been a problem and in the past they were allowed to stayed. Her protest went nowhere but to meet a firm resistance on my part.  Not retreating, she wanted to know what would happen if they refused to go? Oh boy.  The young boy told his sister not to make a scene. I suppose she envisioned a physical take down. I explained they could have all pool privileges revoked.  And by the way they didn’t  have their pool pass with them. Sigh, another pool rule violation.

This is Part 1.

All decisions have consequences. To live by this praxis is to die by it. While seemly wise, when applied alone is a formula for short comings.  More and more I hear it pertaining to the re-election of Obama, as we have seen recent increases in our taxes and restrictions on gun ownership. But it is living by this principle that can, in part, explain why the Republicans lost the election because the consequence of consequences can be so elusive, particularly when grounded in no value system.

It seems perfectly reasonable to use the consequences of a decision as a means of making a decision. Life tosses a multitude of decisions at us.  And in an increasing secular world we need some means for making a decision.  We ask: What’s the worst thing that can happen?  Who is it going to hurt anyways?  What am I  going to miss out on?  

Some of these consequences are small and others quite large. Some decisions bear short-term consequences. Others long.  It’s not going to kill me to eat desert. I hate this job but it pays pretty well. She might not be pretty, but I heard she is easy.  He’ll never know I posted that lie on Facebook.  It’s just an abortion. If I kill twenty six people at Sandy Hook Elementary will people pay attention to me now?

Let’s go back to the pool situation. Faced with a decision, the seventeen year old wanted to know what would be the consequences of her decision.  It was all about what impact the decision had on her.

Are consequences the only thing we should base our decisions on?

At seventeen I would have never lipped back at an adult. Frankly, I would have been embarrassed to break a rule. Why?  Because in the home, community, church and school where I grew up there was an important value instilled upon me and my siblings.  Granted I can not swear I have always lived up to that value, but it was about doing the right thing.  Decisions were about what was morally right and wrong. And your obligation was to do what was right. It wasn’t about what felt right, or how it made you feel or even what you personally wanted to do.  To ascertain what will be the result of a decision wasn’t the thing to consider. It was secondary to making a decision that first had a morally right outcome.  Sometimes the outcome sucked, but it built a foundation for self-control, minimized impulsiveness and reduced selfish behavior. You learned life wasn't all about you and ultimately that made you a more responsible citizen.

Today, we flippantly ask, “What’s the worst thing that could happen” instead of behave in a manner that is morally correct. It is wrong to break rules and it is wrong to disrespect adult authority.  In the end the seventeen year old decided that losing her pool privileges for a month was reason enough to take her little ass home with her brother and sister in tow.  It had nothing to do with her obligation to follow rules for the good of her community, the condo association or the safety of her siblings.

Back to our nation:  we decided that the consequences of an ever expanding federal government that 1. limits our freedoms and 2. will economically implode under the weight of its entitlement programs are of little matter. Instead, the citizenry greedily ignored what was morally right because of the enticements of entitlement programs.  The failure to make a decision based on what was morally right for the country was over-shadowed by the failure to know and understand the consequences of that decision.  Or maybe even more importantly to give a rats ass about the consequences. 

Why is that?

Part II. – I know the suspense is killing you.

Target in Summary

Way back in September I saw an ad for seasonal help at the Target Distribution Center located 4 miles away from Dad’s house. I had planned to be a driver helper at UPS again but the pay at the distribution center was almost $5.00 more an hour, with good reason.  Not that the driver helper job is easy.

I had already been turned down by Target in Hawaii. The small detail of being in town only five months doesn’t go over well with employers. The fact that I’ll work hard and show up is basically insignificant. I know two people who applied to the same store after me and worked there less than six weeks. The reason for quitting: too hard.

I was offered the packer job on the spot, conditional to the standard drug test. This one turned out to be my third of the year and still clean as a whistle. What a life I lead!

Initially, the job was to start Oct 8^th, but it was later pushed out to the 22^nd.  I counted the weekends I was scheduled. Three day work weeks, Saturday through Monday, 12 hours each day. A total of 27 days to Christmas. It didn’t seem too bad.  But when the short winter sun disappeared on a Friday afternoon and didn’t reappear until Tuesday morning that stretch became a mental change as well as a physical one. For me it was rough spending 12 hours in a confined work space in an unheated one million square foot warehouse rarely speaking to anyone and listening to conveyors run all day.  If there was no activity in any area of the warehouse the lights shut off and that gloom shadowed over the packer area isolating me deeper within my work space where I was surrounded by cardboard.

The packer job is simple. Hundreds of boxes of all shapes, sizes, and weights and containing various amounts of products (from beer making kits to vanilla extract) are delivered to the module where the packer works. The stuff comes from China, Lebanon, Pakistan, India, Indonesia and other countries where manufacturing is cheap and people want to kill us.  

 Behind the scenes someone in logistics has summarized the demands of the stores in the distribution center’s service area and someone else has slapped a label on the box with a bar code that tells the packer which store get what and how many. It's the packer’s job to scan that label, take the stuff out of the manufacture’s shipping container, then… shove it, place it, toss it, cram it, fold it but get it into another box that will go to the store along with hundreds of other boxes. Basically a packer is taking product out of one box and placing it in any combination of 36 to 42 other boxes.  This is done as quickly and as accurately as humanly possible. In some modules it can be done over 4000 times a day. I never dared figure out how that works out on a per minute rate.  Only once did I hit my daily target. Depressing. Add to that the responsibility to build and tape boxes, throw away shipper boxes and drag everything down the conveyors.  Sometimes it seems like I could not even take a drink of water or stop to use chap stick.  

Usually packers work in teams of two.  It is a logistic relationship.  When a product comes down the line it may not go to any stores on the other side of the conveyors.  If that is the case the packer places that product in the middle of the two conveyors for the other packer. Sometimes it adds up especially if the other packer is fast.  My competitive nature made it hard to let the other person get the best of me by stock piling material in the middle. Plus that just made the workspace seem more confined when that wall of cardboard went up between us. It should not have mattered because rarely did I have time to chat.

For my age I am in fairly good shape. But age makes joints stiff and painful. After grabbing, pulling, flipping, turning, tossing, etc… items of various weight and size all day long my fingers and wrist were killing me. There were times when I thought I would not even make it to the first break let alone the full day. The soreness disappeared when fatigue and repetitive drudgery turned to numbness.  I’d come home and soak my hands in cold water - an ice down like the major league pitchers do.  Expect the next day I had to pitch again.

The physical demand was bad enough but I managed to catch two colds, back to back. Not since Peace Corps has that happened. And I periodically delivered packages for UPS. The week before Christmas I worked Tuesday through Friday delivering packages for eight or more hours a day. Drained of energy I’d go to bed at 8pm to rise at 4:15am, hours well before the chickens were up. I had enough rest, but my fingers and wrists never stopped hurting. At Thanksgiving my sister told me I now have fat muscular fingers. Ah, the joy of that news!

There were days when I had to dig deep to stay on the job. I prayed to God for His strength. The events of life passed. In October there was Hurricane Sandy. I told God I had no complaints.  I was thankful for the roof over my head.  In November for some stupid reason the country re-elected Obama.  Again, I told God I had nothing to complain about. I wasn’t making $400,000 so what did I care even if my country was falling apart? In December came the tragedy of New Town. I thanked God I knew no sudden heart wrenching loss. But when what I thought would be my last day (and I had mentally checked out on December 31) turned out not to be, I almost told God I had a complaint.  I asked for the strength to go back one more weekend.  Then I went down to Wal-Mart and bought another nine slices of roast beef for my lunch sandwiches.

At first break on Saturday I asked my group leader when the last day would be she said, “Soon. Really, really soon.” That afternoon she made the rounds and told the seasonal workers the season was done.

Thank God, I made it.