The Death of a Parent: A Reminder for all of us to "keep our 'Accounts' Short"

It happened about a quarter after midnight on December 22, 2018.  But because Mama was terminally ill it was not unexpected or not necessarily un-welcomed.  We didn’t want to see her go but we didn’t want to see her suffer either.  For those who have known or have watched a close friend, loved one, child or parent die, understand the drill:  You’re slowly watching the life ebb out of them as they get sicker. They’re in pain and you wouldn’t ever want that for them.  It’s easier to let go than to watch them suffer.

First for the gritty details:

Mama had been a Registered Nurse, her 3rd Career after becoming a Homemaker, Raising me and the older of my two little sisters, asmy littlest sister was born after Mama had gone back to work as a RN.  Before that, she was a Secretary and Bookkeeper.  

At 79+, she had a bout with a slow moving Breast Cancer ("that was so slow moving, that it wouldn't kill her in 10 years.").  Having had a clear CAT Scan in April of 2018, she started having abdominal pains starting in September, it got bad enough around Thanksgiving for her to cancel coming to our house this year and to where she finally was told by her GP to immediately go to the local Emergency Room for Chronic Abdominal Pain, Dehydration and EXTREMELY ELEVATED BLOOD SUGAR LEVELS, due to Type II Diabetes that was out of control. 

After spending All night in the ER, having tests run, she was diagnosed early on the Tuesday morning after Thanksgiving with metastatic cancer, with a "thickening" of the upper part of the Pancreas and "lesions" on her Liver.  If it was metastatic cancer, it must have originated somewhere else than the breast cancer she had and spread to her breast.  She'd just turned 80 about 6 weeks earlier.  She said that when she was in the ER, she knew that she must have cancer:  The question was Pancreatic or Stomach Cancer.  She had been complaining of abdominal pain since at least September and had no energy to even do the smallest things. 

A visit to a Necrologist that Friday and an Endoscopy and a Biopsy the following Monday confirmed the bad news.  Mama asked both me and the older of my little sisters if we wanted her to take Chemotherapy.  I don't know if she asked my littlest sister, as she's never said anything about it.  We both independent of the other, told Mama that we didn't want to see her suffer.  Chemo is tough if you're "healthy," which Mama wasn't.  Although she went to the counseling for taking the chemo the following Wednesday(?), she was far too weak and was admitted to the Hospital the next Saturday, where she slowly lost her battle to stay on this side.

                      Daddy, kissing Mama Good-bye on Friday, December 21, 2018 at 2:30 PM

As Followers (Disciples) of Christ, we're called to “keep short accounts.”  That means “cleaning up personal relationships” and resolving what may be decades old grievances.  We need to forgive others who’ve wronged us or else accept the consequences Jesus lays out in Matthew 6:14-15.  It also means telling our significant others exactly how we feel toward them.  In this case, I asked Daddy to tell Mama everything that he wanted her to know about how he felt about her, leaving NOTHING out and NOT ASSUMING that she knew anything he felt about her and to do it now, as if this was her last day.  I also asked Mama to forgive Daddy for anything that he did that was bothering her.  Apparently,  I’d say they did.

It’s difficult for us to do that sometimes:  We’re (too) familiar with each other and familiarity breeds contempt.  With nearly 60 years of time being married to each other, they had some issues, particularly, Mama had some issues with Daddy.  But, we aren't promised the next breath, and you don't want to leave with anything unsaid.  If you love someone, you should tell them.  That's harder for the older generation, because they weren't necessarily taught to keep saying “I love you” to their spouses.  Most of them just assume that the other know because they do things for them.  The spouse that isn't being told daily, doesn't necessarily see their spouse's service towards them as love.  That's sad.

Trying to keep myself together through all of this, I focused on all of the accomplishments Mama had in her life, and tried to remember all of them and be thankful for them, including things that were specific to me.  I'm thankful for many things about my Mama but 2 stand out like no other.  One of the things was her teaching me to walk.  We walked as went to stores, movies and even and restaurants as Mama didn't drive before I turned 13, so walking long distances 2-1/2 - 4 miles in the heat and humidity of the South was something I learned in elementary school.  The other involves my love of Trains.  We'd visit my Paternal Grandmama in the rural town in the south in which she lived on the north side.  As she lived about 1 block away from the railroad tracks of the Southern Railway, we'd hear the northbound trains blowing for grade crossings long before they got to the crossing a block away from Grandmama's house.  She'd run up the street with me and we'd count the locomotives and cars that went by.  While Mama was teaching me to count, she was also reinforcing my love for trains, and especially the idiosyncrasies of the Southern Railway:  The High Hooded Diesel Electric Locomotives that always seemed to have their Tuxedo Paint Schemes perfectly cleaned, the Long, Long, Short, Long Whistle Posts, the semi-ovaled mile-marker signs - both mounted on an impossibly heavy cast iron post and the Solid Red Bay Window Caboose at the end of each train.  I still love trains and the Southern Railway and they will always have a special place in my heart:  Thanks to my Mama.

I've cried some, probably not nearly enough.  I'm reminded about Albert Camus wrote in his novel The Stranger,  about not caring that his mother had died.  I'm NOT there:  I just choose to see the love and goodness in our relationship and leave the unpleasant and  painful stuff that happened as I got older behind, forgiving and forgetting what she may have said that was ugly and hurt me.

So, to finish this up, let me just remind you again, that we're not promised 1 more breath or 1 more second of life.  Make the seconds, minutes, hours, weeks, months and years count in your personal relationships.  We all have an appointment with death, so be proactive in what you say and do with those whom you love.  Don't just show them, without saying it to them and don't say it to them without showing them every time that you're happy to have a relationship with them.  Finally, when death comes and come it will, you can cry for the end of the relationship, but also celebrate it, as they've obviously meant a great deal to you.  Be thankful for what they have taught you, their accomplishments and their love and/or mentoring you.

Guest Post: The Spectator=> James Ball and Andrew Greenway=> The bluffocracy: How Britain ended up being run by eloquent chancers Britain has become hooked on a culture of inexpertise

I was a buyer for at least that time at a public utility for just about 7 years, having worked as a stock clerk, receiving clerk and courier truck driver in the Materials Distribution Center.  On my first day as a buyer, The Purchasing Department had a meeting (The Materials Manager, The Inventory Control Clerks, The Purchasing Supervisor, The Blanket Purchase Order Coordinator, and The Buyers), in which the Materials Manager plainly stated that it would take (Me or) any other employee) at least 5 years for a Buyer to become proficient.  I couldn't believe it would take that long to master that skill.  While I understand that  John Steinbeck was right and his quote that “Americans are a restless people," my Materials Manager was correct:  I only became proficient at all of the technical parts of changing Purchase Orders and Paying Invoices that would not pay after 5 years of experience.  I worked another 2-1/2 years in the department, before I was "drafted" to be the Fleet Services Specialist - a job that I loved to hate.  Loved because I understood Vehicles and Construction Equipment enough to specify vehicles that could last 12 years of the abuse of Fleet Service, before they failed and knew what tools and fittings needed to go on each type of truck:  Hated, because I was a team of one and the typical MBA/CPA arrogant male prick, who was appointed to be my Manager and was determined to make a name for himself.  I was more than competent in the job, but he didn't care and was happy to end my career with a Performance Improvement Plan (Corrective Discharge), once he had a complete set of Vehicle and Equipment Specifications.  Amazingly enough, I no longer needed Blood Pressure Medication, after I was "Severed."

A former acquaintance of mine and I were once having a discussion about how quickly people change careers at that time (probably 12 years ago, when I'd been a buyer for about 5 years).  He's a university professor and retired Air Force Officer.  He told me that the average young worker now changes jobs every 5 years.  I asked him what were the implications of employees changing jobs every 5 years on the average, when it took 5 years just to learn the job.

Although it was a rhetorical question, he did answer it and it is surprisingly similar to what is written in the article below.   GOD help us all, because of short attention spans and arrogant pricks whose Education Levels cause them to believe they're qualified to Manage others and the Management above them, who believe that an MBA makes a great manager.

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The bluffocracy: how Britain ended up being run by eloquent chancers

Britain has become hooked on a culture of inexpertise

James Ball and Andrew Greenway

18 August 2018

9:00 AM

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Any time we see a politician fail, or an idiotic policy collapse as it passes through parliament — which these days seems like a regular occurrence — we are left with a familiar feeling. That this screw-up is the result of a chancer at work. Someone who has, at the very best, a shallow understanding of the country they’re trying to govern. Someone who knew how to come up with a headline-grabbing idea, and how to make it sound convincing and radical — but didn’t ever have the faintest idea how to implement it.

What we see perhaps less often is that the UK has — for a variety of cultural, social, and economic reasons — set up our public life so that the chancers are best suited to the system, and are most likely to rise to the top.

This is what you might call the British bluffocracy. We have become a nation run by people whose knowledge extends a mile wide but an inch deep; who know how to grasp the generalities of any topic in minutes, and how never to bother themselves with the specifics. Who place their confidence in their ability to talk themselves out of trouble, rather than learning how to run things carefully. And who were trained in this dubious art as teenagers: often together on the same university course.

This malaise is not confined to politics, but is present in a terrifyingly wide range of our institutions. The way we educate the people who will enter public life, the way our career structures work, and the institutions themselves that we have built — from parliament to the civil service to the political press gallery — all favour the bluffers. David Cameron was teased as the ‘essay-crisis’ prime minister, a governing style that worked for him until he failed his Brexit essay. But other consequences are deeper still: the short-termism of our institutions is, in no small part, due to bluffing. As the Brexit preparations (or lack thereof) are beginning to demonstrate.

The typical British bluffer is male, well-polished and the product of public school: the same sort of chap with the same sort of chat. It’s invariably a chap. Women make up two in five senior civil servants and one in three MPs. People of black and minority ethnic origin make up 15 per cent of the country but just 8 per cent of MPs, 7 per cent of senior civil servants, and 6 per cent of national journalists.

Being governed by a bluffocracy creates a skills gap that political bluffers like to bemoan: one recent study suggests just 9 per cent of candidates at last year’s election had degrees in science or technology. This is true of only one of Labour’s 258 MPs: Chi Onwurah, an engineer. The British system of government often sees ministers with no expertise being put in charge of — for example — the National Health Service, one of the largest organisations on the planet.

As a result, top politicians of both parties end up spinning arguments they often barely understand and certainly don’t mean. The supposed watchdogs — political journalists — are often just as bad. And the crisis of trust in mainstream politics and journalism alike does raise the question of whether the bluffers are being found out.

The blaggers meanwhile, are becoming more brazen. Look, for example, at George Osborne, who became editor of a major newspaper with only a few weeks of journalism work experience to his name. His secret? Being utterly unfazed: by that, or the other five jobs he took on. Then take Brexit, the biggest overhaul in British government for a generation or more. And advocated with utter confidence by bluffers who, it quickly turned out, had no idea what they were talking about.

Most bluffers are made, not born — and the archetypical bluffer’s degree is, of course, Philosophy, Politics and Economics. It’s taught at a number of universities across the UK, but is most strongly associated with Oxford. Students are marinated in an adversarial university tutorial system which favours the quick thinker over the deep rival. A standard setup for a politics tutorial, for example, is to have one student read their essay while the other is encouraged to attack it. If they don’t, their own work will come under far closer scrutiny.

This is how the school for bluffers works. Those who prosper are not those who possess the deepest knowledge, but who can deliver a clever quip or a leftfield surprise argument. The ‘essay crisis’ skill trains people to cram what’s supposed to be 20-odd careful hours of reading, research and writing into five hours, and to disguise their shoddiness by delivering a counter-intuitive argument so bold that it disguises the fact that they have not done the work. It’s a skill for life. Or at least for government.

To look at PPE alumni is to understand how Britain is run by the bluffing skill that it teaches. Jeremy Hunt, the Foreign Secretary, Matt Hancock, his successor as Health Secretary, Damian Hinds, the Education Secretary, Philip Hammond, the Chancellor, and Liz Truss, his deputy. Then add Nick Robinson, Ed Miliband, Robert Peston and Toby Young of this parish to our earlier list. Olly Robbins, the civil servant in charge of Brexit. The list goes on, and reads like Who’s Who. Well, you might say, it was ever thus. The British system has always sent MPs with no direct experience to run departments, but their job is to give political direction while the expertise is applied by bureaucratic experts. But the civil service, too, has fallen to the bluffocracy.

Government ministers are notoriously itinerant — Sajid Javid, for example, has held seven jobs in six years. But for a successful civil servant, too, it’s crucial to stay on the move. Nowhere is that clearer than in the Department for Exiting the EU, where the National Audit Office found out that almost one in ten staff move on within three months — a churn rate around four times the civil service average. Never mind being caught when the music stops. When it comes to Brexit, many of the civil servants will be far from the scene before it even starts.

Brexit is not the only area in which this is happening. Jane Furniss, a former senior civil servant in the Home Office, says the Windrush debacle was also a consequence of the short-termism which afflicts government. ‘The architects of the “hostile environment” policy are probably no longer in that area of work at all, and even if they were warned of consequences, they will have been focused on delivering the policy — they won’t be there when it comes home.’

Nick Hardwick, who stepped down as chair of the parole board amid the row over the decision to grant parole to the convicted rapist John Worboys, once put it well. The civil servants who get on, he said, ‘are those that can write a good minute which gets a minister out of trouble’ rather than ‘those who can run things so they don’t get into trouble in the first place’.

He could have gone further. A first-class bluffer knows how and when to speak in meetings, due to having learnt this skill at private school or Oxbridge. For example: if you don’t know much in a meeting, speak early, while the relatively obvious points are still available to be made. By contrast, if you’ve got a killer detail or argument you think others lack — especially if it could prove decisive — wait until the end, so it sticks with people. This and dozens of other tricks — speaking in the intakes of breath that others leave, knowing when to drop a rhetorical question, knowing just how much research to do — are used to get attention.

The final pillar of the bluffocracy is the media, which is supposed to hold the other two institutions to account. Some of the UK’s most talented journalists work in parliament, but they are — by design — generalists, being asked to report about defence issues one day, and train takeovers the next. This system serves to insulate ministers from questions by subject-matter experts. Whatever the scandal in the headlines — nuclear waste, universal credit, implementation of Brexit — there is likely to be in most major newsrooms an expert on the topic. Someone who has spoken to people at the front line of the policy, whether that means people who are affected by it or who are trying to implement it on the ground. At best, thanks to the lobby system, they will be able to try to urge a colleague in the parliamentary press gallery to lob in a question or two. Rarely do specialists get an interview themselves.

So lobby journalists — who are physically and culturally removed from their colleagues — inevitably become more drawn into the game of politics than the realities of its consequences. This is a system which encourages politics as a game by its very design.

And it’s a system that the public is beginning to tire of. A YouGov survey into mistrust of government found that only 13 per cent of voters would rule out a politician who had taken Class A drugs and only 14 per cent would rule out a married heterosexual MP who later admitted he was gay. But 55 per cent would draw the line at a politician who had ‘never had a “real” job outside of politics, think tanks or journalism’. In other words, the public are pretty sick of bluffers in public life.

Can things change? Not in Westminster anytime soon. It’s hard to look at modern frontbenchers and see much hope there in the short-run. As for Whitehall: it is 160 years since the civil service had a genuinely comprehensive look at itself, and an examination is overdue. But if history is any guide, a decent-sized war is probably the only reliable way of getting this done.

We will always need generalists to master new situations quickly, to group specialists together and to help communicate what they find. But the balance of power has moved too far in the bluffers’ favour — at a time when the country is crying out for some proper expertise. It’s time to reshape our institutions to let the experts in, to reward serious knowledge. We need a system that works, and experts who are willing to join it. Any volunteers?

James Ball is a journalist. Andrew Greenway is a former senior civil servant. They studied PPE at Oxford at the same time. Their book, Bluffocracy, has just been released.

Guest Post=> Victor Davis Hanson => Actually, 2018 Was a Pretty Good Year

Forget the Doom and Gloom Naysayers of the Swamp and its Establishment Media Apparatchik.  By ANY NORMAL MEASUREMENT, 2018 was a Good Year for Citizens of the United States.

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Actually, 2018 Was a Pretty Good Year

By Victor Davis Hanson
January 03, 2019

The year 2018 will be deplored by pundits as a bad year of more unpredictable Donald Trump, headlined by wild stock market gyrations, the melodramas of the Robert Mueller investigation and the musical-chair tenures of officials in the Trump administration.

The government is still shut down. Talk of impeachment by the newly Democrat-controlled House of Representatives is in the air. Seemingly every day there are sensational breakthroughs, scandals and bombshells that race through social media and the Internet -- only to be forgotten by the next day.

In truth, aside from the Washington hysterias, 2018 was a most successful year for Americans.

In December, the United States reached a staggering level of oil production, pumping some 11.6 million barrels per day. For the first time since 1973, America is now the world's largest oil producer

Since Trump took office, the U.S. has increased its oil production by nearly 3 million barrels per day, largely as the result of fewer regulations, more federal leasing, and the continuing brilliance of American frackers and horizontal drillers.

It appears that there is still far more oil beneath U.S. soil than has ever been taken out. American production could even soar higher in the months ahead.

In addition, the United States remains the largest producer of natural gas and the second-greatest producer of coal. The scary old energy-related phraseology of the last half-century -- "energy crisis," "peak oil," "oil embargo" -- no longer exists.

Near-total energy self-sufficiency means the U.S. is no longer strategically leveraged by the Middle East, forced to pay exorbitant political prices to guarantee access to imported oil, or threatened by gasoline prices of $4 to $5 a gallon.

The American economy grew by 4.2 percent in the second quarter of 2018, and by 3.4 percent in the third quarter. American GDP is nearly $1.7 trillion larger than in January 2017, and nearly $8 trillion larger than the GDP of China. For all the talk of the Chinese juggernaut, three Chinese workers produce about 60 percent of the goods and services produced by one American worker.

In 2018, unemployment fell to a near-record peacetime low of 3.7 percent. That's the lowest U.S. unemployment rate since 1969. Black unemployment hit an all-time low in 2018. For the first time in memory, employers are seeking out entry-level workers rather than vice versa.

The poverty rate is also near a historic low, and household income increased. There are about 8 million fewer Americans living below the poverty line than there were eight years ago. Since January 2017, more than 3 million Americans have gone off so-called food stamps.

Abroad, lots of bad things that were supposed to happen simply did not.

After withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, the U.S. exceeded the annual percentage of carbon reductions of most countries that are part of the agreement.

North Korea and the U.S. did not go to war. Instead, North Korea has stopped its provocative nuclear testing and its launching of ballistic missiles over the territory of its neighbors.

Despite all the Trump bluster, NATO and NAFTA did not quite implode. Rather, allies and partners agreed to renegotiate past commitments and agreements on terms more favorable to the U.S.

The United States -- and increasingly most of the world -- is at last addressing the systematic commercial cheating, technological appropriation, overt espionage, intellectual-property theft, cyber intrusions and mercantilism of the Chinese government.

The Middle East is still chaotic, but it is a mess that is now far less important to the U.S. for a variety of reasons. Energy-wise, America is not dependent on oil imports from corrupt Gulf monarchies or hostile Islamic states. Strategy-wise, the new fault lines are not Arab and Islamic cultures versus Israel or the United States. Instead, it is internecine strife within the Islamic world, mostly with Iran and its Shiite satellites opposing the Sunni Arab monarchies and more moderate Middle Eastern regimes.

For all the pro- and anti-Trump invective and media hysteria, the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation circus, and the bitter midterm elections, the U.S. was relatively calm in 2018 compared with the rest of the world. There was none of the mass rioting, demonstrations and street violence that occurred recently in France, and none of the existential and unsolvable divides over globalization and Brexit that we saw in Europe

Europe's three most powerful leaders -- Angela Merkel or Germany, Emmanuel Macron of France and Theresa May of the United Kingdom -- have worse approval ratings than the embattled Donald Trump.

In sum, the more media pundits claimed that America was on the brink of disaster in 2018, the more Americans became prosperous and secure.