To Rant Again

Been a long time since I had a good rant. I feel like I need one, so here it goes.

Things I resent:

- People who get drunk/do drugs/sleep around somehow feeling like they get to define the word "party." What you do is not a "party." It is a life-long regret waiting to happen. My parties never cause guilt, remorse, hangovers, or liver failure. They are just fun. So I win. You lose. Now give me and my people back the term "party" and you can start using the real title for what you do: serial stupidity.

- Political extremists on both sides posturing as if passion for a cause equates to intelligence, treating others who are less vehement or who disagree with them as not simply having a difference of opinion, but rather having some form of pervasive mental retardation. News flash to the radicals - we don't agree with you because WE THINK YOU ARE WRONG. The key word there being THINK. We have thought our positions through just as much as you have, and came to a different conclusion. This means, by necessity, that whatever probability there is for us being incorrect or misguided, the very same probability exists for you. So come down off your ivory towers of delusion and play in the sandbox with the rest of us. Yacking away up there just makes you look pedantic and silly. Or stay up there and look pedantic and silly. Your call. Either way, you look silly.

- People who claim the world was a so-much-better-place at some vague, undefined point in the past. The "good old days" are like Bigfoot. Everyone knows about it, but nobody has any evidence that it actually existed. Every major indicator: health, life-span, quality of living, liberty, independence, wealth, education, equality, you name it, does not get better when you look back in time. People who pine for the good old days are suffering from selective memory delusions. They are remembering only the good things, and forgetting all the bad. Like complaining that people are "out-of-touch" nowadays, while simultaneously Facebook chatting with a friend they have not thought about in decades. The old days are just old. Not good. If they were good, we wouldn't have moved away from them. Oxygen is very old, but we still use it. Ergo: oxygen is good. Indentured servitude is also old, but we don't use it anymore. Ergo: not good. It is easy math. Automobiles = good, leaded gasoline = bad. Telephones = good, telegraph = bad. French fries = good, French military prowess = bad. See how that works?

- The American media during election cycles, who eagerly report on how vile, hateful or negative the campaigns are while simultaneously accepting money from those campaigns to run the negative ads. Either you support it or you don't. If you don't like it, don't let it buy your dinner. Conversely, if you do let it buy your dinner, this implies some form of consent. It is like dating. Girls who don't like me usually don't let me buy them dinner. The TV networks are like that girl I dated once who was all too happy to let me buy her dinner, but meanwhile told everyone else she talked to that she didn't like me. The moral of the story - I only bought her dinner once. I wish our media, specifically the networks, would pick a side and stick with it. Stop pretending to bite the hand that you are so eagerly eating from.

- Democrats

- Republicans

- The idea that those two choices are somehow all that there is, and that we should be satisfied with it. Ever go to a restaurant that had only two items on the menu? Didn't think so. Ever been presented with a list of 5 options and been so overwhelmed by the variety that your brain melted? Didn't think so either. The political parties in this country are blatantly insulting our intelligence by telling us we have to chose from Tweedle-Dumb and Tweedle-Worse every election. But we keep drinking the cool-aid, so they will keep serving it up.

Aaaaaaaaaand I'm spent. For now. That is all, carry on.

Musings on Large Numbers

So I had a client no-show today - and rather than do what I normally do in that circumstance (surf the web, chat with co-workers, catch up on notes, etc.) I decided to entertain my curiosity and get smart on something.

See, on my drive in to work, they were talking about the election. What else could there possibly be to talk about, right? Anyway, they mentioned a number off-hand that caught my fancy. They said that between the two Presidential candidates, more than $6 billion has been spent on campaigning. That includes party contributions, Super PACS, and grandma's $5. All the money that has thus far been spent on the election in any fashion. But that is just the presidential race. The state and local races weren't factored in.

So that got me thinking. I once worked with a guy who had a real fondness for large numbers, and helping people to realize just how big these numbers are. So I wondered just how big the number 6 billion is.

For starters, and obviously, it is 6,000,000,000. That is a lot of zeros. Or another way - if you had a room full of millionaires, there would be 6,000 of them. That is a lot of custom tailored suits and sports cars to valet park, and way too many over-priced purses and shoes.

Here is another way of looking at it. According to the magical interweb (US Mint website) the US Quarter is 0.069 inches thick. So, $6 Billion in quarters is 1,656,000,000 inches. That is 138,000,000 feet. These are all still very large numbers, and hard to wrap your head around. So lets make it even more simple. $6 Billion in Quarters, stacked in a column, would be 26,136 MILES high. To put that into perspective, the circumference of the Earth at the equator is 24,901.55 miles. So you could literally walk all the way around the earth on a cable made of solid quarters and still not have walked on $6 Billion. Or another way of looking at it - you could drive round-trip from Anchorage, AK to Panama (as-in the country of Panama) twice before you hit 26,136 miles. Either way, that is a very very very large amount of Quarters. I was going to try to figure out how many hours of old-school arcade games you could play with all those coins, but my brain melted.

We are talking about real money here, though. Not cables of quarters. These are amounts of money that could seriously change people's lives. I can't even begin to imagine what I would do with $6 Billion to spend. So I broke it down into numbers I can start to fathom.

The first house I ever bought cost approximately $250,000. 6 Billion get you 24,000 of those.

The average US Household Income for 2012 is $50,502. 6 Billion is the a year's income for 118,807 of these households. That is more people than live in either Beaumont TX, Evansville IN, Lansing MI, Provo UT or Norman OK. So essentially, you could hire an entire city's population, for a whole year, and still not spend all of your $6 Billion

But Americans are really really rich compared to the rest of the world. The average household income for the world is roughly $7000 (that is rounded up from several different sources). At that rate, $6 Billion would pay a full year's income for 857,142 people. Now we are talking about all of the people in Jacksonville FL, San Francisco CA, Denver CO, Indianapolis ID or Ft. Worth TX.

$6 Billion is significantly more than the entire annual GDP of Haiti.

That is what I was able to discover about $6 Billion during my free hour.

All this money is being spent on the world's most expensive job interview. And no matter who wins, that money has virtually no guarantee on return, because the President has to fight with Congress to get anything done. So in all likelihood it will be another four years of ineffective partisan bickering, letting the country come to the verge of bankruptcy, with looming fiscal cliffs, enormous deficits, and other real problems that need solving remaining unaddressed because neither of the punk kids in the sandbox know how to share.

If you spread that money out equally among all Americans, each of us would get $19.06. That is not a lot of money, of course. You couldn't really do anything significant with less than 20 bucks. But if you piled that money up just for the 46.2 million Americans officially living below the poverty line, it comes out to $129.87 each, or roughly $520 for a family of four. I could definitely do something very meaningful for my family with $520. There has got to be something better we could do with that money than produce annoyingly bad commercials, print bumper stickers, and fight with each other.

As our elections keep burning through more and more money, I am not seeing that we as a nation are benefiting an any way. Politicians keep telling the same lies, making the same ridiculous promises they don't have the power to keep, and then going off to work in Washington where they don't care about you and me, they only care about their party bosses and their lobbyist buddies. I certainly don't feel like the $6 billion spent on this one election is going to do anything for me. I would have much preferred the $19, so I could have at least gone to a movie with my wife. I will still vote my conscience, and my conscience can't be bought.

Politics. Sort Of. . .

This will be my one and only blog post for the political season. I was originally going to write a lot of blog posts about a lot of my thoughts. But I am lazy, and didn't get around to it. Meanwhile, I kept reading a lot of other political stuff from other people, and I realized something - almost all of this political ranting and gnashing of teeth about this or that candidate/policy/debate/gaff/whatever just starts to be pathetically futile background noise. It reminded me of something I saw on Facebook once that struck me as being particularly true. It said something to this effect:

"Your political rants and tirades on Facebook have really convinced me that my previously held beliefs are wrong. I have decided that I should now think like you.

-Said nobody. Ever."

I think that is basically true. I can't think of a single political rant that I have ever read that really gave me pause to reconsider my own stances. It is all propaganda. The Nazis could not have dreamt of a more effective way to spread dissent and hatred. Worse yet, it is almost always misinformed, half-baked and terribly biased. Plus, the amount of venom and vitriol that is spread around on Facebook and other sites about politics is just plain rude. We would never lambast each other like this if we were in the room together. But in the anonymity of our living rooms, we can wax grandiose and belligerent about things we aren't qualified to teach, smugly belittle others while wearing sweatpants and slippers, and for the most part, get away with it.

All of this political fighting doesn't reveal nearly so much about our politics as it does about our character as people. If we are willing to offend, alienate and disenfranchise our friends and family just to make a politically inflammatory statement, then this necessarily means something about us. It means that we suck as people. And if we do this harm to others without being aware that we are harming them, it means we suck as people and are ignorant of it. That is infinitely worse.

I think a lot of people who do this political posting are unaware of the harm they are causing. Unaware (or maybe uncaring) about the feelings they are hurting, the disrespect they are showing, and the lack of civility they are betraying to the world. It is one thing to show support for a cause you champion. It is another thing entirely to mock or belittle the stances of others. Even as a kid playing pee-wee soccer, we were taught that good sportsmanship is cheering for your team. Bad sportsmanship is cheering against the other team. If you score a goal, you cheer. If the other team does something stupid and you cheer, that means you are a jerk. You are celebrating their misfortune. You are a bad sport. You shouldn't be allowed to play. In fact, I can remember a time when just this thing happened.

I was playing basketball in the Jr. Jazz league in Riverton. I wasn't very good, but I was very tall. So I played center. I remember that the other team had a power forward who was a very good shot. But he was short. So I kept blocking his shots. And people in the tiny crowd watching the game would cheer. That felt good to me. But then someone began making fun of him. Whenever he got the ball, they taunted him to try and shoot again. That did NOT feel good to me. I was ashamed. I was ashamed to have been pulled into something that became tawdry and cheap. I became part of persecution. I hated it. I kept blocking his shots when I could, but I didn't enjoy it anymore. I wasn't mad at myself or at the kid. I was mad at the person who turned my good game into his cause to make someone else feel like they were somehow less. The jerk kept it up, though. And was ejected from the game. He was the father of one of my team-mates, and when he was ejected from the game, I felt relieved. He was ruining it for me and for everyone else.

That is what all this political/philosophical/theological abuse really is - we are trying to make other people feel like they are less. This is the essence of persecution. It is bad sportsmanship, bad citizenship. So if you do it, stop. Doing it means you suck. Don't suck.

We don't have to agree. It is healthy to disagree. But if we do so in an ugly way, it necessarily means that we are ugly ourselves. All the anonymity in the world doesn't change this. Ugly is as ugly does.

So here is my plea as the election winds down - next time you have something political to say, make sure you are cheering for your team, and not against the other one. Make sure that, in your zeal to promote your cause, you don't simultaneously degrade yourself. There was once a pretty smart guy who talked about how we should treat people we don't agree with. If I remember the story right, there was nothing mentioned about criticizing, being mean, or making anyone feel like they are less. I am paraphrasing here, but it was something like "do good to those that despitefully use you."

If Jesus thinks we should be nice and understanding to people who are literally crucifying us, I shudder to think how He feels about it when we are rude or dismissive or harsh to others who have only done us the grave offense of disagreeing.