Monthly Column?

Wow, while procrastinating the long, slow process of sorting through what to pack up, I realized this blog has really slipped! Thanks, Ray, for sticking with it. The post previous to this one is for you. What it lacks in quality, it makes up for in frustration AND volume (two posts in a week to balance out a long month of nothing).

With the mid-term elections coming up, and too much going on in my life, I don't know how much of that I'll be doing in the next few months, but I'll have to strike some kind of balance because I realized I'm not ready to give up on this thing just yet.

I'm sure when my wife reads these posts, she'll remind me that I have more important things to do with my time, but I was really losing focus on those things and performance was suffering. I was losing ground. I'm hoping this will put a little balance back into things... sort of straigten out the old feng shui or whatever the hell that is.

Anyhoo. It's nice to be here again. Say hello to the family for me and take care.

Luth.

Paying the price for defying the world.

Defying the Word 

President Bush announced that Kim Jong Il will find out what happens when he ignores the rest of the world by conducting missile tests. He specifically mentioned that North Korea had "defied China, South Korea, Japan and Russia. Later in his press conference, he accused Kim Jong Il of "trying to force us to do something by ignoring the world." Bush even specifically mentioned going to the UN Security Council to establish "some red lines" that Kim Jong Il shouldn't cross.

Hmmm. Interestingly enough, China, Russia, and North Korea officially called for UN sanctions against the US for invading Iraq and defying the world.

It seems that had Bush followed his own advice on not defying the world back before he chose to invade Iraq, we'd be 2500 troops stronger, and billions of dollars richer right now. Who knows, maybe we'd even have made some progress in solving the issues we face here at home.

Check out the map. The "blue countries" are those that opposed the invasion of Iraq. The political leaders in those countries knew that Saddam Hussein was surrounded by the US and our allies. That he was powerless and that sanctions against him would eventually force a change at the hands of Iraqi citizens with UN, not US support, NOT at the hands of American troops. Those leaders probably even suspected that Iraq posed little or no threat to the US and that there was little or no connection between the 9/11 and Iraq. The leaders of those "blue nations" knew that Saddam presented no threat to anyone outside of his own country and that the best way to deal with him was to present (to use Bush's words from his Chicago press conference) one voice of the world to force him to comply with the world's demands. The UN security council agreed with the "blue nations" and felt that diplomacy had not, in fact, been exhausted in dealing with Saddam. THE WORLD felt we had plenty of time and that an invasion wasn't necessary.

Far be it from me to suggest that we shouldn't learn from our mistakes. In fact, I see that as a fairly admirable trait. One we should expect of our leaders for sure. When John Kerry went to Vietnam, (did I mention Bush didn't?) he was a proud, young, idealistic US Naval officer with the same romantic notion of war that most armchair soldiers and politicians safely home in the US have today. He learned first-hand how wrong that notion was. He acted appropriately given the new information he acquired and came home to tell everyone what he saw, how unorganized it was, and how the lack of any clear, specific US objective rendered the war a waste of resources at best, a dangerous diversion and blunder that hurt the US reputation at home and abroad at worst. So Kerry learned to correct his youthful foolishness. But the Bush administration hasn't made any mistakes, so how can they learn from them.

Now I'm not saying that no one in Vietnam or Iraq acted heroically or made sacrifices they felt were in the interest of the nation. That's a whole other argument. Soldiers on the ground then, like today, don't get to choose the wars they fight. They do their jobs. They do them well, and for that, they should be recognized, but the people who send them there should have a better understanding of what that means and rather than spinning their sacrifices into some kind of twisted jusification for the war, they should deal with those two separate issues as just that: separate issues. They should face the questions on the justification for the war BEFORE putting troops in harm's way, not put them there and then use their dedication as justification.

The point is, however, that the Bush administration used Kerry's experience and spun it as flip-flopping.

Perhaps that's why Bush can't admit mistakes even when he blatantly reverses his position on issues like defying the world to invade Iraq (actual use of military might, not just a test of a weapons system) or using strategic oil reserves to moderate gas prices or... I could go on, but what's the point.

I'm not saying Kerry is my hero, as has often been suggested here. I'm simply using him as a comparison since this administration has so often criticized him for doing exactly what they've done since the first campaign. Why are so many Americans so unwilling to apply this administration's own rules to this administration? Why do so many only criticize people like Kerry for doing things this administration does while letting the administration get away with it? Why now is Bush getting away with criticizing Kim Jong Il for doing what Bush himself did in invading Iraq?

In his press conference, Bush suggested that Kim Jong Il should pay a price for defying the world's opinion on his missile tests. It's pretty obvious that the US has already paid a price for defying the world's position on invading Iraq. How much longer will we pay such a price without asking Bush to pay a part of it as well?


Map source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governments%27_positions_pre-2003_invasion_of_Iraq

Speech transcript: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/07/washington/07text-bush.html?pagewanted=1

Sure, just call the guy!

Sure... just call the guy. 

Hey dudes. How's things. It's been pretty nuts here. We've got movers coming in three weeks, but each time I say, "OK, I'm not doing anything but packing for the rest of the week," something else gets in the way. Last week it was the well. Ours was apparently struck by lightning causing the well casing and the pump to fail all at once.

Four days and $4,000.00 later, we've got water again. They say timing is everything. I replaced my well pump and discovered the evidence of the damaged casing the day before I signed the contract to sell the place. That's the kind of luck I have.

I called my buddy, Todd, when I discovered the pump wasn't working because I knew he'd dealt with this before. He suggested I just "call the guy." In my head I agreed, but my heart didn't want to give in that quickly. Hearing this dose of reality from Todd was wierd because he's always been a fiercely independent do-it-yourselfer. He's a "guard buddy" and like my other guard buddies, that independence is probably one of the things that drew us to the military and kept us in the national guard as long as we've stayed. Our experience in a highly mobile (meaning: sent to the ends of the Earth) civil engineering unit has given us the opportunity to do and learn a lot of skills that you need when constructing a small city in the middle of nowhere. In addition to on-the-job training, you also learn things through necessity when there is no "guy" to call. Bob and Greg, the other two guard buddies who've been with me since the beginning, are just like that. In and out of the guard, we've developed skills and an attitude that always makes us lean toward doing it ourselves before even considering "calling the guy." (Our wives aren't always impressed with this.)

Greg and Bob repaired parts on a generator that powered our little "village" in Iraq once because not repairing it meant no power for an indeterminate amount of weeks. The contractor who was supposed to be there for and who made way too much money for his knowledge of generator repair and maintenance had ordered replacement parts and was content to wait. His village had power. Greg and Bob diagnosed the real problem, fixed the parts in question, and we had power that day. That's just one example of many, many, many situations where you either fix it yourself, or go without, so you can understand how this attitude developed.

So when Todd told me to call the guy, I was a little hurt. I think that must be what Michael Jordan felt when he realized his body just wouldn't do what his mind remembered anymore. Granted, he was still competitive among professional players half his age - I'm not talking that kind of performance, but still. That must be what it's like. On the other hand, this realization or plateau is also the result of realizing that our time is worth something too. It's part of maturing I guess. That it's just more efficient to pay someone even though it would be cool to have the time to do it ourselves. I'm busy with the move, Todd's busy running a company, Greg's busy remodeling his first house, Bob's busy working and finishing up a degree, and we all have families with whom we'd like to spend more time. I guess it really is a sort of longing for one's youth. For a time when life was less complicated.

My former roommate in Iraq, John, another one of those guard buddies, emailed me on the 4th of July to tell me he'd gotten up before anyone else in his house and in that quiet, was thinking back one year to the strange routine we'd developed in order to survive that experience. He said he'd caught himself actually missing aspects of the deployment. And then he said he called himself nuts for doing so, but there was a simplicity to the routine over there and there was a necessity of taking care of things on your own... and there was definitely a lot of time to do so without the needs of work and family and home and on and on. It was just the guys. It was like being back in that first bachelor apartment. Back when you were too dumb to know what you had. And there was no guy to call.

There was an episode of Two And A Half Men where their satellite TV goes fuzzy and the Charlie Sheen character wants to just call the guy. His brother tells him they simply need to aim the dish. The brother goes so far as telling him, "that's your problem in life... you think you can solve everything by just calling the guy." So he crawls up a ladder onto the roof, aims the dish, and falls when climbing back down. He breaks both wrists and sprains his neck. In succession, each character he encounters and who inquires about his injuries responds with, "why didn't you just call the guy?" for the rest of the episode.

With that image in the back of my head, I gave in to Todd's advice as much as it pained me. The guy turned out to be 26, but had been working for the well-drilling company for ten years. His "helper" was the actual owner of the company. It was pretty cool to watch these two guys at such different places in their careers, work their magic. Both were knowledgeable and efficient and both seemed to really enjoy what they did. Once we determined that not just the pump, but the well casing too was shot, we scheduled the crew to come back the next day and begin drilling the new well. The owner didn't come back. In his place, the first guy and two more, another expert, and a "new guy" showed up with the well rig and the truck that carried the rest of what they'd need.

It wasn't hard to call them when it came to drilling a new well. That's not something I could pull off on my own even with all of my guard connections, but watching the efficiency, the expertise that came only from working with that rig and doing their job, amazed me. And then even they called a guy to dig a trench from the new well to the basement wall where their work would meet up with my new plumbing. (I couldn't just let them have all the fun.)

My dad always used to tell me, "You do a job your'e good at and that you like doing so you can pay someone to do the other things for you. You earn your living, and they earn theirs." Of course, we were usually fixing a car, or building on to the house while he (a salesman most of the time) was telling me this, so it was kind of a mixed message.

As I prepare to buy that house where I got that advice, I look forward to doing a lot of the repairs and remodeling it will need, but I am also at a point in my life where I have fewer and fewer reservations about "calling the guy" to do the jobs I either don't want to do or don't know how. I guess that means I'm growing up. That's not so bad, is it?