Thanksgiving Tributes

A friend recently sent along an e-mail containing photos from Iraq, part of a tribute to fallen members of Baker Company, U.S. Marines. The photos, two of which are shown below, had an impact on me.

Marines catch up on sleep (above) and spell out "We Remember" (below.) Double click to enlarge.

So this Thanksgiving, in addition to being grateful for loving and supportive family and friends, and for good health, I give thanks to the men and women in uniform who serve our country--in Iraq, Afghanistan and all over the world.

I am including two items as part of my thanks. The first is a link to the National Museum of American History, in Washington, D.C., and its special exhibit entitled "The Price of Freedom: Americans at War." It provides an apolitical examination of how wars have shaped our nation's history. As such, it provides a fitting tribute to those who serve in our military.

Here is how the Museum describes the exhibit: "The Price of Freedom: Americans at War surveys the history of America’s military from the French and Indian Wars to the present conflict in Iraq, exploring ways in which wars have been defining episodes in American history. The exhibition extends far beyond a survey of battles to present the link between military conflict and American political leadership, social values, technological innovation, and personal sacrifice. The heart of the story is the impact of war on citizen soldiers, their families, and communities."

You can take a virtual walk through the exhibit by going to: http://americanhistory.si.edu/exhibitions/exhibition.cfm?key=38&exkey=77 Also see link at right.

Second, I invite you to view the video below of a performance by the rock band U-2 at the 2002 Super Bowl at the Louisiana Superdome. The song, Where the Streets Have No Name (a personal favorite), is a tribute to the 9/11 attacks. The performance includes a huge banner (visible in the background in the still photo below) on which are listed the names of those killed in the attacks. The names scroll upward, rising metamorphically like a skyscraper then appear to suddenly collapse.

To enlarge to full screen click on the second icon from the right.

Time for the R Words

The UK's Daily Mail has called Cleveland the "sub-prime capital of America." There were some 17,000 foreclosures here last year. Yet new investors, some from great distances away, have recently entered the market. The house below on Cleveland's west side is an example. An investor bought it in 2007. Can you guess the purchase price?

Take a breath. It was $1,500. (No, that's not a typo.) Properties like this can be fixed up cost-effectively and sold or rented profitably.

It's encouraging that people are finding reasons to invest. (One might view this a case of vultures swooping in.) Perhaps it signals a beginning of the end to the financial crisis.

What happened? How did the wheels come off and why did it catch us (most of us) by surprise?

In the last post we cited a need for greater stewardship. Webster's Pocket Dictionary defines a steward as "a person entrusted with the management of the affairs of others." It implies a high degree of responsibility. And there it is--one of the "R" words that are at the heart of the problem.

Daniel Henninger of The Wall Street Journal wrote about them today in an article called "Mad Max and the Meltdown." Here's what he said:

"What really went missing through the subprime mortgage years were the three Rs: responsibility, restraint and remorse. They are the ballast that stabilizes two better-known Rs from the world of free markets: risk and reward."

"Responsibility and restraint are moral sentiments," Mr. Henninger wrote. "Remorse is a product of conscience. None of these grow on trees, each must be learned, taught, passed down."

He asserts that our society's move toward greater secularization and "dereligioning" encouraged the behaviors that resulted in the subprime crisis. Bankers, borrowers, investment managers and government officials are people after all. We're all capable of good and bad acts. But now we must ask--who is teaching the concepts of responsibility, restraint and remorse?

When was the last time you heard anyone talk about the virtue of restraint?

I like Mr. Henninger's summation: "The point for a healthy society of commerce and politics is not that religion saves, but that it keeps most of the players inside the chalk lines. We are erasing the chalk lines."

We better find some chalk.

Time for Improved Stewardship

Several interesting data points can be found among three articles in today's Wall Street Journal. (See sources listed below.) As I contemplated these I found myself wondering what happened to the idea of being prepared for a rainy day? What happened to stewardship?

Here are the data points:

1. More than 12 million homeowners, out of about 75 million, have mortgages that exceed the value of their homes. The average negative equity gap is about $40,000. Yikes!

2. Declining state tax revenues are causing budget troubles.

• California faces a budget deficit of $10 billion.


• To help deal with a $2 billion budget deficit, Illinois is slowing down payment of its bills.


• Pennsylvania announced a hiring freeze on September 16 to solve its budget woes. But a few weeks later its deficit grew by nearly $300 million.


• The Employee Benefit Research Institute estimates that the average public sector employee earns 46% more in total compensation than counterparts in private industry. That's because governments spend 60% more per worker on benefits including retirement.


• According to the Pew Charitable Trust, states have about $11 billion saved up to pay some $381 billion in future nonpension benefits such as health care.

3. New York City faces severe declines in revenues as the result of layoffs on Wall Street. During the recent financial bubble many people on Wall Street made lots of money and consequently paid lots of city income taxes. So what did New York City do? It increased its rolls of full-time employees to a record 313,965 as of June 30, 2008. In 2004 the number was about 260,000.

All this begs the question: What were they thinking?

It's time for a renewed emphasis on something that has been allowed to lapse: Stewardship.

Sources:

• "Our Spendthrift States Don't Need a Bailout" - Steve Malanga, senior editor, Manhattan Institutes's City Journal
• "The Public Payroll Always Rises" - Editorial, Wall Street Journal
• "How to Help People Whose Home Values are Underwater" - Martin Feldstein, Harvard professor and chair of Council of Economic Advisers under President Reagan

What Happens When No One is Left to Remember?

Remember this famous photo?
The Associated Press reported yesterday that 90 year old Edith Shain, of Los Angeles, says that she is the nurse in the photo. It was taken in 1945 in Times Square on the day Japan surrendered, ending World War II. Famous photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt snapped the shutter just as the sailor and nurse, strangers to each other, kissed in the midst of a jubilant crowd. They went their separate ways so quickly that Mr. Eisenstaedt could not record their names.

If indeed Ms. Shain is the nurse, her age reminds us that those who remember World War II are getting up in years. At some point in the not too distant future no one will be left to remember. What happens then?

It's one thing to read or hear about events as tumultuous as World War II but it's not the same as having lived during that time. How well will we the successors apply the lessons learned?

I have long been shocked and intrigued by the Holocaust. How could it have happened? I've read and watched movies about it and have visited Holocaust museums and exhibits in Jerusalem, Washington, D.C., and Cleveland. But not having experienced the Holocaust first hand, it remains at least to some extent an abstraction.

Every now and then I'm jolted by a first person account of some horrible event or, interestingly, something comparatively mild. Two recent articles in The Plain Dealer did just that.

The first was a story about former Army infantryman Joe Pucci, who was part of the Allied invasion at the seaside resort of Anzio, in Italy, in January 1944. It was a surprise sea-based attack behind enemy lines met with enormous resistance by the German army. It was awful. The Allied troops were pinned down on the beach for four treacherous months. But that's not what struck me so much. The jolt came from the realization that Mr. Pucci was drafted when he was a junior in high school. A junior! In short order he found himself on a troop ship sailing for North Africa. Imagine, one day you're a high school kid in Cleveland and then suddenly you're on a troop ship making its way to a battle in North Africa. Talk about growing up fast! How different my life would have been had I experienced all that at such an early age.

And then there is the story of Betty Gold who at age 66 is committed to telling young people how the Nazis wiped her home town off the map. She grew up in Trochenbrod, a Jewish farming settlement in Poland. On August 9, 1942, the Nazis forced most of the inhabitants into the town's center and shot them. Some 4,500 people were murdered that day. Ms. Gold, 11 years old then, was one of 16 family members who hid behind a fake wall in a shed behind her family's home. They huddled close together in silence and fear waiting for the Nazis to come. That's when a toddler, her cousin's daughter, began to cry and wouldn't stop.

"The mother frantically tried to shush her daughter," the article recounts. "She rocked her, she spoke softly to her, she kissed her. But the shrieks intensified. The other people in the tiny space bit their lips, their eyes darting nervously. The mother clamped one hand over the girl's mouth and the other her soft neck. She squeezed her daughter's windpipe. Hard. The crying stopped."

Imagine the horror of that day and ask--what in our experience comes close to that?

It's fitting that we have events like Veterans Day to help us remember the important lessons learned in the past. But a part of me wonders what will happen when persons like Edith Shain, Joe Pucci and Betty Gold are no longer around to tell their first hand accounts. What happens when no one is left to remember? We will of course remember...but, admittedly, it's just not the same.

Trust the Process

Many years ago I learned an important lesson. I was a member of a church long range planning committee. Our group came up with what we thought was an outstanding idea--start a child daycare center. The congregation had to vote its approval for the center to become a reality.

The issue was highly contentious with strongly-held views expressed on both sides. In the end the congregation voted the idea down. I was not a happy camper and entertained thoughts of how to circumvent the congregation. That's when Jack, the committee chair and prominent attorney with a national law firm, pulled me aside. He quietly counseled me to "trust the process." Over time, he said, despite ups and downs, it has been proven that the process works. Subsequent events, not necessary to recount here, showed that he was right.

I have never understood the enormous disrespect many people have demonstrated toward President Bush. I do understand that there are differences of opinion and that one can be passionately against positions taken by another. But to heap ridicule and scorn upon those we don't agree with, as many have done with respect to President Bush, serves only to deepen differences and conflict.

I did not vote for Barack Obama for president. But he is now president-elect, which means that on January 20, 2009, he will become my president. He thus deserves my respect. He shall have it.

It was heartening to see today's Wall Street Journal quote blogger and law professor Glenn Reynolds. On election day he wrote the following at Forbes.com: "'I thought it was wrong when Bush supporters in 1992 slapped "Don't Blame Me, I Voted for Bush" stickers on their cars before Clinton was sworn in...I'm not an Obama fan, particularly, but a lot of people I like and respect are. To treat Obama as something evil or subhuman would not only be disrespectful toward Obama, but toward them. Instead, I hope that if Obama is elected, their assessment of his strengths will turn out to be right, and mine will turn out to be wrong.'"

Jack has since passed away. But I feel as though he were standing next to me today, advising me to "trust the process."

Congratulations!

Congratulations and best wishes to newly elected President Barack Obama! It's exciting to witness history in the making.

But note that amid the many headlines about Mr. Obama's election win comes this eye-catching banner in today's International Herald Tribune: "Russia to Deploy Missiles Near Poland."

In his first state of the nation address, Russia President Dmitry Medvedev announced that Russia will deploy missiles near Poland in response to U.S. missile defense plans. Russia will also install equipment to disrupt a missile defense system the U.S. is planning to implement in Poland and the Czech Republic, new NATO members. The system is intended to defend against missiles from such countries as Iran.

The article also states that Mr. Medvedev "blamed the U.S. for the war in Georgia and the global financial crisis. He said he hoped Barack Obama would act to improve relations with Russia but did not offer congratulations to the president-elect."

Mr. Medvedev said that "it is up to the U.S., not the Kremlin, to seek to improve relations."

Very soon, possibly, we may all be concerned about foreign policy issues that were not very visible just a few days ago.

The president-elect faces many significant challenges.

What Does Barack Obama Want Us to Choose?

Barack Obama speaks eloquently and draws large, passionate crowds. I want to believe that he should be the next president. For some reason I just can't.

Fouad Ajami, professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, has helped me understand why I feel this way. He wrote a Wall Street Journal article entitled "Obama and the Politics of Crowds." It comes down to ambiguity and equality.

Professor Ajami credits Mr. Obama with having a certain political genius--that of being a blank slate onto which people can project onto him what they wish.

"Ambiguity has been a powerful weapon of this gifted candidate," Professor Ajami writes. "He has been different things to different people..."

This ambiguity makes me uncomfortable. I wonder what Mr. Obama is hiding and why. I want more of the measure of the person who seeks to be president. But Mr. Obama remains elusive.

Professor Ajami adds by citing Nobel laureate Elias Canetti's book "Crowds and Power" which states that crowds are about equality. Crowds seek the moment when "'distinctions are thrown off and all become equal. It is for the sake of this blessed moment, when no one is greater or better than another, that people become a crowd."

Equality is something in which I think Mr. Obama truly believes--that and fairness, a word he uses. That's admirable. But I also get the feeling that Mr. Obama is less than fully committed to the importance and value of individualism, individual achievement and the accompanying rewards. I find that troubling.

Kevin O'Brien, columnist with the Plain Dealer in Cleveland, has also helped me see why I react to Mr. Obama the way I do. He recently wrote that at stake "in this election is nothing less than the pivotal question of the individual's relationship to the government--a question defined in what may be the only two moments of candor Obama has offered America during this campaign."

"ABC's Charlie Gibson first lifted the veil back in April," wrote Mr. O'Brien, "during a primary-season debate among Democratic candidates. He asked why Obama would raise capital-gains taxes even if the result were decreased collections for the government."

"Obama replied, 'What I've said is that I would look at raising the capital-gains tax for purposes of fairness.'"

Who decides what's fair?

"Then came Obama's chance meeting with Joe 'The Plumber' Wurzelbacher, who questioned Obama's tax plans and got this reply: 'It's not that I want to punish you for your success. I just want to make sure that everyone who is behind you - that they have a chance for success, too. I think that when you spread the wealth around, it is good for everyone.'"

Who decides what wealth to spread around and to whom?

This is what I struggle with: Mr. Obama believes in equality and that sometimes it is necessary for someone--government--to decide that you or I have to make some adjustment, pay more taxes or do something else not yet seen, to ensure that others have equality of opportunity. That strikes me as a blow against liberty disguised as something more delicate.

It was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late Democratic senator from New York who, Professor Ajami wrote, "once set the difference between American capitalism and the older European version by observing that America was the party of liberty, whereas Europe was the party of equality. Just in the nick of time for the Obama candidacy, the American faith in liberty began to crack."

Is this where we find ourselves on the eve of the presidential election, a choice between liberty and equality? Perhaps that is too dramatic.

But it's not unreasonable to suggest that Mr. Obama has a preference between the two, and that by voting for him a person expresses that same preference. That's what Mr. Obama wants us to choose.