President's Choice

In the U.S. capitol, our president was dissatisfied with the food service, so he brought in a chef and culinary staff from his home state.

The chef orchestrated elaborate banquets at the presidents home until a problem arose.  Uncle Harkless (or Hercules, as he was known) was a slave, and the law in Pennsylvania required slaves to be freed after six months of residence.  The nation's capitol being in Philadelphia at the time, President George Washington was obliged to set Hercules free, but instead he sent him back to Mount Vernon along with the other kitchen slaves.

President Washington had sworn to never buy another slave, but he sent the staff back to Virginia just short of the six-months residency, intending to return them to Philadelphia after a few weeks.

Hercules eventually escaped from Mount Vernon and was never heard from again.

Louis-Philippe, the future king of France, visited Mount Vernon in the spring of 1797.  According to his diary entry:

The general's cook ran away... and left a little daughter of six at Mount Vernon. Beaudoin ventured that the little girl must be deeply upset that she would never see her father again; she answered, "Oh! Sir, I am very glad, because he is free now."

George Washington was the first among our presidents to make a callous decision based on self-interest at the expense of another.  Slavery dictated  how Hercules and his wife and children would live their entire lives.  When it could have been rectified by the choice of a gracious heart, it was not.

George Washington was a good guy, of course.  He freed his slaves in his will, all 124 of them.  There were 153 more that belonged to Martha Washington that were part of her estate when she died.  Because of property laws, the children of Hercules and his wife remained enslaved and are presumed to have died at Mt. Vernon.

Later presidents have made similar choices.  Viewed in isolated retrospect, the choices were selfish, perhaps shameful. The judgment of history is harsh and laments the broken lives left in their wake.

And it's more fun to get this one right, 

of course; to be a help bringer instead 

of a fight-winner.  GA.5.22

We all do the same kinds of things, do we not?  Choosing selfishly without a second thought is the easiest way, and doing otherwise has a price.  We may not get the attention of history, but the choice and effects remain.

We might ask if our impact today will be a noble one.  

It's a 'life now' question that can open a thousand doors.

Half Chance

If you marry, you've got about a 50/50 chance it will end in divorce. True?  No, although that's the popularly offered forecast.  And the numbers are the same for churched folks?  Also not true.

From the U.S. Census Bureau (see table 6, right) we find a different picture.

If you were to check on folks at perhaps age 70, odds are about 96% that they will have gotten married.  Their odds for divorce are 23% or less. (23% for men, 21% for women.)

That's 70%+ of first marriages that did not end in divorce. 

And for church folks? Overall, regular church attendance lowers the divorce rate anywhere from 25-50%, depending on the study you look at. (Barna/Feldhahn)

For the record, there's a continuing battle over the interpretation of such statistics with varying validity in many arguments dealing with age, education, race, cohort, and so on.  The popular media doesn't offer a helpful analysis. The numbers are there for you to peruse yourself, if you like.  You'll have to dig a bit, but those particular facts persists across the studies.

The important part is that marriage can work.  There are a hundred obstacles, a thousand changes, a million landmines along the way, it seems.  We understand, and it hurts deeply when such troubles touch us and our families, our friends.  But marriage wins on points; it's the better path, the greater good.

Mom and dad, decades 

along the pathway.
They're the norm.

Imagine the difference; to be able to tell a struggling couple, “Most people get through this, and you can too.”

Imagine equipping young folks with the ability to counter the cynical statements of college professors or the “why bother getting married” comments of friends, with the actuality that most marriages last a lifetime.

It does raise the question; why would our culture accept the worst possible interpretation of something so great?

What's Fair?

The debate over raising the minimum wage brings out some strong opinions.

The rant (left, attributed to the Tea Party) made the rounds on Facebook with 149,633 liking it and 192,573 folks re-sharing it on their own timelines.  It got 9000 comments.  It's perhaps representative of one side of public opinion.

The reality is that the minimum wage has lost ground over the years just in purchasing power.  If measured against productivity, it's about half what it was in 1963.

The 1938  Fair Labor Standards Act banned oppressive child labor and set the minimum hourly wage at 25 cents, and the maximum workweek at 44 hours.¹  It was a beginning, addressing the economic enslavement and abuse of some for the benefit of others.

When I was a kid, minimum wage was what I expected starting out in the grocery store bagging groceries.  It was years later that I discovered it was there to protect adults in the workplace as well.

Today's job market is pretty tight, and progress can be slow.  Paying for college or recovering from a lost job, it isn't easy to fight your way up from entry level.  And the minimum wage we pay today is worth less than it was when times were easier, economically.

The growing gap between rich and poor illustrates the issue more broadly.  In an industry where productivity has quintupled along with profits, workers make less than a decade ago.  Same issue.

Minimum

Curious about the effect on job growth that changing the minimum wage might have?  

This is the primary argument against raising the minimum wage, that it would cause massive job losses.  It's a flawed argument.  All the credible studies say the impact on jobs would be virtually nil. 

The benefit to workers and their families, on the other hand, would be substantial.  Of course.

Curious why there are such strong objections in Congress?  Who would want to pay workers less per productive day as time passed?  Who indeed.

Employers pay less than half as much per unit of work compared to forty years ago at minimum wage.  (See the real minimum wage chart; adjusted for 2012 dollars) (To find out where the money went, see the 1979-2010 Wages by Wage Group graph at the top of the page.) 

In America, the lowest two quintiles of household income are the ones most affected by the minimum wage. It's not just high-school kids working in the grocery store, it's mostly moms and dads in unskilled and semi-skilled employment.


See the National Bureau of Economic Research for the actual impact of raising the minimum wage.  It encourages children to stay in school, among many other good things.  Fascinating. 

Comfort Zone

For the gregarious only.

'Comfort zone' is just another term for 'stuck in a rut'.  At least that's the way the extroverts among us feel.

If we want to avoid repeating the mundane, we'll want to step up, climb out ...

Want change?
Pick one!

If your routine is ... routine,  plan a breakout; not a vacation, but a rut buster.   Go bicycling in Denmark, volunteer in a soup kitchen, or in Africa, go climbing in Colorado, exploring in Wyoming, weekending in NY, or work in the garden; whatever adds a fresh perspective.

For a bizarre challenge, try talking to a teenager about whatever they want to talk about.  One fellow talked about his first prom for as long as I was willing to smile and laugh and commiserate.  Another complained at length about his pre-calc class and showed me the 'stupid homework' on his iPad. More commiserating.

My dental hygienist and I laughed long and hard, exchanging grand-baby stories while she had stuff in my mouth.
A colleague regaled me with horror stories about building a deck and how the dog fell through the unfinished hole.  More commiserating.
A friend in Kenya laughed and told how the rain was so bad, you couldn't see, and her first grader couldn't go to school today.
Another fellow and I exchanged texts about his college progress and expenses.
My wife is sewing tick guards in pant legs for our son-in-law; he's a conservationist and has to be careful about such things.  They did the design together, and he loves the result.

Chatting with the new cashier at the drugstore about whether the afternoon would be a mandatory bike-ride or just an optional; he's maybe 20 and a neat fellow and lives 5 minutes from St. Mary's lake.
Most folks are easily engaged, and it's a lot more fun than just mmmphing at each other and moving on.

OK, that's the extrovert's view.  What does an introvert do for fun?

JA1:2-4.

If we're smart, we'll be happy when we find ourselves in this or that difficulty. Our labor through such times strengthens and equips us for greater challenges and service.  True?

Happy hump day.