June 2011: Dr. Jack Kevorkian

June 3, 2011:  Dr. Jack Kevorkian passed away today. 

Jack Kevorkian was Armenian.  He was born Hagop Kevorkian on May 26, 1928.  Hagop was the second child and only son of Levon and Satening Kevorkian.  His father left his home village of Passen near Erzeroum in 1912 before the Armenian Genocide of 1915.  His mother was, like many Armenians in the Detroit area, from Govdun, a village near Sepastia.  She survived the Genocde and made her way to the US.  Detroit was a draw for the immigrant Armenians because of the abundance of jobs in the automotive industry.   The family lived in Pontiac, Michigan.  In those days, it was not considered part of metropolitan Detroit as it is today.

Jack, as Hagop become known, graduated from Pontiac Central High School in 1945.  He went to the University of Michigan for both his undergraduate work and then medical degree in 1952.  He embarked on a career as a pathologist.  Even early in his career, Jack was interested in the end of life doing experiments on transfusing cadaver blood in humans.  He probably got the hepatitis that caused his liver cancer from transfusing the cadaver blood into himself.

Dr. Jack Kevorkian became famous or notorious for his interest and action in euthanasia.  He was called Dr. Death because of this assistance in helping terminally ill people end their own lives.  His trials for second degree murder, his convictions,  and time in prison were front page news when they were happening. 

June 6:  Armenians were never sure if we should be proud or ashamed of him.  There was no problem acknowledging his Armenian heritage and most of us tried to give him the benefit of doubt and understand what he was trying to do.  At the same time, we would try to reconcile any Armenian being an advocate for euthanasia.  Dr. Jack was, after all, the son of a genocide survivors.   Life was supposed to be precious to us.  We proudly claim to be the first Christian nation and his work certainly crossed some ethical lines in this regard.

Personally, I could see both sides.  I can see that if someone is suffering, unable to care for themselves, and costing their families or society thousands of dollars a day, they might want to end their life.  I also see the preciousness of life.  I believe that the hospice movement has the right middle ground.

My grandmother, Azniv Frankian Merian, was in St. Mary’s in Livonia back in the mid-1990s.  She was probably 90 years old at time.  She came out of surgery and was in her room.  A priest or nun, I do not recall, came to see here and she said, “you know that I am Armenian, you know, like Dr. Jack Kevorkian.  I bet you don’t let him in here.”  She had to have that trademark glint her eye.

Back in the 1960s, the Detroit Armenians of the St. Sarkis community built a new church in Dearborn. MI.  It was a very exciting time.  The generation of Jack Kevorkian built the church and they were energized to move the church and the community forward.  They formed a Men’s Club.  The Men’s Club decided to have monthly dinner and have guest speakers of interest from business, sports, and wherever Armenians were making their mark.  Sometimes the dinners were father and son events.  I enjoyed going with my Dad.  It was being part of a fraternity and being part of the adult world.

I remember two of these events distinctly.  At one of them, an executive at the Ford Design Center spoke.  He gave us insights at the world of concept car design as well the process of taking a concept to actual production vehicle.  It was fascinating.  I decided to ask whether they considered aerodynamics in their designs but I was too young or too nervous to actually use the word aerodynamics.  I felt a little stupid even though I knew it was a good question and something I was curious about.  The speaker told us that they really did not consider aerodynamics in their designs.  I remember thinking that they probably should.  This was a few decades before it seemed every car ad from every carmaker showed footage of a car in a windtunnel.

The other speaker I remember was Dr. Jack Kevorkian.  I want to say that at the time he spoke he was either the Wayne or Oakland County Coroner or Medical Examiner.  I tried to verify this but all of the articles about Kevorkian talked only about his assisted suicide/euthanasia work and his conviction.  There were very few references to his earlier positions.  He was always fascinated with death.  At the time he spoke, I never knew what a coroner or medical examiner did.  They may have featured such on television crime dramas but those were not shows I was watching in those days.  It was also a few years before the Jack Klugman series, Quincy ME, about a medical examiner.

I recall Dr. Jack Kevorkian was an engaging and interesting speaker.  He talked about his job and shared amazing facts about the human body.  He was an energetic speaker bordering on the nervous.   I became more interested in biology and medical sciences because of his speech.  Up until then, I was more interested in physics and aeronautical engineering primarily because of the US Space Program and the Race to the Moon which was in full swing at the time.

June 15:  I never gave another thought to Dr. Jack Kevorkian until he became newsworthy in the 1990s.  Even then I did not immediately remember it was the fellow I heard speak at St. Sarkis twenty or twenty-five years earlier.  It wasn’t until I actually heard him speak on a news broadcast that I put two and two together.

So what do I think about Jack Kevorkian and his legacy?  I am not so much for euthanasia.  Life is precious.  The end of life can be very difficult and painful to deal with.  As mentioned earlier, I think I am more prone to what the hospice movement does.  Their goal is make each day a good day for their patients.  They help manage the pain and try as much as possible to have their patients stay at home.  It is infinitely better than being in a hospital connected to machines.  I thought it was a very good thing for my Uncle Azad. He had lung cancer and they made his last days as good as possible.  He died at home and given the grave end game of his disease, he had a decent quality of life in his last year always until the last week.


I also believe that the Genocide strongly influenced Dr. Jack Kevorkian.  I believe he was, in some way, trying to give some control to people of how and when they die.  When I learned that Jack Kevorkian was also an artist, I was curious about his paintings.  When I saw them, I was pretty convinced of my Genocide influencing him theory.  His art is obsessed with death.  But, don’t take my word for it.      

• Google “Jack Kevorkian Art” and then click on images
•  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/03/late-jack-kevorkian-also-_n_871236.html

One does not have to be trained psychologist, psychotherapist, or art historian to see the theme that runs through a great majority of his art.  The man was heavily impacted by both death and man’s inhumanity to man.  I can only imagine that the travails of his parents influenced Jack from his youngest days.

I did not know that Jack Kevorkian was an artist and musician until the past few years.   I found out only because the HBO docudrama on him, You Don’t Know Jack, starring Al Pacino as the famed Dr.  In tandem there was a documentary on Dr. Kevorkian that seemed to have run simultaneously.  The documentary featured a showing of Dr. Kevorkian’s art at an Armenian Church in California.  The subjects and nature of the paintings had a great impact on me.

The docudrama starring Pacino was heavily hyped.  I watched it when it first aired and then watched it a second time.  It was well done and had seasoned stars with Brenda Vaccaro as Dr. Jack’s sister and Susan Sarandon and John Goodman as his friends.  I expected something more from the movie and I was not sure what.  It just seemed a little reserved to me as if something was missing.   The aforementioned documentary revealing the Doctor’s artwork provided the missing pieces for me.

A lot has been made of Dr. Kevorkian opting for a natural passing rather than taking his own life as he advocated for and helped others do.  He had a terminal illness and yet chose to let it run it’s course.  I guess he was advocating “pro-choice” and he made his own decision.  Should he have taken his own life to have made a point?  Does it matter?  There was a cartoon in the Sunday June 5, 2011 New York Times of Dr. Kevorkina at the Peraly Gates.  St. Peter asked him a one word question, “Unassisted?”  The cartoon was the work of Jeff Stahler of the Columbus Dispatch:  http://www.gocomics.com/jeffstahler/2011/06/04

There was a movie that starred Charleton Heston and Edward G. Robinson.  It was called Soylent Green.  The future as depicted in this 1973 movie had many disturbing practices and a grim prediction of the future as were many movies of that era of The Generation Gap and the divisive Vietnam War.  One of the practices that was in place in this future United States was encouraging older people to commit suicide, state assisted suicide.  The suicides took place in beautiful facilities with what was the equivalent of Imax like videos of the most beautiful nature scenes as the elder slowly and beautifully died.   The Edward G. Robinson character was supposed to die alone but died in the presence of the Charleton Heston character.

As beautiful as the death chamber was depicted, it was still a death chamber.  It was supposed to be offensive and I definitely took it as such.   Such movies of that era were to make us suspicious of the government or Big Brother.  We should be very careful as too how much power and leeway “they” have over us.  One of the messages in Soylent Green is that if are not careful the government could end up promoting assisted suicides at the end of life.  The real fear is that promoting or encouraging assisted suicides is a fine line away from mandating assisted suicides i.e. deciding who should live and who should die.   This is the scary part of going down the Kevorkian path. 

When President Obama and Nancy Pelosi were promoting their health care legislation a few years ago, there was an interesting scare tactic used by the opposition.  There were serious discussions around the very high costs associated with the very end of life care.   The basic point was that thousands upon thousands of dollars are spent to on patients that are clearly dying.  The expense is disproportionate to both the extra time a patient may live and the quality of life the patient might experience during that time.  While such debates may be realistic, it is easy for many to be leery of the kind of life decision the government and insurance companies might have over us.  It was easy to see that a price was being put on life.  If the price benefit ratio is not high enough, the expenditure would be denied and the patient in question would naturally expire.  This quickly translated into “Obama Care will decide who lives and dies.”

Certainly Dr. Kevorkian was strongly committed to his beliefs and worked passionately to realize his vision.  I believe that his views were strongly influenced by what his parents lived through.  In my view, I just don’t think it is right and there are more compassionate ways of managing the very real issues that Dr. Kevorkian, minimally, got us all thinking about.

The August 2, 2010 New Yorker had a brilliant article on how we should approach the end of life.  The article advocated hospice as the most humane and dignified alternative.

 

June 25:  I was grading final exams for a statistics course I was teaching.  I took a break and flipped on the TV.  You Don’t Know Jack was on one the several HBO channels.  I watched it.  It was very close to the end which is the trial that led to Dr. Kevorkian’s conviction and jail sentence.  Dr. Kevorkian was on trial for assisting in the suicide of a very ill patient.  At one point, the prosecution likened what Dr. Kevorkian did and was advocating to the Nazis and genocide.  Dr. Kevorkian flipped out.  He went ballistic and kept bellowing “How dare you!?!”

How did I miss this in my first viewing of this docudrama?  The prosecutor accused Dr. Kevorkian of advocating something that could lead to genocide.  He accused an Armenian of this.  He accused an Armenian raised by genocide survivors and obsessed with death of this.  The prosecutor was either lucky to hit a nerve or an amazingly good tactician.

I certainly did not know Jack, but I believe I understood a bit of what moved him to the position and actions that defined him.

Orange Colored Glasses

6-25-11

There is an old adage about looking at the world through rose colored glasses.  It is a saying about people who look at the world this way.  It is a not necessarily complimentary and implies that the wearer of the rosy lenses are naively viewing everything as positive.  Their glass is always half full.  They never seem to see the harsher reality of the world.  So, when the phrase is used, it is generally to disparage the naivete and oblivious view of the person it is directed toward.

These days we admire people that have a positive attitude.  We are encouraged to turn every twist and turn in life into something positive and helps us grow.  It is not exactly looking at the world through rose colored glasses because this philosophy challenges us to see the world as it is and not gloss over what can be nasty twists and turns.  Rather than looking at the world through rose colored glasses, this philosophy tells us to that when the world serves us lemons we need to make lemonade.  It is a good way to approach life.  It is better than glossing things over and merely look at the world through the proverbial rose colored glasses.

I do not look at the world through rose colored glasses.  I try to make the twists and turns of life into positives but I am not sure how well I am at this special skill.  What I literally do, however, is look at the world though orange colored glasses.  

Orange colored glasses?  Whatever for?

When I got into bicycling, I took a rather nasty header in my third year.  I was wearing whatever sunglasses I had laying around.  They happened to be metal framed.  The rims of the glasses cut into the bridge of my nose and right below my right eye socket.  As I healed up, I started to look into cycling glasses and learned that they are all plastic frames and lenses.  This is done to be both light but also to minimize exactly the kind of injury I had.  

I settled on Smith Sliders.  Smith is a French brand of sport glasses with interchangeable lenses of various colors, tints, and polarizations to accommodate any and every weather and visibility condition.  Changing the lenses was easy, they simply slide in and out hence the name.  When I finally got to a store that stocked Smiths, the style of frames that I liked came with clear, green polarized, brown, and orange lenses. I hesitated buying them because of the orange lenses and vocalized such to the sales person.   The fellow told me “If you buy these, you will end up only using the orange lenses.”  Huh?  Crazy.  I took it as a sales pitch but bought the glasses anyway.

I loved the glasses.  I mostly wore the green and brown in the first few weeks.  I remembered what the sales person said about the orange lenses.  I decided to give them a try  even though the idea of using orange lenses in the bright sun sounded counter intuitive.   The sales person was absolutely correct, within a few more weeks I just left the orange lenses in all the time.  What made them so good?

Like the rose colored glasses, everything just looked better.  Things are brighter and crisper.  Yet, there is no need to squint and there is less glare.  Everything is better defined.  There is more contrast.  And yes, the world looks more dull and drab when I take them off, for just a moment.  The orange color lenses are like those blue blocker sunglasses that were being peddled on TV a few years ago.   Even though I never bought a pair of those, I remember having a pair.  I have no idea where they came from.  They were OK.  These Smith’s are unbelievable.  

My daughter Armene used to always call me “orange sunglass man.”   I used to respond in three ways.  I would mostly respond “I’m looking at the world through orange colored glasses.”  But, I would also respond, “I am setting a fashion trend, you;ll see.”  Once I noticed that Bono wore almost the exact same glasses and lenses, I would say “It is just me and Bono! See, I am at the cutting edge of fashion.”

The orange lenses do not gloss over the world.  They make both the good and beautiful, as well and as the bad and ugly, more vivid and distinctive.  It is up to me, to decide which attitude to take.  

That is a life long endeavor.

What to Do When the Electricity is Out?

I was at a Toastmasters Meeting yesterday, Tuesday, June 21, 2011.  Toastmasters is an organization dedicated to having meetings that are “learn-by-doing workshop in which participants hone their speaking and leadership skills in a friendly atmosphere.”   www.toastmasters.org  One of the sections of the meetings is something called Table Topics.  The Table Topics Master poses a question.  The participants, who have no prior knowledge of the question, must respond ad lib.  It is a great way to improve one’s skills at impromptu discussions and comments.  In this most recent meeting, the Table Topics Master asked this question:  “The electricity is out at your home, how would you pass the time.”  It was a prophetic question.

I was teaching later on the day, in the evening, at the College of Lake County.  When I got out of class at 9 pm, the weather was horrible.  It was windy, raining sideways, and everything about the air and sky had a tornado like eeriness.  Driving was not so bad.  I figured I would get home around 9:40 pm or so and made a mental list of the work I needed to accomplish before turning in.  I was thinking I would sit in front of the TV watching something mindless and peck away on my laptop.  If I was efficient, always a big if, I would be done at 11:30 at the latest.

As I turned into our neighborhood, it looked like a war zone.  There were branches of every size strewn all over the place.  There were a few very large trees down.  Most importantly, the street lights were off and all the homes were dark.  The electricity was out.  Normally, when the power goes out, it either a momentary flicker or it is restored in a few minutes.  This did not feel that way.

We are so used to having electricity all the time that I hit the garage door opener out of habit.  The little red light in my car blinked but the garage door stayed closed.  Ah yes... no electricity.  Upon going into the house, I instinctively hit the light switch to illuminate the laundry room.  Hmm... nothing.  Of course, the electricity was out.  I sat down and ate a piece of fruit by candlelight.  Then I turned my attention to what to do next.

While my laptop was fully charged and theoretically I could work, the files I need were in the cloud of Google Docs.  I needed the inter-net to access those files and to access the inter-net required electricity to run the cable modem and wireless router.  SOL as they used to say.  I thought about watching TV just a micro-second before realizing that that device also required electricity to operate properly. One does not realize that almost everything we do is requires electricity to function. Most everyone I know has never lived without it.

I sat there and took a deep breath.  Shortly, I realized that the Table Topics discussion from earlier that day had suddenly become very prophetic and very real.  I thought about all the things the participants in that discussion suggested.  Their ideas ranged from playing a board game with the family to pulling an Abe Lincoln and reading by candlelight.

So, what did I do?  I went to bed.  I was tired.

College Grads and Jobs

The economy is getting a little doomy and just a tad gloomy again.  No one is talking about slipping back into recession or using words like double dipping.  In fact, President Obama said we will not experience the double dip.  The stock market has been on a slide most of this month greased by less than positive economic news.  A recent lead story on YahooFinance summed it up in the first two sentences:  

Another lackluster economic report sent stocks down Wednesday, extending a weeklong slide. The Federal Reserve report, known as the Beige Book, showed the economy slowed in several U.S. regions for the first time this year.

Gasoline prices are high.  The Arab Spring and Summer is working itself out in Syria, Libya, and Yemen.   Food prices are high in the poorest parts of the world.  The economies in Greece, Ireland, and Portugal are still tenuous.  So, while we hear that things are getting better, they are going slower than most would like.

Personally, I still worry about the job market.  Actually, it is just part of the job market:  fresh college grads.  I met two just this week and it gave me the inkling about this segment.  Both were working in food service.  I was at breakfast recently.  The waitress was a the All American girl next door.  She looked like a younger lovelier Katherine Heigl.  This young lady had just graduated from college.  She could not find a job and was waitressing.  A few days later I met a young man at Starbucks.  He is a barista.  He also  graduated recently and could not find a job.  

The fellow has a degree in general business.  He is going to CLC to become a CPA.  He figures that specializing will improve his chances for getting an entry level job.  The young lady will have a harder time.  She measured in Art History.  She wants to work at a museum.  She will have a much harder time fulfilling her desire.  

Only 24% of the college graduates this year had a job waiting for them.  As awful as this sounds.  It is an improvement over last years 20%.  The average starting salary dropped 1.7% to $47,673.  Young people with liberal arts degrees had average starting of only $33,540.   I cannot imagine what is like for some like the waitress especially if she has $50,000 or $75,000 in education debt.http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/business/economy/25gradjobs.html

OK things may not be much better for white males in my generation.  But, we are grown ups, we have had our chance.  We are still in there fighting and things will somehow work out.  To me it is just wrong and unfair for the young people.  They have finished their educations, they are ready to join the workforce, and they are eager to begin their careers. All three quarters of them can get are service jobs.  It makes me feel bad.

Certainly, things will work out for these folks.  In my sample of two , they have great attitudes and understand the supply and demand of the marketplace.  They are happy to have the jobs they have and do them very well as they continue to work toward their career objectives.  They will be stronger for it.  I just wish it I had that magic wand that I would use to make it easier for everyone in their generation.

Check out the great cartoon on the subject from the Pulitzer Prize winning Matt Davies: http://rss.tmsfeatures.com/rss-bin/image_preview.cgi?id=20110614eddav-a.tif&provider=TMS_____

May 2011: Need for a New Race to the Moon

May 5:  Today was the 50th anniversary of Alan Shepard’s 15 minute flight into space.  I was all of eight years old then and I remember the impact the space race had on me.  Yuri Gagarin and the Soviets beat the US and Shepard into space by 23 days.   So, in actuality, Shepard was the 2nd man in space.  He was the 1st Amenican.  Gagarin orbited the Earth.  Shepard just peaked his head into space.  I think he was only in space for a grand total of five minutes.   He did not fly again until 1971 when  he was on the Apollo 14 mission and actually walked on the moon.

The Soviets took an early lead with the Sputnik satellite and Gagarin’s flight.  It shocked us as we were still feeling our new found economic and military superiority coming out of World War II.   President John F. Kennedy also felt this shock and motivated our nation, or at least NASA, to win the space race.  We out spent, out manned, and out engineered  the Soviets to win that race and land a man on the moon.  No other country has landed a man on the moon.  President Kennedy pushed an agenda of engineering, science, and math tied to the Space Race and it had an effect...  at least on me.

Some recent news has me believing we need a similar galvanizing mission or challenge of this nature today.  

What was this news?  On April 25th, the IMF released a report projecting that China will overtake the US are the predominant economy in the world.  That projection is not all that astonishing given that their economy is surging and they have four times the population as we do.  The surprise to me was that the IMF report forecasting that China will surpass us as early as 2016.  That fact astonished and jarred me.  But, I was in a distinctly small minority in finding this news unsettling.

What has happened to our national sense of competition and striving to be the best or to be #1.  I fear it has been supplanted with individual greed.  It is not that individual advancement and greed has not been parts of most societies throughout history.

The questions I ask myself at this point are:

1. Did we ever has a sense of striving together?
2. If we did, have we lost it?
3. Can we get it back?

The first question is easy to answer.  I think we did just that World War II.  Factoring out the treatment of Japanese Americans, we seemed to pull together in a real meaningful way to beat the Axis Powers and free Europe and Asia from tyranny.  Maybe I am naive, but this is the sense I took from growing up in the 1950s and 1960s.  There was a common sense of purpose and a common sense of sacrifice.  Everyone worked to achieve the common goal.  

This continued a bit through the fifties and sixties in fighting the Cold War and striving to win the Space Race.  While there was a shared sense of purpose and mission.  People were not all making the same sacrifices and everyone was not working toward the same goal.  The World War II notion of a collective sense of sacrifice and mission was still believed by my parents and grandparents generation.  It made less and less sense to my generation.  This difference became the famed Generation Gap of the late 1960s and early 1970s.   The focal point for this Generation Gap became the Vietnam War.  

We won the space race and we were all happy.  But, we were had changed somehow.  Wall Street took over and the striving for quarterly results dominated at the expense of strategy.  We become a nation of outsourcing, mergers, and acquisitions motivated by consolidations and cost reductions.   

While this was happening here, other countries developed that sense of collective mission and sacrifice.  Japan became an industrial power in the years following World War II.  By the time we took notice, their electronics and automobiles were serious threats eating into our market share.  They caught us flat footed.  They killed our consumer electronics industrial segment.  We survived in automobiles flourishing again in the 1980s and 1990s only to require a government takeover of GM and Chrysler a few years ago.  

There is probably a natural evolutions of economies.  People, governments, and corporations make sacrifices to grow and prosper.  At a certain point, the three segments lose their hunger and become complacent and thus vulnerable.  Complacency plus favoring the short term over the strategic makes us vulnerable to countries that have a strategic industrial strategy and are hell bent on making it happen.

I believe that after the Great Recession of 2008 - 2010, we have emerged as something less than we went into it as.  Maybe we are becoming the UK.  Our middle class continues to erode make us like most societies in the world:  a small rich class of HAVES and very large class of HAVE NOTS that struggle to make ends meet and survive.    OK it is not this horrible in America as yet, but I believe we are headed in that general direction.

So the answer to the above question #2 is Yes.  Yes, we had the common sense of purpose and sacrifice but we lost it in the 1960s and 1970s.  We have yet to regain it.  I believe that the IMF report should be taken as an economic Pearl Harbor.  It should be a call to action for the leadership and people of this great nation.  We need to pull together to drive more science and engineering graduates.  We need to pull together to create strategies to build our manufacturing base up.  We then need to execute those strategies and create meaningul jobs.  We need to do this whether we remain #1, #2, or even #3.

Since John F. Kennedy, we have tried to declare war a few times.  We have declared war on poverty and inflation.  President Lyndon Johnson declared War on Poverty in his 1964 State of the Union Address.  A few years later the worst rioting and looting occurred in poorest sections of Newark, Detroit, and Los Angeles.  That War was not what I would call a success.  Certainly Lyndon Johnson did not win it.  Arguably, we are still fighting this war.

The War on Inflation was actually a little comical.  In 1974, President Gerald Ford declared War on Inflation.  He wanted every American to take up a personal fight against inflation.  He called his program Whip Inflation Now and encouraged everyone to wear buttons with the letters WIN.  The whole program became fodder for every comedian and political satirist in the country.  Inflation was eventually whipped but it had nothing to do with President Ford’s program.

While those wars did not really resonate and take hold like the Space and Cold War with the Soviets, 9/11 had a galvanizing effect.  I saw a greater emotional commitment to the War on Terror. which seems to have culminated with the death of Osama Bin Laden earlier this month.

We need a state of war mentality in regards to our competitiveness.  We need to fight to shore up or middle class.  We need to be serious about our future, our status and stature in the world, and the well being of our citizens.  While we are a country of rugged individualism, we need to mobilize to create a strong and competitive workforce. We need to re-create a business and industrial base that is sustainable and renewable.  We need to renew and we need to renew now.

Maybe we are on the same trajectory as the UK.  Their empire began to fade after World War I and continued to the point where they are kind of an economic and military has been.  They have not been able to resurrect or revive whatever it was that made it great.  

May 16:  This morning I heard a report on NPR.  It was titled “College Student Debt Grows. Is It Worth It?”  The talking head expert in this piece suggested that debt one incurs should not exceed the starting annual salary expected upon landing a job..  This is dependant on the university and major.   The problem seems as bad as the housing crisis. http://www.npr.org/2011/05/16/136214779/college-student-debt-grows-is-it-worth-it


It made me think about the wonderful higher education system we have here and how we should leverage it to help our own people and industry.   I began to think of what we ought to be doing to turn this ship around.  My plan is simple, at least to say, and is two pronged.

1. Educate our workforce differently:  We have the biggest and best university infrastructure in the world.  We need to leverage this strength.  We need to educate our young people to compete in the world economy.  We need scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and computer scientists.
    
2. Provide jobs for the new workforce:  We then have to create the jobs to put these people to work to build our business and industrial infrastructure back-up.  

It is a great plan.  There is just one little question.  How the heck do we fund and provide effective incentives to students, universities, and businesses to make this plan work?  Three are models for this:  Japan (30 years ago), Korea, and, of course, China.  We are competing against countries that plot and plan.   They have focused on industries and sectors and have done a great job making inroads and even dominating industries.  Japan did this, as menitoned above, with consumer electronics, automobiles, and heavy industry.  Korea did it in consumer electronics first in microwave ovens and then having LG and Samsung do to Japan what Japan did to the US in consumer electronics.   China took a lot of production from Europe and the US with an army of really cheap labor.  Besides the cheap labor, the government created policies and incentives to facilitate industrial growth in the country.  As a nation, we let it happen.  Cost reduction was the major driver in the move.  There was the “huge sucking sound” that H. Ross Perot talked about in the 1990s about NAFTA.  He was absolutely right, his timing and geography were off is all.

We should do the same thing.  What is our industrial strategy in this country?  Seriously, what is our Industrial Strategy in this country?  Where do we see our place in the world economy in 2016 and 2021?  Where do we want to see job growth in the next five and ten years?  What are we doing to facilitate this?   Our politicians always seem promise the creation of quality jobs and then there is little follow through.  There has to be a partnership of government and industry to make this happen.  We are spending a lot of money funding wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Maye we can take some of these funds and invest them in our industrial base and our workforce.

We rely on the free market, the competitive marketplace, to drive our business sectors.  Companies either will adapt to be competitive or go out of business.  It is hard to argue that this does not work.  It worked from the beginning of the industrial revolution until today.   There was a lot of debate and criticism when the auto companies were taken over by the government in the Great Recession.  A lot of business people thought we should have let them fail.  The argument is that inept leadership and poor union relations took General Motors and Chrysler to bankruptcy.   I believe the government did the right thing.  General Motors paid back the government last year.  Chrysler did the same just this month.  We only did this with these auto companies and the banks because of the dismal state of the economy in the Great Recession.  We need to consider being more proactive in this regard.

The second part of the equation is education.  We need to make our students the best in the world.  We need to ensure that we are all literate, that we produce good managers, engineers, scientists, and mathematicians.  We need to ensure the education excels both in theory and practicality.  We need to also realize that college is not for everyone.  We need to people to learn trades that will be necessary to support the re-industrialization of this great nation.  

We cannot survive as a nation where the majority of the population works in the service industry.  There is no wealth or growth in that.

May 20:  I learned of another report that has a slightly different angle.  This comes from the Boston Consulting Group

Within the next five years, the United States is expected to experience a manufacturing renaissance as the wage gap with China shrinks and certain U.S. states become some of the cheapest locations for manufacturing in the developed world, according to a new analysis by The Boston Consulting Group.

http://www.bcg.com/media/PressReleaseDetails.aspx?id=tcm:12-75973

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Hmmm... which are we to believe?  Do we believe China will overtake the US or rather should we believe that manufacturing jobs will return to this country in great numbers?   Certainly, trends develop and play out faster these days than ever before in human history.  I am less sure that humans are equipped to keep up let alone ahead of these changes.

Think about it.  In just about a twenty year span beginning in 1996 to 2016 we have exported a large measure of our manufacturing base to China.  In the next four or five years, we can see both China becoming the predominant economic power and manufacturing jobs to return here.  It is a little mind boggling.  

Why would the jobs come back here and not to the next low cost geography like Africa or Latin America?  Without us being prepared and having an Industrial Strategy, jobs will only return here if the transportation costs increase to the point where production has to be near the points of consumption.  

Jobs and industry will not return here unless we want them too.  We equals the government, corporations, and people of this great nation.  We allowed the jobs to leave.  China had a strategy and funded that strategy to make it happen.  We went for the big fat cost reductions that moving production to Asia offered.  We allowed our corporations to make the easy short term profit decision.   Some of us foresaw the consequences but were not in positions of influence to affect policy.  So, the jobs left and we saw our stock market soar.  The same short term thinking, and yes greed, caused the housing market and banks to melt down causing the Great Recession.

We are a very independent country.  We have great pride, as well we should, in our freedoms and our independence.  But without a strategy and clear mission, short term optimization usually does not guarantee long term optimization.  This is a position that W. Edwards Deming was most passionate about.  It was true in 1970 and 1980.  It is even more true now.

We need determined leadership to make this happen.  We need determined and intelligent leadership to convince all the different segments and constituencies to get on the same page and then to work to realize the goals and objectives.

This is a gargantuan task.

May 25:  I sat down to work on this letter this evening.  First, I thought I would do a little Twitter.  Time magazine posted the following.  

TIME 50 years later, watch JFK's famous 'Moon' speech, now an American icon http://ti.me/iracRp

I did not realize that John F. Kennedy made his famous Moon Race speech until after the Alan Shepard flight.   A 1:45 minute excerpt of the speech is embedded in the Time article.  You hear President Kennedy lay out the objective:  "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.”  I find the message inspiring today.  It was a different time but not all that long ago.  President Kennedy emphasized that we were doing this as a nation and doing it for mankind.  It was noble and good.

I believe we need something just like this.  We need something positive and looking to the future to drive us as a nation and unite us as a people.  We need something to galvanize us, give us a goal that we can collectively work for.  We need something positive to work for and do.

I will be called naive and overly optimistic by some.  Others will accuse me of being too liberal or too conservative.  Don’t ask me how are why I could be accused of both but believe me it will happen.  I will be happy if I can at least get people thinking about this.

I am certain my ideas are not remotely close to a plan.  The ideas need to be discussed, beaten into a plan, and presented to the American people, universities, and corporations in a way that unites us all.

I would love to President Obama lay out a proposal and fund a plan that does just as President Kennedy did 50 years ago.

Un-Raptured

May 21st came and went uneventfully.  To me, it is what I both expected and kind of hoped for.  I really would like to spend more time here with friends and family, doing the things that provide fulfillment and.  I really look forward to meeting and getting to know grandchildren at some point.  I am not sure if there is ever a good time for the world to end.  May 21, 2011 just did seem like it was the time.

Perhaps none of us are any good and we were all left behind. Gee, I am pretty sure that is not the case. I know some very good exemplary people that would have been taken up.  

This whole end of the world thing did create a certain amount of buzz.  My little blog piece http://t.co/PzXQCg6, The Rapture - May 21, 2011,  had a record number of hits.  Well it had a record number of hits for my blogs.  In one day, it became the most read posting ever. I was amazed to see that 350 people read it.  I had a really teeny little glimpse of what going viral must be like.

Clearly I was not alone in my fascination with this event that did not happen.  I read one article in the Washington Post over the weekend of what people were planning or not planning to do.  My favorite were some young people who were recruiting others via social media to leave clothes strewn about, full outfits, to give the illusion that people were raptured right out of their clothes.  If they had been able to pull that stunt off on any grand scale, I am sure it would have really freaked out some people.  There were others that were planning to spend time in worship with others feeling the same way.  The vast majority of folks simply went about doing whatever it was they had planned.

We were in Washington DC to celebrate my son’s 30th birthday.  He and his wife live in Georgetown.  It happened to be Georgetown University’s Graduation on May 21.  People had travelled from all over the United States and the world to be with the children or grandchildren who were graduated.  I did see one of those sign toting “the end is near” cross between a street monk and homeless person.  While his sign was predicting our demise, he seemed oblivious to all the hype about May 21.  His sign was what they call “evergreen.”  I am sure he is using the same sign today without modifying it one little bit.

I read about people who firmly believed that The Rapture was going to happen and that they were going to Raptured.  These people liquidated all their assets to advertise the coming of this end.  There were stories of people that ran up their credit cards touring the US before they were Raptured up.  They all believed so strongly that money become worthless to them.  I had conjectured the same, but I only conjectured.  I wonder how those folks are feeling today.  Yikes,  not only do they feel let down that nothing happened but now their finances are in shambles.  They have to figure out a way to re-group and move forward.

This whole thing was due a 89 year old evangelist named Harold Camping.  He went into seclusion as soon as he realized that The Rapture would not be happening on the day he has been predicting for months.  He emerged today expressing that he was totally “flabbergasted” and “astounded” that The Rapture did not occur.   While he was expressing how disappointed he and his followers were, his radio network quietly retooled their branding that seems to include not mentioning The Rapture affair at all.  

Camping went on to say that God decided not to torture those left behind for five months but rather to make the event, when it does come, happen all in one day.   I am a bit impressed that the Almighty shares such top level strategic information with him.  In reality, it seems as if Harold Camping is trying to extend his fifteen minutes of fame.

He did not deserve the first fifteen minutes and certainly should not be granted any kind of extension.

I am glad everyone I know and care for is still around.

The Rapture - May 21, 2011

May 12:  There was a report on NPR’s All Things Considered as I was driving from my client to my teaching gig.  It was about The Rapture which many believe is supposed to happen on May 21st just nine short days from now.  What is The Rapture?  This is when God comes down and takes the true believers, the faithful, up to heaven.  Everyone left behind is basically in deep trouble.  They shall suffer though the end of the earth.

There have been a a popular series of Christian novels written about this.  Left Behind is a series of sixteen novels written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.  There is way more dogma surrounding this than I would ever want to get into here.  This is supposedly all outlined in The Bible in the books of Ezekial, Isiah, Thesalonians, and, most certainly, Revelations.  To understand just how little I understand consider the folliowing lines from Wikipedia

Left Behind is a series of 16 best-selling novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, dealing with Christian dispensationalist End Times: pretribulation, premillennial, Christian eschatological viewpoint of the end of the world.

Really?  Dispensationalist?  Pretribulation?  Premillenial?  Eschatologica?  And the end of the world?  I do not know what these words mean. I suppose I should have read these novels.  I also suppose, given that these words sound so very confusing to me, that I will be amongst those left behind.  I do not think I can do much in the next nine days to make a difference.  If I were to valiantly try to make amends or changes, I would have to assume an all knowing and all powerful God would have to know I was just doing it to save my soul.  Plus, again given my confusion by the worlds used, I would probably not know what to change or how much to change.   

I remember the Harmonic Convergence event of the 1980s.  There was even more hoopla (hoopla then is what we call buzz these days) about that then there seems to be for this weekends end of times. I remember the 2012 Mayan End of the world which have been “recalculated.”  The NPR piece talked about other ends of the world that clearly did not happen.  I guess I am of the belief, well at least the hope, that this one will pass uneventfully.  

May 19:  It is my sister Laura’s birthday today.  She would have been 53 years old today.  She passed away in 2002.  My sisters Nancy and Ani, my cousin David, and my mother always exchange emails this day and share spiritual feelings   

Amid thinking about my sister and how fast time has gone since she passed, I was reminded again by Yahoo News about the coming rapture on May 21st.  We will actually be in DC to celebrate my son Aram’s thirtieth birthday.  His birthday is actually on Monday but we will celebrate it on Saturday and Sunday.  If the rapture were to happen on the 21st as some are predicting it will certainly be a memorable birthday for my son and all how made the trek to celebrate it with him.  

In theory, we could start the festivities with the ten of so people and end up with some number less then that.  The pious and true believers in our little group might not be there for the birthday cake and the opening of the gifts.

Other than the crazy scariness of being “left behind” and thus somewhat damned, there are other questions that have come to mind:

1. I have to get some specific things done for my client in preparation for a meeting on Monday.  This will require taking my laptop and spending sometime working over this weekend.  If the rapture occurs, will the meeting be cancelled?  Should I not waste my time preparing now for something that won’t even matter in a few days?
2. At the birthday dinner, should I order obscenely expensive champagne and cognacs?  I mean if apocalyptic events unfold during dinner I might not even get the bill.  If I get the bill and were left behind, I wouldn’t care much about paying a credit card bill.  A bad credit score would be the least of my worries.

Both of these questions presuppose that I would be among the “left behind.”  Just because I am asking this inane borderline sacrilegious questions mean that I may not make the pure of heart cut.  I have doubts about my own worth and value in this regard.  I attribute it to being human and a combination of jerk and asshole... at times.  The people quoted in the various articles about this May 21st rapture thing are all 100% that this is going to happen and they will be going to heaven.  I just wonder how they can be so sure about either?

OK, it is clear that I am not taking this seriously.  Part of me must be a little concerned or I would be even more scathing and facetious in my words here.  Yet, if I were to guess and mind you it is only a guess, nothing will happen.  I want to hear what those so sure this was going to happen will have to say come Sunday morning.  I suppose they will go back to the algorithms they used in their calculations, make some changes, and come back with another date some time in the next few months or years.