A Thankful Post: Sometimes Failure is for the Best

After watching another BBC special last night, I went to bed extremely thankful that certain things in my life haven't worked out. No one is always good at everything, but still, I wanted to be the exception to the rule.  One area I am definitely not good at is dating. I suck. I pick people who are bad for me and my admiration of their virtues makes me completely blind to their faults.  Mostly it is harmless, but there have been those few bad choices that probably would have sent me over the edge.  Like the heroine in the BBC special, whose husband was a philandering idiot, and tried to make their son into a drunk when he was like 5 years old. Really now? A five year old. 

There was one scene that was particularly poignant. The heroine and her loser husband are arguing, and suddenly he grabs her by the neck and basically smashes her into the wall behind her.  After being a victim of physical abuse in a relationship, I know exactly how it feels, and how suddenly the fits of rage can come. The scene seemed like a moment in my life, replayed before my eyes. At that moment I thought: thank God for failure!  When the relationship ended, I was so young I didn't understand the blessing in disguise. Not that I am very old now, but I do know that there is a serious difference between the understanding of an 18 year old, and the understanding of a 25 year old. 

The American culture teaches a get-up-and-try-again mentality.  I think that this culture encourages abuse.  Because people think that things must work out, they must be able to master a situation and be good at something they try.  I never felt this pressure growing up; I felt confidence abandoning pursuits that did not seem to go in my favor.  There is a difference between failure in an area and hitting a rough patch.  However, the way that things are perceived culturally make this difference hard to come by.   This can be especially true with personal relationships, and the desire to mend (taught by tv or otherwise) when the reality is that the relationship is a failure.  And, though no one seems willing to admit it, you learn more in failure than in success.  But not just to get back on the horse. Maybe you learn that this horse isn't right for you, and you should try a pony next.  Or walking. Or just standing still. 

From someone who feels like failure is losing, and hates to lose, a failed relationship really sticks in my craw. I want to be good at everything, and have every relationship end with protestations of love, but realizations of impossibility.  This never seems to be what happens. Someone considers a restraining order. And in the extreme, I consider whether I should change my name. Not always; but enough to make me wonder just how I could be so bad at this. 

However, I do have the ability to look back and laugh at my choices. So  I am thankful that providence seems to intervene and help me escape the bad choices, and that I can celebrate the good ones.  Life is full of situations where we must make choices that open some doors and close others. Relationship choices are those types of situations.  And while we cannot take back what we have done, we can learn from it, and be glad when situations lead us to growth, change, and knowledge.  Sometimes failure at something really is best. It reminds us we are human. And, especially with personal relationships,  it can save us from a much worse situation down the road. 

Faith Based Healthcare? For the Provider, no less!

A CNN Article about healthcare workers following their own beliefs was troubling for me. Here is the article: http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/12/18/provider.conscience/index.html.

When I was 20, I had a pregnancy scare.  The pharmacy where I got my birth control pills was closed for some reason, so I had gone to a different place.  The pharmacy where I went gave me pills that were more than two years pass the expiration date.  When I called, they told me that they don't condone sex without marriage, and that they did not sell the morning after pill.  When I missed my period, I was quite certain I was pregnant.  I was a junior in college at the time, at the end of my Junior year. I was stressed out of my mind, and went to see my regular doctor at the student clinic for a pregnancy test and to discuss my options. My boyfriend showed up, and I was so mad I refused to talk to him.  I was so confused by the way that a stupid situation could change my life. 

The first thing that my doctor told me was that he does not perform abortions, and he doesn't think that I should get one either. He explained his theory of life. Then he gave me my options. 

Fortunately I was not pregnant.  But to this day, I don't know what I would have done if I was.  It was one of the most frightening times in my life.  I appreciated that my doctor took the time out to discuss options that, in reality, were not things of his choosing.  He of course, before I left, reminded me that abstinence is the best policy. And wrote a prescription for the morning after pill. 

I always admired my doctors ability to walk a line.  He was a wonderful conservative Christian who really practiced what he believed.  But he provided excellent medical care, and gave his patients, many of them young women, all the options.  That has got to be hard at a college clinic.  But I know that it helped me stay both safe and informed during college, and helped me make smarter decisions about my sexual health.  

As a conservative Christian and attorney, I understand the troubling intersection between faith and choice when you are advising someone else.  What concerns me with the new agency rules and guidelines, with the force of law, is that it impacts the duty of a healthcare professional to discuss options.  And that is really important. 

I further wonder about the legal implications of this.  Some may not know it, but when the United States Supreme Court made its historic decision in Rowe v. Wade, the child at the center of the discussion was almost 3 years old.  I often wonder how that child feels today, a kind of hail mary pass in the annals of legal theory.  And I wonder what a challenge to these rules would look like.  

I also wonder about the people who make such a choice and their real dedication to a child's life.  I often see people picketing at the Planned Parenthood down the street from where I live. I pass it on my way to work in the morning, and at least a few times a week there are people there with signs. I just wonder if they don't realize that there is another growing crisis around them.  Right now, the departments that handle children who are abused or neglected are having the same budget shortfalls as other agencies.  Children are being returned who should not be, simply because there is no where to put them.  Do they think about that, and the life of abused and unwanted child can face.  We owe a duty to children, not just in the womb, but thereafter.  Fortunately, the child in Roe v. Wade had a mother who could have afforded, both emotionally and financially, to have another child.  But some women, like a 20 year old college student who realized that her pregnancy would mean she was kicked out of college, and that her life would change forever, wouldn't have the liberty to make such a choice.   A woman, and man, in a position dealing with sexual health, needs all the options. 

Imagining a Change from Consumerism

****Ed. Note***** I know nothing about the Obama birth certificate controversy, nor am I advocating having children at home.

One of my favorite law blogs, the Wall Street Journal Law blog, had a few entries on the multitude of law suits against Obama stating that he was not a US Citizen.  The crux of the issue was a live birth certificate, with, what the observers called, faulty information.

About a year ago, I received a call from my mother, letting me know that on a trip home for a birthday of one of her sibilings (I think it was my second oldest uncle), she went to the house where she was born in Ellisville, GA.  My mother, who is younger than Obama, was born in a house.  And so were at least 13 of her 14 siblings.  And it hit me, in reading this article, that no one knows where Obama was born definitively because, a fact that all such articles don't seem to mention, a great deal of babies weren't born in hospitals.  And parents would get certificates of birth months, or even years, later.  It does present an interesting conundrum for citizenship. Is my mother really a citizen because she was born in a house, and her birth certificate is strangely silent about many of the facts surrounding her birth (while it does proclaim her colored, and born, that is about it)?  For all I know, she was born in Mexico (a few miles away?).   If you look at, say my most recent nieces birth certificate (she is 7 months old), it gives so many statistics about her birth it's like information overload, with handprints and footprints, eye color, weight, circumference, and anything else you could possibly want to know about a new born child, including the county and city in the state she was born in.  Do we really need all those statistics?  By the way, my mother's birth was probably nearly free. Try having a baby for under $5,000 and get back to me.

Why the great increase in cost? And is it really worth it? Salaries have not increased by 1000% since 1959. They average a 100% increase over about 20 years.  The cost of child birth, without insurance, prices some people right out of the market.  And perhaps explains why so few people are willing to have very many in this day and age.  I don't know what is to blame: the astronomical rise in the cost of health care,  the tort system that makes insurance so necessary and costly, or the societal belief that we must do all we can, so that we will not feel guilty if things go wrong. 

How does this relate to consumerism? I think that, in an attempt to be knowledgeable we pay for excess. And it is the expensive brand of consumerism that Americans are allowed to have.  We want to be inundated with knowledge.  And safety.  Not necessarily the kind we must work for and seek. But the kind that comes with a price tag. Which is another reason I think higher education can be so costly.  This type of consumerism is like a right of passage.  And I think it is why no one talking about birth certificates is talking about home births, for fear we may wake up and realize that we don't need all the stuff that the media, in the guise of "teaching us" is pushing. Because there was a time when we didn't.  

Again, not advocating home births!  And this post isn't about Obama, just the things that are left out when people have a discussion. 

Communication Lessons Are Helpful for More Than Married Couples

Relationships are always more complicated than they seem.  There is the history that the relationship contains.  There is the future that the relationship represents.  There is the individual goals of the two parties.  After seeing my parents this weekend, who are separated, and talking to my little brother, who recounted that their relationship is, well, rather stable, I couldn't help but think about other relationships that need to read points of stability.

A current relationship that is soon to be in the news is the relationship between the United Auto Workers Union and American auto makers.  If the companies go bankrupt, the theory is that many of their obligations to the union will be discharged. 

The UAW union and American auto makers like GMAC and Chrysler have had a rocky relationship with unions since the beginning. Perhaps it is all owed to Ford, that went on a limb to hire minorities and women in a bid to pay lower wages.  Perhaps part of the problems come from unions that have historically discriminated against women and minorities, and today seem to have a hard time integrating new Americans into their affinity.  Two problematic histories collide, and the problems grow. 

But both the union and the company serve important purposes for maintaining a viable workforce.  They should have a good relationship, one that preserves workers and keeps companies moving.  

In the sixth grade, the teachers in the Dayton City School System went on a strike for several weeks. At first, it was fun, because the substitutes that we had were very easy.  However, after going home and telling my mother that I watched the first half of the  safe sex special by Magic Johnson, she pulled us from the school, and I still don't know what happened at the end.   And I remember the caustic picket line and seeing my loving teachers act out of character, yelling and screaming at those who crossed the lines.  Years later, when discussing a picket at a local grocery store with a high school teacher who took part in the strike when I was in grade school, I was told that either you are a person who crosses pickets or you aren't. I don't think it is that easy, as picking sides in a relationship you need to survive.  

Recently, I came across a list of layoffs on vault.com.  While discussing the current environment for employees, co-workers and I opined that we would take a pay cut to keep our jobs.  In it's inception, a workers union existed to pass on the collective voice of the employee to the employer. Perhaps, before a major company like Cysco Systems laid off several thousand employees, they might have passed along a minor paycut to their workers, resulting in workers keeping their jobs, and still saving the company millions in the bottom line.  But without that collective intelligence, and some greater entity for bargaining, and perhaps justifiably so after decades of both entities failing, with far too narrow a vision, to meet their potential, companies will continue to send this economy spiraling downward.  Which is sad, because the infrastructure is there, and the potential is there, but the ideas of working hard, and pulling together, and general nostalgia that allegedly made this company great can be resurrected. Through employers listening to their employees and giving them a seat at the table where management decisions are made.  And through employees coming together and ignorning superficial differences like accents and skin color to develop a collective good for every employee. 

Debt Only Has a Downside

Debt is like a shackle around a wrist, like a ball and chain.  And today, higher education means that many a student has a significant amount of debt and nothing but an informed mind to show for it. 

Even though the market is actually relatively stable, considering, for young workers and college graduates, it is still a scary place to be considering a move or starting a career. 

And, the situation is getting more and more complicated because of student debt. College costs have increased by 300% in the past thirty years.  Incomes have only increased by about half that.  Endowments are plummeting during this time period.  Scholarships are suffering as a result. And the federal government isn't giving more money to students as a response to the increase in costs.

The increase in debt means fewer choices for students when they graduate.  This could discourage individuals with gifts for areas that doesn't pay as well, such as academia or non-profits.  Graduating with debt will make students more risk adverse in their career choices. You will see fewer start-ups from individuals outside of the monied America, the individuals in a position to challenge the status quo.  Entrepreneur-ship is important, because it keeps industry moving forward. Once an idea becomes established, and the individuals running this idea maintain little incentive for progress, young entrepreneurs are the ones who push the envelope. But the new crop of graduates, saddled with house-sized debt, will be much more reluctant to push anything, except paper for a paycheck. 

And finally, greater debt will cause a much more conservative graduate, especially after witnessing the fast and hard fall of the generation before it. This economic downturn will probably squeeze whatever little entreprenual spirit is left out of the recent and soon to be graduates. They will find a job, and work, keeping their heads down and below the radar.  Perhaps it is how the media tells the tell, but specials on failing small businesses and giant news stories on ailing business giants make it seem that this climate isn't a good one for a new idea, or even some old ones. Perhaps a few current students will take heart, and go start the next Microsoft. But a young Gates successor seems unlikely in the generation that may be known for having significant debt before buying anything. 

I also wonder if the mountain of debt recent and future college graduates have will further forestall important life events like marriage and home ownership. But only time will tell.