It's like the weather: We all complain but no one does anything

I have been trying not to be so outspoken in my comments to political questions on Facebook.

It isn't that I don't have strong opinions. It isn't that my own views haven't evolved strikingly in recent years. Seven years ago I wrote what I thought would be a good manifesto for a party of the political center. It drew a lot of attention and it left me feeling there might be someplace to go with it.

Then 2008 changed everything. America took a giant step into the 21st century by electing the first president who wasn't a white man, and while a lot of people thought it was wonderful, the election of Barack Obama brought a lot of formerly quiet racists out of the woodwork.

It was actually pretty amazing how often we heard things like "It's the White House, n**ger," or saw pictures of Obama as a jungle dweller or watermelons growing on the White House lawn.

It may surprise some people who know me to hear that I don't think Obama has been a particularly effective president. I think he has tried too hard to compromise with people who aren't willing to give an inch, and I have questioned his priorities at times.

To be fair, though, questioning his effectiveness is sort of like questioning a baseball player' s hitting when each time he goes up to the plate, someone from the opposing team kicks him in the groin.

When you start your first term in the White House with the opposition leader in the Senate saying his only goal for the next four years is to keep you from being re-elected, there's something wrong about that.

Consensus? Not likely

And when you have some of the richest people in America spending tens of millions of dollars to oppose your programs, and disguising the well-financed opposition as a grassroots movement, it makes it difficult to get anything done.

And when it comes to Facebook, what you get is often the less thoughtful, worse informed people speaking the loudest.

You'll get folks parroting whatever they heard from Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh or Fox News.

You don't find truth that way.

I get incredibly frustrated when I hear people saying we should follow the "original intent" of the Founding Fathers, as if a constitution for a coastal nation of three million people would be a perfect fit for a country that has 313 million people and covers most of a continent.

I see people on the right advocating for a return to the way things were 50-100 years ago, and while I doubt they mean a return to racism and sexism, there's no way to do that anyway. Too many good jobs have disappeared for good and we have far too much wealth concentrated in far too few people.

We're never going to have doctors making house calls again, and there's probably never going to be a job for everyone who wants to work.

What we really need is a Constitutional Convention to rework things. Small rural states have far too much power. You could get 51 U.S. senators -- a slim majority -- from states that add up to just 20 percent of the population. Giving such a small number of people a veto over the common good isn't going to result in anything good.

What we really need is to get rid of states.

No, I'm not talking about telling Mississippi to find itself another country to be part of, and I'm not talking about messing with Texas. I think we should change the map and create 50 states of relatively equal population. That might mean the Dakotas would have to hook up with Montana, Wyoming and God knows who else to make one state, and it might mean California would be six different states.

But it would help.

H.L. Mencken wrote in 1922 that the American republic would fall in less than 100 years due to two weaknesses -- ignorance and greed. Thirty years ago, I would have laughed at that. Now I think it may happen.

The thing is, there has to be a reason to keep working at it. There has to be something good we can accomplish. Otherwise, there will be something called America, but it won't be anything like what the founders gave us.

If we're honest, we've already lost a lot of that.

Maybe we can hang onto the rest, but it will take a heck of a lot of work.

A lot more work than just commenting on Facebook.

Corporal punishment is schools is a silly relic of a different America

I never thought much of corporal punishment in schools.

My one personal experience with it was so strange, so Kafka-esque almost, as to eliminate any possible feeling that it might be useful.

The board of education

It happened in late January 1963, just after we had moved from Ohio to Northern Virginia for my Dad's job working for the Air Force. I was halfway through the eighth grade, and all of a sudden I didn't know anyone at all.

On my second or third day at my new school, I was in the middle of changing classes when a kid I didn't even know jumped me and started hitting me.

I had a quick decision to make. My parents had told me many times they did not want me to fight, that it took a bigger man to walk away from a fight than to participate in one. That was something that made a lot of sense to me for adults, but it really didn't seem like a workable way for a 13-year-old who was the new kid in town to behave.

The kid who had jumped me was no bigger than I was, and he wasn't particularly strong. I probably could have held my own against him, but I remember thinking that if I retaliated, I would be punished too. I decided to cover up and protect myself, trusting to the truth to be on my side.

Teachers broke up the fight and took us to the principal's office. As soon as the assistant principal for discipline walked into the room, the other kid spoke up.

Thank you sir ...

"He started it."

Of all the things he might have said, that was the last thing I expected to hear. I denied it and tried to tell the guy what had really happened. He could have asked if there were any witnesses and maybe someone would have told the truth.

Instead, he said since it was my word against the other kid's, he would have to punish both of us. I said that wasn't right, and his response was ridiculous. He suggested that I was frightened of being paddled, and the other kid smirked at me.

So I was spanked. It wasn't a big deal -- one hit, maybe two, I really don't remember -- but it left me feeling that the system was completely ridiculous. I found myself wondering what kind of person wanted to be an assistant principal for discipline, and for years and years I thought someday I would return to that school as an adult and tell the guy what a jerk he had been.

Of course I didn't. Eventually I even forgot the guy's name, but when it came time for me to talk to my son about the kind of man I hoped he would become, I told him the story.

I told him I didn't want him to be the kind of man who started fights, but I said when the question arose of whether to fight back when he was attacked, I trusted him to use his own judgement. I told him there would be times when he should walk away. I told him there would be other times when he might want to defend himself.

I trusted him to know the difference.

A lot of the corporal punishment has vanished from our schools, but there is still too much. I think it's stupid, because the only lesson it really teaches is that bigger people can assert their will on littler people.

There's nothing educational about that.

Sure it's scary, but I'm not going to let it worry me

There aren't many words in the English language more frightening than "cancer."

My mother is a cancer survivor, my grandfather outlasted cancer and died at age 89. The people I consider my closest friends have all been pretty fortunate, and we went through a scare about 15 years ago only to learn that my lovely wife did not have cancer.

One of my sisters-in-law has been battling cancer for the last couple of years and seems to be holding her own.

Monday I'm going to find out if it's my turn.

About six weeks ago, I had a couple of symptoms that sent me to the doctors office for the first time in more than a year. I learned I had Type 2 diabetes, and I learned there were a couple of other irregularities that would need to be checked out.

Apparently there is the possibility I may qualify for a yellow ribbon. Thankfully, not the one of the right. Bone cancer is one of the really scary ones. My problem, such as it may be, is with my bladder.

I'm really not that worried. The lab tests that have been done don't show any cancer cells, and I haven't had any pain or discomfort.

Still, they want to be sure. I'm going into the hospital Monday morning for a biopsy, which in this case is considered outpatient surgery. I will go in, get put to sleep -- temporarily -- and then they will open me up and look at what they think is a tumor on my bladder. If it turns out to be benign, that would be the end of it. If it is cancerous, then we'll have to determine where to go from there.

I don't have any complaints. I have had a wonderful life, and while I certainly hope it will last longer than just this, I don't think I have been cheated out of anything.

At this point, all I can really do is leave it in the hands of God, who has always treated me pretty well.

I've got no problem at all with that.

Tough to compromise when you think the other guys are evil

Sometimes it's difficult not to think our political system is falling apart.

A system like ours really only works if the opposing parties have at least a modicum of respect for each other. Each side wants to be in power -- and they relish it when they are -- but they can't see it as disastrous for the country just because the other side beats them in an election.

During the years America worked well -- the post World War II era -- the two parties managed enough respect for each other to get things done. There was a basic civic consensus on both left and right that the government had a role to play in Americans' lives. Democrats thought its role should be bigger, Republicans thought it should be smaller.

But no one in the mainstream saw the government as the enemy, except for maybe some of the wealthiest Americans, who didn't see any reason they should pay higher taxes to educate people or to feed the poor.

These folks, many of them people who inherited their wealth or who expanded it through government contracts, never saw themselves as anything but self-made men.

Their fathers had opposed Social Security and they fought against Medicare as if we were taking down the Stars and Stripes for the Hammer and Sickle.

But even a moderate Republican like President Eisenhower admitted that Social Security had become such a part of our country since its inception in 1935 that anyone who proposed doing away with it would find he had no future in politics.

Ditto with Medicare. Before it passed, Ronald Reagan said Medicare would turn our country into a Communist dictatorship. But even the most anti-government types now -- the Tea Party protesters -- made a point out of leaving Medicare alone.

Things sort of collapsed politically in the early part of this century. George W. Bush took office in 2001 after a highly disputed presidential election, and benefited greatly in a political sense from the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Although Democrats didn't like him, they basically supported much of what he was doing and at least didn't obstruct him.

All that changed when Barack Obama was elected in 2008. The first words out of Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell's mouth were that his only goal over the next four years was to prevent Obama's re-election.

Republicans did everything they could to obstruct Obama, and the bad economy had people more nervous than usual about their lives. Add to that millions of dollars in political donations to start the so-called Tea Parties and the controversial fact of the first non-white president in our history, and you had almost a perfect storm of protest.

It certainly didn't help any that the media had become so irresponsible. Cable networks like Fox News allowed people on their shows to continue making accusations about Obama even after they had been disproved. Huge numbers of people opposing the president supposedly believe he wasn't born in the United States, that he is actually a Muslim and most amazingly at all, that he is the Antichrist.

Liberals aren't that imaginative. They just thing the people who believe these things are idiots.

It's tough to find any consensus for the good of the country when you think your opponent is an idiot, or even worse, when you think he's one of Satan's minions.

Can we get past all this? I have my doubts.It's one thing to disagree over how high taxes should be, but you try telling the ultra-religious that no, you cannot turn America into Bible-vania. How are they supposed to compromise with what they see as evil?

I've written this before, but it seems to me that over the last 40 years or so, we have undergone an unfortunate devolution in our respect for the opinions of others. Can you imagine a Teabagger today saying, "I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

Actually we've gone way past that, passing through "You're wrong" and "You're stupid" and winding up in the worst possible place -- "You're evil."

Where can you go from there?

***

It's maybe the best time of year to be a sports fan. Baseball is working up to the World Series in another week or so, pro and college football are in full swing, the hockey season has started and pro basketball is approaching opening day. Baseball is what makes it the best, though.

I don't know who Manny Schwertz is, but he has an interesting piece about why he is no longer a Republican.

I watch a lot of movies on DVD, generally while I'm doing something else on my computer. But I found one thing that doesn't work when I'm not giving the screen my full attention -- watching silent movies. I was watching "Wings" for the first time, but I realized after about 30 minutes that I was missing dialogue cards, who sort of came out of nowhere.

I don't think the government shutdown affected the three federal employees to whom I'm related. My brother is an essential employee in his office, and my two children are both consular officers in embassies outside the country. But there are all sorts of families who aren't that lucky. I'm glad for their sake it's over.

Real-life love stories are often every bit as wonderful as the movies

Sometimes things surprises us, and sometimes the surprises are even pleasant ones.

I don't read Nicholas Sparks' books, and I think the only one of his movies I had seen was "Message in a Bottle," back in 1999. I never saw the one so many people seem to like -- "The Notebook."

The Notebook

I finally saw it, nearly 10 years after it was released. It wasn't because of Ryan Gosling and Rachel MacAdams. I gave it a try because of James Garner, who I have always enjoyed, and Gena Rowlands.

The story touched my heart deeply, because it reminded me so much of a good friend who is now gone.

The thing that makes "The Notebook" special isn't the story of young love. It's the eternal nature of love, the story of a formerly young man whose lifelong lover is slipping away into dementia and no longer remembers him most of the time.

It touched my heart because the story -- at least the older part of it -- was almost the same as one I knew from a friend of mine.

I was 31 years old and editor of the campus newspaper at George Mason University when I met Walter Masterson. He was 60 that spring, the baseball coach at GMU and a veteran of 15 major league seasons from 1939 to 1957. I covered the games, partly out of a love of baseball and partly because I enjoyed the postgame conversations I had with the coach.

Walt

We would start out talking about the game, but then move on to an hour or two of non-sports subjects. We talked about education, one of his favorite subjects, and he told me why there would never be major league baseball again in Washington unless a new stadium was built.

We stayed in touch into 1984, when my career as a sportswriter had taken me to South Carolina. Walt made a call for me to the sports editor of the Oklahoma City paper, for a job I was trying to get. He told me he thought I would get hired, but it turned out a hiring freeze got in the way.

I moved on to St. Louis, then to Colorado and eventually to California. I lost touch with Walt after that, but I used the Internet to locate him in 2005 and re-established the friendship. He was long retired by then, and at Christmas 2005 I visited him at his home in Durham, North Carolina.

He was 85 then and his beloved wife Ginny was in a nursing home with Alzheimer's. He was living alone in their home, but the next year he sold the house and moved into the assisted living part of the nursing home where Ginny was.

I visited him again at Christmas 2007, the last time I saw him.  He was living in the equivalent of a hotel room with bathroom, and he spent part of every day with Ginny. She no longer recognized him, but they had been married for 66 years and he wasn't going anywhere.

We talked frequently on the phone. I had been trying to help him write a baseball book in which he would pass on some of the things he had learned over the years. It never got finished. He had a stroke and died on April 5, 2008.

I still miss him, and I'm aware that as I write this, I am three years older now than he was when we first met. I don't expect to live to 87, and I would have to live to be nearly 109 to be married to my lovely wife for 66 years. But as long as we both are alive, I will be with her. She is the love of my life, and we will be together even if one doesn't know the other.

Not because of a movie, no matter how beautiful the sentiments are, but because I have a lot of good examples in real life. My parents were married nearly 52 years, my grandparents nearly 65. Then there were Walt and Ginny -- 66 years and he loved her till he died.

That's a great love story.

One problem Americans have is most don't seem to know any different

Why do so many Americans believe that people everywhere else in the world has it worse than they do?

There are numerous reasons, but it all starts with the fact that at least two-thirds of us never travel anywhere outside the United States. Only 30 percent of Americans had passports as recently as 2011, a number that was much lower until passports became necessary to travel to Canada and Mexico.

Of my five closest friends over my lifetime, only two have traveled outside North America. Both of them have graduate degrees, and one traveled as a youth because his father was in the Navy.

Two of the other three have traveled very little. They're just sort of typical Americans, seeing the grass is greener right where they are. Their vacations tend to be to the mountains, to the beach or to Disney, -land if they live out west and World if they're in the east.

Those of us who grew up in the '50s and '60s heard time and again from our parents about how badly people were suffering in postwar Europe. We were told to eat our vegetables because there were children starving in Europe for at least a decade after any actual starvation was happening.

We were told time and again how much better we lived than people in other countries, and for a while it was true. But somewhere along the line, things started to change. In the 1970s, we looked up and realized that folks in Europe were driving better cars than we were. They may have been smaller, but they were more dependable and got better mileage.

They also had better television sets with sharper pictures, and most of the electronic stuff -- stereos, cassette decks, the new video recorders -- were coming to America from Japan and Europe.

It was around that time that we made a mistake that should have been obvious. When the laws against multinational corporations started going away, those corporations decided they could make a lot more money by getting rid of high-priced American labor and using Third World workers to make the products that would be sold in the United States.

It came as no surprise to most people when at some point in the early '80s we realized there were no longer any televisions being manufactured in the U.S.

We went from a company that made things to one that waited on people. We have reached a point now where nearly 70 percent of all jobs in America are in the service sector.

"Welcome to Walmart."

"Would you like fries with that?"

"How may I help you?"

Meanwhile, folks in other countries find that their lives are improving. All the benefits we don't have, they do. In the countries considered to have the happiest people -- how's that for a survey? -- people have much lower levels of stress. They don't have to worry about medical bankruptcy. They don't have to worry that they won't be prepared for retirement and will have to work till they die.

And surprise of surprises, they actually take the point of view that making sure everyone has at least four weeks a year of vacation, and making sure they take it, actually makes them more productive when they return from their time off.

Imagine that. When you look at our employers by comparison, it seems that the biggest motivation our workers are expected to have is fear of losing their jobs.

It's truly a shame more Americans don't get the chance to see how people in other so-called free societies live. Call them socialist if you want, but if you're honest, you'll accept the fact that these are societies that are run for the greater good. Not just for the people at the top of the pyramid.

It's a shame we can't seem to learn from them.