I have always been the voice of reason. I am adept at looking at another’s opposing viewpoint and weighing it for legitimacy before deciding how I feel about it. Do I agree or disagree with that viewpoint and why? I love to play devil’s advocate. Some of my favorite memories from college were of nights in the lounge arguing various talking points with my friends. We’d talk politics, religion, sports, history, law, science, and many other subjects. We’d start out in the evening and by dawn, we’d have taken up the others’ viewpoints, just for the fun of it, and be arguing each other’s viewpoint. For me, that was nearly four decades ago.
I grew up in a household that supported the Republican candidate 100% of the time. In the latest election cycle, with Donald Trump running against Hillary Clinton, it was a no-brainer – vote for Donald Trump. My parents would have voted for a rock if it could run for office on the Republican ticket, and Donald Trump was the next best thing. When I first graduated from college, I saw myself as a Republican. I, too, would have voted for a candidate like Donald Trump, thirty five years ago. But the ensuing years have softened my political viewpoint. Today, I consider myself an independent who leans conservative. I voted for Obama, Bush Jr., Bill Clinton, and Bush Sr., once each. I did not vote for Donald Trump. Today, I’m more interested in candidates – Presidential or Congressional – who will represent the needs of all Americans. When I first graduated from college, every candidate worked to represent every one of their constituents, regardless of their political affiliation. Today, that is no longer true of every candidate. Therefore, it’s important to look far beyond candidates’ political affiliations and ideologies to determine whether they’re good for the country or not.
Who am I really? I have a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Information Technology. I have worked blue collar jobs. I have worked white collar jobs. I have owned a small IT company with zero, one, or two employees over a 15 year period. I have worked for major employers. I have been a contractor and a consultant. I have made more than $200,000 in a single year, and I’ve made less than $15,000 in a single year. I’ve been fortunate enough to have health insurance through an employer and I’ve been unlucky enough to have to buy my own health insurance through the affordable care act, which is anything but affordable. I have worked for an hourly wage and I’ve worked back to back to back to back 80 to 100 hour-weeks for months at a time as a salaried employee whose income didn’t change whether I worked 40 hours or 100 hours in a week. My wife and I are closing in on 30 years together. Our only kids have fur and four legs. We have fostered dozens of dogs in our home.
I voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, not because I thought she would be good for the country, but because her opponent would be disastrous for the country. Unfortunately, Donald Trump – or “The Don” or “Infant Orange” as I like to call him – won the election and the things that make this a great country are already beginning to unravel in favor of the things that make this country “white” again. Unlike The Don, Hillary would have worked for all Americans, not just the ones who supported her and think like her.
I am Pro-Choice because who am I to tell another human being what’s right or wrong in her life? I am not a God. Therefore, I have no authority to speak on His behalf and judge those who would seek an abortion or speak for those who haven’t yet been born. That is His job.
And speaking of God. I was raised in a home where the idea of God, of Heaven or Hell, of spirits or angels, was taboo. Anything that could not be explained by science was utter nonsense. Now go read my book, The Spiritual Awakening.
I am for Religious Freedom. And for the record, Religious Freedom doesn’t provide a list of allowable religions for the citizens to choose from. If you are a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu, or even nothing at all (or any of a hundred others), you are welcome here and I will support your right to be free from religious persecution in the United States. For the record, I believe that Obama is a Christian who may have been raised as a Muslim. But I don’t care. He could have been a Muslim, and I would still support his right to run for President and serve as President of the United States. The United States Constitution gives him that right.
I am for a certain amount of gun control. There is nothing in the 2nd amendment that would be violated by eliminating conceal and carry, open carry, or assault weapons. If you want to carry a weapon, then you should be able to demonstrate that you are responsible enough to carry that weapon. The conservatives want to keep all of the refugees out because at least a few of them might be radicalized and want to destroy our way of life. The liberals want to keep guns out of the hands of the people because some of those people might have violent tendencies and want to destroy our way of life. The converse of both is 100% unacceptable to the other. Yet, the base reason for wanting the refugees out and the guns out is the same premise. The conservatives want the refugees to stay out because they cannot tell the bad ones from the good ones. The liberals want the guns out because they cannot tell the bad gun owners from the good gun owners. Neither realizes that they have the same argument. Neither is willing to listen to anything designed to curb the others’ position.
Are you a heterosexual? Are you a lesbian? Are you a homosexual? Are you transgendered? Are you a fence post? I believe that you have the right to call yourself anything that you want. You can be straight, gay, lesbian, transgendered, bisexual, white, black, green, purple, or even a chimpanzee; I don’t care. I believe that if you are a human being and if you choose to marry another human being and it’s consensual, then you should be allowed to marry. I support the LGBT community’s right to exist and to have all of the legal rights granted to every other citizen. We are all humans. If you want to use a public restroom, use the one that best fits your appearance. After all, before it was an issue in the courts, I guarantee these people didn’t just hold it. My spouse and I are of opposite sexes and we were born that way. You want equal rights under the law. I am prepared to vote for your rights. But please don’t flaunt your choice to my face. I have no need to know. And, frankly, I don’t want to know. I am a reasonable person who is perfectly willing to go through life without knowing that your artificially assigned gender is not how you were born, or what your sexual preference is.
Do you believe that you are somehow entitled to the same life as a wealthy person? Do you believe that the wealthy got wealthy on the backs of the poor? Do you believe that you are entitled to a $15/hour minimum wage? You won’t get any sympathy from me. I was a business owner. Labor costs are already the biggest expense that an employer pays. I do not believe that any employer owes its employees a living wage. I do believe that the employer needs to honor the wages that they’ve agreed to pay when the employee accepts the job. Further, I believe that the employee needs to work for the wages that they’ve agreed to accept to do the job or else they should go work someplace else. I believe that an employer should have the right to terminate an employee who fails to do their job, regardless of whether they choose to strike or protest or they are out sick too many days. The wealthy got wealthy because they managed their income and expenses better than the rest of us. The book, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era, is a great book about the economy. The basic premise is that there is a time in the not-too-distant future when there will be no more need for humans to work. Every job will be done by a computer or a robot – even fixing the broken computers and robots. Forcing employers to pay higher and higher minimum wages only serves to hasten our advancement toward a non-human workforce. The state of New York created a local $15/hour minimum wage. McDonald’s responded by installing kiosks that would take people’s orders, thus eliminating a large segment of their workforce to keep labor costs down. McDonald’s will tell you that those kiosks were already planned. But they started rolling them out immediately after the minimum wage increase.
Are you still with me? Man-made climate change is bunk. The science doesn’t support the argument. While there was some discussion prior to Al Gore’s book, An Inconvenient Truth, the truth is that the current explosion of support worldwide happened after the release of his book. But Al Gore got his facts wrong. His relationship between temperature and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is backward. Carbon dioxide rises in the atmosphere hundreds of years AFTER the temperature rises. In other words, the primary driving force of man-made climate change, according to the climate change accepters, happens after the climate has warmed. The climate is always changing. That’s the nature of the beast. We could forcibly change our climate, but what would the long-term consequences be if we did? The climate change pundits are basing their theories on a few hundred years worth of data out of 5 billion years of history. Recently, NOAA — the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration — was puzzled by a deviation in the climate data where the data no longer matched the computer models for man-made warming — in-fact, the data showed a cooling trend. NOAA “scientists” did what pundits have done for thousands of years: they manipulated the data until it showed what they wanted it to show. That’s not the scientific methodology. The scientific methodology is to recognize that the model is wrong and adjust the model so it correctly represents the data. The story is in the data, not in the model. Changing the data to match the theoretical data model is just a well-hidden lie.
I have been willfully unemployed for many months. I haven’t accepted a single dime worth of unemployment benefits. I am at a crossroads in my life where I don’t know what’s next for me. My mental image of self is: I am standing in the middle of the intersection, where Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks, Cast Away, 2000) found himself at the end of the movie. My path leading up to that point is different than Chuck’s, and my future choices are likely different, but I am nonetheless at the crossroads trying to decide which way to proceed and I have been stuck here for many months. I have a good decade of hard work to go before retirement. I want to make it count. I want to be useful. And I want to make enough money that I can actually retire in a decade.