My mother was a mover. She moved every few months because she wouldn't pay rent beyond the first month. My sister counted 68 addresses in her movements by age 18. I have lived in the same house, now, for over 30 years. My mother was the most irresponsible person I ever knew for which her reward was being the most unhappy person I ever knew. She was a prime example of why welfare without responsibility destroys humanity. Help that does not help the helpless to help themselves is not help. The social consequences are real: Of eight kids, only 3 finished high school and only I finished college. Private welfare is as dehumanizing as public welfare: consider the whining blond bimbo in California whose great granddady left her $25 million. What's her name? Oh, yeh, Parisite Hilton.
Brains? No, luck. One brother with only a 9th grade education is the major domo of ADM's Decatur expansion: No plumbing, rail, electrical, transportation, etc. is implemented without his reviewing and approving the blueprints--he has a 3-D thinking process and can tell when a 2 ft pipe is going through a 3 ft pipe which it is not supposed to do. Another freshman dropout did 26 years in Marine Corps with achievements that I heard about from other Marines, e.g., interfacing 8" field guns via modems on each cannon to the F.A.A. air traffic computers to prevent the gun from firing if a plane was scheduled to be in the firing test airspace. I, while graduating in at 192 in a class of almost 400, scored in the 97th percentile on the college boards.
I was lucky and did not know it. My resume reflects a studied path to follow new paths every few years. Most people when they read it don't believe it to be true. I went to college for an education not a job. I observed and lived being a "free thinker"--to wit, "Freedom's just another word for nothing else to lose." (Janis Joplin). I wouldn't trade a new thought nor would I deny another person a deserved smile or laugh for all the money in the world. I cared for understanding life without "strings to bind my heart." One can travel farther faster when one travels alone. One can do a variety of things that the average person cannot fathom let alone understand. I have only three regrets which do not include the innumerable stupid, foolish things I did along the way. God, when I think of some of the things I did at SDHS, I wince.
I've been really lucky. Some have accused me of trying to be "perfect." I didn't seek that path. This path unfolded as I tried to live the truths that I discovered one of which was not to hurt others who don't deserve it. Someone said that to find a a--hole as big as me, one would have to go to the Grand Canyon. A long-term friend and legal advisor disagreed by saying that when I want to be an a--hole, one could only find the comparable by emptying the Pacific Ocean.
I've been really lucky. Consider some of the following. My military experience had some exceptional moments and achievements. I completed electronics school scoring the highest on the final exam, a de facto GRE for a BE&E. I was rapidly promoted with waivers on minimum time in rank. One big disappointment was not making the final cut for being one of the annual 100 "mustangs" for matriculation to Annapolis from the enlisted ranks. The review board of three Naval Academy grads said I had the smarts and motivation but my speech impediment would not earn me respect nor be understandable in the heat of battle. They echo'd what my grandfather told me my freshman year at SDHS. When I said I was taking French, he said, "You ought to first learn to speak English." Do you remember my high-pitch unintelligble elmer fudd twang? "The liddle wed wabbit went wunning acwoss da wailwoad twack!"
From electronic school I was assigned to a premo station, one of two Communication Command ships, "floating pentagons" from where the President could direct a war. Bob "watergate" Woodward had served on the ship as a "communication" liaison. Navy food is notoriously the best of the military service. My ship won the best mess afloat in four of the previous five years. Lobster for lunch on Friday! While most Navy ships had one to six electronic technicians, the USS Wright had 44! Due to some unusual events and mentors in the Navy, I finangled an honorable discharged at two years instead of the original six. A twist on my naval experience was how in the early 1990's I watched the commissioning of the lead ship of a new class of destroyers, USS Arleigh Burke, in Norfolk, VA, from the deck of the first Soviet warship to visit the US since World War II.
With the GI Bill and a state scholarship, I attacked undergraduate school from the perspective of a person who had seen the world without an education. No one should be allowed to go to college without a year working in the real world without mommy and daddy continuing private welfare. Anyone who wonders why young people want something for nothing only need to look at the parents who said their kids weren't going to work as hard as the parents did. Duh. America doesn't work anymore because everyone wants to be a player compliment of the parents who pushed the play pathos over the work ethic. Spare the rod and spoil your retirement! The massacre at Virginia Tech (where students just sat in their desk like deer frozen by the approaching headlights of a car or train that will kill them) would not have happened in an inner city high school.
Another truth that most people don't believe is that I matriculated at SIU-E in September, 2000, and accumulated enough college credits to earn a degree in 2002, cum laude. One semester I ace'd 24 hours. I did the pre-med organic chemistry course in two months, taking the May final with the students who started in September. Because of commencement formalities, the degree was not awarded until 1973. In just two years, and maybe a couple of months, I caught up with my high school classmates who had started college the same year I started the Navy.
In a sense, I fulfilled what Mr. Ebbs, the math teacher, had said after the banner, "If you put the same energy into your classwork, you'd be an A instead of a C student." In high school, I worked 40-50 hours per week. My cousin gave me a bed and board but everything else I had to pay for. In college, I did not have to work because of the GI Bill. Because I completed UG so quickly, I was able to use the GI bill for a masters and an ABD.
(Needless to say, I was both elated and troubled by my good performance in academia. I worried about getting a big ego so I decided to pose for art classes in the nude to shrink my ego. Guess what shrunk? The size of the audience! Notice I did not say the size of the ordinance. LOL. If my jokes still, like in high school, bore the doodoo out of you, remember that with friends like me you don't need enemas.)
Other achievements include running for the US Congress as an independent in 1998, scoring five times better than the average independent and twice as good as the last major party opponents to run against the incumbent. I started a resume service to talk to people about work--my resumes had interview rates six times the national average, and, more importantly, a high job offer rate. I started a printing company. One month, my firm printed more carbonless than any other cutsheet printer, a month which happened to have a multilevel sales contest by NCR with the second prize being a Carribean cruise and top prize being a trip to Europe. I won six Carribean cruises and four European sojourns. Because I quickly grew tired of hiring and training computer programmers who left for better jobs in six months because they were more qualified, I became a computer programmer. Like every other endeavor, I left the field when more people were calling me than I wanted to be called. In the 1980's I did a program for Blue Cross/Blue Shield that generated a quarter of a million dollars in revenue.
The most important thing that I have done which echos my educational rationale for college--not job training--and which has tied my life together since SIU-E is a concept called timism (time+ism). All my meandering career refocuses every 3 to 5 years have been to explore and expand what is a "periodic table of existence" based on the quantification/qualification in time of dynamic systems. The meandering include a two year stint as a "homeless" person in Minneapolis despite having a paid-for home in Richmond, VA, (to wit, from heidegger, one cannot understand hunger until you have been hungry.) There is a lot to human sadness and suffering that you cannot understand from being a check-writer to good causes. Many are the good souls who slipped and were kicked instead of being offered a helping hand. Many are the good fools who think they have citizen and constitutional rights until they attempt to use them. This is like having health insurance that is denied when you get sick, to wit (Catch 22), you have health insurance if you don't use it and don't have it if you do.
Timism sounds simple enough! In summary, there are basically six levels of existence (physics, metabolism, mental, economics, politeness(politics) and morality) which observe three processes centered on the creation and destruction of time. The periodic table of elements in chemistry can be viewed from the time perspective. Deep throat was self-limiting when he said, "Follow the money" for a better inclusive statement is "follow the time." Like with Darwin's survival of the fittest which is a subset of "survival of the most time creative." Timism shows that Shakespeare was half right when he wrote the first half of following whole truth: Ignorance is bliss until the ignored problems blitz you.
Once one has timism as a sixth sense, one can redefine problems from any level of existence into timistic units. Timism is the universal language, like the common jigsaw pattern that holds together the puzzles of life which mankind has differentiated with a thin veneer of varying vocabulary that is not the real substance of life. Academic schools of thought are like political boundaries--they don't last.
An example of timism as a heuristic clutter cutter, I have a paper I wrote in 1982 in which I said the real impact of rising atmospheric CO2 will not be from warming but precipitation changes with longer droughts and record downpours which would destroy the foodchain causing social, economic and political collapse. C'est la vie. Why? CO2 is a dessicant that either soaks into water (carbonated beverages) or soaks up water (drought). Once the atmospheric CO2 is water logged/saturated, it is a monstorous CO2 bottle waiting to be agitated whereupon it will spew forth its water like shaking a two-liter pop bottle with your finger over the opening.
My social and political activism has not been goody-goody altruism but payback to those who mentored me out of repeating the white-trash welfare cycle. When I realized that I was an exceptional success in my mid-twenties, I went to my mentors and asked what I could do to pay them back. Independent of each other at different times they each said basically the same: "You can't give me anything that I need. I have everything I want and need. Do what I did. Take the time to help kids that are like you."
I remember Bill "King" Krekel laughing when I asked him that question with him saying, "Boy, you can't give me anything. Help others." Visiting him before he died, he always introduced me as the best grill boy ever--40 years after I first got a milkshake for picking up trash on his lot. (He gave me a car when I graduated from high school, drove it thruout the Navy and U.G. till I got married. I sold it for a demolition derby: I felt like a traitor as it took a beating before succumbing to a broadside that flipped it.)
Whenever I owned a business, I always had a teenage employment niche to hire and train high schoolers. For several years in the 1980's I ran a summer "Work Ethic" school in which I hired an ed major to supervise a teen crew: half time in work, half time in learning computers, typing, english and math. Cost several thousand each summer, but it was more fun than spending the money going to Europe. The kids don't call anymore since I don't have businesses anymore but it was always great to get that call out of the blue, to wit, "I didn't like you when I worked for you, but I now realized it was your tough love to teach me the work ethic. As a result, I am doing better than my peers with promotions and duties." Deja vu of me when I realized the debt I owed to my mentors.
Some people actively hide their troubled pasts while others use them to seek pity. Not me. For those kindred souls arising without the mentors from whom I profitted, sharing how one's sweat and self-belief can lift one to a higher plane is a form of helping others from afar. Humanity needs the best from each of us regardless of how the parental dice were thrown. One need not have a crappy life if at the start one comes out craps.
Being born white trash does not mean one has to remain trash though there is always some in the recesses of one's mind. Bill Clinton shows this: You can take the boy out of the country but you can't take the trash out of the boy. For me, Decatur always fosters the angst and anxiety that I felt as a monster on my back for many decades after leaving, monsters that return when I return home, to wit, "once there was a way to back home." (beatles).
One benefit of a hard-scrabbled start in life is that you don't sweat the small shat which is one of the contributing reasons that I have been repeatedly accosted as being undeservedly too happy. And, as the race comes to an end, those who started at the back of the pack but finish well ahead of the pack covered more distance in less time.
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