Fat Tuesday

This is a short post today. Today is Mardi Gras, meaning I am thinking of NOLA and desiring to re-visit the Quarter. My last visit came while I was livening in Tennessee. I was asked to speak at the AARO conference in April of 2009. My son and I went down and had a great weekend. He still speaks of the oysters, the crawfish, and the wonderful breakfast we had.

I plan to return to NOLA this year at some point. While I wish it were during Jazz Fest, it probably will not be until later in the year.

NOLA, comment tu me manques.

Is it wrong to put self before others?

March 6, 2011

This blog is really just an attempt to put some ideas on paper. It will soon be a larger collection of my musings.

Is it wrong to put self before others?

This question provides many examples to the query, whatever your personal persuasion. Capitalism is an example of self before others. Communism or socialism puts the whole in front of the promotion of self. In the American society, we are taught to embrace capitalism and shun socialism. America seems to be at odds with the very beliefs that the majority of the population holds. The majority of citizens express some form of Christian based belief system to be their preference (source).

I find it an interesting topic, if for no other reason than the irony presented in the query. From a young age, we are all taught to share, to think of others before ourselves, to treat our brothers/sisters, as we would like to be treated. We are taught to honor the legacies of those that came before us, to use their achievements to better ourselves. The conditioning that we are exposed to is supposed to prepare us for life within society. To make us productive citizens that contributes to the whole.

The religious connections are obvious, when looking at established contemporary Christian beliefs. We accept the face value of such teachings as we see reason within the doctrine: common sense is what some call it. I have followed this line of thinking most of my life. It has led me down a path that once proved to be successful, but ultimately ended in failure. I have spent several years pondering the situation, sometimes at great cost to my personal life. I have studied and questioned my way to a convergence of the paths now set before me.

My experiences have led me to question the fundamental beliefs stated in this text. I have long considered myself a Christian, over time I have developed an agnostic view of the religion. My experiences have not created a sense of doubt, but rather a subjective observation of the human condition. I digress, the point of this musing is not about religion, albeit is a related topic. One that is best suited for another time.

I was once a proud executive officer of a very successful small business. The first several years of owning that company saw my income double three years in a row. I enjoyed the time I spent within that enterprise. I enjoyed the embrace of capitalism to the point that I began to see money as a trapping. I reveled in the benefits of sending my son to private school, to buying a larger than needed home, vacations that were sorely earned from long hours.

Money lured me into the confidences and company of other successful men and women. I have always tried to find the good in others, but that soon proved foolishness on my behalf. I placed too much trust in one person in particular, one that took full advantage of me. I blame myself for the shortsightedness. I have long held lofty ideals in my mind, only to taste sour grapes. My back was used as a stepping-stone for the concerns of this person and offspring. My well-being and that of my family were of no concern, only the coin that could be made.

This relationship went well as long as the market appreciated. I was able to provide my craft in an ethical way. When the market started to level and then ultimately decline, I was presented with a choice. I could do business in an unethical way, and secure my income. I could follow my ethics, and those of my profession, and perform my job as it should be performed. I chose the latter. This person I speak of saw it fit to find me useless when my ethics stepped in front of the ability to have a profit. I have always tried to walk the high road, but have done so with peril. My ability to earn anything similar to what I did was torn away from me.

I am not bitter about my choice and I am not surprised with the result. I stand where I do knowing I did what I should. I have a sustainable lifestyle now, and I am thankful for it. It still does not comfort me when I see that my children and wife are not provided for the way I desire for them to be. I desire to support them as I once did, the way that they deserve.

The personal result to my belief system has changed me completely. I see capitalism, in the way it is carried out in this society, as a true evil. I watch those that would harm others in their personal pursuit to obtain more and more do so with no penalty. I am a part of the middle class, the class that is being eroded by capitalism. Once it was a good thing to be a middle class citizen, there was an appeal to citizens to strive for a quality of life that no longer exists. We now live in a society that went from executives of large companies making about 70 times the average income of the workers in their company, to what is now estimated at 1000 times more.

We have allowed the beliefs that we are taught to shade us from the truth, those with power allow us things like religion, entertainment, and other things to hold our attention while they stuff their wallets with our money. We have been lulled to sleep, and have handed over our power as a mass in doing so. The majority of this country should hold the power, not the elite few. We are all slaves to the master: greed, or the love of it by those elite few.

We are forced believe that business should be allowed to move forward without regards to the people that provide the means for the almighty profit the elite receive. Rather than accept a reasonable margin of profit, they have plied the political machine with enough grease that profit rains down a sif from God above. The elite seek to receive so much profit that it drives the human capital (as they call us) into the ground. We are of no concern, just a means to an end.

It is criminal the way that we turn our heads, only to see our own means diminished in the process. How so many can be ruled by the elite few is an age-old paradox. A Paradox that is presented repeatedly throughout the halls of time. Through the evolution of society we have seen tyrannies in many forms. We are better off than our ancestors such as the masses in middle age England, or the slaves of empires past. Nevertheless, here we stand in yet another age that shows the few are greater than the masses that feed them.

Do not get me wrong, I support capitalism, but only the responsible version of it. There has to be a medium that allows the preservation of the workforce, the environment itself, and still allow a margin of profit that would make it worth it to the captains of industry. I am not a socialist, and do not think it is a preferred system. It has shown to be corruptible in so many of the same ways as pure capitalism. On paper, socialism is a lofty ideal, one that would better align with the religious views of most Americans. In reality, instead of corporations stealing, those with the guns control everything.

The mass is conditioned to learn the ideals of socialism, only to be staunch supporters of an idea that steals from them. We are lulled into the thought that we each have the ability to become a captain of industry. While that is an occasional result, more often it is will never be realized. We are fooled into allowing our political leaders to make way for the interest of corporations in the belief that if we ever make it to that level, we will benefit from it too.

Welcome

March 5, 2011

Blog 1 is now underway. I have wanted to do one of these for a long time but never really thought about what I should write. A few of my closest friends know that I enjoy the medium of writing. I enjoy the musings and fiction of others to occasionally writing my own. Up until now, I have limited my writings to things revolved around my profession: real estate valuation. Several opinion pieces are available over at www.appraisalscoop.com.

I hope that the blog page will intrigue a few folks to think, even if it requires you to do so outside of your comfort zone. I find that most people cannot do this. They are so set in the trappings of their upbringing and reasoning that few seldom break free to have thoughts of their own. We are all guilty of this, me included.

I am the product of the parts that combined to make my whole. Like most folks, my parents had the biggest influence on my upbringing. Their decisions to where we would live, and how we would live have resulted in what I am now. I am truly the product of the village that I am from which I hail. Sometimes, I am grateful for it, and sometimes I feel as if it were a village of fools.

My mother is from rural North Carolina. She graduated from a small public high school between what is now Fayetteville and Wilmington. Her parents were farmers. She was and is a devout southern Christian woman. She had four children from a previous marriage, and then met my father and had me. I had the experience of being an only child, but also a sense of family albeit sometimes it was not a good sense. Her belief system and love of family regardless of their deserving it or not, ha shaped me.

My father is from Little Washington, VA. He is also a product of a rural community. My father was not a religious man, was lover of Ronald Regan, and a proud graduate of 8^th grade. I have siblings that see my father as a failure, perhaps he was with them. He was not with me. He put me before himself after my birth, actually, after he stopped drinking when I was a small child. He poured into me things that have been critical in my development.

One thing many of you will see in the blogs that will come is that I am an armchair politician, a self-depreciating humorist, and I have a fierce love or dislike of all things. There is little in my life that exists in the gray mist, but everything usually falls into my black and white compartmentalization that is my perspective.