Checks & Balances?

     Many of my friends, even those my age or older, call me old school because I write checks, those old fashioned slips of paper that as a form of monetary tranfers, are on the verge of fading into the sunset, perhaps taking me along with them into that great recycler.  And yes, I've heard all the cautionary tales or how those paper checks contain all of your banking info (routing and account numbers), and how ball point ink can be washed off and the amount rewritten by unscrupulous and nefarious individuals (gel ink dodges this problem, but really, who even uses a pen these days?), and how checks can get lost in the mail.  Heck, even the IRS no longer issues paper checks (which I discovered this year, sending even more of my info to DOGE and who knows who else).  Even my trash company --the county one that picks up your trash bins for waste and recycling each week-- said no more checks: electronic bank transfers only (we paid in advance to avoid this for another half year).  Of course, the other half of writing checks was jotting the amount down in a checkbook, a register if you will.  A running total, or a balance.  Open the register and realize that paying for that air conditioner you replaced would bring your balance to near zero, so you had best budget in other areas to try to reduce expenses.  It was simple, perhaps scary, but that system of checks & balances worked well.  It was also how our government was supposed to work...

Photo of Lenin banner: Kylie Cooper/Reuters

Photo of Trump banner: Peter Turnley/Getty

     In the "old" days, Congress controlled the "purse strings" or the money a president could spend.  A president trying to change a program which involved allocated funds first had to get approval from Congress, all to keep a party's campaign promises of "a balanced budget."  But as all but a third of our country knows, this is no longer the case.  Our current president sees no reason to hold back on accessing what he likely feels is his own pot of gold, silencing Congress with just a simple stare or announcement.  Tear down part of the White House and build a ballroom?  Or an arch?  Your money.  Start a war that uses up advanced weapons and raises the price of gas and heating oil?  Your money.  Hire a team of expensive lawyers to keep stalling the courts?  Your money (Capitol One only now admitted to closing hundreds of Trump Organization accounts in 2021 due to "concerns about money laundering."  Use government jets and security teams to transport you and your bullet-proof cars just to campaign for others (or to play golf every other week).  Your money (the vice-president is doing the same thing).  Hang 3-story banners with your face across public buildings, something Lenin and Saddam Hussein also did?  Your money.  And then post this for the world to see: ...a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.  I don't want that to happen, but it probably will."   And meanwhile, Congress sits as silently and as vacantly as a semi-comatose Mitch McConnell who now has an aid standing behind his wheelchair to whisper instructions to him when voting (as a blistering op-ed noted in Salon). It all got to be too much for Wilton Lemieux, an Army veteran who served in Afghanistan and had returned home with an injury that basically wiped out his short term memory.  Despite a disability check for $2500 each month, he found himself just barely scraping by, what with rising prices and two young daughters to raise by himself (both are straight A students).  It all caused him to ask, “Why are they lying to the American public?”

     It was the topic of a piece in The Washington Post that wrote: The 34-year-old single father pondered that question at the grocery store and the gas station, where $20 now filled a quarter of his tank instead of the usual half.  His $200 weekly budget couldn’t keep up.  For the fourth month, he’d dipped into his savings to cover the basics.  Alone in the car, Wilton pasted his words into a teleprompter app.  He repeated himself three times, four times, five times until the tone he tried to keep gentle at home matched his inner monologue: angry, betrayed, grieving all he’d lost while trying to do everything right.  “Why are they lying to the American public?”  “They” were his shorthand for politicians, corporate suits and tech bros — the elites he viewed as too preoccupied with artificial intelligence and a White House ballroom and a war that never made sense to him while everyone he knew struggled with the rising cost of survival.  Yet the president was on his television, declaring, “We never had the American Dream like we have it right now,” which sounded to Wilton like a sales pitch or a delusion or both.  Four months earlier, his faith in that national ideal died one evening at an ExxonMobil pump.  Wilton remembers rage at yet another price hike, then clarity, then an ache to vent about what he couldn’t train his brain to stop noticing, like how sad his mom’s neighbor looked when she talked about working for 41 straight years and not being able to afford a vacation for the last 12.  He pulled out his phone and filmed a takedown of the American Dream.  “It’s all an illusion of something better that never is going to come,” Wilton spat out.  Pressing “post” on that selfie video felt like a satisfying micro-protest.  Wilton drove home and went to bed, expecting a bit of grief from his Army buddies.  Then he woke to 25,000 comments that were overwhelmingly supportive. --"I’m tired of waking up every morning with heavy anxiety.” --“My mother can hardly afford food...after working for 36 years." --“I make 70k a year before taxes and I live paycheck to paycheck.” --“Work work work work but nothing around me changes.” --“70 and can’t retire.” --“EVERYONE IS BROKE AND TIRED.”

     Maybe veteran Lemieux was describing your feelings: wondering when you can once again start adding to your savings, or go on a vacation, or feel that your job is secure, or pay off that student loan, or afford to look for a house, or to be able to fill up your cart at Costco, or to have a dinner you really want to eat, or to pay your medical bill.  Or to simply not have your kids see that you're struggling.  The news has not been good as of late.  Nearly 10 million people are defaulting on their student loans, nearly double from a year ago, wrote the Associated Press.  And 75% of seniors will face higher bills on their prescription plans next year as Trump's scrapping of the Biden subsidies goes into effect, wrote 24/7 Wall Street. The food stamp program has already dropped over 4 million people from its rolls as Trump's new work rules went into effect (this included over 775,000 children).  And while Congress continues to avoid passing any ethics rules to block insider trading among its members or anyone in the administration, it did pass a bill to cut another $141 million for fruit & vegetable benefits used by the women, infants and children using SNAP, the supplemental nutrition program; children under 5 will now receive just $10 a month for such food items.  Fruits and vegetables!  The reality is that nearly 14% of Americans now depend on food banks, said a federal report (Trump ordered such reports by the USDA to stop such reports saying that such studies "do nothing more than fear monger")  In addition, Trump has cut nearly a million people from receiving Affordable Care, citing fraud, wrote The Washington Post.  Meanwhile, many of the tariffs Trump imposed were ruled illegal and are being refunded, just not to you (so much for that promised boost to the economy as the federal deficit sails past the $41 trillion mark.  Yet Trump ordered a new granite helipad, compete with presidential insignia, be built at the White House (again, your money).  And those supposed $5000 checks Trump is bragging about?  Wait, he's only offering to give back your own taxpayer dollars (Trump's two earlier promises for refunds to Americans were more carnival bluffs, wrote USA Today).  For those college grads now facing an uncertain AI future, what do you do when you commencement speaker tells you to just "deal with it," as The New Yorker reviewed.

      But what do you do when even more happen?  Your fridge goes out, or an uninsured person totals your car, or your car is repossessed (1.7 million cars were repossessed last year, the highest in 17 years), or you're evicted, or a water line breaks, or your dog begins convulsing, or you fall and break something?  This is what happened to Rose Whitmore, an athlete who had dislocated her elbow and was frustrated at the slow pace of its healing, especially since she was the star player and her team was sort of counting on her to return sooner so they could possibly win another championship.  Wrote the author in The Sun: Now, in the quiet of my office, I hear a voice, not just a whisper.  It says the story I've been telling myself no longer adds up.  I don't want to bounce back.  It doesn't matter to me if i don't get another season, another championship.  But what would I do?  Starting over feels impossible, and besides, I have no real plans, just fantasies.  Pack up and leave for Spain, a place I've always wanted to go.  Practice the Spanish I've worked so hard to learn.  Write a novel.  Pick up the old dreams of the person I used to be, before my dad died, and breathe life into them.  A fiery redhead I met at a small gathering told me of doing as much as she could while she was young, visiting county after country, working where she could and making just enough to take off and explore the sights, but was now facing the reality of starting anew at an older age (such travel adventures are still being done by many).  Peter Santenello did much the same, taking two years at the age of 24 to travel through 50 countries, all on a budget of $20,000.  As he writes in he opening of his book, Your Fellow Americans: Over the next 15 years, I spent long stretches of time outside the US.  My plan was to get in as many experiences as possible before turning 40, doing whatever jobs it took to save up the money, then leaving the US, returning home broke, and going at it again.  That drive led me through eighty-five countries...When I came back home, friends would ask which countries I'd like the most, and I'd say places like Tajikistan or Syria.  The reaction was always the same: a confused look, like Why would you go there?  I didn't have an answer for them. 

    Looking back, I recalled that period in my life as well, that wanderlust of me venturing over to Japan by myself and traveling the country for 8 days with a budget of $200 (yes, two hundred dollars); it involved riding country all-night trains with wood-slat seats (to avoid hotel bills), learning the inexpensive (at the time) bus system, and eating lots of noodles.  I later did the same with a solo camping trip through southern Utah, long before I actually moved here.  My dinners were out of cans, my one shower at a gas station where truck drivers (or dusty vagabonds like me) could slide back a cheap vinyl curtain and shower for $2, soap and shampoo not included.  But I was also in my late 20's, full of nearly everything but fear and judgement.  The world awaited.  But that was then, a time when all of what I wrote with and saved for was "old school:"  ball point pens, the post office (still losing money), and yes, checks (try cashing one at the grocery store if you want to see some befuddled faces).  Send me your address and I'll send you a postcard (what's that?) with cursive handwriting (more gibberish).  But once upon a time, most tourist sites were full of cheap postcards, a time long before refrigerator magnets, a time when friends were happy (or appeared to be) to tape your photo postcard on their fridge.  There was a time for all that, perhaps as there has been for everything.  But knowing when to say that that time has passed is tough, especially when it comes to the issue or life itself.

     I have a friend who was recently moved out of memory care facility (to me, a prison where folks go to die) and returned to her home.  The cost of the facility was actually more expensive than paying for home care.  My mom, to be fair, spent her last few months in memory care, mainly due to her needing meds.  But looking back, I now wonder just how much of that was something I could have handled myself.  She was getting a bit of dementia, but nothing so bad that she would have left the stove on or wandered out the door (as she often said to me about being in "memory" care, "they dumb you down here").  But our home is full of stairs and that was the real problem.  A fall of any sort at her age (93) would be catastrophic.  But then this letter appeared in The Sun, a magazine which often asks readers to write their perspective on a topic, in this case, practicing.  The letters run the gamut, from the expected to the completely unexpected as in the letter from a reader in Michigan: My mother was a hard worker who believed a day spent crossing tasks off a to-do list was a day well spent.  In her final years, though, she was confined to a bed in a case facility.  I was haunted by the thought of her lying there, motionless and alone.  Once, between visits, I attempted to replicate her day, to better understand what the monotony was like.  I lay flat in my bed, a cover pulled up to my waist, and stayed at the ceiling, picking out details: a nick in the paint, a wisp of dust.  I scanned my body, feeling my thighs against the sheets and my head against the pillow.  My watch ticked away the minutes.  My books and tablet out of view, I ruminated on my solitude, with no one to listen to my old yarns or the dreams of my younger self.  It must take tremendous strength to endure such an existence, I thought.  I could hardly imagine the diligence required to pass from this world to the next.  Dying is hard work. 

    Why bring any of this up?  Because at times it is easy to take sides, to feel that you're right, or that you missed out, or that it's too late.  Truth be told, many of my conservative friends continue to feel that all this excess spending of our taxpayer money is fine, as long as those dang immigrants are being rounded up.  But in most instances, remove politics from the discussion and you'll find really good people underneath, which is likely something they say about me.  This is how author Santenello described it: Behind the headlines, statistics, and political hot takes is a huge, chaotic, fascinating country -- one that's impossible to comprehend until you've seen it.  And even then, after years of digging in, you can look at  map and realize how little of it you've already covered.  America has tropics, deserts, tundra, and endless stretches of rural back roads.  New York City's greater metropolitan area alone is home to more people than thirty-five of the forty-five countries in Europe.  We've got 575 federally recognized Native American tribes and peoples from every nation on earth...After thousands of miles and thousands of conversations, the thing that keeps hitting me each and every time I find myself somewhere is how much people care -- about their families, their towns, their little corners of the map.  About the country we all live in together.  This is one of the easiest places on earth to get a smile or have a stranger hold the door open for you.  There's a beautiful "you do you" spirit here too.  I'm always awed that most of us really do respect others' paths --even admire them-- as long as those paths don't interfere with our own.

     Certainly there's a lot if anger and frustration out there.  But I also sense a feeling of rethinking, of digging down into an inner strength, a unification, a reevaluation.  There is a feeling that the bullying has come close to exhausting itself and that the resolve now is shifting to the people, the majority, the ones who care about others, the ones who feel that the higher power doesn't reside in Washington but somewhere far beyond...ageless, timeless, understanding.  One of hope and outlook.  Just one example was that of my wife's cousin and his wife, both of whom have cerebral palsy, hers a version that has paralyzed virtually everything except her hands and head...and yet they both just completed a half-marathon (don't let their appearance fool you as he has a Ph.D and she has a Masters; both of them work at high-end jobs for the UK government).  Here is what she wrote after the experience: The Big Half Marathon is over, and what a day it was.  I’m still carrying the feeling of it, the atmosphere, the energy, the togetherness.  It wasn’t just a race; it was a community moving as one.  The camaraderie blew me away.  Everywhere I looked, people were lifting each other up, pushing through pain, encouraging strangers, and refusing to give in.  We were all on an equal playing field, every single one of us fighting our own battle to reach that finish line.  To be one of only a couple of assisted‑wheelchair participants was something truly special.  I felt seen.  I felt included.  I felt part of something bigger than myself.  And it reminded me why I believe so strongly that running, in all its forms, should be accessible to everyone, no matter their ability.  The joy of movement, the freedom of the open road, the shared determination…everyone deserves to feel that.  Training for this event changed me.  Running, or being pushed as part of a team, opened up a world I didn’t know existed.  Those late‑evening runs became my favorite moments.  The peacefulness of the darkness.  The streetlights flickering on and off.  The uneven pavements making us wobble and laugh as we went.  The cool night air brushing past my face.  It was a kind of freedom I had never experienced before.  And then came the realization, a quiet, powerful one, that I didn’t truly recognize the streets I had spent years wheeling through.  I’d always travelled with my head down, eyes fixed on the feet around me, hoping people would notice the sound of my motors and give me space.  I moved through the world invisible.  But running changed that.  It made me look up.  It made me see.  It made me feel part of the world in a way I hadn’t before...My hope is that others with disabilities may feel inspired to take up the challenge too.  That they see running as an opportunity to raise awareness, to join a community, to discover joy, and to realize that they are capable of more than they’ve ever been told.  Along the way, I’ve discovered something beautiful: a willingness from others to guide, share, and support.  The joy in realizing that people genuinely care has been overwhelming.  We learn and grow through every challenge and every adventure we experience together.  That sense of shared humanity, of people choosing to stand beside one another, is what makes this.

     Such inspirational emotions were reflected in the movie I Swear, a true tale of  a child not understanding the onset of Tourette's which causes involuntary jerking and body actions such as spitting out food and uttering things you'd never normally say; the difficult part of Tourette's is that you're aware of what you did almost immediately, although an apology rarely makes up for how offended a person feels.  When he encounters a young lady wearing a tight skirt and blurts out "slut," imagine his encounters with the police, or with the Queen (he went on to receive one of the UK's highest commendations for helping to educate others about Tourette's...the extended clip shows a bit more of this moving film, one which deservedly earned Robert Ayamayo a BAFTA for best actor).  People just needed to know the real-life person, to talk to him, to accept that he was a person, a person with as many feelings as you or me.  As editor Jennifer Sahn brought up in High Country News: ...we've delved into conversations that are pretty difficult to have at the moment, as well as conversations that are helping people get through a difficult time...There are a lot of divisions at the moment keeping people from having civil exchanges, from truly listening and being open to possibly having their minds changed.  Yet that is so essential to how democracy works and how community works...A conversation may come to an end, but it's never really over because you'll see that person again, or it will arise in your thoughts long after the conversation is over.  That mother lying in memory care, that exhausted parent back from her second job, that injured worker who can't afford to be injured.  That person dying...

                          

     I can't say why so many of my conservative friends feel okay with benefit and medical programs being cut to the bone, and why those in Washington seem to feel the same.  We're all traveling down the same road, coming to the same end.  So I had to look at it all from a different perspective, as one book noted when we near death: ...imagine for a moment: What kind of language might you use to describe the experience of dying.  Not only is it an experience for which the listener has no compelling reference point, but also it is completely strange and new to the person who is dying.  It is, in every way, completely without a frame of reference for most of us.  Consider, as well, both the possibility that dying is an incomprehensible "this," as my father described it to his secretary a few days before dying ("This is very interesting, Alice"), and the possibility that if there is another dimension or an afterlife, it too would elude all the literal meanings we have known in this world.  Perhaps just by crossing into these new dimensions, we engage new parts of our brains and, as a result, our language.  Whatever the reasons for how others think or react, it is not for us to judge, or at least not until we near our own ending.

     Over 20 years ago, political commentator David Brooks, did a TED Talk which questioned what would likely be on our minds at some point in the future, perhaps as life begins to trickle away:  So I've been thinking about the difference between the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues.  The résumé virtues are the ones you put on your résumé, which are the skills you bring to the marketplace.  The eulogy virtues are the ones that get mentioned in the eulogy, which are deeper: who you are, in your depth, what is the nature of your relationship are you bold, loving, dependable, consistent?  And most of us, including me, would say that the eulogy virtues are the more important of the virtues.  But at least in my career are they the ones that I think about the most?  And the answer is no...the tricky thing, I'd say, about these two sides of our nature is they work by different logics.  The external logic is an economic logic: input leads to output, risk leads to reward.  The internal side of our nature is a moral logic and often an inverse logic.  You have to give to receive.  You have to surrender to something outside yourself to gain within yourself.  You have to conquer the desire to get what you want in order to fulfill yourself.  In order to find yourself, you have to lose yourself.   One of my friends asked me if I had pre-written my eulogy (he had done so for himself), and I replied that I hadn't even considered it.  But it got me thinking, imagining what others might say after I'm gone.  And while they might have a difficult time trying to put me in this hole or that hole, I think I'd be quite content if they simply summed up my life as, "I guess you could say that he was old school."