“N****’s be sufferin’ here!”

The Red Ranger: I never had the chance to tell you about an episode that took place after Winter Storm Nemo last month.On top of the roughly 24 inches of snow we received we had no power since the night the storm hit. Needless to say our home got mighty cold. Luckily, we have a wood burning stove which kept the temperature in our family room around 45-50 degrees. I had to sleep in the cold to keep our guinea pigs alive while Margaret went to the local middle school to sleep in its relative warmth with the boys for two nights. On Saturday morning after her first night’s sleep there she noticed some folks who were from another town and somehow had been driven to our town to stay.

She overheard a conversation two of them were having. Both were in there late teens/early 20’s. One had three kids all under four years old and the other had one kid who was about one. Apparently, they were both on probation and desperate to get in touch with their probation officers to get allowance to leave their town. Luckily, they got permission. Then she overheard them complaining about how they were forced to sleep on hard cots and they weren’t going to put up with that anymore, then they wanted to be moved to a different shelter and when their ride (I guess some state sponsored program that moves deadbeats from place to place) was not immediately available one of the young ladies was overheard saying–forgive me for using this explicit term but I use it only once, for context: “Niggas be sufferin’ here!”.

My wife obviously was amazed at the gall and lack of gratitude these women showed. In addition, they did not appear to even be African-American. Not that this would have excused the use of the “N” word, but that alone demonstrated how coarse many in our society have become. The boys thought that the act they were putting on, was a riot. While I would never deny services to those truly in need, the attitude of entitlement displayed by these two was outrageous. Like most things it is a few bad apples who spoil it for everyone else.Nattering Naybob: Well Red Ranger first let me say that my wife and I were very concerned about you and your family during Nemo and its aftermath. Both being animal lovers, we were very impressed that you endured the discomfort of your power-less home primarily to ensure that the two Red Ranger guinea pigs did not perish in the harsh New England cold.

I also would like to point out that with the publication of this blog post, there will be exactly 50 official entries in our little blog. Congratulations to us.

I can empathize with the outrage that your family experienced (although the boys seemed to be entertained mightily). I think that there is a small percentage of people who are just genetically ungrateful, and this crosses all ethnic, racial, and economic lines. People who are uprooted from their homes for whatever the reason, and regardless of how fleetingly, tend to be very upset from the outset before they even reach whatever shelter they are placed in. Still the fact that they seemed to be on probation for some unspecified crime, and they referred to themselves by what is considered to be (ostensibly) the vilest term that cane be used in our language today, understandably reinforced the perception that these people were ungrateful for their safe and warm(er) shelter. I say “ostensibly” because we have a dichotomy in our country whereby the “N” word is in most cases not even permitted to be printed or spoken, even if the person is conveying what someone else said… yet the term is used by recording artists with total impunity. I don’t know when I am more outraged– when the term is used by an African-American or a non-African American. When I hear an African-American use it , I think that they are so disrespectful to the Civil Rights figures of the 60s such as John Lewis, who literally got his head bashed in with a baseball bat while protesting for equal treatment for African Americans. Don’t the people who use the “N” word, care about the sacrifices made by older African-Americans? And when I hear non- African American use it, I am struck by their absolute ignorance and coarseness, that they themselves never had to be subjected to being called the “N” word… so they decide they want to call each other the same term (?!!) Unbelievable no matter how you slice it.

Spelling Bee

The Red Ranger: Ryan made it to the finals of his Middle School spelling bee which were held today.  This is quite an impressive feat considering he got a “C” in English this term.  He made it a few rounds but was tripped up on the word “audacious”.  I would have expected him to nail this word since he hears it so many times on FOX News to describe Obama’s policy.

I give him a lot of credit for going up in front of the school.  I know that I would never have done that at his age.  I think the teachers today are much more proactive in getting students to feel comfortable speaking in front of a large crowd.

I was very surprised when he told me he made it to the finals since I know that he never studied any words.  It was funny to see the 6th, 7th and 8th graders on the stage and thinking back to our time in those grades.

Nattering Naybob: Good for Ryan. If the word was “Socialist” or “Muslim” or “arrogant”, Ryan also would have been expected to get that correctly because those are also words that are used on FOX News a lot to describe President Obama.

I do not have any daily contact with today’s teachers, either personally or observationally, so I cannot in good conscience agree or disagree about your statement that today’s teachers focus more on encouraging students to get out in front of people. But I suspect it is true. I remember when we attended Horace Mann School in New Jersey (I think this was the 6th grade), I actually misspelled a word on purpose in my class’s “qualifying round”, so there would be no chance of my having to appear in the actual spelling bee, because I feared I would be too nervous to appear in the final round in the auditorium, which was so big and imposing that I got pretty nervous just attending weekly music class there, especially when Mr. Menzer had one of his frequent fits of rage at our not grasping the finer points of St. Saens or Prokofiev. I’m sure you remember Mr. Menzer’s signature piece he would play on the piano every month or so, when he was in a good mood, “Hong Kong Rush Hour“. One of my most vivid memories of grammar school was hearing that song being played by him on the piano, echoing throughout the entire three floors of the school, each of which overlooked the 3-story tall auditorium by virtue of arched double doors that opened onto a railing you could lean over and look at the goings-on down on the auditorium floor. I attach this YouTube clip of a performance of the aforementioned “Hong Kong Rush Hour”, for your listening pleasure.

The Red Ranger: I also think he could have gotten the words, sequester, deficit, unemployment, Benghazi and golf.

Yes, Mr. Menzer’s playing of this was certainly a highlight.  I actually forgot some of the architectural details you mentioned about the auditorium.  The auditorium was certainly the highlight of the school.  I vividly remember my fourth grade performance as Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol.  I wish I somehow had a recording of that.  If I actually saw it I would probably immediately destroy it though.

Nattering Naybob: I actually remember your appearance in “A Christmas Carol”. If I recall, you had trouble unlocking the chains around your wrists. Today those chains might be a metaphor for the shackles of Republicanism that is constraining you from enjoying the kind of re-birth that was enjoyed by the other protagonist in “A Christmas Carol”. I’m not saying you’re Scrooge-like… necessarily.

The Red Ranger: Actually, I believe the chains were around my waist.  Now I view those chains as a metaphor for the 47%’s (as I noted previously I believe this number is actually too high as those who have worked and contributed to Social Security should be excluded)  who are living off of my hard earned tax dollars.)

Nattering Naybob: Oh, is that what it was. I am having trouble understanding the purpose of chains around someone’s waist, and then the purpose of unlocking those chains, but what do you expect from a grammar school production ca. 1971? As much as I hated going to school in my youth, I would love to be able to sit in that auditorium (the way it was when we were of school age) just one more time. I remember our weekly visits to the (so-called) school “library”, which was jerry-rigged into the auditorium’s balcony (the librarian’s name was Mrs. Vergsuon, does that ring a bell?) I spent many of those library sessions musing about whether I could ever survive a leap from the balcony to the main floor of the auditorium, a la John Wilkes Booth (but a benevolent John Wilkes Booth, who in an earlier parallel life may have discovered a ticking bomb planted by a domestic terrorist, and determined that the only option to mitigate its explosive impact, was to bring it up to the upper reaches of the balcony, then leap to safety from the balcony just seconds prior to its detonation, while shouting some more humanitarian version of “Sic Semper Tyrannis”. These are the things I thought about in the 4th grade.)

Regarding your complaint about your own hard work being used for the benefit of others, I wonder if you think the reverse is true. I am referring to people who, for example, work in restaurants making minimum wage (if they are lucky) schlepping around trays of plates and other heavy objects all day. Are they too entitled to believe that another class of people may be unfairly gaining advantage from their back-breaking work, especially since they themselves work 40-hour weeks doing very hard work that does not, in most cases, offer them an annual wage that is above the poverty line? I have a feeling that this conversation will probably spin off into a larger debate about the minimum wage, which we surprisingly have not had yet on our little blog. I am eager to have that debate by the way.

The Red Ranger: While I do appreciate the fact that waiter/waitresses that is serving me my 24 oz. filet mignon is making below minimum wage, I do also realize that there is not someone holding a gun to their heads making them work in that job (unless of course it is some Mafia-run establishment).  Hopefully, they are all taking steps to improve their education and skills and will someday be eating that 24 oz filet mignon themselves.  At least that is the Republican way.

I know that the Democratic view is that this person really shouldn’t have to work harder to improve themselves all that needs to be done is to take more of the money from the person eating the 24 oz steak and give it to the waiter/waitress in the form of food stamps, free cell phones or whatever other government program they can avail themselves of.

Nattering Naybob: It depends on what you mean by “working hard”. Someone who is not blessed with perhaps the intellectual talents to go to Harvard University, so instead gets employment as a sanitation worker say in New York City, I would bet works “harder” than 99% of the people who in fact graduated from Harvard. I think you and a lot of other people are missing the boat when you constantly claim that the reason people do not have high-wage, high-vacation jobs, is they don’t “work hard” enough. I say the proper way of looking at it would be in many cases because the low-wage worker is not as “resourceful” as the Harvard grad, meaning that they do not have the time, ability, or mental energy to sit down and plot a life path which would enable them to be able to quit their job as a sanitation worker, go to Harvard, and get a white-collar “knowledge” job. And do you also think that someone who might live in the South Bronx or East New York or in rural Alabama, who has to work at a menial but back-breaking job for less than minimum wage, then has to come home and maybe care for a sick parent or sick spouse because there is no money for a nursing home… is that person in their predicament because they don’t “work hard”?

Your entire characterization of “The Republican Way” and “The Democratic View” is so cliched and structurally unsound that I think you may be beyond redemption on this topic.

The Red Ranger: I do not believe I ever said that these people weren’t working hard just that maybe they need to worker harder to get ahead.

While I fully appreciate the fact that there are people who are in unfortunate circumstances that put significant roadblocks in the way of their attempts to better themselves there are also countless stories of people who have overcome seemingly insurmountable odds to become successfully.  Do you really want to say to the person that worked two jobs and went to night school to get their degree when they are interviewing for a job, “We would really love to hire you but we have this person over here who didn’t have the time, ability or mental energy to do the things you did but we are going to hire him because we feel sorry for him?

Do you think the person who does not have the time, ability or mental energy should be hired for the same jobs as the Harvard grad you refer to?

Nattering Naybob: I checked the transcripts and you are correct, you did not actually invoke the term “hard work” or “hard working”, it was actually “hard earned”. The full sentence is below, when you were referring to the chains you haltingly removed from your waist in the 4th grade production (in more ways than one) of A Christmas Carol, as…

a metaphor for the 47%’s …. who are living off of my hard earned tax dollars.

Only through the most tenuous of technicalities did you wriggle off the hook, because the intent of your message is in my mind still the same, i.e. you claim that others are “living off of” your “hard earned tax dollars”… which basically implies that you work hard and the people to whom your tax dollars are supposedly supporting, are not. From that interpretation, I will not back down.

Of course I do not believe that everyone and anyone should not be admitted to Harvard or get the types of high-wage jobs that graduates of that august institution traditionally obtain. However, I believe I am safe in assuming that you are partly referring to a) people who get unemployment benefits and b) people who receive SNAP or other supplemental income because they find themselves under the poverty line even after working 40 hours a week. And I think that you are using too broad of a brush in saying that all these people are “living off” you, if “living off” implies lounging around the house doing nothing but eating box after box of Bon-Bons and watching Jerry Springer of The Steve Show.

Let me know if your Republican-centric mind cannot absorb the above nuance and complexity and I will try to help you out.

Get back to the office, you slackers!!!

Nattering Naybob: Did The Red Ranger notice the announcement earlier this week that Marissa Mayer, the recently-installed CEO of Yahoo!, has informed all employees who previously were working full time “remotely” or “from home”, that they have until June to shut down their home office, hand in their remote access fobs, and report back to headquarters at Yahoo!. The general reason given was that workers were beginning to forget that “working from home” means just that. “working”….”from home”. This article from The Daily Beast annotates various opinions about this decision, from some notable business and tech leaders.

I have mixed reactions to Mayer’s edict. For purposes of full disclosure, I currently work the old-fashioned way, in a luxuriously-appointed office at Rockefeller Center in New York City. Although I always yearned for a day where I too could join the “telecommuting” generation as yet another step in my campaign to render obsolete my need to interact with people from the outside world, especially strangers. Still, I can see both sides of the argument.

I am anxious to see what The Red Ranger thinks of this decision by Marissa Mayer, in order to help me draft my own White Paper on the subject. Although I have a pretty good idea of what your answer might be about people staying home in their pajamas while others from the same company have to get dressed, go out into the freezing winter or boiling summer, and commute an indeterminate amount of time to and from the office twice a day.

The Red Ranger:  I also have mixed reactions. I have not read the article you attached so please excuse me if I repeat anything.  I know a number of people who “work” from home and it always seems like they are able to attend school events, coach teams, etc.  So I do tend to doubt the full time work at home model.  However, I am comfortable with the occasional need to work from home model.  I would fully expect that in most cases a person working from home is probably less productive than someone working in the office.  However, if you say that a person working 8 hours a day is 80% productive you get 6.4 hours of work.  However, if a person who works from home 10 hours a day (two additional hours due to not having to commute) is only 70% productive (a 12.5% reduction in productivity) you still get 7.0 hours of work which is more than you get in the office.

One thing I would like to see all the employees who are being forced back into the office do is to refuse to do any work at home while not in the office.  This would include answering e-mails after dinner or on the weekend, etc.  I am sure that Marissa wants it both ways people in the office and also doing work at home when out of the office.

I think you probably thought I would have been more for the go to the office and work like a dog model, however, my theory is that people work best when allowed to have a separation between work and outside activities.  Working 20 hours a day all the time is not effective.  In short bursts it may be necessary but it is not my preferred approach.

Nattering Naybob: A very reasonable and refreshingly surprising approach from The Red Ranger. I will be sure to include it in the “Appendix / Supplemental Material” section of my White Paper once it is published. I may even decide to give you credit, although I’m not making any promises. I have found I get better results when I plagiarize the work of others, outright.