Poll Tax Redux

Harry Truman was President of the United States when I was born, but being preoccupied by maturation, I recall nothing about "give 'em hell Harry." But I was old enough to remember the re-election of Dwight D. Eisenhower.

What I remember was being in our Dallas apartment, the room was cool. It was cold outside. My father came in, took off his overcoat, and handed me a little paper American flag stuck to a tiny stick.

"Where'd juh git dat?" I asked.
"I got it when I paid my poll tax," he said.

I didn't know it then, of course, but the poll tax was a tax levied against anyone who wanted to cast a vote. The poll tax was intended to disenfranchise poor people, to discourage the "inappropriate" voters. Inappropriate voters were generally seen as people of color, poor people, and the inebriated, but mostly, in the United States, the inappropriate voters were people of color, and among them it was mostly black people. The poll tax was institutionalized racism. Younger voters may have no experience with the institutional racism that was integral to the United States. But it existed, and it is not part of our ancient past. This didn't happen a long time ago. Institutional racism and wide spread prejudice against people just because of the color of their skin is recent.

I remember going to Sears with my mother and needing to pee. I told my mother I needed to potty and she said I would have to wait because there was no place close where I could go. I pointed out a rest room right next to where we were standing and she told me we couldn't go in there, because, "that was the colored bathroom."

While the poll tax has existed off and on throughout history in countries all around the world, it has an interesting recent history in the United States. The poll tax stemmed back to the 1880s when members of the Populist Party started working to create a coalition of African Americans, and poor, lower class white people and to get them registered to vote, and to actually casting votes. This voter action in the South was viewed as a threat to white supremacy. If this voting was not nipped in the bud it was possible that laws, and rights might come in to being that disadvantaged those whites who had been in charge for as long as anyone could remember, and could actually give rights, and advantages to backs, Indians, Mexicans, and poor white trash.

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All across the South, the ruling white class, the planters, merchants, and industrialists moved to protect and preserve their power, and the method for suppressing these unacceptable voters was to pass a deliberately prohibitive poll tax. The threatened and fearful white big shots through out the South were spectacularly effective. African-Americans, often referred to by the "N word," as well as the poor whites, often referred to as "poor white trash," simply could not afford to pay the poll tax and therefore they lost their right to vote.

Institutional racism existed, especially in the South. Institutional racism mandated that there be separate public toilets, separate drinking fountains, separate schools, sections on the bus and so on. It was not uncommon at all for a restaurant to have a dinning area for whites, and a window at the back where black people could buy prepared food wrapped up in wax paper and put in a brown bag.

I use to wonder why we were willing to eat in a place where only white people could sit, but we were eating food prepared by blacks working back in the kitchen. We could eat food they prepared, but we couldn't eat a table near a black person? This was odd to me.

I am going to vote today, early voting, and I will be voting for Barack Obama, the first black man to run for this lofty office. The act of voting caused me to remember that little paper flag and the poll tax used to discourage blacks from voting.

The poll tax was not eliminated until three-fourths of states had ratified the 24th Amendment to the US Constitution. At the ceremony in 1964 formalizing the 24th Amendment, the President said:

There can be no one too poor to vote. ~ President Lyndon Johnson

This 2008 Presidential election is all the more remarkable when you realize that Barack Obama was born on August 4, 1964, and the poll tax preventing or discouraging blacks from voting was not made illegal until February 4, 1964. The poll tax was still in effect after Barack Obama was born. When you realize this, you can see how far this country has come.
But we have not come far enough.

While the poll tax was made illegal, this has not stopped efforts to discourage voters. A recent debate has arisen over states that require voters to show a driver's license or a state identification card. The rationale is that requiring a picture ID would prevent voter fraud. Everyone should support stopping voter fraud, but this State ID requirement is a disguised form of the poll tax. You see, there is a fee required to get a driver's license, and most states require a fee for the State ID cards as well. I have no problem with the fee for a State ID because the materials, the photo equipment, and the labor all cost money, so, yes, it makes since that a reasonable fee be charged for those cards, but this fee stops being reasonable when you have to have one of these two things in order to vote. If you require a State ID cards or a Driver's licenses you are requiring people to pay a fee in order to vote. To avoid being accused of voter suppression two states, Georgia and Indiana, offering free identification cards free to those who can demonstrate the need. This helps, of course, but I remain opposed to such requirements for the following reasons:

1. Traveling to a government office can be prohibitive for the homeless and the poorest of society. These voter requirements mean that a person has to have the time, and the transportation to go to a state office somewhere, stand in line, and get the ID. You have to have to be able to get to an office during normal office hours, which is hard for low income people to do, and you have to have transportation, which is also hard for low income and elderly and handicapped people to manage.

2. Even if the ID is free, it is only free if you demonstrate need, meaning that you have to go through the humiliating hoops of proving you are poor.

Should people have to pay fees and have transportation, and get time off work without loss of wages, or loss of the job in order to vote? Shouldn't people be able to vote without revealing to a stranger that they are down on their luck, or poor?

The poor are not being prevented from voting by these ID requirements, but they are being discouraged from voting by the fees of the ID and the hassle hoops they have to jump through to obtain those IDs.

As a Child Welfare case manager I find myself working with families where abuse and neglect are suspected. I have had to visit many homeless mothers and their children at Salvation Army shelters. Not too long ago I ran into an old black man hanging around the Salvation Army shelter. He was not eligible to get a bed there, but he was able to get a meal there once a day. This elderly homeless black man asked me for money and then noticed I was wearing an Obama baseball cap.

"You fur Obama?"

"Yes, sir, I am."
"Why you, a white man, fur Obama? You tell me why you, a white man, would be fur Obama."

I explained first that I was a Democrat and I was going to support the Democratic candidate no matter who that was, but that I was excited by Obama specifically. I said that I thought he was smart, that he was going to work for regular Americans and not just for rich people, and I thought it would be great if little black children could see a black man in the highest office in this country. It would show them that there are no limits on what you can do if you work hard, and have courage and determination.

This old man put his hands to his face to cover his tears. I found our conversation a little off putting. I was just talking.

"I'm gunnuh tell folk what you said, and I'm gunnuh tell dem dat a WHITE man said this."

As I left this guy I remember thinking, "I bet he won't even be allowed to vote." This homeless man, probably an alcoholic, has no address. He hasn't got money for his next bottle, or for a sandwich. He has no transportation. This old man, was lucid, sane, and the actions of government affect his daily life, but because he has no mailing address, can't afford a State ID, and has no transportation to the DMV office, he will not be allowed to vote. He has the physical ability to stand in line, to sign a ledger, but he is disenfranchised by fees, and rules and the hoops we require voters to jump through before they can cast their vote.

Worry by tex norman

This is a poem about worry.

The first line is not as poetic as the second line.
I was worried this would go just as it has
been going, but, hell, what'duh'ya'do?
While worry is not a productive emotion
and it contributes nothing posiitve to my life
it is what I'm good at and so. . .

In the second stanza I intended to make some
insightful points. The word insight implies
having some sight of what is inside of me, but
weel, it's pretty dark in there and so I don't have
much insight. I wanted stanza two to help me
as well as other worriers, to worry less, but
to be honest, stanza two seems somewhat vacuous.

I've decided against trying
to write a third stanza.

Writing In Blank Verse

I like blank verse. I believe that narrative poetry (poems that tell stories) can be very powerfully contained within blank verse poetry. I would guess that most people who are not poetry junkies have no idea what makes a line or a poem blank verse.

Some may recall from high school English lit classes that Shakespeare wrote his plays with blank verse, and I imagine most of adults remembering the required reading of Shakespeare's works have most decidedly unfun memories of struggling through those plays.

This is certainly not true of every student. I was a wantabee poet back in my high school days and while I struggled with the language and the archaic vocabulary, but when the teacher explained blank verse I wanted to understand it.

The problem was that my teacher wasn't really a poetry fan and had only the most basic understanding of blank verse. I have studied the form off and on for years and continue to learn more about it as time goes on.

What Is Blank Verse?

Well the blank part of the name is there because where the rhyme would normally be waiting it is missing. The rhymes are all blank. In addition to no rhymes, there is a pattern of beats in blank verse poetry. Our words are pronounced using syllables, and as we say words some syllables are stressed and some are not. If I say "the boy" I say the "the" with less force than the word "boy."

the BOY

To study the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables the traditional marks are as follows:
U = unstressed and ' = Stressed

U...'
the BOY

Actually, it is difficult for me to indicate because the fonts available.

These poet nerds have given names to the various combinations of stresses and unstressed. In blank verse the line is said to be written in iambic pentameter. An iambi is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one. One iamb is often referred to as a foot. The word Pente means 5, so an line of iambic pentameter is a string of 5 iambic feet.

U....'.........U....'.........U....'......U....'...U...'
The mon - key stuck an ap - ple up his nose.
tuh...dah.......tuh..dah.......tuh..dah...tuh...dah.tuh...dah.

Blank verse resembles regular speech, almost. To write a blank verse line you have to select your words carefully. When I write in blank verse, I mutter and mull over each line and tap with my finger listening. I'm listening for 5 stresses in each line, of course, but I am also listening to hear if the line makes sense, is the line saying what I want to say, does is sound good.
Here is the problem. Hardly anyone writing in blank verse writes strict or perfect blank verse. The poets are always adding extra syllables, extra beats, tinkering with the pattern.

In Robert Frost's wonderful poem The Star Splitter there is a line that goes:

We've looked and looked and after all where are we?

As I scan the line for it's meter I get this:

U........'..............U......'...........U.....'......U...'.....U.........'......U

We've looked and looked and af - ter all where are we?

There is an extra unstressed syllable at the end. If it were perfect iambic pentameter there would be 5 iambs and only 10 syllables in the line. The line above has eleven syllables.

Here is another Frost poem in blank verse, Mending Wall,

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun

The first line starts not with the unstressed syllable, as strict blank verse would, but with a stressed syllable. When you scan the lines you get other variations:

'..............U.......U......'....U......'........U...'.........U....'

Some - thing - there is.. that .does - n't ..love ..a .wall
dah.........tuh,,,..,,tuh.....dah..tuh...dah....... tuh..dah...tuh..dah

Note that the pattern is not strict at the beginning of the line, but quickly falls into perfect iambic pentameter. But when I bold and italicize the stressed syllables I find that the last two lines from the excerpt do fit the blank verse patter, but that word swell seems to be a sort of half stress to me.

Well, if a world recognized expert in the use of blank verse veers off from the perfect pattern of blank verse, then first we want to know why, and secondly, if we too are poets, we want to know how their rationale will help us in our own writing.

There are two kinds of blank verse

There is strict blank verse (which makes every line perfect) and blank verse loose (which is dominated by the pattern, but allows from variations.)

The loose iambic pentameter with diversions from the perfect pattern is there to keep the lines from become too monotonous. Take the plays of William Shakespeare. After a thousand lines of perfect iambic pentameter the listeners would be lulled into sleep. If you have ever slept with a fan on, in the room, you know that if the sound is repeated perfectly and endlessly the way machines make noise, you can actually sleep better. It is a poor man's white noise machine. You just don't want your poetry to become monotonous.

What follows is a blank verse poem of my own. You will notice that in some cases I dropped down a line to complete the line of iambic pentameter.

U......'.........U....'.....U..'.........U......'....U....'

"You need not hang a round with me,"
........................................................................he said.

AFTER DINNER WITH DAD by tex norman

"You need not hang around with me,"

.....................................................................he said.
"If you've got stuff to do, I'll understand.
I'm sure that you're as busy as a one
legged man who's paid for kickin' butts."

My father laughed at his own joke, but I
just sat there. I didn't say a thing.
.............................................."Maybe
you've got folks to see. Don't baby sit
with me, I'm fine. Of course it's great to see
you, and I love your company, you know,
but you're a man with tasks you must get done
I might be old, but able still to fend for
myself. I've learned a thing or two about
how to murder time and not get caught.
What with your mother gone I do the work

of two."
.............I sat and let the old man talk.
Eventually the pauses in his speech
outnumbered words. My father petered out.
Silence, like a Rhino, wedged between us
on the couch. You can't ignore a beast
as big and dangerous as that. So I
stood up and told my dad I had to go.

"I've got a bunch of stuff to do,"
.....................................................I said.

He said he understood. That it's been great.
I said we'd get together soon, and left.
Then slowly I drove home to watch TV
preferring nothingness to him. I've learned
to push the guilt aside like clutter on
my couch. I shove it back and clear a place
for me to rest guilt free, guilt free, guilt free.

I won't be voting for McCain

I will not be voting for the McCain/Palin ticket for the following reasons:

1. McCain picked Sarah Palin. The selection of a Vice Presidential partner is the only Presidential decision a candidate makes and McCain did a poor job of it. Palin has shown that she is acceptable only to the most radical of religious right conservative Republicans.

2. McCain voted with Bush 90%. This information about how often McCain voted with Bush comes from McCain himself. I saw him bragging about this 90% voting with Bush on tape. Last Sunday on Meet The Press, while attempting recently to distence himself from Bush, McCain told Tom Brokaw that he and Bush share a political point of view. I don’t approve of Bush, and I don’t approve of anyone who supports Bush 90% of the time.

3. McCain has changed his message every few days hoping to see a positive reaction in the polls. I am not mad about this, because I would likely do the same thing. But then, I am not qualified to be the President of the United States. By staggering from message to message it is an indication that he has no clear vision of where he wants to take the country. If you can’t effectively run a campaign, I can’t see how you could effectively run the country.

4. McCain says for a health care plan he will offer a $5000 assistance in getting health insurance, but the average police costs employers $12,000, and if you have pre-existing conditions and are buying (not a group plan but) an individual plan you will be rejected, or the policy will be cost prohibitive. This is, in essence a lie. He is telling us we would have health care with his Presidency, but we would not.

5. McCain will tax the portion of dollars paid by employers for providing our health care. This is not something I want, but it is not really a reason to reject McCain. Since people without employer paid insurance get no tax break, and people with employer paid insurance do get the tax break it is not exactly an equitable thing. The problem is that if McCain will cause many American’s to lose the insurance they have now. McCain’s plan will cause me to lose the better deals with larger group plans and force us to individual plans. and I already said in Number 4 that this would cause millions of Americans to be excluded from pre-existing conditions.

6. McCain voted several times to privatize social security. In effect, McCain would gamble with Social Security, and if the markets crash (as they have recently crashed) people counting on social Security to survive would, well, not survive. McCain believe in free market in all respects and even someone as respected and conservative as Allen Greenspan recently said in a Congressional Hearing that he had made a mistake and that an unregulated free market did not fix itself, and he had made a mistake. McCain would continue making the same mistake.

7. McCain is not pro-choice, and Palin is even less pro-choice than McCain. Sarah Palin would object to abortion even if the mother had been raped or the victim of incest. She would actually force a woman to go through 9 months carrying a reminder that she had been raped and brutalized.

8. McCain has several lobbyists for campaign staff, and some of these lobbyists have advocated for things that are directly linked with our current economic crisis. Again, this is alone is not enough for me to reject him, but when added to these other issues it contributes to my rejection of him as a candidate.

9. When McCain was running for President the last time, Bush hired a company to spread lies and insinuations against McCain and his family through the use of robo-calls, a sort of phone advertising done using a pre-recorded voice. McCain condemned the practice, but now, because winning means so much to him, McCain has hired the same company to spread lies and insinuations against Obama.

10. McCain lied about suspending his campaign. The facts show that while McCain did, eventually go to Washington, but his campaign ads, and his surrogates continued to campaign. McCain’s going to Washington was a stunt, and it complicated the process, it interjected Presidential politics into the economic crisis, and you just should not add complications to a crisis. If McCain’s handling of the economic crisis shows anything about his leadership abilities, then he is NOT for me.

“Last week John McCain said the fundamentals of our economy are strong. This week, he said it’s the worst crisis since World War II. So he suspended his campaign, unless you count doing interviews, airing attack ads, sending out surrogates on TV to attack Obama.” -Bill Maher

11. Claims at last debate he doesn't give a hoot for a washed up 'old' terrorist Ayers but continued to robo call about Ayers. Ayers turned himself in, charges were dropped, and he has been a respected citizen since. The lies and innuendos about Obama and Ayers is just smoke and mirrors trying to get the eyes of the people of the ineptitudes of the McCain campaign.
12. McCain and Palin have stirred up hatred and implied through surrogates that Obama and anyone who is a liberal or a Democrat is anti-American. The statements made in speeches, ads, and robo calls have inspired people to shout out that Obama should be killed. There has been precious little from McCain to try to calm his supporters and blunt the unreasoning hate he has fanned into flames. His message is directed to divide this country more which is not putting country first. It is putting McCain first.

"McCain called this 'B' girl to offer his support. Palin called her to offer some support, and Karl Rove called to say, 'You dumbass, you got the B backwards!'" --Bill Maher

13. McCain blasted Obama for doing what he himself did, and for the same reason. McCain said Obama voted against armor for the troops. This is true, but the reason was that the bill did not contain a timeline for getting troops out of Iraq. But McCain also voted against a different bill that would have provided armor for the troops, because that bill DID contain a timeline. Anyone familiar with the way bills are written knows that no bill contains only one item within it. The elected officials look at the whole bill and while there may be things in a bill you support, there may other things in that bill that are too objectionable to support. It is disingenuous for McCain to criticize Obama for doing the same thing he himself did.

14. McCain is just too old, and Sarah Palin is just not ready, nor is she smart enough to learn enough, fast enough while on the job.

“Sarah Palin, and John McCain are a good pair. She's pro-life and he's clinging to life." –Jay Leno

"Now obviously Sen. John McCain has made an enormous amount over Barack Obama's lack of experience, so it seems curious that the 72-year-old, four-to-five time face cancer guy would choose a running mate whose resume appears to be more suited for a Northern Exposure reunion show." –Jon Stewart

"The Wall Street Journal said today Democrats are sending an army of lawyers and investigators up to Alaska to look into the background of Sarah Palin. And of course, John McCain is furious. He said, 'Hey, if I didn't look into her background, there's no reason you should be looking into her background.'" --Jay Leno

14. When Palin was a mayor of a town in Alaska she required rape victims to pay for their own rape kits. Really.

15. Governor Palin found recently found guilty of ethics violations by a bipartisan legislative investigatory group. When asked about this ethics violation she said she was just glad to be exonerated. When told that she was not exonerated she used double speak and again said how happy she was that she was found innocent of all charges. Since Palin is not an idiot (I give her the benefit of the doubt) this means that she understands she was found guilty of ethics violations and is just denying the obvious. I just can’t see putting someone a heart beat away from being President who can lie like that

16. McCain failed to vote for the GI bill for our troops. I oppose the war, but I support fair treatment of our troops. Not only does this country owe it to the troops to provide them with a GI Bill and for health treatments for as long as they are needed, but a GI bill would increase the number of educated adults among our citizens, and with this education the economy of this country would be strengthened. The GI bill was the right thing to do for the troops and for the country.

17. McCain is ill-tempered man lacking the temperament needed to be President.. Of course this is an opinion, but then, this is an opinion piece. Rolling your eyes, interrupting, making snide remarks are not enough to disqualify him as President. In fact I don’t believe McCain is disqualified to be President. But given a choice, and I have been given a choice, I will not vote for a grumpy ole guy who might pop a cork in a crisis when calm cool and collected would more likely bring us to a rationale decision.

18. I hate it when McCain says “I know how to do that. . He says he knows how to create jobs, but doesn’t give us a hint of what he would do that would create jobs. He knows how to take care of the military, he says despite the fact that nonpartisan military advocacy groups give him low marks for supporting their issues. Here is a direct McCain quote:

"I'm not going to telegraph a lot of the things that I'm going to do because then it might compromise our ability to do so. But, look, I know the area, I have been there, I know wars, I know how to win wars, and I know how to improve our capabilities so that we will capture Osama bin Laden -- or put it this way, bring him to justice. We will do it, I know how to do it."

If McCain really knew, why doesn’t he share that information with someone? He says he places the country first, so it can’t be that he wouldn’t get all the credit for the solutions, could it? Surely McCain would not be blackmailing the American people saying I can solve your problems, but I will only do so if you elect me President first. Why do we have to elect him to learn his secret. Here is what I think: McCain has no idea how to get Ben Laden, or create jobs, or any of these things he claims he already Knows How To Do. But McCain thinks, if he is elected he will be able to figure out what to do. Maybe he would figure it out. But to claim he has answers he does not have is, at best, hyperbole, and at worse it is just a campaign lie.

19. I believe McCain has hinted he would likely go to war with Iran and Russia, but that he would not follow Ben Laden into the boarder mountains of Pakistan because they are a sovereign nation

20. McCain lacks the intellect of his opponent Barack Obama. McCain, flunked out of high school, graduating 6th from the bottom of his class. Maybe he was smart but incorrigible. I don’t think McCain is dumb. But the academic achievements of Obama are far more impressive than McCain’s. When Obama was called an elitist I laughed. I want an elitist in the oval office. We found out what it was like having a gnat-brained, fool in there for 8 years, so it is time we try something else: like electing smart people.

21. I have to be honest and say that I am a Democrat and I vote for the party, always. I have explored the general political point of view held by Republicans and Democrats and I support the principals, and the plank of the Democrats. I don’t expect to agree with everything within my party, just as I don’t object to everything in the Republican part. But I am a Democrat fully, totally, through and through so, at least right now, I can’t imagine me voting for McCain under any circumstances.

Is Rhyme Passé

I recently got this message in my email from someone named Matthew.

In my experience, if you rhyme in a poem, no one takes you seriously. I don't understand these brainwashed people.
Are we to believe there are no more Poe's, or Frost's, or Shakespeare's, or all kinds of great poets throughout the centuries?
A good lyrical poem is very hard to come by, but that does not mean they don't exist?
I have a difficult time believing that "real critics" take any NEW lyrical, rhyming poems seriously. I would need proof to feel differently.

I wrote a response:

Dear Matthew: In your note to me you seem to be either frustrated or upset. I think you are when you say that many people do not take your work seriously if it rhymes. I am not sure it is fair to brand all of those people as “brainwashed.” When a majority of people accept something it may mean that they are just going along with the majority, they are on the bandwagon, in step. racing toward a cliff like a bunch of lemmings. But any label applied to a large group is usually a prejudice. Some of those people who prefer “free verse” may just prefer it for some reason.

Are good rhyming poems being written today? Yes. Are there recognized contemporary poets using rhyme today? Yes.

One mistake some people make is assuming that because a poem is called Free Verse that it is free from rhyme. End rhyme is often missing, or used only occasionally, but internal rhyme may actually be used with abundance. Free Verse often makes use of many traditionally accepted poetic techniques.

I continue to think about rhyme even after responding to Matthew. I remember a couple of lines by Theodore Roethke:

I am the final thing
A man learning to sing.

I remember reading A Precocious Autobiography by Yevgeny Yevtushenko in which the Russian poet said that he wrote his verse using rhyme because he liked the verse to sing.

When Robert Frost said that free verse was like playing tennis with the net down he was speaking to the challenges that come with fixed form poetry and the writing within the parameters of the fixed form has an aspect of fun attached to it.

Nevertheless, if you scan Poet’s Market you will see, over and over, literary magazine editors saying they do not want to receive any rhyming poetry. Why is rhyme less of a factor in most contemporary poetry, or poetry deemed by most as serious poetry?

Rhyme Driven

Sometimes you will see a criticism of a rhyming poem that it is “rhyme driven.” What does that mean? Well, if a poem is rhyme driven it means that the line is heading for the next rhyme. The trip matters less than arriving at that perfect rhyme at the end of the line. When the whole reason for the poem is to reach the rhymes, that poem is rhyme driven.

Poets using rhyme came to realize that they were sometimes prevented from saying what they want to say, because the rhymes were not there. If they establish a pattern of rhyme and want to stay consistent with that pattern they end up not saying what they originally intended to say. Or if they say what they wanted to say they had to torture the syntax. A line may be considered tortured, if there is even the slightest whiff of odd word order. Consider one of the great poems of American literature. Let’s look at the opening two lines from Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening by Robert Frost:

Whose woods these are, I think I know
His house is in the village though

Wouldn’t we normally say:

I think I know who owns these woods

It is very common for the word order to alter in order to force the line to rhyme. But word order alterations are also used by free verse poets. Take for example the opening two lines from former Poet Laureate William Stafford’s powerful poem, Traveling Through The Dark:

Traveling through the dark I found a deer

dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.

In this free verse example the natural order of the words is clearly altered. Most of us would say,

Driving through the darkness I found a dead
deer on the edge of the Wilson River road

Most of us would call driving driving and not traveling. Most of us would say we came upon a dead deer not a deer dead.

In the Frost poem the word order is altered to make the rhymes fit, and they do fit very well. In the Stafford poem the word order is altered to simulate that slight surprise you get when you come upon something dead. The first line ends with deer, and the beginning of line two is dead. The altered word order, and by separating the words on different lines gives you a tiny unexpected shock.

Am I saying that altering the natural word order is bad when it is done for rhyme and acceptable when it is done in free verse for some intended effect?

Well, no. I love both the Frost poem and the Stafford poem. Poetry is not natural. Poetry is not the same thing as natural conversation. I think we want our poems to elevate language. We want poetry to have a density to it. In a poem we want, at least sometimes we want, levels of meaning. We like the words to have multiple meanings and all (or most) of these different meanings to apply to the meaning of the poem.

All poetry alters the natural way of using the language, but better poetry tends to alter or manipulate the words without having that alteration stand out. We don’t seem to like it as well if the alterations of the phrases and sentences call attention to themselves.

Rhyming Nouns

In some inflected languages (like Italian) where the word endings change based upon their grammatical usage, you are just going to find oodles and gobs of rhymes. Translating these rhyming poems into English and matching the rhyme scheme can be difficult and sometimes impossible. In English we have a problem of having fewer rhyming words, and so we end up rhyming a bunch of nouns together (boy, joy, annoy) which tends to force us to put our rhymes at the end of each line. So you are reading the poem, and you are coming to a near full stop at the end of each line. This pause at the end of each line causes the poem to have a sign-song, nursery rhyme quality to even a serious work.

Take this corny, just made up example:

Standing by her grave I sigh
and wonder why she had to die
the driver he was young and drunk
a careless no good stupid punk
and now she rests beneath the sod
and I stand here questioning my God.

I intended the subject matter to be serious, but obviously the lines come to a full stop and there is the rhyme waiting and obviously a noun. It just doesn’t have the effect on a reader that the subject matter would have sought.

Enjambment

Enjambment means that the sentence moves on to the next line with little or no pause at the line’s end. In English, while rhymes are less frequent, we do have words that pair up when we look for other parts of speech. A noun might rhyme with a participle, or a verb with a pronoun, or an adjective with a preposition. This provides some interesting possibilities, and it tends to move the poem along forcing the reader to read past the end of the line without stopping to saver the rhyme.

Consider the Keats poem: Endymion (a poem, like Chaucer's, in iambic pentameter rhyming couplets) which demonstrate how enjambment works:

A thing of beauty is a joy forever:

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness but still will keep

A bower quiet for us, and asleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.(ll .1-5)

In line 2 we end with the words will never and that is a stand alone phrase. The mind is asking, “never what?” The whole phrase, will never pass. The word never is an adverb. By mixing things up and rhyming nouns and using adverbs, prepositions, nouns, verbs, pronouns, adjectives and nouns to rhyme with one another you get lines that flow. You avoid lines that end with a big stop while the rhyme yells out “look at me.”

AS for me, I both agree and disagree. I don’t enjoy serious poetry that sounds forced, and trivialized by its use of rhyme. One of the more comman creative forms using rhyme today is rap lyrics. In one rap by Eminem the writer/performer attempts to tell a serious story about his marriage and his feelings for his child. Here is a short exerpt from one of Eminem’s songs.

I keep having this dream, I'm pushin' Hailie on the swing

She keeps screaming, she don't want me to sing

"You're making Mommy cry, why? Why is Mommy crying?

"Baby, Daddy ain't leaving no more, "Daddy you're lying"

You always say that, you always say this is the last time"

But you ain't leaving no more, Daddy you're mine"

She's piling boxes in front of the door trying to block it"

Daddy please, Daddy don't leave, Daddy - no stop it!"
When I'm Gone by Eminem

This is an autobiographical work, and it is serious. The lyrics go on to describe a performer who is tortured by guilt for being “on the road” and away from his child. The lyrics include the attempted suicide of his exwife, and the turmoil of his daughter’s life. This is a serious work, but it doesn’t work as a poem. Just reading the words seems to trivialize the content.

Now it is not fair to take a song lyric or a rap lyric and expect it to stand alone as a work of poetry. Some song lyrics can stand alone, but usually the lyric is central to the music it was designed for, and what might not work with words alone, may work out perfectly when accompanied by music.

So let’s look at serious rhyming poetry by famous and admired writers.

First look at an excerpt from Longfellow’s poem The Wreck of the Hesperus:

The skipper he stood beside the helm,

His pipe was in his mouth,

And he watched how the veering flaw did blow

The smoke now West, now South.

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Then up and spake an old Sailòr,

Had sailed to the Spanish Main,

"I pray thee, put into yonder port,

For I fear a hurricane.

"Last night, the moon had a golden ring,

And to-night no moon we see!"

The skipper, he blew a whiff from his pipe,

And a scornful laugh laughed he.
The Wreck of the Hesperus By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

No one can deny that a ship sung in a hurricane is a serious topic, especially for the sailors that died and the grieving family members left behind, but this poem just seems silly to me. Notice that all the rhymes are either nouns or pronouns.

Let’s check out The Man He Killed by Thomas Hardy. Thomas Hardy’s fiction is very powerful even for today’s readers, and he is clearly a skilled poet. In this poem the speaker is contemplating a man killed on the battle field, and noting that under different circumstances the man he killed might have easily turned into a pal, a nice guy he would be happy to share a beer with, but because of war things turned out very differently.

I shot him dead because--

Because he was my foe,

Just so: my foe of course he was;

That's clear enough; although
The Man he Killed by Thomas Hardy

Write What you Want The Way You Want

Does all this mean that a serious poet can only use rhyme for satire, humor, and children’s poetry, but never for serious works? Can we never again have a Robert Frost style poet recognized and admired by the masses?

I don’t know. I like to think that a great work of poetry, or a great work of any sort of art, will be recognized by the world. I fear this is just something I want. I believe there are great writers, and artists everywhere, and they gain fame and admiration because they work hard for it, and they get lucky. I believe there are fabulous artists who may be admired by a small group, but once they die their art fades into oblivion. Really, it is the nature of existence that we all eventually fade into oblivion. There will be a time when no one remembers Shakespeare. Of course this may not happen until all human beings have been wiped off the earth, but the conclusion of life on earth is to die and this planet will become a spinning ball of dust similar to Mars. Oblivion comes to us all; it is just a matter of timing. If oblivion is unavoidable, then why not write what you like, and write it the way you want to write it. Creativity is interesting and almost exclusively the purview of human beings. When we create we celebrate human life, all life and our place within all that exists.

Socialism and an interview with mama

Mama: I don't want Obama to be President because I don't want to live under Socialism.
Me: You say Socialism, but what does that word mean?
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Mama: Socialist are Communists. They will take all my money and leave me poor. I want to keep my money.
Me: We tend to use words and we sort of know what those words mean, but pressed to define them we can find ourselves floundering for a meaningful and clear definition of those words. The word Socialism actually refers to a broad set of economic theories. These Socialist theories advocate for a state or collective ownership and administration of the means of production. In other words, under socialism, manufacturing, would be owned by, and run by the government, and all the employees would be government employees. Also, socialist theory advocates for the distribution of goods by the government, and for the creation of an egalitarian society.
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Mama: So what is an egalitarian society?
Me: Egalitarianism is a word derived from the French word égal, which means equal. Therefore, within the socialist theory an egalitarian society would be a society in which all people would be treated as equals and everyone would have the same rights, including political, economic, social, and civil rights.
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Mama: Sounds Commie to me.
Me: Well, it does have something in common with Communism. Actually Communism is like socialism on methamphetamine.
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Mama: Well all this sounds as bad as I thought it was. I don't want all the businesses owned by the government. I don't want the only employer to be the government. And I don't think equality should go to everything. Lazy people should not have the same stuff that people who work hard have.
Me: Ok.
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Mama: So, that's why I am against Obama. He is a Socialist.
Me: Is he? Does Obama want all businesses to be owned by and run by the government?
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Mama: I don't know.
Me: Well, he is not saying that the government should own the airline industry, and the car making industry, or any other businesses. But do you know what leader of a political party just did Nationalize the Banking industry? It was George W Bush, the current head of the Republican Party. When you Nationalize the Banks it means that the government has taken over the Banking industry. That is pretty close to fitting into a socialist theory.
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Mama: But Obama wants people who make more money have to pay more taxes.
Me: Yeah, that is true. But this is not an idea new to Obama. In fact, this idea has been in place since 1926 when the government added progressive income tax to the US Constitution. Since 1926 almost everyone, and both Democrats and Republicans have agreed that a progressive income tax was fair.

Mama: What is progressive income tax?
Me: Progressive income tax says that the government will take less money from poor people and take more money from rich people in order to pay for the running of our government and government services. The idea is that you can take more money from rich folk and they can still live pretty well.
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Mama: Well, ONE, I don't think there should be any government services. And TWO, I don't think it is fair to punish people for being successful by taking more money away from those who do well, and giving a pas to people who are lazy or dumb.
Me: Lets consider your FIRST objection. You say you don't think there should be any government services.
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Mama: That's right.
Me: But you are retired, aren't you?
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Mama: Yeah.
Me: And you get social security from the government don't you?

Medicare and Social Security have created the healthiest and most financially secure generation of senior citizens in American history. ~Jim Walsh

Mama: Yeah, but I paid money in for that Social Security.
Me: Yes, you did. But you did not pay in as much money as you will get back in retirement. Most people on social security will get more back then they paid in, unless they die young. So everyone on Social Security is getting money from the government, and that is a service from the government. Are you ready to refuse your Social Security Checks?
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Mama: Well, no.
Me: And you get Medicare, as well don't you?
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Mama: Yeah.
Me: These are socialist-like programs, and services provided to retired people by their government. You cannot get these services unless someone is paying in to the government to fund the programs.
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Mama: Well, those programs are OK, but that should be it.
Me: So you don't want the government to provide police protection, or pay for a fire department? Would you prefer to have private companies and if you wanted fire protection you would pay a fire protection bill each month like you pay for your car, or rent on your apartment? .

Mama: Maybe. Maybe I do. We could just subscribe for fire protection like we do for the newspaper.
Me: Here is the problem. If you pay for fire protection and the person next door doesn't their house could catch fire, and since they didn't enroll in a fire fighter company their house burns to the ground, and as the fire gets out of hand it catches the houses around it on fire. It might mean that six houses on a block could be on fire and they would be funded to only fight two of those fires. This might mean that your house catches on fire because they let your neighbor's house go without trying to stop it early.
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Mama: OK I guess a fire department makes sense.
Me: How about the police, an army, public schools, traffic lights, regulatory agencies to keep you from being ripped off by unlicensed contractors, or unscrupulous insurance companies? Would those services be good?
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Mama: Yeah.
Me: Let's look at your second objection: You think taxation should be uniformed.
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Mama: Yeah. It isn't fair to take more money from rich people and let poor people pay little or nothing.
Me: How would you prefer to pay for these services you just admitted were worth having?
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Mama: I think taxes should be just a flat rate.
Me: OK, but if we had say, a 10% flat tax that would mean that everyone paid 10% of their income, and a poor guy making $1,000 per year would pay $100, and a richer guy making 3000 per year would pay $3,000,.meaning the rich would still be paying more than the poor.

I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible. ~Milton Friedman

Mama: Well, I just don't like taxes.
Me: No one really likes taxes. I don't like taxes. I don't like paying my bill at a restaurant. I don't like cancer, or tornadoes, or tooth decay. There are millions of things we don't like, but we have to deal with lots of stuff we don't like. You may not want to pay taxes, but do you want to live in an area populated with other humans? As soon as human's gather into neighborhoods, or cities, or nations we have problems that have to be addressed. We can't live together without having roads, police protection, sewage disposal, garbage disposal, clean water, and on and on, and all of these things cost money. If we just allow anyone who wants to build a road and put up toll booths then fine, you are paying for the roads you use. But we tend to want and expect that these roads be safe. We want regulations to ensure that we are kept safe. We don't want the bridges to fall down with us on them. The regulators of bridge construction have to be hired. The regulations have to be written. The people who do all this stuff have to be paid. If every single need we have from living together in a civilization is handled by private business people then it gets impossible to regulate, and the quality of services is very inconsistent. Having a government to regulate services and to provide services becomes the logical way to have a civilization.

If you are actually going to be against all taxes then that is fine. But you also have to be willing to live without social security, or Medicare, or public schools, or ambulance services, or a fire department, or cops, or an army, or agencies to protect children from abuse, and on and on. If you are against all taxes then you are saying you want to live in a country without any government.
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Mama: Maybe that is what I want.
Me: Well, let's look at a country that has no taxes and no government. The only one I know of is Somali. The last government, in Somali was that of Siad Barre, and that government was toppled in 1991. Since the government disappeared the country of Somalia has divided into a thousands of different fiefdoms, bands of people controlled by warlords, and from time to time the warlords get into violent clashes with other warlords.
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Without government this is what life is like in Somalia:
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1. There is No public spending
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If you go from one city to the other, in Somalia, you will pass checkpoints, each run by a different warlord militia. At each of these "border crossings" all passenger vehicles and goods must pay an "entry fee", ranging from $3 - $300, depending on the value of the goods being carried - and what the militiamen think they can get away with. There is no standard fee. A standard fee would be fair and logical, but there is no government to insist that this be done, so it is not done. There is no pretense on the part of anyone that any of this money will be going for public services, such as health, education or roads. Most of this money will go into the pockets of some militiamen and will be spent on khat, an addictive stimulant, whose green leaves the warlord henchmen will chew on for hours on end.
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It is possible to travel through these checkpoints (or roadblocks) but only if you can afford it travel with several armed guards. Without a government, every person must provide his own police protection. If you can't afford protection you just have no protection.
Without a government there are no cops, or military, and so, in Mogadishu, the schools, colleges, universities and most government buildings have become squatter camps for the thousands of homeless people who fled from fighting elsewhere.
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2. There number of Kidnappings increased
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The warlords have started to kidnap aid workers, demanding huge ransom fees, which has caused many of the aid agencies to pull out of the country. Without foreign aid workers this leave most of the people there without any assistance whatsoever.
It only cost $3 to see a doctor but without work, without protection to do business, with danger all around, no one and so people are dying of easily treated diseases with relatively inexpensive medications to bring them a cure. At least they have no socialism.
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3. Without a government there are no market forces
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Somalia is the perfect example of a pure free market. From a capitalist, free market, laissez-faire point of view, a pure free market a good thing? Right? Many economists might say yes it is a good thing, however, in Mogadishu this totally free market with zero interference from a government has created a very harsh reality for the Somalian people.
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4. Without a government, interestingly enough, the currency of choice in Somalia happens to be US dollars.
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Somali shillings are still used but the notes only come in one denomination - 1,000, and the 1,000 shilling denomination happens to be worth exactly seven US cents.
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5. Documents mean zero without a government.
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In Somalia, for just $80 US dollars, you can, within 24 hours be a Somalian citizen, born in Mogadishu. With passports and guns freely available, those wanting to launch terror attacks have just about everything they need. Total freedom with no government is sounding very attractive indeed.
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Anti-tax conservatives seem to enjoy criticizing our governments, and pine for a minuscule government that costs nothing and stays totally out of their life, but life in Somalia shows the living with no government is far worse.

Hoax, Racism, and Some Americans

This turned out to be a hoax, but when the story first broke it was very alarming. A McCain campaign volunteer, Ashley Todd , told the police that she had been robbed at knife point, while withdrawing money from an ATM. Before her assailant left he saw a McCain sticker on Ms Todd’s car, and returned to beat her and scratched a B on her cheek, the B allegedly being for Barack. I was upset that a criminal supporter of Obama would bring such bad publicity to the campaign, and terrorize a young woman exercising her right to advocate for the candidate of her choice.

I heard this story first, and then, I watched the coverage on TV and saw the photo of the injured Ms. Todd. The black eye looked bad, and genuine, but the B. There was something odd about the B. Look closely and you will see the arches of the B are going backward. Now unless the attacker had a horrible case of dyslexia, if the guy had this poor girl down and was scratching a letter on her face, the ache of the B would be correct. This B was backward. It looks like the error one might make if they carved the B into their own face.

Apparently the details from Ms Todd came out in dribbles and spurts. One time the assailant was said to have bent over her. The next time she tells the story her assailant was sitting on her chest. The first time the story was told there was no mention of a McCain sticker being the motive of the beating. The way details were given just did not conform to the way real victims give information to the police. There were no ATM photos to confirm any part of her story. Then the cops gave Ms. Todd a polygraph exam that she reportedly failed. Finally, Ms. Todd confessed that she made the story up, and that she has a history of mental problems. Wow! I didn’t see that coming. The police department's investigations division, now say that Ms. Ashley Todd is being charged with making a false report to police.

No one can directly blame this nasty attempt at smearing Obama on the McCain Campaign, however, there are reports that the McCain people in Pennsylvania jumped on this story and started pushing it on the media before the facts were investigated. Obviously the McCain campaign needs something to increase their chances, and this race based attack by a “6’4” black man and Obama supporter” may have seemed like really good luck to them, but they spread the story before they had the facts and it turned out to be the made up story of a mentally off McCain volunteer staff supporter. There are some, including me, who feel this eagerness for the hoax to have been true is an example of race baiting. The hoax plays on a long term fear among some white segments of our population and huge segments of our white patriarchs. Big scary black men messing with our precious, pure white women and that can’t be allowed. The fact that this lie has been used and abused by guilty white people is an undeniable fact.

Remember Susan Smith the woman who claimed a big black man had hi-jacked her car and driven off with her two young children still strapped into their child safety seats in the back of her car? Susan Smith finally admitted killed her own two very young children and blamed it on an imaginary black car-jacker?

What about Charles Stuart who shot his seven months pregnant wife in the head, and then shot himself in the abdomen. Stuart told the police that the murderer was a Black man, which sparking a police round-up of hundreds of innocent Black men for questioning. Stuart's story unraveled and he committed suicide by jumping off a bridge.

Being in Oklahoma City I recall clearly that the Oklahoma City Bombing was, at first blamed on "the Nation of Islam." The suspected involvement of the Nation of Islam was announced by both Tom Brokaw and and Peter Jennings. The actual terrorists were white men from middle America with U.S. military backgrounds.

Then there is the lesser known, Jesse Anderson, a white man, told the police that while leaving a suburban Milwaukee restaurant he and his wife were attacked and stabbed by two big ole Black guys. Of course Anderson was just barely stabbed at all and his wife was stabbed over and over in her face, her head, and torso. Guess which one of them died? After a five-day search for the fictional Black criminals, Anderson was arrested and charged with his wife's murder. Apparently the blood evidence made the cops suspicious. Oh, yeah, also, Anderson called his wife's insurance company one month prior to her murder to determine whether her $250,000 policy was in effect.

Robert Harris claimed that he and his fiancée, Teresa McLeod, had been shot and robbed by an armed Black man wearing a camouflage jacket and black and white pants. Harris was shot once and McLeod was shot several times. Guess which one died at the scene: the fiancée. Harris confessed to his involvement: and that he mistakenly believe he was the beneficiary of his fiancée’s $250,000 life insurance policy.

Remember the "Runaway Bride," Jennifer Wilbanks? Wilbanks got cold feet, and ran off just before her wedding. When the Runaway Bride showed up later she claimed that a Latino (non-white) man and a white woman had kidnapped her. The lie came out and later the Runaway Bride was asked how she came up with her fabricated story, Wilbanks’s answer was that she watched too many cop and robber movies.

Or how about the horrible crime against a woman known for years as the Central Park Jogger This was a horrible crime that lead to the arrest and imprisonment of 5 teens who were convicted, in 1989, of assaulting and raping a white woman. They were said to have been "wilding" a term that meant they were just going nuts coming unspeakable crimes against any and all innocent white people they could find while wilding in the park. A non-Black serial rapist admitted his guilt in the crime, and his confession was confirmed by DNA testing. The victim of this crime did not blame black or non=white teens for raping and beating her and leaving her near death. That victim remembered nothing of the crime. The public was happy to do the blaming for her. The actual rapist later said that he had never met the five accused (and innocent) perpetrators

If black people mistrust white people, they are mistrusting racism, and that is appropriate. ~Jasmine Guy

This most recent play on historic white fear is just an example of the racism that still lives beneath the skin of America like a parasitic worm. I can’t know this, but it certainly looks like part of the desperation of Republicans to smear Obama comes from the sudden realization, by a segment of White American that we just might actually elect a black man as President and that is just totally unacceptable to them.

As some know, I work as a Child Welfare Case Manager going in to the homes of families involved in child abuse. Some families are abusers, and some are families that take in abused children. During the primary race this white father told me that he was voting for the Republican, whoever that might be, because the only choice the Democrats had for him was a woman or a n#%&er.

Racism is man's gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason. ~Abraham Joshua Heschel

No one likes to lose, and while the road to the White House looks bleak for the Republicans, it is still not a done deal. McCain could still win. The election will not be based on a popular vote, but on the Electoral College vote. This racist based hoax is evidence that we are just not totally OK in this country. We are better, but we are not there yet.

Frugal me! Frugal me!

There is an old teacher joke that goes like this: The English teacher asked the kids to use their vocabulary words to write a story. Little Johnny looks up the word Frugal and sees that at least one of the definitions is To Save. So Little Johnny writes:

There was once a beautiful princess imprisoned in a tower. She yells from the tower, ‘Frugal me! Frugal me!”

A handsome Knight was riding by. He ran in and frugaled her and they lived happily ever after.

In these times of economic uncertainty it is time to consider being frugaled.

I am interviewing for jobs about 3 or 4 times each week, but I have no job right now. I don’t think I am making a lot of mistakes with my resume, or my interview performance. I feel that if there is one opening (and 20 applicants) that 6 or 8 of the applicants may be perfect for the job, yet the hiring team can only pick one. But having no job is stressing me. I haven’t worked for months because of a bad car crash that has required me to care for my wife who was injured so badly she could not get on without constant care until just recently.

No money is coming in, we have just a little left from the sell of our house, and being frugal is something important to me right now.

So what must I do to slow my spending and hold on until I do find a job?

When You Get Paid – Pay yourself first

This has to come first because of the way it is worded, and I know how crazy it sounds, but I really believe it is true. Always, always, always pay yourself before you pay anyone else. The first bill you pay must be yourself.

Whenever I have said this to poor hurting families I get one of two reactions.

Reaction 1

I can’t pay my bills now. If I pay myself first I won’t be able to pay my bills and we’ll go under.

Paying yourself first does not mean to pay yourself so much that you shortchange your debts. It would be great if you could save 10% of your salary for a rainy day, and put money into a retirement fund of some sort, and perhaps have some diversified investments, but if you are in deep debt an aggressive saving program will be impossible. Nevertheless, you can still pay yourself something. If you can’t save $100, can you pay yourself $10? If $10 is going to hurt, then how about $1, or 10¢? If you look closely you will find that all of us waste money, and at least a tiny amount of money usually wasted could have been saved, and if it could have been saved it ought to be saved.

Reaction 2

You’re suppose to pay God first.

If you are a person of faith, especially the Christian faith, then you may have this idea that God demands a tithe (10% of your income) and to not give that to God is to commit a sin, and to risk your immortal soul. If that is what you believe there is nothing I can or should do about it, however, there is a scripture I feel you should consider:

But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel. ~1 Timothy 5:9

There are a lot of scriptures that seem to conflict. The Old Testament commands the faithful to avoid work on the Sabbath, but in other places we read that if an ox falls into a ditch on the Sabbath you are commanded to get the animal out of the hole. You aren’t to work except if the animals will be in pain by not being milked you should milk them. Jesus himself said, that the Sabbath was made for man, and man was not made for the Sabbath. The message is clear: some scriptures must be followed within the parameters of the Big Picture. You may believe that God wants you to support Him with your heart, your time, and your treasure, but God also wants you to take care of your family, and neglecting your family in favor of God makes you worse than a nonbeliever.

Be aware of your spending

No habit can be changed without awareness, and living beyond one’s means is an American habit. How do you become aware of your spending patterns? By writing down what you spend. Keep track of what you spend for one month. Save every receipt, and carry a notebook with you at all times. If you buy a cup of coffee at a drive through, write it in the notebook. If you put a dime in a gum machine, you write down, Piece of gum 10¢

Increased awareness and education could be a great help toward improving spending and saving habits and increasing participation and contribution levels to retirement plans. ~Ron Lewis

The truth is that we waste a lot of our hard earned money on a daily basis. If we were aware of the waste, we might not spend it. If we didn’t spend it, we would have more money to save, or pay on debts, or to buy essentials.

Consider the following common waste:

Coffee:

The National Coffee Association, says that the average price for brewed coffee is $1.38. Using simple math (or in my case a calculator) if there are 260 weekdays in a year, and if you buy one cup of coffee on the way to work, you have just spent , so buying one coffee every weekday morning costs almost $360 per year.

Smokes:

At my local mini-mart the guy in line in front of me bought a package of cigarettes and paid $4.54. If you smoke one pack of cigarettes a day, and there are 365 days in a year, that means you are spending $1,657 a year.

Beer:

Let’s say you drink just two beer a day (and lots of people are drinking a lot more beer than that) then you are spending a lot of money. If these two beers are purchased at a bar you are probably spending about $4 per beer, maybe more. If you stop off with the guys at the local bar and grill, and drink two beers after work and there are 260 work days in the year that would mean you would be spending $1,040 per year. If you prefer mixed drinks, you can figure twice that ($2,080 per year) for two distilled spirits based mixed drinks a day at the local bar.

Buy a six pack and bring it home, and limit yourself to two beers per day then if the entire 6-pack cost $6.00 (about $1 per beer) and you drink two beers for say 300 days out of a 365 day year you will have spent: $600. That's not chicken feed, that is cash..

Bottled water:

A 20 ounce bottle of water costs about $1. Drink one a day and you just spent $365 for the year. per year. It costs the environment plenty, too.

Unused Memberships:

Perhaps the worst example in lots of our lives is the fee we pay to be members of a gym. It is common for a gym membership to cost somewhere between $35 and $40. which could mean you are paying $480 per year. If you are a member of a gym and don’t go to the gym, this is wasted money. When you remember that you can go outside and walk, or job for free, this is a perfect example of wasted money.

Just start writing down what you spend on vending machines, eating out for work week lunches, manicures, car washes, a daily newspaper, books, extra Shoes, etc. and you will soon discover that we tend to nickel and dime ourselves into poverty. You can waste this money without noticing it when you have good pay coming in, but in hard times, you can’t afford to waste money.

Reduce debt

Until recently I owed $17,000 for credit card debt and one of those cards was at 26% interest. The median amount of credit card debt carried by Americans is $6,600. If their interest rate were set at 13.44% and if they make only the minimum payment due, it will take those 21 years (250 months) to pay this off. While I still advocate that you pay yourself first, I also advocate for paying off credit cards as soon as possible. The majority of your disposable income (meaning the money left over after paying your essentials) must go to paying down credit card debt. Consumer credit card debt is in 2008, about $744.2 billion. The level of credit card debt has gone up $17.4 billion in just one year.

It is imperative that we make consumers more aware of the long-term effects of their financial decisions, particularly in managing their credit card debt, so that they can avoid financial pitfalls that may lead to bankruptcy. ~Daniel Akaka

Learn the difference between NEED and WANT

Wants are not needs, but they often feel like needs. If you want to survive the hard times, and work toward getting out of debt, you need to know the difference between what you need and what you want. We need food, clothing, and shelter. We don’t need so many clothes that we can go a whole season and never where the same garments twice. We need food, but eating steak is not a need. There are cheaper forms of protein. I have a friend who’s daughter asked for $300 to get her through until payday. He was happy to do that, until, as she was leaving his daughter told her mom that she was behind on her payments to her personal trainer. A personal trainer is not a need. Designer moisturizers, unlimited bandwidth, and tickets to the Superbowl are wants not needs. The truth is that we don’t need a fraction of the stuff we spend our money on.

Now I am not saying you have to live a miserable deprived existence. Maybe you do need to live a Spartan existence , if times so bad for you that you are facing homelessness, but for most of us we are just having hard times, and we need to get our income, debts, and spending under control. You can drink water, never drink another cola or beer for the rest of your life, and your life will not be in jeopardy, but maybe you like a soda-pop once in a while. I am not saying you can’t ever have a pop, or go to the movies, or get an extra pair of shoes. I am saying be aware of what you spend, and make informed choices about how you use your money. I am saying set up a pattern in your life of saving money, and getting out of debt.

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons. ~Woody Allen

Fingerprints on History

Probably the earliest scientist to include mention of finger prints in their scientific writing was Marcello Malpighi (1628-1694) and Dr. Nehemiah Grew (1641-1712). Marcello Malpighi, was an Italian anatomist and microscopist who described the patterns on the tips of fingers as part of an overall study of human skin. He is regarded by some to be the first histologist, a term for one who studies tissue. One of the lower layers of skin is named for him, the "Malpighian layer." Dr. Nehemiah Grew wrote a work entitled Philosophical Transactions for 1684 where he described the "innumerable little ridges."

In science unless something is studied and variations have been identified, separated out, and named, we have not made progress. Therefore, the next progressive scientist to contribute to the history and study of fingerprinting is Jan Purkinje (1787 - 1869), a Czechoslovakian physiologist who, in 1823 what he described as 9 different patterns of finger prints.

1. Transverse curve
2. Central longitudinal stria
3. Oblique stripe
4. Oblique loop
5. Almond whorl
6. Spiral shorl
7. Ellipse
8. Circle
9. Double whorl.

Dr. Purkinje was just cataloguing what he saw, and he had not made the leap from what he was seeing and how that information could be used as a means of identification.

The only way a fingerprint could be of value for identification purposes would be if each one was unique and shared with no one else. The first person to notice the uniqueness of fingerprints was William Herschel (1833 – 1918) who had been working as the Assistant Joint Magistrate and Collector in colonial India. Herschel began collecting, as keepsakes, the fingerprints of his friends and relatives and took note of how each impression was unique to the individual and he also noticed that even after the passing of several years, an individual’s finger print stayed unchanged. Herschel made the leap that finger prints were unique to an individual that no two finger prints were alike, and therefore, finger prints could be used to differentiate one person from another. From 1877 - 1878 Herschel ordered that government pensioners use a finger print to sign for their monthly payments. He also had finger prints used to register deeds, to authenticate their transactions such as deeds of sale, and even had the courthouse forced convicts to fingerprint their jail warrants to keep them from hiring someone to pay someone to serve in their place in prison.

In 1892, Sir Francis Galton (1822 - 1911), he published the book Fingerprints and, in doing so, significantly advanced the science of fingerprint identification.

As Inspector General of the Bengal Province Police in India, Sir Edward Henry (1850 - 1931), set out to solve the problem of fingerprint classification. Sir Henry had read Sir Galton's book Fingerprints and upon his return to England in 1894 Sir Henry had the opportunity to consult with Sir Galton. Upon his return to India Sir Henry had his team set up a classification system which was officially adopted by British India in 1897. This was the first known use of fingerprinting as a method of crime solving, and not only as identification. Eventually Sir Henry wrote a book entitled The Classification and Uses of Finger Prints, and was influential in getting his India method of fingerprint identification adapted in South Africa, and eventually in England as well. Sir Henry returned to England and was made the Assistant Commissioner of Police in charge of Criminal Identification at New Scotland Yard. In 1903, Henry became Commissioner of Police. Amazingly, Sir Henry’s Classification System is considered to be start of the modern era of finger print identification, and this Henry System, with few modifications is the classification systems presently used today.

In the United States, Gilbert Thompson, a geologist in New Mexico started using fingerprints on documents in 1882 to prevent forgery. Mr. Thompson, aware of Herschel's work, may be the first person in the United States to start using fingerprinting as a means of identification.

Being ahead of his times, and just a brilliant as one we have heard, author Mark Twain also used fingerprints, in his book Life on the Mississippi (1883) and in Pudd'n Head Wilson (1894). Mr. Twain depicts fingerprinting as the proof of guilt in a fictional criminal case, and may have done more than any nonfiction work in promoting the use of fingerprinting as a tool in solving crime and determining guilt.

The International Association for Chiefs of Police started gathering an extensive collection of fingerprint files and in 1924 this Association of Chiefs of Police turned their collection over to the newly created FBI.

Once fingerprinting began to be accepted it quickly became the strongest method of identification and crime solving available. In 1903 the New York State Prison system begins fingerprinting criminals in Sing Sing. In 1904 the federal prison at Leavenworth begins using fingerprinting to identify prisoners. The US Army begins using fingerprint identification in 1905, the Navy in 1906, and the Marines in 1907.

Soon the volume of fingerprint samples became a major problem. By 1933 the FBI had 5 million fingerprint cards on file. By 1946, the files contained 10 million. fingerprint cards.

Eventually technology managed to get a handle on this vast collection of fingerprint cards. The FBI developed a computerized Criminal Fingerprint File in 1980. Then in 1983 the FBI created the National Crime Information Center, a site designed to dissemination information about criminals between the FBI and local law enforcement agencies. By 1989, when comparing a fingerprint from a crime scene against the millions of fingerprints on file was speed up because of the computer system, going from obtaining a match in 14 days to getting a match in 1 day.

While DNA is the fancy new method of identification, it is unlikely that fingerprinting will ever become obsolete. Today, when a DNA match is found at a crime scene the main defense is to claim some sort of contamination. These contamination and cross contamination claims are sometimes weak, and sometimes persuasive, but they will seldom be stronger than a suspects fingerprint in the blood of a victim.

A Brief but very Taxing History

If you are looking for an anti-tax article look some where else. My goal here is not to support or besmirch taxation, but to understand how taxation has functioned in our countries history.

There have been attacks against Obama for saying he would ONLY tax people making more than $250,000. I wonder why? Of course, if I made a quarter of a million dollars per year then maybe I would cringe a little hearing that a tax increase is coming. But I have always been lower middle class and can’t remember a time when my check didn’t seem to shrink a little. Paying taxes is not a joyful act, and usually the taxes we pay are taken from us, and not something we actually agree to pay.

What surprised me are the political attacks on Obama for wanting to take money from people who have a lot of it and spreading the wealth around. What I hear is not that Obama wants to be a political Robinhood, taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor, but Obama wants to take some money from the rich and not take it from the middle class.


The attacks on Obama seem to object to the rich paying more taxes than the non-rich. But that is true now, and has been for a long time. It is called the Progressive Income Tax and it was actually added to the US Constitution as the 16th Amendment. Since Amendments have to be ratified by the states, and the states do that ratification by people voting, that means that majority vote established a progressive income tax on February 25, 1913. We have a progressive income tax because 2/3rds of the states ratified the proposed amendment.
When Obama calls for people with money to pay more income tax than people who make less money that is not a new idea, it is not a socialist idea, and it is not an idea that most people have (in varying degrees) agreed since 1913 to accepted.

How Did We Pay For The Revolutionary War?


In the very earliest days of our countries history most people had little contact with the Federal government. But a government doesn’t function without funds. You can’t have a group of law makers without having some place for those people to meet to make laws. They either have to rent a space, or buy a space and build a building and that takes money. There was no income tax in the earliest days of our Nation’s history, so where did the money to support the government come from? Most of the Federal government's tax revenues came from excise taxes, tariffs, and customs duties.

Something had to change, however, when this country issued a Declaration of Independence and went to war with England to win independence. Before the Revolutionary War, the colonial government had only a limited need for revenue, while each of the colonies had greater responsibilities and thus greater revenue.

When we went to war with England we had to pay for bullets, food, uniforms, ships and everything else needed to wage a war. More money was needed, and excise taxes, tariffs, and customs duties were not going to do it. For one thing, the taxes on trade were not going to bring in the big bucks, and, because the country was at war, their trade with other countries was diminished. Congress decided to finance the Revolutionary War, by slapping an excise taxes on distilled spirits, tobacco, sugar, carriages, property sold at auctions, and various legal documents. These sound like sin taxes and luxury taxes to me.

The Articles of Confederation and Taxation


In 1781 the Articles of Confederation, passes tax laws that reflect the distrust Americans had of a strong central government. Most of the powers to tax were given to the States and the national government’s responsibilities were limited so that the size of the Federal Government would be kept small, their tax revenue needs by the Federal Government would also be small. Under the Articles, each State was a sovereign entity and could levy tax as it pleased.

The Constitution and Taxation

The US Constitution was adopted in 1789, at by that point the leaders of our country realized that they could not safely rely on excise taxes, tariffs, and customs duties to support the central government of this new Nation. If you rely on taxing foreign goods to support the Federal Government you end up with a Federal Government that can be bankrupt by other countries if they got mad and just stopped trading with our country.

So the Constitution was given the power to:



"…lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States."

BUT the people were still very leery of a strong central government, and so to keep things in check, the taxes were imposed by the Federal Government, but the collection of the taxes was left as the responsibility of the States.


In the early days of our Nation’s history an income tax was just not seen as a reasonable way to support the government. Thomas Jefferson wrote:

To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his father has acquired too much, in order to spare to others who (or whose fathers) have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, "to guarantee to everyone a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it. ~ Thomas Jefferson

In other words, you should not punish one person for working hard, having skill and getting rich, and give that money to someone else who has need but did not work hard, or had no skills.

The Whiskey Revolution

As has been said, to support the Revolutionary War the Federal Government levied a tax on whiskey. As usual, once a tax was in place, the government refused to lift the tax. This lead, in 1784, to a group of farmer/whiskey makers in southwestern Pennsylvania to physically opposed the tax on whiskey. The Whiskey Tax rebellion was viewed as a serious threat to the Federal Government, and President Washington sent Federal troops to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion. This act of enforcing a tax with Federal Force clearly established how important the government felt about its revenue. The Whiskey Rebellion also confirmed, that the anti-tax sentiments that sparked the Revolution had not evaporated after that war was won.

The French Revolution and USA Property Taxes

France had a Revolution that ran from 1789 to 1799, and that event disrupted trade and caused a revenue shortage with the US Federal Government. In 1790 the Federal Government levied its first direct tax on the citizens who own their own property: houses. land, slaves, and estates. They called these taxes Direct Taxes because they were recurring taxes and the people who owned land and slaves were required to pay a tax on that property directly to the government based on the assessed value of that property. Thomas Jefferson, mentioned above, was already on the record as being opposed to direct taxes so when he was elected President in 1802, direct taxes were abolished and for the next 10 years the only Federal Revenue came from excise taxes.

The War of 1812

The US went to war, again, with England, in what we now call the War of 1812, and to support that war Congress imposed additional money through tariffs, customs, and duties. The Federal Government also raised money by issuing Treasury notes. Congress repealed these excise taxes, tariffs, and customs duties and for the next 44 years the Federal Government collected received most of its revenue from high customs duties and through the sale of public land.

The Civil War and Personal Income Tax


To support the Civil War Congress passed the Revenue Act of 1861, which restored earlier excises taxes and imposed a tax on personal incomes. When it became clear, in 1862, that the War Between the States, was not going to end quickly, the Federal Government passed additional taxes on playing cards, gunpowder, sending telegrams, on shortage raw materials such as iron, and leather. The government also taxes luxuries such as pianos, yachts, and billiard tables.

The income tax was abolished in 1872, and the Federal Government, from 1868 to 1913, got most of its money from excises taxes.

The Spanish-American War and The 16th Amendment


I think, as the size and responsibilities of the Federal Government grew, the taxes on imported goods, these tariffs got higher and higher until the taxes on imported goods were so high that other countries just felt they couldn’t or wouldn’t pay them. The importation dropped reducing Federal revenue. There were also retaliatory tariffs and taxes put on US Goods going out to other countries.

The War Revenue Act of 1899 sought to raise funds for the Spanish-American War by selling bonds, and doubling the taxes on beer and tobacco. Not to leave the kids out, a tax was even imposed on chewing gum. With the Spanish-American War ended the War Revenue Act expired and in 1902, the revenue going in to the Federal Government dropped to 1.7% of Gross Domestic Product to 1.3%.

[Notice how closely taxation is tied to war.]

A movement to establish an income tax were introduced by Congressmen from agricultural areas because farmers were afraid that any shortfall in revenue would be made up by increasing taxes on property, and, let’s face it, without land, a farmer is just a guy standing around with nothing to do.

The people saw there had to be some reliable way to support the Federal Government, and the debate that followed lead to a Constitutional amendment that would allow the Federal government to impose tax on people’s incomes.

By 1913, 36 States had ratified the 16th Amendment to the Constitution. In October, Congress passed a new income tax law with rates beginning at 1 percent and rising to 7 percent for taxpayers with income in excess of $500,000.

World War I and the 1916 Revenue Act

When the US entered World War I there was an increased need for revenue and Congress passed the 1916 Revenue Act. The Act increased the top tax rate to 15 percent on taxpayers with incomes in excess of $1.5 million. The 1916 Act also imposed taxes on estates and excess business profits. Other changes (increases) followed.

Taxes and the 1929 Stock Market Crash

The October 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression that followed lead to a shrinking revenue for the Federal Government. Congress responded to falling revenues with the Tax Act of 1932 which dramatically increased tax rates once again. This was followed by another tax increase in 1936, and again in 1939.

Income tax was firmly established by 1939 and the taxation of income was progressive, meaning the more you made the more you paid. The thinking was, of course, that a rich person could afford to pay more in taxes and would still have enough money left to live a good life.

You may hate taxes, but do we really believe we can function as a nation without providing revenue to support the government and the services they provide? Are we going to have bake sales to pay for fighter plans. Are we really willing to have pay a toll to a road entrepreneur just to back out of our drive way? Would we really prefer to fight our war with a bunch of volunteer guys with deer rifles? Instead of law enforcement would we rather go to vigilante justice and everyone carrying Colt 45?

Do we want to amend the constitution again and institute a flat tax? Until then, I don’t think you can call someone supporting the 16th Amendment to the Constitution a socialist or a communist.