Cost Cutting and Hair Cuts

Yesterday after a long day at the office I came home and was greeted by my Pomeranian and Cocker Spaniel - Pebbles and Missy respectively.

They were full of energy and eager as ever. The afternoon ritual of barking, jumping, pawing, petting started before the front door had hardly closed and culminated in two clicks from the leashes attaching to their collars for a quick trip outside for the dogs to relieve themselves.

And that's when I noticed something different about my Pomeranian.

As she bounded away from me toward the grass, I noticed her bottom looked like the bare bottom of a baboon. Not new-born-baby-smooth, but definitely no hair around there. You understand what I mean.

My dog's bottom was a glaring example of how our family's behaviour has changed as a result of the economy. She's the unwitting victim of our household's economic condition.

My wife and I are trying to reduce expenses like many Americans, but in recent weeks I've complained that Pebbles really needed a hair cut.

"If we don't cut her hair soon, she'll be able to clean the floor by just dragging her coat across it," I said the previous Saturday. Rather than spend the extra $50 dollars we would have done without thinking last year, my wife decided $50 dollars would be money well saved and gave Pebbles a hair cut at home.

My wife Claudia, God bless her, is the most wonderful person in my life - but she is not a dog groomer.

"I had to hold her in my arm with her bottom facing the mirror so I could see what I was doing," she explained. "When I let her down, she of course was running around the house like crazy. Her bottom didn't look like that in the mirror!"

Thankfully, Pebbles has a lot of attitude and hasn't been fazed by the drafty rear.

What's Important this Easter?

Tedder Boulevard, the neighborhood street of my childhood is completely unrecognizable today after being ravaged by an F-3 tornado at 12:40 p.m. on April 10, 2009. Good Friday.

At the time the tornado hit, my youngest brother Aaron was cowering in the downstairs bathroom half a mile away. The winds howled like continuous thunder. The sides of the house were being pelted by debris. And my brother was thinking, "Am I going to die alone in this bathroom today."

Bill McKay, a neighborhood friend, and his wife were huddling together in their kitchen. Gripped with fear, they watched as debris shot into their house - splattering their living room with mud. With creaks and groans their roof was torn from the house by the twister. McKay's wife suffered slashes from glass flying in the room. Thankfully they live.

Down the street, unfortunately, a young couple with their nine-week-old baby was running to their vehicle and abandon their soon-to-be destroyed home. Mother and daughter were ripped from the bounds of this earth before escaping. The husband broke his back, collapsed his lungs and survived with nothing more than his life. No wife. No daughter. No house.

Children, home for Good Friday, were together in fear while their home was torn to shreads.

Homes were obliterated by more than 130 mph winds. They were torn apart as though Mother Earth was a demonic force with gnashing teeth capable of uprooting trees and making houses explode into splinters with her breath.

An hour before the tornado hit, I picked up my step father Allen to give him a tour of projects I'm working on in Mt. Juliet and Nashville. We checked the weather to see if it would be okay to go ahead with our plans. We decided our path would avoid the storm line enough and decided to travel to Mt. Juliet.

I am so very thankful that no one in our family was hurt during the tornado.

When Allen and I returned to the neighborhood it was as though a bomb had exploded. People had begun to come out of their homes. Emergency personnel had arrived.

Police instructed us that if we wanted to see our home, then we needed to park our car and walk.
"Can you do me a favor and park your vehicle so it blocks the street from other cars passing," the officer requested. I obliged.

As we walked down Henry Hall Drive straight toward our house, we were in shock. Homes were reduced to rubble. The roof beams of other homes were exposed like human rib cages without skin. The pugnant smell of natural gas filled the air as though we were walking through a war zone.

Our home only suffered wind damage. A house two doors up Henry Hall Drive was completely destroyed. A few doors down Tedder Boulevard we saw a two-story home. The problem was we could see inside the living room on the second floor. A man was walking in the room and picking up the leftovers from the storm.

"I need you to get out of the house now," yelled a police officer.

I stepped carefully over electric cables, utility poles, wires, pieces of roof and brick. This is my neighborhood now.

The day after the tornado, my wife Claudia and I went to Tedder Boulevard to help clean up debris that landed in the yard of my childhood home. After an hour, there was a small pile of lumber, shingles, bills and checks from neighbors half a mile away, buckets and other items.

"You know, we're picking up this lumber and tossing it in a pile as though it were trash," I said to Aaron. "But this is a piece of some one's home."

And looking up the street, the vision of devastation to the homes in front of us was almost too much to comprehend. We were very blessed.

A Warning to Capitalism:

People think of evil dictators and oppressive governments when communism and socialism are mentioned. They think of Stalin and Mussolini.

When Capitalism is mentioned, it is more frequently than not, thought of as a positive form of economic system. At least that is the case in the United States and other democratically-based governments.

But all three forms of economic systems are imperfect designs created by imperfect creators.

Hands of socialist and communist citizens strain against their fetters while reaching heavenward, and the hands of capitalist citizens are unrestrained and stretch so far skyward that their fingertips are scorched by the sun’s flames.

Today our country is in the middle of its most significant recession since the Great Depression. Companies are struggling to survive. Employees are fearful of their next corporate decision to be handed down. Unemployed people quickly become disenfranchised by the entire process of their job search because technology has essentially eliminated the human element from human resources in corporate America.

Capitalism for the past three decades in the United States has progressively turned into the “All you can eat buffet of America.”

As access to credit became easier, citizens, small businesses and corporate blue chips became gluttons feasting on their future incomes. Americans became consumers; not producers. To live up to that reputation, Americans leveraged their future incomes more and more. Meanwhile, China evolved into America’s resource for all things manufactured from televisions and cars to children’s toys and dog food.

We outsourced manufacturing to other countries because we were too evolved to perform those jobs and audaciously believed out sourcing the jobs would help those “Third World” countries eventually enjoy an equal standard of living.

We let our education slip and our schools become trailer parks because of inadequate funding for expansion. As America’s prosperity out-paced the entire world, we forgot everything comes from our Creator. We became, in our own minds, self-sufficient.

Now the house of cards has begun to collapse. Our society of materialism and credit is being destroyed from within. As our citizens have lost their moral compass, so have the executives who lead our industries.

We have pushed the boundaries of our morals. We have capitalized on the destruction of our own future. We have become moral relativists and rationalized why we step on the backs of those in front of us.

Capitalism in the hands of citizens without a moral compass and without self-restraint is as dangerous a threat to democracy as Nazi Germany and Al-Qaeda.

As civilized as we may believe ourselves to be, we are only a few short hours from regressing socially to the savagery of our knuckle-dragging cousins a few thousand years ago.

If you don’t believe me, then you need to recall how quickly our social decorum disintegrated after only a few days without gasoline in Nashville during the summer of 2008.

People were shoving and fighting each other in the gas station parking lots. Police were called to direct traffic because people were backed up into the streets to get gas. Citizens frantically horded gasoline as though that was the resource that held our society together.

Don’t misunderstand me. Our country is great and will survive this recession. Our economy will bounce back. The more than 4 million unemployed people will soon be taking their Monday through Friday commute from suburbia to corporate America again.

But when we ask ourselves who should be held accountable for our economic downturn, the answer is in the mirror. What lessons will we learn? How will we change our behavior? More importantly, what priorities and values will change?

Which will be more important on the other side of this recession: the flat screen television purchased on credit, or Sunday morning church service and the search for America’s moral compass?