Category: Uncategorized

I like living in the United States. Sure, I’ve never lived anywhere else, but I think we have a pretty good quality of life here. We have freedom, and opportunity, and at least in general, civic pride. True, the United States is not perfect. Our healthcare system is among the worst in the free world (It’s the most expensive with some of the worst outcomes), we imprison a higher percentage of our population than any other country on earth, and we don’t do a particularly good job of taking care of the least among us. Even so, most people in the United States enjoy a high standard of living when compared to other countries.

Or so I thought…

I recently went down a rabbit hole trying to determine the best country in which to live. I, like a lot of Americans, take it for granted that the United States is the best place to live. But in recent years, I’ve started seeing more and more evidence that things in the United States are not as good as I’ve previously believed.

Before I get into the meat of this essay, let me state for the record that I still like living in the United States. This is where I was born, where my friends and family live. At least in theory, I can live anywhere I want, and I choose to stay in the United States. My purpose in writing this essay is not to besmirch the United States. But I do think it is valuable to see where our shortcomings might be so we can address them, making the country even better than it already is.

American Exceptionalism would have us believe that the United States is the greatest country on earth, and questioning that notion not only denies what many Americans believe, but is considered unpatriotic. I’ve traveled the world enough to know that people in almost every country feel that their country is the best. But unlike Americans, they don’t trot out the idea of [Fill in the Country] Exceptionalism to actively promote the concept the way we do in the United States. We use it as a sword and a shield. Most other countries simply hold the idea, if they hold it at all, quietly in their hearts. My hope is that this essay, and the data contained herein, will help dispel the corrosiveness of American Exceptionalism and will show us that, while we are great, we still have some work to do.

Background

In 2009, Mladen Adamovic, a former Google software engineer from Serbia started Numbeo to collect data from around the world to determine worldwide consumer prices, crime rates, quality of life indices, healthcare data, etc. Each year, Numbeo post reports comparing countries based on their collected data.

In 2021, Numbeo published a Quality of Life Index that took purchasing power, safety, healthcare, cost of living, property prices, traffic commute time, pollution, and climate into their equation. Initially, I thought this index would tell me which countries were considered the best, and I was interested to find out where the United States finished. But as I studied the list, I started to think that the methodology used for the list didn’t correspond with what I thought should be included in a ranking of quality of life.

Here are the top 20 countries on the Numbeo Quality of Life Index:

1. Switzerland
2. Denmark
3. Netherlands
4. Finland
5. Austria
6. Australia
7. Iceland
8. Germany
9. New Zealand
10. Norway
11. Estonia
12. Oman
13. Sweden
14. Slovenia
15. United States
16. Spain
17. Japan
18. Portugal
19. Lithuania
20. Canada

I suspected that many of these countries would make any list of the top quality-of-life countries, but there were a few surprises. Most obviously, Oman seems to be an outlier on the list. Slovenia is another country I didn’t expect to see in the top 20. I was also surprised that countries like the United Kingdom, France, and Italy weren’t in the top 20. I decided to put my own list together.

Methodology

I have no doubt that, based on the data they used, the Numbeo list is accurate. The problem I have with the list is, I don’t think, at least for my purposes, they’re using the correct data. Of course, using different data makes my list different, but not necessary better. I admit that. What I wanted to do is rank countries based on the happiness of its citizens, by the amount of freedom they enjoy, and by the relative cost of living in the country. These were the things I felt were the most important when analyzing a country’s quality of life.

Having said that, I’m not ignoring crime rates, healthcare, pollution, etc. These things are baked into the happiness experienced by its citizens. I suspected that the freer a citizenry is, the happier they will be, but I wasn’t sure. So, I turned to the Human Freedom Index published annually by the Cato Institute, and factored in their data. And to round out the data set, I used Numbeo’s Cost of Living index. Utopia may exist, but if it’s unaffordable, I don’t want it on the list.

Equal weight was given to each of World Happiness Report (from World Population Review) rankings and Human Freedom Index rankings, and the countries that made up the resulting list were then ranked based on cost of living. The top 30 countries on the World Happiness Report and the top 30 on the Human Freedom Index made up the final list of 39 countries. Those countries were then viewed in isolation to determine their relative cost of living ranking.

Here’s what each of the individual indexes has to say about their methodology:

World Happiness Report

Founded in 2011 by Shane Fulmer, World Population Review is a website dedicated to global population data and trends. According to Fulmer, “Most demographic data is hidden in spreadsheets, behind complex APIs, or inside cumbersome tools. World Population Review’s goal is to make this data more accessible through graphs, charts, analysis, and visualizations.” World Population Review monitors world population with real census and UN data, as well as real-time estimates based on birth and death rates.

“The World Happiness Report looks at countries with respect to their performance of six particular variables:

• Gross domestic product per capita
• Social support
• Healthy life expectancy
• Freedom to make your own life choices
• Generosity of the general population
• Perceptions of internal and external corruption levels”

Human Freedom Index

The 2021 Human Freedom Index was authored and compiled by Ian Vasquez and Fred McMahon of the Cato Institute, a Libertarian think tank headquartered in Washington, DC. The following was taken directly from the report.

“The Human Freedom Index (HFI) presents a broad measure of human freedom, understood as the absence of coercive constraint. This sixth annual index uses 76 distinct indicators of personal and economic freedom in the following areas:

• Rule of Law
• Security and Safety
• Movement
• Religion
• Association, Assembly, and Civil Society
• Expression and Information
• Identity and Relationships
• Size of Government
• Legal System and Property Rights
• Access to Sound Money
• Freedom to Trade Internationally
• Regulation of Credit, Labor, and Business

“The HFI is the most comprehensive freedom index so far created for a globally meaningful set of countries representing 94 percent of the world’s population. The HFI covers 162 countries for 2018, the most recent year for which sufficient data are available. The index ranks countries beginning in 2008, the earliest year for which a robust enough index could be produced.

“The findings in the HFI suggest that freedom plays an important role in human well-being, and they offer opportunities for further research into the complex ways in which freedom influences, and can be influenced by, political regimes, economic development, and the whole range of indicators of human well-being.”

Cost of Living Index

The following was taken from the Numbeo website:

“To collect data Numbeo relies on user inputs and manually collected data from authoritative sources (websites of supermarkets, taxi company websites, governmental institutions, newspaper articles, other surveys, etc.). Manually collected data from established sources are entered twice per year.

“We perform automatic and semi-automatic filters to filter out noise data. We utilize user behavior and previous data for the city/country to determine likelihood of a certain input whether it is considered as spam. There are more than 30 sophisticated filters which in use. The performance rate of the filter is enhanced once more inputs are included.

“One of the advanced filters tries to eliminate bad training data. It digs into discarded data (spam data) and if it notices irregularities, it moves them back into the calculation. The algorithm which determines irregular spam data uses the following filter: if for a single item in a city exists a high number of classified spam data with a relatively small standard deviance from users that have more positive inputs, that means these data are misclassified and the algorithm fix it to the proper classification.

“To summarize our filters, Numbeo uses heuristic technology to get the data quality. Using the existing data Numbeo periodically discards data which are most likely incorrect statistically.

“Numbeo also archives the values of old data (our default data deprecation policy is 12 months, although we use data up to 18 months old when we do not have fresh data and indicators are suggesting that inflation is low in a particular country). The values of old data are preserved to be used for historical purposes.

“To aggregate data for a country, we use all entries (for all cities) to calculate average country data. Note that it is different from the aggregating calculated data for all cities in that country. So, in calculations for the country, we are weighting a city by the number of contributors. Since there are higher number of inputs for a country than for a city, aggregate data showed on a country level consists, in general, much more data points.”

Surprises

As I mentioned earlier, I was surprised to see Oman and Slovenia on the ranking of the top 20 countries for quality of life. For instance, Oman ranked 133rd on the Human Freedom Index, and wasn’t listed at all on the World Happiness Report. It’s hard to imagine that the cost of living or level of crime or pollution could make up for the lack of relative freedom or happiness in Oman.

On the other hand, I was wrong about Slovenia, which was formerly a part of Yugoslavia. Slovenia ranks 33rd on the World Happiness Report, as well as 33rd on the Human Freedom index. Both rankings eliminated Slovenia from this list of best countries to live, but it was much closer than I anticipated.

I was also surprised that other countries I expected to make the ranking of best countries to live didn’t make the top 30 on the World Happiness Report or Human Freedom Index. These Countries include Greece (77th on WHR, 56th on HFI), Brazil (32nd on WHR, 88th on HFI), Colombia (44th on WHR, 86th on HFI), Argentina (55th on WHR, 70th on HFI), and South Africa (109th on WHR, 68th on HFI).

And then there’s Panama…

Many years ago, I questioned where I would move if for some reason I had to leave the United States. I considered several places and was influenced heavily by International Living, a publication targeted at American ex-pats and ex-pat wannabes. It was through International Living that I became interested in Panama. They seemed to have everything: a democratically elected government, low cost of living, tropical location, the Panamanian dollar was tied to the American dollar, and there were a lot of English speakers among the country’s population. Panama seemed great. Yet, they were only 36th on the WHR and 40th on the HFI. Sorry, Panama. Close, but no cigars.

A Quick Caveat

You’ll note that Hong Kong made the list of best places to live. They finished 78th on the World Happiness Report, 3rd on the World Freedom Index, and 27th on the Cost of Living Index, placing them 35th on my Best Places to Live List. However, most of the data used for the 2021 editions of the three resource lists are from 2018, the most recent year that complete data is available.

Things have changed for the worse in Hong Kong since 2018. China has clamped down on Hong Kong, limiting citizens’ rights and implementing more restrictive regulations. As a result, Hong Kong most assuredly will not appear as high on future lists.

Also, both the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia made the Best Places to Live List. UAE was 38th and Saudi Arabia 39th. They are on the list because they met the requirement of being in the top 30 on one of the resource lists. In both cases, they were top 30 on the World Happiness Report. However, both countries were ranked so poorly on the Human Freedom Index that I would never seriously consider either country to be one of the best places to live. Their people seem to be pretty happy, but they are both among the least free countries in the world.

The Results

And the best place to live in the whole wide world is:

Canada?

I assumed Canada would be on the list, but I didn’t expect them to take the top spot. Don’t get me wrong, Canada is great. I just didn’t think it was this great.

Canada didn’t lead either the World Happiness Report of the Human Freedom Index, but it did very well in both. They were 11th on the World Happiness Report and 6th on the Human Freedom Index. And among the finalist countries, they were 15th in cost of living. In the end, they were good enough in each category to earn the top spot.

Following close behind were Finland and New Zealand. Finland took the top spot on the World Happiness Report, and New Zealand did the same on the Human Freedom Index.  Their results, when coupled with their cost-of-living rankings (22nd and 25th respectively) propelled Finland and New Zealand to a tie for second on the Best Places to Live List.

The Netherlands was alone in fourth position, finishing 6th in the World Happiness Report, and tied with Finland for 11th on the Human Freedom Index. 

Tied for 5th on the Best Places to Live List were Denmark and Germany. Although they were tied, they went about it very differently. Denmark did great in both the World Happiness Report and the Human Freedom Index, finishing 2nd in the WHR and 4th on the HFI. Germany was 17th in the World Happiness Report and 9th on the Human Freedom Index. So, how did they tie? It came down to the cost-of-living. Denmark was 24th out of the 39 countries on the list, while Germany was 16th.

Here is the entire Best Places to Live List:

What We Can Learn From The List

The United States came in a middling 13th place on the Best Places to Live List, tied with Ireland. In fact, the people of Ireland are, on average, happier than Americans, and enjoy more freedom than we do in the United States. The only reason we ended up tied with Ireland was because of the comparatively lower cost-of-living in the United States (18th) when compared to Ireland (30th).

We in the United States have a skewed view of the world. We are confident that one of the things that make us great is our relatively low taxes. Sure, we don’t have some of the nice things other countries have—like universal healthcare and no-cost college—but we have lower tax rates. We get to keep more of the money we earn, and that makes us happy.

Not so fast.

The countries at the top of the World Happiness Report are generally happier than people in the United States. According to Investopedia, the United States ranks 24th in the world for single tax-payer rate, and 25th for married couple rate. Yet, we are only 18th on the World Happiness Report. The vast majority of the countries ahead of us on the WHR have a higher personal income tax rate than we do. Do high taxes lead to happiness? Probably not, but the services those taxes pay for likely do.

Likewise, most of the countries ahead of us on the Human Freedom Index also have higher taxes than the United States. I think a lot of Americans conflate low taxes with high freedom, but it doesn’t seem to work out that way. Many high tax countries seem to enjoy more individual freedom than we do in the United States.

What About Guns?

One freedom that Americans enjoy more than any other country in the world is the freedom to purchase and possess firearms. It is very easy to obtain a permit to carry a firearm in public, and despite a plague of mass shootings, legislators in many states are trying to make it easier, rather than harder, for citizens to carry loaded firearms in public.

Here’s why I bring this up: Not too long ago I was having a conversation with a friend about the whole concept of freedom. COVID-19 and the need to wear a mask in public started the conversation, but it quickly broadened into the larger topic of freedom. I mentioned that New Zealand, along with several other countries, enjoyed more freedom that we do in the United States, yet, in many of those countries, citizens had willingly worn masks. They didn’t complain about having their “freedom” taken away from them, and as a result, their countries and their economies had recovered, while ours continued to suffer.

“Can people in these other countries buy guns with little or no restriction?” he asked.

I admitted that in most other countries, firearms were not nearly as easy to obtain as in the United States.

“Then they’re not really free, are they?”

That stopped me cold. It’s hard to have a conversation with an irrational person. If he equates “easy access to guns” with “freedom,” there’s not much I can tell him that he’s going to listen to and accept. I can’t explain to him how our societal happiness decreases in part because of easy access to guns. I can’t tell him that one of the reasons our overall freedom suffers is because we sacrifice those freedoms in favor of widespread gun availability. He simply would not hear of it. To him, ability to purchase guns equals freedom.

Lest I be misunderstood, I’m not in favor of a ban on gun sales. The 2nd Amendment is one of our country’s most cherished Constitutional rights.  Even so, I do think there are common sense steps we can take to make it easier to keep guns out of the hands of those who shouldn’t have them, and I think it’s time we address the gun culture in this country. The power of the gun lobby and the sway it has over our elected officials makes the United States a less good place to live.

Final Thoughts

I have no intention of moving out of the United States. This is my home and I’m not looking to make a change. However, I think we in the United States can learn a lot from other countries, particularly countries that enjoy more happiness and freedom than we do.

Too many people in the United States have been made to believe, through the concept of American Exceptionalism, that the United States is better than any other country. We’re good, but we’re not the freest and we’re not the happiest. In fact, we’re not even in the top 10 in either category. That might surprise a lot of Americans, but until we recognize that we’re not the best, it’s much harder to make the commitment to become better.

The Biden Administration, along with most Democrats in Congress, seem committed to strengthening the social safety net and rebuilding the infrastructure in the United States. There’s also a push for universal healthcare, two-years of no-cost college, and perhaps student loan forgiveness. There has even been talk of universal basic income for adults, free or subsidized childcare, and other programs designed to help low- and middle-income families.

Even if you are opposed to these programs, it is important to recognize that they are similar to programs already in place in several countries that enjoy more happiness and freedom than we do in the United States. If these programs could increase the happiness of most Americans and would provide us with ever greater freedoms, would they be worth the additional taxes required to pay for them? I don’t know the answer, but people in countries with more happiness and more freedom almost universally believe the better lifestyle they enjoy is well worth the cost.

If you look at a map of the United States and focus on the southeast portion of the country, you might notice something kind of unusual. Look directly at Mississippi and Alabama. See anything strange or interesting. If you see that the two states are near mirror images of each other, you’re seeing what I’m seeing. There’s a story behind why these two states look so much alike.

At one point in our country’s early history, Georgia was three times the size it is now. It encompassed the land we now know as Georgia, as well as modern day Alabama and Mississippi.

After the Revolutionary War, Georgia was financially and militarily weak. They had trouble protecting the western part of the state, known as the Yazoo Lands, named after the river that runs through the area. The state legislature tried a couple different times to establish settlements in this area, but they were unsuccessful. A third attempt ended when the state demanded that land speculators pay for their land in gold and silver, rather than in the depreciated paper currency. The speculators balked and Georgia was back at square one.

In 1794, Georgia reached an agreement to sell 35 million acres (the size of present-day Mississippi and Alabama) to four companies for $500,000. But to get approval for the sale, the state had to “gift” substantial land holdings to US Senator James Gunn, several state legislators, state officials, newspaper editors, and other influential Georgians. When word got out, angry Georgians protested the sale, claiming bribery and corruption.

When US Senator James Jackson learned of the sale, he returned home from Washington, determined to overturn the arrangement. He held hearings that led to the 1796 Rescinding Act, overturning the sale of the Yazoo Lands. In 1802, the Yazoo Lands were sold to the federal government, who quickly extinguished any claims to the land by Native Americans.

The land speculators were not anxious to give up their claim on the land, but the federal government resisted their efforts for reparations. The land speculators sued the government and in 1810, the case of Fletcher v Peck was heard in the Supreme Court. Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that the 1796 Rescinding Act was an unconstitutional violation on the right to contract, and the federal government eventually paid the land speculators $5 million of the proceeds of land sold in the Mississippi Territory.

In 1803, the United States made the Louisiana Purchase, buying a large swath of land from the French. The United State now owned all the land east of the Mississippi River, with the exception of a small area to the south of the Mississippi on the Gulf of Mexico, leaving the Mississippi Territory landlocked. The land, which was claimed by Spain, was desired by the United States to give their new territory access to the Gulf.

In 1812, the military was sent to the Mississippi Territory to confront the Spanish, who ceded the land along the coast without a fight. The Mississippi Territory now had access to the Gulf, making distribution of cotton and other crops by boat much easier and more profitable.

Five years later, in 1817, The Mississippi Territory was separated, with the Alabama Territory to the east and the Mississippi Territory to the west. Each territory was roughly the same size, and each was given 60 miles of shoreline on the Gulf.

Although Mississippi and Alabama were split equally, the Alabama legislature wanted more land. Between 1811 and 1901, Alabama tried several times to annex the land in the western panhandle of Florida. The Florida territorial government, and later, the state legislature, rebuffed these attempts. But after the Civil War, it became obvious that the western panhandle was much more connected to Alabama both spiritually, and by infrastructure, than it was to Florida. For instance, Pensacola was connected by train to Mobile and Birmingham in Alabama, but to get to the Florida capital in Tallahassee required an arduous journey through swamps and thickets.

Florida finally relented and set the price of giving up the western panhandle at $1 million. The Alabama legislature agreed, but the citizens of Alabama, who initially approved of annexing the western panhandle, thought the price was too high and fought the legislature’s efforts, stopping them from raising the funds needed for the purchase. A railroad line from Pensacola to the interior of Florida was constructed in 1883, and serious attempts to annex the western panhandle ceased shortly thereafter.

I find this type of history fascinating. It’s easy to take something as mundane as a state’s shape for granted, but there’s almost always a story of corruption or intrigue from long ago that led to what we now take for granted. The shape of the states of Mississippi and Alabama is one such story.

People of a certain age don’t even have to think about what words come after the phrase, “Almost Heaven.” The obvious answer is, “West Virginia.” But is that really correct?

There’s fairly strong evidence to suggest that the words following “Almost Heaven” are, “west Virginia.” In other words, the western part of the commonwealth of Virginia as opposed to the state of West Virginia.

In case you’re unaware, the line in question is the opening line to John Denver’s 1971 hit, “Take Me Home Country Roads.” The following line is, “Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River.” It’s this second line that gives us some insight into exactly what Denver was singing about.

The Blue Ridge Mountains run north-south from Pennsylvania to Georgia, barely encroaching over the West Virginia state line. Conversely, the Blue Ridge are prevalent in western Virginia.

The Shenandoah River runs for 150 miles, from it’s headwaters near Front Royal, VA to the Potomac River near Washington DC. Again, the Shenandoah barely crosses into West Virginia, running for about 20 miles through the eastern panhandle.

Despite these facts, it’s unlikely that Denver knew which state he was signing about. At the time he recorded the song, he had never set foot in either Virginia or West Virginia. His co-writers, Bill Danoff and Taffy Nifert, claim that the song was inspired by a drive they took on Interstate 81, which runs primarily through western Virginia.

But to make thing more complicated, Danoff and Denver said in an interview that they wanted to write the song about two completely different states. Danoff wanted to write the song about his home state of Massachusetts but couldn’t get the cadence right using that state. For his part, Denver said that he was inspired by Maryland, but just as with Danoff, couldn’t get the state name to work in the song.

Despite the controversy, West Virginia doesn’t seem to care much about which state the song is about. They’ve adopted it as one of four state anthems, and when the University of West Virginia football team wins a game (which they often do), the marching band launches into “Take Me Home Country Roads.”

So, which is it? Is the song about West Virginia or west Virginia? We may never know.

I met Brett when we were both in fourth grade. He had a curly mop of hair, a crooked smile, and a mischievous personality. He liked to have fun and didn’t take much of anything too seriously. We became fast friends.

We remained close through grade school and junior high, then Brett went off to a private high school while I stayed behind in public school. Even so, we saw each other often, especially in the summer.

Brett went to three different colleges. He started at St. John’s College in Winfield, KS, where he got a baseball scholarship to play soccer. I don’t remember all of the particulars, but Brett was a really good soccer player and St. John’s wanted him to play for them. Unfortunately, they were out of soccer scholarships. Brett was also a decent baseball player, so the school gave him a baseball scholarship to play soccer for them. He was on the baseball team, but he was there to play soccer.

After two years at St. John’s, Brett moved back home and took classes at Waubonsee Community College. I didn’t see him much while he was in Kansas, but once he came back to Illinois, we saw each other much more. I was at Western Illinois University at the time along with several other friends, and I talked Brett into joining us there the following year. Five of us, including Brett, lived together in a house on the east side of Macomb. What a crazy year that was. We had a lot of fun.

After college, Brett moved to St. Louis where he got a job with an insurance company. He had been there a couple of years when I talked to him about my plans for the future. I was having trouble finding a job and decided I would join the Air Force if I didn’t find work by the end of the year. Brett encouraged me to apply for a job with his company, but I didn’t know anything about insurance. I resisted him for a while, but as the year wore on, I applied. I also set up a date to take the test to get into Air Force Officer Candidate School. The test was scheduled to take place on January 4. On December 30, I was hired by the insurance company. I’ve been there ever since, thanks in large part to Brett.

When Brett got married, his life changed again. The fun-loving, gregarious guy was replaced by a married homebody. He really took to marriage. My former partner in crime transformed into an adult. He was a different guy. Of course, we were still friends, but I was immature and single, while he became mature and married. The dynamic had changed.

Brett moved back to Illinois and settled into marriage. He and his wife bought a house, had a couple of kids, and generally moved on with life. We didn’t talk as often or see each other as much. But when we did, it was clear Brett had changed. He was more introverted with his thoughts, quieter. Even though we remained friends, it was hard to get too close to him. I think I knew this was happening at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight, it’s much easier to see now. 

Several years later, Brett was divorced, and the experience broke him. He never recovered. Despite not easily sharing his feelings, I could tell he was hurting. When the pain became too much, he quit his job, moved away from his family, and left for California. I think the big draw to California was that it was far away from the pain he experienced in Illinois. Of course, it’s impossible to run away from pain, so Brett carried his with him to California.

He met a woman in San Francisco and they were together for a while, but the relationship didn’t last. Brett moved further north in California and bought a rundown cabin in the woods. I never saw the cabin, but I envisioned him living there like a recluse, alone with his dog and his thoughts.

It was at the cabin that Brett got seriously ill, beginning the final chapter in his life. He reached out to his family to let them know he was likely to die, but almost miraculously, doctors were able to save him. Unfortunately, the illness left him with badly damaged kidneys, and he was put on a kidney donor list.

Brett continued to work as much as he could, but his illness took its toll on him. He was often sick, and didn’t have anyone nearby to help him. He did the best he could, but life really became a grind for him. During this time, when I’d talk to him, Brett was rarely happy or hopeful. I don’t think he saw any brighter days ahead for himself.

A year or two ago, that changed. Brett moved back to Illinois where he could be closer to his daughter and grandkids. He established a relationship with Northwestern Memorial Hospital, and for the first time in a long time, had hope that his health situation could improve. I had high hopes that the move to Illinois was going to be a new start for Brett.

And then he got sick again. For the next year, he was in and out of the hospital, and he was removed from the kidney donor list. He was just too sick to undergo a transplant.

I had the opportunity to see Brett about a year ago, at the start of the COVID pandemic, along with friends Keith Johnson and Paul Baudouin. Brett had just been released from the hospital the previous day and looked drawn and tired. I hugged him and he felt smaller, diminished, as if life had ground him away. Regardless, it was good to see him.

We ate and talked for a few hours. It didn’t dawn on us that the restaurant had closed and we were holding them up from locking the doors and going home. We said our goodbyes, thinking we would see each other again soon. Sadly, that will never happen. Brett died this past weekend. He was just 61-years old.

While I grieve his loss, I can’t help but remember all of the fun times we had together. The memories have been flowing the past 24 hours since I learned of Brett’s death. Let me share a few of them.

We were both good kids, but we could be troublemakers too. For instance, we liked to throw snowballs at passing cars. One winter day, the temperatures turned bitter cold, and we didn’t want to be outside. So, we filled several buckets with snow, brought the snow in the house, and threw snowballs out of Brett’s second-floor bedroom window at cars passing below on Fifth Ave, the busy street that ran in front of his house.

Another time, we were throwing rotten apples at cars, near our friend, Paul Bettcher’s house. The idea was to allow the car to pass, then step out of the bushes and launch a throw as the car drove away. This seemed like the safest way to do it. Brett had other ideas.

As a car approached, Brett stepped out of the bushes and rifled an apple directly at the front of the car. The apple splatted on the car’s windshield and the driver slammed on his brakes. Paul, Brett, and I took off through the bushes and sprinted down the street to Paul’s house, the driver in hot pursuit. We ran down Paul’s driveway, burst through his back door, and locked it behind us. The driver must have seen us, because he pulled in the drive, got out of his car, and began pounding on the door. We hid in the dark, along with Paul’s mom, who quickly became a co-conspirator. After several minutes, the driver gave up and left. Once the coast was clear, we headed back to the bushes and our rotten apples, making sure Brett better understood our strategy.

I spent a lot of time at Brett’s house when we were kids. His mom became like a second mom to me. But that doesn’t mean she was always happy with me. One time, Brett and his brother were wrestling in the house when they crashed into a table, knocking over and breaking a valued hurricane lamp. When their mom found out, they both blamed me, saying I broke it. The truth was, I wasn’t even there when it happened. Even so, for years, Faith, Brett’s mom, was upset with me for breaking her beloved lamp.

One of Brett’s favorite places in the world was at his family’s cottage on the shore of Lake Michigan. I joined the family there several times and completely understand why Brett loved it up there so much.

Near the cottage was a breakwater wall at the mouth of the canal leading from Lake Macatawa into Lake Michigan. We fished there a few different times. Brett was a fairly serious fisherman. I was not, so I screwed around while Brett actually tried to catch fish.

At one point, my lure got caught on something at the foot of the breakwater wall. I couldn’t get it unstuck, so I began climbing down the face of the wall. After a step or two, my feet went out from under me, I fell hard on my back, and slid down toward the water. My body froze, and I was sure I was going to drown. I hit the water and came to a dead stop. Somehow, I didn’t plunge into the lake.

As it turned out, there are big metal plates at the foot of the wall about six inches below the surface of the water. I had landed on one of those plates. I was relived I wasn’t going to drown, but having had the air knocked out of me, I laid there, unable to move. I looked up to Brett for help. He was staring down at me, unamused.

“Would you get up here?” he said.

Not wanting to irate him further, I stood up on the metal plate, dripping wet, and made my way up the side of the wall.

The year that Brett went to Waubonsee Community College, I went to WIU. It was Friday, and we had just started spring break. When I got home to my parent’s house, I was tired and just wanted to chill in front of the TV. But Brett called, excited. He said he met this girl in one of his classes and was going to go out with her that night. He also said he had gotten a date for me. I told him I was too tired, plus I didn’t have any money to go on a date. Brett said he would pay for both of us. Having Brett say he’d pay was akin to hearing the Pope say, “Don’t worry about those commandments. Go have a good time.” In other words, it never happened. I knew he must really want to see this girl. I agreed to go.

I met Brett and the two girls at a local bar. To my surprise, my date was actually very cute. She was the sister of the girl Brett was dating. After the bar, we went to get something to eat. As we waited for our food, we talked, and during the conversation, my date revealed that she was just 14-years old. I was 21. Earlier, I had scooted up close to her, but now I moved away. I said I was tired and thought it was time to head home.

Later, I confronted Brett about setting me up with a 14-year old, who I had been buying drinks for at the bar. He didn’t see the problem. It wasn’t my money, he reminded me. He had paid for the whole date. It seemed lost on him that he had set me up with a minor.

In his defense, I doubt Brett knew she was so young when he set her up with me. He just wanted to date her sister, and getting her a date was a prerequisite. And considering that she didn’t look fourteen or act fourteen (she was at least as comfortable in the bar as we were), I’m sure her age was as much of a surprise to him as it was to me.

There are so many other stories I could tell. We grew up together, lived together in college, Brett was best man at my wedding, and we were lifelong friends. I’ll miss him, and I pray that he truly is in a better place, free of the heartache, the health issues, and the daily grind that wore him down far too soon. Rest in peace, my friend.

In early July 1854, Abraham Lincoln took some time to prepare for his upcoming campaign by writing down some thoughts he could use in speeches on the campaign trail. At the time, Lincoln’s political philosophy of the purpose of government was considered radical in comparison to his contemporaries. No other president before him took such an activist approach to governmental purpose as Lincoln did.

It is believed that the following fragment that was written in early July 1854 was composed in preparation for a lecture, although there is no proof that such a lecture was ever given. What is known is that Lincoln never shared these thoughts as part of a campaign speech while running for president, or in campaigns prior to his presidential run.

This is what Lincoln wrote about the purpose of government:

“The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves—in their separate, and individual capacities.

“In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere.

“The desirable things which the individuals of a people can not do, or can not well do, for themselves, fall into two classes: those which have relation to wrongs, and those which have not. Each of these branch off into an infinite variety of subdivisions.

“The first—that in relation to wrongs—embraces all crimes, misdemeanors, and non-performance of contracts. The other embraces all which, in its nature, and without wrong, requires combined action, as public roads and highways, public schools, charities, pauperism, orphanage, estates of the deceased, and the machinery of government itself.

“From this it appears that if all men were just, there still would be some, though not so much, need of government.”

Before Lincoln, most politicians, including presidents, felt that the purpose of government was to not intrude on the life of the individual, other than to protect them from foreign invaders and provide them a freedom from government interference. Former New York Governor, Mario Cuomo, who was a well-regarded Lincolnphile, had this to say about Lincoln’s thoughts on the purpose of government:

 “Some said government should do no more than protect its people from insurrection and foreign invasion and spend the rest of its time dispassionately observing the way its people played out the cards that fate had dealt them. He [Lincoln] scorned that view. He called it a ‘do nothing’ abdication of responsibility. ‘The legitimate object of government,’ he said, ‘is to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they cannot, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves. There are many such things…,’ he said.  So he offered the ‘poor’ more than freedom and the encouragement of his own good example: he offered them government. Government that would work aggressively to help them find the chance they might not have found alone. He did it by fighting for bridges, railroad construction and other such projects that others decried as excessive government. He gave help for education, help for agriculture, land for the rural family struggling for a start.  And always, at the heart of his struggle and his yearning was the passion to make room for the outsider, the insistence upon a commitment to respect the idea of equality by fighting for inclusion.”

As I said, Lincoln’s approach to government was fairly new and out of the ordinary. In his life, Lincoln’s philosophy never got a fair hearing. He was too busy running a government engaged in a civil war, and he didn’t live long once the war was over. However, his words found a home with Theodore Roosevelt who became the father of what is generally known as “progressive Republicanism,” a term that seems like an oxymoron to us today, but which was popular with conservatives in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

Just as Theodore Roosevelt borrowed his philosophies from Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt borrowed his philosophies from his cousin, Theodore. In other words, the philosophy of government that led to the New Deal, found their origin in a fragment that Lincoln wrote back in 1854.

I’m really interested, not only in Lincoln’s philosophy of the purpose of government, but also in the way that philosophy inspired Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, and how it led to one of the most progressive policy proposals in our country’s history. If you have any suggestions on readings (books, articles, etc.) that deal with this topic, please let me know in the comments.

The violent, bloody siege of the Capital on 1/6/21 was the logical conclusion of the big lie Donald Trump has been telling in one form or another since last summer. The big lie, that the election was stolen from him, has been amplified by Republicans and right-wing media incessantly since Trump first broached the subject. The claim was ramped up following the election, and was bolstered first by frivolous lawsuits, then by calls to ignore or replace certified electors from swing states that voted for Biden, and finally by an attempted takeover of our government by extremists who heard the big lie, believed it, then acted on it.

During yesterday’s House impeachment debate, Republicans, one after the other, stepped up to the microphone and continued lying to the American people. They claimed that Trump didn’t incite the crowd and that it wasn’t Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol. They re-hashed arguments from the first impeachment, saying that the Mueller Report exonerated Trump and that it didn’t find any evidence of collusion.

On the way to his speech in Alamo, TX yesterday, Trump told people on Air Force One that he won the election in a landslide. Then this morning, Trump aid, Peter Navarro, told Fox News morning propogandist, Maria Bartiromo, that Donald Trump won the election, and he excused the insurrectionists who took over the Capitol last week, saying that they were simply standing up for election integrity.

Can we just stop with the lies already? Millions of Trump supporters are all ginned up because they think that their chosen candidate had the election stolen away from him. They believe this despite there being no evidence to back up their belief. They believe it despite more than 60 election-related lawsuits that were dismissed for lack of evidence. They believe it despite the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security conducting investigations and both finding there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

So, why do they believe the big lie? They believe it because Trump says it, Republicans amplify it, and right-wing media repeats it, over and over again.

The facts are not in dispute. All evidence indicates that the election was free and fair. Chris Krebs, former Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency within the Department of Homeland Security, stated that the 2020 presidential election was the fairest and most transparent in our country’s history. That didn’t square with Trump’s position, so he fired Krebs and doubled down on the big lie.

According to Timothy Snyder, history professor at Yale University and expert on authoritarianism, this is how the big lie works:

“The claim that Trump won the election is a Big Lie.

A Big Lie changes reality. To believe it, people must disbelieve their senses, distrust their fellow citizens, and live in a world of faith.

A Big Lie demands conspiracy thinking, since all who doubt it are seen as traitors.

A Big Lie undoes a society, since it divides citizens into believers and unbelievers.

A Big Lie destroys democracy, since people who are convinced that nothing is true but the utterances of their leader ignore voting and its results.

A Big Lie must bring violence, as it has.

A Big Lie can never be told just by one person. Trump is the originator of this Big Lie, but it could never have flourished without his allies on Capitol Hill.

Political futures now depend on this Big Lie. Senators Hawley and Cruz are running for president on the basis of this Big Lie.

There is a cure for the Big Lie. Our elected representatives should tell the truth, without dissimulation, about the results of the 2020 election.

Politicians who do not tell the simple truth perpetuate the Big Lie, further an alternative reality, support conspiracy theories, weaken democracy, and foment violence far worse than that of January 6, 2021.”

We all want unity and healing. Our nation is hurting, and we need to come together to address the many challenging issues we face. But unity can not happen, and healing can not begin, until the people responsible for the attempted coup on our government are brought to justice. They must be held accountable before we can move forward. That accountability starts by telling the truth.

If Republicans’ calls for unity and healing are to carry any weight, they must first accept that the election was free and fair, and that the results are credible and accurate. They must announce this fact to their followers, and they must do it in a way that their followers can hear and accept.

They must denounce the terrorist attack on the Capitol, and they must announce that it was right-wing Trump supporters, not Antifa, that carried out the attack.

They must accept that Trump and many Republicans in Congress shared the big lie and incited the insurrectionists. The only way to undo the horrible damage done by the big lie and all of the lies that were told to support it is to tell the truth.

Telling the truth is just the first step, but it is necessary for other steps to follow. We cannot have a strong democracy and a thriving nation when half the population lives in a fantasy world devoid of verifiable facts and disconnected from reality. They trusted Trump, they trusted Republicans, they trusted right-wing media, and they were fed one lie after another. It’s understandable why they believe what they believe, and it’s logical (although unforgivable) that some acted on the lies they were fed. The only way to de-escalate the situation, to bring us all together, and to move forward as a unified nation is to provide all citizens with a shared reality. That can only happen when the lying stops, and the truth-telling begins.

In the hours after terrorists flew two planes into the World Trade Center in New York, I was sitting at my home in Wisconsin watching it all unfold on TV. At the time, we were hosting a foreign exchange student from Germany. She was a pretty cool customer, but I could tell by her fascination with the images on the television, that she was concerned, maybe even frightened, by what had happened earlier that day.

As we watched the news coverage and listened to journalists and pundits try to dissect the attack, Sophie, our foreign exchange student, asked me the question that was on everyone’s mind.

“What’s going to happen now?”

I was sitting in my favorite chair, holding my young son, and I remember thinking how badly I wanted to tell Sophie that everything was going to be alright. After all, she was just eighteen years old, and in the middle of a heinous, devastating terrorist attack, she was far away from home, far away from her parents, and far away from the things that anchored her in life. I wanted to reassure her, but I wasn’t willing to lie about what had happened that day.

“I don’t know what comes next,” I said. “But things will never be the same.”

That’s how I feel today about the insurrection that took place in Washington, DC this past week. I don’t know what will happen next, but I’m certain that things will never be the same.

Americans have been blessed with a stable, if imperfect, government for nearly 245 years. We’ve weathered depressions, pandemics, and wars, including a Civil War, but our country has survived, and at times, thrived. We can be forgiven if we’ve taken for granted the blessings of our enduring democracy, and the rights and freedoms that come with it. They are our birthright. What we’ve failed to understand is that these rights and freedoms are not automatic. They must be protected. If we don’t remain vigilant, they can be lost.

Because of our good fortune of living in a free, democratic country, we weren’t prepared for the rise of authoritarian sentiment. Many of us thought it couldn’t happen here. We knew the term coup d’état, but we thought it was reserved for other less enlightened countries. The thought of a coup in America never crossed our minds. So, when it walked up in broad daylight in the person of Donald Trump, most of us didn’t recognize it. Even as he violated democratic norms and bent the Constitution to the point of breaking, we still didn’t recognize, or couldn’t admit, that Trump was an existential threat to our country and our way of life.

Even now, after he incited a bloody insurrection that claimed the lives of five people, caused significant damage to the Capitol, and disrupted the workings of the Congress, many people still refuse to admit that what Trump and his supporters did to try to overturn a free and fair election was an attempted coup. These people make excuses, and lies, to deflect the fact that their favored president, on U.S. soil, called for an insurrection and led a bloody coup.

But there’s another aspect to what happened at our Capitol that I’m just now starting to come to grips with. It has taken a few days, but the emotions from the attack on our democracy are now running full speed.

I’m a proud American who loves our country and our democracy. I can be critical of our government, often harshly critical. But that’s only because of their failures to establish a more perfect union. I hate to see potential wasted, and often, our government fails to realize the potential that our American values and institutions promise. Even so, I am a proud American who marvels at our history (as flawed as it is at times) and has great hope for our future.

As a proud American, I was horrified watching our Capitol come under siege. It wasn’t just that insurrectionists had taken over the building. It was what the building represented. The Capitol is a symbol of freedom, a sanctuary of our republic, the cradle of our democracy. It is the People’s House, and represents, in all its monolithic splendor and architectural glory, our American ideals and the hopes of our nation. To see it overrun and desecrated by faux patriots, many of whom were hellbent on killing elected officials, including the Vice-President, was shocking and disheartening. This was not supposed to happen here, yet it was happening.

Since then, I have alternated between feelings of sadness, hopelessness, anxiety, and anger. There’s been a lot of anger, enough for everyone involved.

• I’m angry at President Trump, who has consistently violated his oath of office, has fomented chaos, division, and violence for four years, and who has diminished the presidency and our country in the process;
• I’m angry at the politicians who coddled the president, who lied (and continue to lie) about voter fraud, who worked to overturn a free and fair election, and who incited violence and insurrection;
• I’m angry at the traitorous seditionists who defiled our Capitol and threatened (and continue to threaten) our democracy;
• I’m angry at the law enforcement authorities who botched the job of protecting the Capitol;
• I’m angry at our government, who still, five days later, has not held a press conference to tell us what’s going on with their investigations and what they’re doing to prevent a similar attack in the future.

My initial thoughts upon seeing the insurrection was about what we should do about it. I became analytical and thought about how we should punish those involved and make sure something like this never happens again. It was only later that the shock of what had happened wore off and I began to allow my emotions to come out. I know that seems backwards, but that’s how I’m built. Once the emotions started to flow, they flowed like a torrent.

I suspect it will be a long time before my emotions subside. As long as politicians keep trying to avoid responsibility for their actions and right-wing extremists continue to threaten our country and our democracy, I will remain angry and persistent in my hostility to their efforts and goals. They are antithetical to the values and ideals that built this country, and it is imperative, if we are to save our democracy, that we remain keenly on-guard to protect it from these anti-American, traitorous hordes.

Just like our nation, I want to know what comes next. Of course, that answer isn’t forthcoming, not anytime soon. But the one thing we can be sure of is, no matter what the future holds, things will never be the same.

Leading up to the 2020 Presidential Election, I wrote a Facebook post explaining socialism. I was frustrated that so many people labeled almost every proposal they opposed as socialist. It had gotten so bad that TV news interviewers were beginning to question Democratic politicians as if they were socialists.

After making my first post on socialism, I thought of a different way to address the issue, so I wrote a second post on the definition of socialism. I’ve re-printed those posts below in hopes that it will help anyone who reads them better understand that not everything called socialist is actually socialist.

WHAT IS SOCIALISM (Part 1)

A few times in my life, I have converted to a keto diet. If you’re not familiar, a keto diet requires the dieter to eat little or no carbohydrates. This high protein, high fat, low/no carb diet goes by a few different names, but they are all essentially the same.

I like the idea of the keto diet. About 15-20 years ago, I tried a keto diet for the first time and it worked well. I enjoyed most of the foods I was eating, so it wasn’t too hard to stick to the diet. In more recent years, my results haven’t been quite as good, even though I’ve stuck to the diet very closely.

One of my main concerns about a keto diet was not being able to eat pizza or pasta, two of my favorite foods. But surprisingly, that wasn’t the part of the diet I found most difficult. The part of the diet I struggled with most was breakfast. I love bacon and eggs, but I don’t love it every day, and I don’t love cooking every morning. More than any other food, I missed breakfast cereal.

I haven’t been on a keto diet for quite some time, so these days, I’m enjoying eating breakfast cereal again. Earlier in my life, I was a big fan of Lucky Charms (They’re magically delicious) and Fruit Loops. Neither do much for me anymore. At various times I’ve enjoyed Frosted Mini Wheats, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and Frosted Flakes. More recently, I’ve tried Reese’s Puffs, Hershey Kisses (the cereal, not the chocolate), and Cookie Crisp. They are all loaded with sugar, and I try my best not to overdo it on any of them.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite cereals was Life (“Hey, Mikey! He likes it!”). But in those halcyon days of my youth, the reason I liked them so much was that I would liberally coat them in refined sugar. The cereal was delicious, as was the sugar-milk that was left in the bowl when the cereal was gone. My mouth is watering just thinking about it.

As an adult, I wasn’t going to coat my cereal in sugar, and I was afraid, because of that, I wouldn’t like Life anymore. I was wrong. I love Life cereal, even without the added sugar. It is now my “go to” breakfast food.

But not all is well in the world of breakfast cereals. As an adult, I have gotten into the habit of looking at the side of the cereal box for nutrition information (It’s not as exciting as it sounds). A serving of Life cereal contains 33g of carbohydrates, 8g from sugar. As far as breakfast cereals go, that’s not bad, until you consider how big they say an individual serving is. In an 18 oz box of Life, there are 12 servings. Really? Do you know anyone who only eats 1.5 oz of cereal when they have breakfast? I can get 3.5 (not 12) servings out of an 18 oz box of cereal. Each of my servings come out to about five ounces. Does that seem excessive to you?

Breakfast cereal is not the only food that reduces their serving size to a ridiculous level in order to make their nutrition facts seem more reasonable. Manufacturers do this with several types of food. But for some reason, it bothers me more with breakfast cereal. Most people eat about the same serving size when it comes to cereal. Granted, it may be less than my 5 oz helping, but it’s far more than the manufacturer’s made up 1.5 ounces. As best I can tell, most people eat about 4 oz per serving of cereal. That seems like a reasonable amount, but when you multiply the nutrition info out, the picture becomes pretty bleak.

For instance, a 4 oz serving of Life contains 88g of carbohydrates, 21.34g from sugar. That doesn’t sound so healthy, does it?

I’m not planning on changing my eating habits. Life is better (i.e. healthier) than a lot of cereals. But healthier isn’t the same as healthy. I just wish the cereal manufacturers would be more up front and honest about their product. I’d continue to eat it, and I wouldn’t feel like I’m being lied to. Unhealthy I can deal with, but I will not tolerate being lied to.

Oh, who am I kidding. Lie to me. Just keep the cereal coming.