Growing Old Ain't For Sissies

NUMBER SEVENTY-THREE
Infinite Loops and Customer Service

As we rush headlong into the biggest shopping season of the year, I am moved to observe the mixed blessings of automation.

When I bought my latest computer I bought a year of .Mac from Apple. This was a marvelous thing but I never used it. Apple didn’t seem to mind (any more than Sears minds when you don’t use the service contract on your new washing machine). It became a problem to me when Apple notified me by email that they were going to renew my .Mac membership for another year. They did allow that I might update my arrangement with them by going to .Mac and looking at my account data.

I responded to the email, but the computer wouldn’t talk to me, other than to refer me to .Mac where I could solve all my problems.

Here is where the trouble began. To get into .Mac I needed my user name and password. Since I had not used the service I had forgotten them. After a variety of frustrating dead ends I discovered that they would be happy to send me my user name and password if they could send it to my old email address – the one I had when I bought the service.

That was not an option since I have changed services and there is no way I was going to restart AOL just to communicate with Apple. The other option was to submit a report – I did and that put me right back into the infinite loop.

At this point I was facing an automatic charge in three weeks, a charge that I would have to get the credit card company to resolve with Apple. After more searching I found there is not one phone number in all of Apple’s extensive on-line resources where I can call a human being. There is a mailing Address for Corporate Headquarters – and the address is perfect: 1 Infinite Loop. Here is the registered letter I sent them:

Dear Living Person,

I feel like a bug, running round and round on one of M.C. Escher’s Mobius Strips. Your address does not give me much comfort but it is the only place left for me to find an answer to my dilemma.

On November 3, 2003 I purchased my third Mac. I have used them and loved them since 1988. With this eMac I bought a one-year membership in .Mac (see exhibit 1). I have not used this membership. I have forgotten the member name I chose and the password I used.

On October 10, 2004, Apple Computer sent me a notice (Exhibit 2) that you will be automatically renewing this membership in 30 days. When I responded (Exhibit 2) I received an automated message (Exhibit 2A) directing me to several Apple sites. None of these automated sites would speak with me since I could not produce the proper combination of user name and password. After a long day of frustration I found a password reset option screen (exhibit 3). I have not had access to aiyeka@aol.com for a long time so I chose option 2 -- I sent a report.

The response to this report (exhibit 4) was to direct me once more to sites that won’t talk to me as stated above – been there done that – back in the infinite loop.

What really irritates me about this is that nowhere in any of your vast on-line resources is there a phone number that connects to a real person or an email address that doesn’t require me to know something I don’t know to accept my message. Apple has no problem finding me to send me a renewal notice or newsletters or product promotions, but you seem highly averse to actually speaking to me. I understand the need for automation, but yours seems to be very close to a cosmic run-around.

As it stands now, I am going to get billed for another year of something I don’t want and won’t use and couldn’t anyway because I can’t log into .Mac no matter how hard I try.

I sincerely hope that a real person will read this and do something about it. If my credit card gets charged for this renewal you may rest assured I will not pay it, ever!

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Having little faith in this letter getting any early action I cancelled my credit card and signed up for a new one with another company. It was not a sad goodbye. Recently, after 25 years, the Wachovia Computer sold me to the Bank One Computer and the Bank One Computer, brilliantly recognizing a new credit card customer, began bombarding me with opportunities to utilize all kinds of wonderful services. About the time this died down, the Chase Manhattan Computer bought the Bank One Computer. So far this transition has seemed to be seamless, but I can’t believe it will stay that way.

At any rate, the next time I heard from Apple was an email expressing disappointment that Bank One rejected their automatic renewal billing and referring me to the .Mac account site so I could get my act in order.

Two weeks later I got another email, giving me the user name and password I had given in the beginning. It appears that a human being actually read my letter at Corporate HQ and did something about it. Better late than never! It said they had removed me from automatic renewal but that I should get my credit card stuff straightened out as quickly as possible so I would not suffer an interruption of my .Mac service.

On-line buying can be very good. I love Amazon.com and have found other sites that have their act together, but the “customer” is largely gone from “Customer Service” and only one that gets served in most of these infuriating situations is the company bean-counter whose god is the bottom line.

So beware of “free” offers – on TV that just means they will sock you with a second shipping and handling charge for the $2.00 worth of clever plastic they send you or if the gift is really free and something goes wrong you may get sucked in the infinite cyber loop that customer service has become.

And double beware of anything that even hints of “automatic renewal.” If you get into the cyber-loop here, you may be like the man on the MTA – doomed to ride forever because he lacked the dime to get off.

Sorry this has gotten overlong; it is a something inherent in the infinite loops of cyberspace.

Breather Blog #1

This is your semi-annual time to get off my mailing list. If you wish to travel with me into the next year, you need do nothing, if you would prefer not to receive these blogs, just let me know.

I know several of you forward these blogs to your own lists. I would be interested in knowing if you do this and how many friends are on your list.

We are off to Palatine to celebrate Thanksgiving with Joan's extended family. We wish you and yours the very best as the days shorten and the holidays approach.

NUMBER SEVENTY-TWO
Separation of Church and State: A Brief History

After the “moral values” election, the liberal media is often evoking the myth of the separation of Church and State. We need to be reminded that it is a myth.

Men of faith founded the original colonies, and religion was very much a part of their community and political life. The Bible was the foundation of their moral and civil laws. Membership in good standing in the local church was an essential qualification for voting.

In 1776, the Declaration of Independence affirmed the beliefs of the founders; “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—that to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed…”

In 1789 the Constitution was ratified. The Declaration and the Constitution became America’s founding documents. Two years later the first ten amendments (The Bill of Rights) were ratified. The first amendment, addressing the relationship of Church and State declared, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” This was the beginning of Federal religious pluralism for the Republic.

At this point each state was free to make its own determination, without interference from Congress, about religious privilege and religious freedom. The national federation was to be pluralistic, making room for a diversity of state religious establishments as each state determined for itself.

By the 1830’s all of the states had disestablished their religions, choosing to follow the Federal model. This worked because the society had a Christian/theistic/deistic heritage that served as its moral glue, glue affirmed by many state constitutions and governments.

About the same time, the common (public) schools were established to preserve and pass on this general, religion friendly, public morality. The Bible was read in these schools, the Bible was studied and taught in these schools, and prayers were said in these schools. Right and wrong was taught in these schools. God was more than just welcome in these schools.

The first problem arose with the arrival of large numbers of Catholic Immigrants in New York and Massachusetts. The Protestant powers that be decided the Catholics would not fit into the established Protestant public school system. They allowed the Catholics to have their own schools and pay for them on the side. They called the Protestant Public Schools, “non-sectarian.” They called the Catholic Private Schools, “sectarian.” Both systems were essentially religious.

As time passed the WASP majority forgot the religious character of the public schools and the word “religion” increasingly came to be used to refer only to churches and religious practices that had to be kept private because they had no place in the established republic.

By the middle of the twentieth century the public schools were thought to be secular, and organizations like the ACLU, Americans United For The Separation Of Church And State, and People For The American Way, were busy driving every vestige of religion from the schools and from all of public life.

What started with a Constitution forbidding the Federal establishment of a national church or religion has evolved into a society where the name of God on our money or in our Pledge of Allegiance is claimed to be unconstitutional. The public school that once taught what was right and what was wrong has become the public school that teaches that there is no objective right and wrong.

Where do we go from here? In spite of the best efforts of the Anti-God Squads, the Charitable Choice provision of the Welfare Reform Act is pointing the way. In a nutshell, Charitable Choice says that state governments, when cooperating with non-government social service organizations and using federal welfare funds, may no longer exclude religious service providers from cooperation with the government due to their religious character. Nor may the government demand that a religious service organization secularize itself in the process.

This is a small part of the huge welfare program, but it is a principle that may well be extended to other areas. It could and should feed back into schools, families, and businesses. If there is no constitutional reason for the government to discriminate against religious service organizations, as long as it treats them all equally, so there is no constitutional reason why the government should discriminate against religious schools, so long as it treats them all equally. This, along with national defense, is what the Federal Government is here for.

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There are weighty tomes on this whole subject –most of them are dull, dry and not very accessible. The best and most accessible account of this may be found in Chapter 4 of Jim Skillen’s new book, In Pursuit of Justice – Christian Democratic Explorations. I am indebted to Jim for the thinking above. Having served on the Board of his Center For Public Justice and had many discussions with him on these things, I have found Jim to be one of the most thoughtful, insightful and Biblical thinkers and writers on the subject of the Christian as citizen.

NUMBER SEVENTY-ONE
Reflection, Psalm 16

The sixteenth Psalm is King David’s prayer about the hope of the faithful and the Messiah’s victory. It is a good one to read and ponder in troubled times.

PSALM 16.2

I said, O Lord,
You are my Lord
And there is none beside.
Although it's so
I come and go,
Within Your fullness
I abide.

Deep inside
The heart of me
Your bush
Is burning bright
To bathe the poorest
Part of me
In Your eternal light.

O bush that burns,
O shining glory
Brighter than the sun -
This dust and ashes
Offers You all worship through
Your one and only Son.

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How blessed is the man whose strength is in You,
In whose heart are the highways to Zion.
Psalm 84.5

NUMBER SEVENTY
Of Such Is the Kingdom

Dr Bob Pierce founded world Vision in 1950 in response to the needs of Korean War orphans. They did good work and the work spread. It broadened into emergency relief and eventually into community development. It has grown to include fund raising offices in countries in North America, Europe and the Far East. Lately, more and more offices in countries traditionally perceived as beneficiary nations are also raising their own funds. In 2003, World Vision offered material, emotional, social and spiritual support to 100 million people in 99 countries.

Across the years and across the world, there are millions of stories, this is one small one.

Sui-lin ducked. The rope sandal sailed over her head, hit the wall and dropped into the family's lone iron cook pot at the kitchen end of the hut. "Duck" isn't exactly what she did-it was more like a formal bow in a stately dance.

She was fighting a never-ending battle with the dirt floor, her ragged broom coaxing the dust into a small pile. Her back was to her father, who lay on the string bed in the end of the hut with a half empty bottle at his side. He was mumbling. He always mumbled when he was drinking.

He cursed the mountains that required so much of a farmer and gave back so little. He cursed the landowner who demanded so much of the peasants he hired and gave so little in pay for their labor. He cursed the weather, the merchant who demanded cash for the bottle that helped him forget, and he cursed his four children who were too young to earn any real money.

Most of all, he cursed his wife who had deserted him for the glitter and excitement of the lowland city where there were good jobs to be had and pretty things to be bought and places to live with glass in the windows.

Usually his mumble was a low monotone, a kind of background music in the hard daily life of the ten year old girl who had been cook and housekeeper and mother to her brothers and sisters for the past three years. From time to time the tempo of his mumbling would pick up and the volume would increase. This was a sign to her that he was getting ready to throw something. He had done it so often she found herself hearing it and anticipating the result without conscious thought. When the sandal came, she bowed from the waist, never missed a beat with her broom, and went on with her work. She never looked at him. To an observer it would have been uncanny, how she ducked when he threw. To her it was just one more small piece of one more long day.

She often thought about her mother. It wasn't the glitter that drew the mother away, she was driven away by the father's love of the bottle. For a child with nowhere to go, his devotion to the bottle was bearable. For a young wife with dreams, it was just too much.

Sui-lin never thought much about God. From time to time she passed the small village church, saw the children at their lessons, heard them singing strange songs. At these times she wondered. She felt warmed somehow by this place where there seemed to be smiles and health and love.

Then one day something wonderful happened. The Pastor came to the hut and invited Sui-lin and her youngest sister to come to the school. The father was sober that day and was convinced that free clothes, a hot meal every day and an education would payoff for him in the long run. It did, but not in the way he expected.

In the school Sui-lin met God. He captured her heart, and soon the heart of her sister. Thru these two he invaded the dreary hut in the mountains of Taiwan and captured the heart of the father who gave up his mumbling and went back to work.

Together the family worked and saved and were able to build a decent house.
In time the mother heard of these things in the lowland city and came to see.
God caught her in His arms and she stayed to fill the last empty seat at the new family table.

These days Sui-lin still sweeps, but with a new broom, and with new background music--the happy sounds of a family together in tune with their Creator.

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One day children were brought to Jesus in the hope that He would lay hands on them and pray over them. The disciples shooed them off. But Jesus intervened; “Let the children alone, don’t prevent them from coming to me. God’s kingdom is made up of people like these.” Matthew 19.13-14 The Message

NUMBER SIXTY-NINE
Against All Odds

Some of you have asked what I meant by “Against all odds” in my day after the election blog (#68) Consider just some of the things the President faced in this contest:

1. The day the Democratic primary began (two years ago), the Liberal national media began an intense, often vicious assault on the President. They never missed an opportunity to fully report the Demo Presidential Wannabes’ harshest criticisms and wildest charges against Bush. One pundit, a respected liberal, estimated that this assault would be good for at least 15 points for Kerry in the popular vote. If the media had been thoroughly objective and unbiased (an impossibility I know) Bush might well have beaten Kerry 66% to 33%. 3% is a mandate -I think 33% might be considered a super-mandate.

2. Osama Bin Laden is still loose.

3. The war in Iraq has turned messy and costly.

4. Iran and North Korea are growing threats.

5. The European Union is in a tizzy because we messed up their oil and weapons business with Saddam Hussein.

6. The readers of the Manchester Guardian wrote letters to the voters in Ohio, imploring them to get rid of Bush – an editorial in that paper asked, where are all the good assassins now that we need one.

7. The economy is recovering but many heavy industry jobs may never come back.

8. The Democrats pulled out all the stops to mount a massive registration and get out the vote operation, including illegal aliens, felons, the dead, and imaginary voters like Mary Poppins and Popeye the Sailor Man.

9. Several billion watts of Left Coast celebrity power (Bruce Springsteen, Whoopi Goldberg, Michael Moore, Eminem, Cameron Diaz, P. Diddy, Christina Aguilera, etc., etc.,) mobilized their money, talent, and brains (?) to sink the President.

10. During the morning of November 2nd, the exit polling organization did the best they could to continue the 15% handicap given Kerry by the liberal media. They were predicting Kerry by a landslide in the swing states.

11. About half the lawyers in the country were in the swing states looking for billings, and the other half were on 12 hour alert to rush to the real trouble spots and target rich environments.

12. And there were plenty of dirty tricks, like slashing the tires of 30 Republican “get out the vote” rental cars – even dousing my Bush/Cheney yard sign with gasoline and touching a match to it at 11 PM the night before the election.

There is more but this is enough to make the point. In the face of all this, Bush got the largest popular vote in history and the biggest sweep overall since 1936. The GOP picked up 4 seats in the Senate, 2-4 seats in the House, and put Tom Daschle out to pasture. All in all, it was a pretty good run for a dumb cowboy from Texas.

The whole thing turned on the character of the candidates, security and the moral issues at play. Voters came out in droves in 11 states to approve amendments limiting marriage to one man and one woman. One senior Kerry advisor lamented, “We didn’t have a message, we had a bad candidate, and Terry McAuliffe was an absolute disaster.”

Kerry has conceded, graciously, (maybe the only honorable and useful thing he has done in the whole campaign, possibly in his whole adult life) and now life goes on. The tune the Democrats will sing loudly from this point on will be “we need to all come together and heal our divisions.” Senator Pat Leahy, Senator Ted Kennedy, Senator Charles Schumer, and others will begin bloviating at length about the need for Bush to “reach across the aisle” which, being interpreted, means “Do it our way to prove you are bi-partisan.” And the strongest pitch will be to ask for moderate (i.e. leftist liberal activist) judges, acceptable to the Democrats, judges who will continue to enable the left to achieve their agenda through the courts whenever they fail at the ballot box.

The Democrat Party is at the crossroads – either they can take a long look at themselves and decide it is time for some fundamental changes (they could read Zell Miller’s book for starters) or they can decide they just weren’t mean enough and clever enough and loud enough to get their message out or the people are either too stupid or too lazy to pay attention and join their crusade. Either way, the infighting has already begun between the Edwards/Bayh branch of the party and Hillary/Bill branch. Election 2008 has already begun.

P.S. God is not a Republican or a Democrat, but all things being equal, he seems to frown on those who promote the murder unborn babies and the marriage of men to men. These two things played a substantial part in this election.

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“If one lives and interprets life’s meaning based on the belief that human beings have been created in the image of God and that in all of their relationships and responsibilities they are marked to the core by their relation to God, then one’s point of view will be radically different from the view that human meaning is confined within the course of natural, animal cycles without a transcendent origin, reference point or meaning. These contrasting points of view, to name just two, can lead to significantly different judgments about what is good and bad in contemporary society and about the proper aim of public policies to affect what is good and bad.”

James W. Skillen, "In Pursuit of Justice: Christian-Democratic Explorations," Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2004, Page 43

NUMBER SIXTY-SEVEN
Madras Summer

Twenty-eight years ago I was in a small village about 60 kilometers south of Madras. This fine fellow caught my eye on the front stoop of a small, well-kept dwelling. We talked with the people there but I never got it straight – either these folks supported Indira Gandhi’s Congress Party, of which the rooster is a sign, or they didn’t want the rooster to end up in the neighbor’s pot, or he was a pet of the family with a tendency to wander off. He might even have been a watch-rooster but that is the least likely possibility.

At any rate, it was hot and humid and near the end of a long trek through the city slums and small villages of India. The following poem and some pictures are about all that remains of that trip. That, and perhaps a tall Neem tree planted in a settlement of lepers not far from the village where I met the rooster. “Rups” are rupees, the currency of India.


MADRAS SUMMER

In the land of Rup's
All mankind droops
From heat that's
Sore oppressive.

Throughout the land
The outstretched hand
Entreats in tones aggressive.

The beggars swarm,
The sweets are warm,
And so's the Coca Cola --
Lord let me go
Back where there's snow
And not so much
Payola.

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