You Know Better - Marriage Primer No.2 (for Wives)

Men can say all day, "They should know better" in their most serious self deprecating way but you know better than to take that and swallow it like baby aspirin. First, I am not under duress for writing this rebuttal on behalf of the wives after the previous musing where only my men friends seem to have taken much delight from it.  My wife's most gentle suggestion won me over to the side of the balance beam for a fairer take on the reality of marriage. 

Rule 1. You cannot change the man from before marriage to another after taking the vow.  At least not immediately.  And even if you fail, take comfort in the fact that their inability to change is all attributable to thousands and thousands of years of evolution. The Neanderthal DNA is hard to shake off but nature had a reason. Your husband is hard wired to resist change because his survival from his caveman days counted on hardheadedness towards maintaining his habit to be alert, vigilant and stubborn because of the constant fear that if he changes anything he feels outside of his comfort zone. But there is hope.  Notice that they never attempt to change you. They're too busy maintaining what they're used to or spend much energy trying to resist change.

Rule 2. Remember that the word ego and what it represents was started by Sigmund Freud - a man. His writings almost always referred to men as likely to be more egotistical than women. Just look around you. The statues ratio of men/women everywhere is 31/1. What does that tell you? They claim to have put you on a pedestal (at least during the early moments of the courtship dance) then they turn around and construct statues for themselves. But right there is a weakness so clear you are often blinded not to see it. You can actually turn that ego to work for you. Make him believe, and believe me he will, that all the decisions in your household were made by him without realizing that his willingness to believe that was from an illusion so well crafted by you. He would even be willing to believe that the decision to establish diplomatic relations with North Korea or get out of the Iran Nuclear Deal had his thumb marks on them. You know how to do it. I don't have to spell that for you.

Rule 3. For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction. It is a physics principle that he is not about to contradict. Wait for his action and then whip up a reaction better and bigger in scope. Wait for him to buy that tool. Your new washing machine or blender is coming up. Make sure you spend a little bit more. It will make him think twice before his next craving. But he has a poor memory so rest easy. Make him buy that boat, if you feel like splurging on something.

Rule 4. Take it with a grain of salt when he says you nag too much. Just remind him that you are that way because he is a repeat offender. If he likes baseball, let him be aware that the third time he ignored to do the chore he promised to do - invoke the "third strike, you're out" rule. Explain to him that when you recall his infraction, that little misdemeanor he loves to argue on his behalf that made you make a Federal case out of it is because committing so many of those "little misdemeanors", specially the ones that keep happening over and over at the local state or county, ultimately gets carried over to the Federal level. Yes, make him know that you have every reason to declare it a felony this time. 

Rule 5. When you ask him during one of those quiet moments about what he was thinking and he says "nothing", he really means that. A man is actually capable of doing that, believe it or not. It is a blessing in a way. That is the reason he suffers less from stress than you do. He can clear his mind just like that by not thinking about anything at all. Speaking of stress, be reminded  though that while he may claim not to suffer from stress  he could be a carrier and you are easily susceptible to it. It is best to find out if a vaccine is available to inoculate you from "husband-borne stress". It is supposed to be real. The "husband-borne stress", I mean.

Rule 6. When he tells you that you worry too much or that you are likely to be pessimistic while he maintains optimism most of the time, say that that is because in those cave-dwelling days you were the one that worried whether her mate and his buddies will come home with meat from a successful hunt or empty handed. You were the one who worried that if the men didn't come back a saber toothed tiger may have gotten the guys instead. It was you who worried and cared for the children. You even worried why even after an unsuccessful hunt the men would still come home home jubilant and having fun recalling how so and so missed an easy target or how one of them fumbled so badly and lost an easy prey. The men were capable of that despite a bad day. Remind him that that is not optimism. Say what you really feel.

Rule 7. If he did tell you that you don't look fat in that dress or that you are as ever beautiful to him, take that with this attitude. He still loves you and he is not about to lose you on some trick question or technicality. Take that as a genuine willingness on his part to not ever be saddled by something as trivial as a dress or a few wrinkles or crow's feet around those still adoring and understanding eyes. Lastly, don't try to put him on a spot again. Well, you can do it from time to time - just to check.

There are only 7 Rules for you. Your husband, like all men, is a simple creature. Don't complicate things for him. Or make a complicated issue out of a simple one. You know better.

WE Should Know Better - Marriage Primer No. 1 (for Husbands)

Should know better is also known by another phrase question: What were we thinking? And better if said in one's most sincere self deprecating way. 

If you're a man and you're married, the likelihood that you know better  about the intricacies of matrimonial relationships has odds stacked against you at no better than 2%. To improve those odds there are a few golden rules. But first, how does a husband respond to his wife's question, "What were you thinking?" Know this and don't ever forget: she is not looking for an answer. That question is a quicksand.  An attempt to answer will only prove this incontrovertible phenomenon in nature. To answer is to flail and flailing is bad when you're in a quicksand. Stay motionless as in not saying anything because in a few moments she will throw you a lifeline.

1. Marriage is wonderful, but unarguably arguments are its spices - sometimes sweet, sometimes bitter - that are to be used only sparingly. But husbands be forewarned to perish the thought - obviously wishful thoughts - that an argument with your spouse is a winnable one. You see, even if you think you won you actually did not. The happiest husbands in the world, specially those who had been married over forty years, are those whose win/loss record in arguments with their wives is 11/10,000. The 11 wins were early on and all during the first year. In fact, these gentlemen had learned early on that the only way to  end an argument is to be prepared to raise the white flag at the most opportune moment - just seconds after it begins.  The best example, if you're looking for one that is defined as "hopeless futility" is the notion of trying to win an argument with the missus. However, all husbands must embrace this: there is victory in losing a spousal argument that is more sublime than anything you can ever imagine. This is the only instance in life where losing can be a winner. Realizing that sooner or later is defined as achieving marital nirvana.

2. Anticipation is better than preparation. Preparing for a defensive position after you did something wrong is exactly that - you are being defensive. But anticipating that you will somehow do something wrong and you are found out (and you will be) is being proactive. The best ever strategy ever put out by one honorable man is that of a husband who each morning  before ever doing anything is to look into his wife's beautiful eyes, long before make up and blush on were applied, and say, "I'm sorry". At the first instance he did that his wife naturally asked, "What for?" And his answer, "For everything I will do wrong today". Since then the ritual worked like clock work. It was better than clock work. It worked like a charm.

3. Every day act like a lawyer, as one in the court of marriage relations. Do not ever ask a question you do not already know the answer. Every lawyer knows the pitfalls of asking a witness a question that he, the lawyer, does not already know what the answer will be. The biggest mistake every husband does is to ask, "What's wrong?" The myriad possibilities of answers will far exceed the number of probable permutations a super computer can predict. So, why bother asking that? Believe it or not, the worst answer a husband gets, which is what catches every one of them is when she says, "Nothing!!"  - punctuated by an exclamation point hotter than magma deep in the bowels of a volcano about to explode. Because now you have just ventured into the unknown. And that is not a good place. On the other hand, if she gave you an answer, it is not the one you were prepared to assuage or mitigate, anyhow, so why bother? Also, if she gives you an answer, it becomes a marital court record. So, in the future, she can dig that record up and what have you to say when, again, you are not able to assuage or mitigate.

4. Learn to never attempt to do the chore she had been used to doing, specially those she had been doing for years from the day you first got together. Your attempt to do it "better" is the worst you will ever do. Actually, the best way to never be asked again to do a chore (specially those you'd rather not want to do, anyway) is to do it badly. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that strategy. It had worked for millennia, so don't ruin it for the rest of us.

5. Don't ever pit you memory against hers. First of all, you don't keep a good record. Husbands don't because they are quicker to shelve anything away that are soon forgotten. Your wife is the keeper of records. It is in their DNA. Early in the evolutionary processes, they were programmed to commit everything to memory. Even in the animal world, females have that task. The matriarch among elephants knows where the water holes are or the next patch of leafy greens. Female salmon knows where to go back to spawn.  The males merely follow, even if it means that that is their last act before they expire. Your wife, mark this well, not only commits everything to memory every misdeed you've ever committed, she has a retrieval system that beats the capability of the NSA. So, don't try. Now, if you followed  Rule No. 2, you anticipated well. Unfortunately, husbands are not known for memory. The rigmarole continues. 

6. Don't rely on earlier rulings on every misdeed you did. You see, depending on the circumstances, or mood of the day or hour, when she recalls what you did wrong 18 years ago, the verdict can change. What you thought was a minor infraction back then, clearly a misdemeanor as far as you can remember, can be a felony today, subject to how she feels about what you just said, however inconsequential it was. When she retrieves that from her memory bank that infraction can be elevated to something short of a cardinal sin, usually because you were either flippant with your answer or you chose to be condescending just now.

7. You don't have to answer every question she asks. This is a corollary  to  Rule No. 3, in some sort of way. When she asks you, "Do I look fat in this dress?" or "Do I look old to you?", invoking the "Fifth Amendment" is not a bad idea. But mark this. If ever there is this one golden opportunity to actually disagree with her, this is the  moment.  This could very well be the one and only time where vehemently saying, "No!" is not only the proper reply, it is full of extra credits that you can parlay later on.

8. As enticing as the temptation to use logic or what you premise to be reasonable thought processes, don't.  It is not that they cannot follow or understand it, because they probably have good instincts for it, they are just suspicious of it. You see, logic or to argue an argument grounded in logic, was from and predominantly used by such luminaries as Plato, Socrates and Aristotle. They were all men. They knew all along that fifty per cent of the world were women, what did those guys think? You are allowed to use logic but you will have to be subtle about it. Subtle such as to begin your sentence, "You know I remember your mom told me this". You may not use her dad for reference, if you have any doubts whatsoever. On the other hand, and this is where what little you've learned about diplomacy may help, the idea of using her mom to buttress your argument must be done with care. You are on your own on this one though because your memory may not be reliable and you're never good with diplomacy. The long and short of it is to not use logic. And one last important thing. Don't even let the word, "logic", come out of your mouth to reinforce your argument.

9. Figuratively speaking or literally speaking have different meanings to your wife. Remember that when you use a figurative form of speech, and you are very sure about what you mean, it is possible she will take it literally. On the other hand, she may sound literal about something but you could be wrong because she was saying it from the heart, or so she says later, if you attempt to make a Federal case out of it. One thing to remember. From the heart or from her head are interchangeable origins of where she is coming from. So, she could conceivably be talking from her heart or from her head, but don't assume you have that figured out because, literally, you don't know.

10. This is the best advice I've learned from a true diplomat when I read about it a few years ago.  I retell it as often as I can. Let her do  all the minor decisions while you focus on the major ones.  Examples, you ask. Well, let her decide how much to budget for a new car. First, she decides when to get a new one. Same thing with shopping for a new home, where the kids should go to college, time to refinance the home, where vacations should be, how much to allocate to savings and retirement planning, how much should be spent for Christmas, where to retire ultimately, and she decides all the estate planning down to the cemetery plot. She gets to do all those minor things. 

So, you may ask, "What are the major decisions the husband gets to handle?" You want examples, right? Well, you look at whether this country ought to stay with NATO; should Brexit proceed once and for all; should we keep putting money into the space program, should the Supreme Court be expanded to 15 justices, should the Electoral College be abolished; is the Green New Deal worth the paper it is written on, and so on and on. If you can delineate each other's responsibilities this way, you are well on your way to winning the "Husband of the Year Award" this year. 

The second part of this musing was going to be a Primer for the wives. After some careful analysis I arrived at the decision, "nah". No way.

Well, maybe on the next musing if I get positive vibes. Or, if the wife decides this is a major decision ... then I will perhaps, maybe do it.

Where Is Everybody?

Enrico Fermi was not only one of the lead physicists who, together with John Oppenheimer, led the Manhattan Project that launch America and the world into the nuclear age, he was also notorious for his response when confronted with the idea  of the existence of extraterrestrial life. Told that there is high probability, based on statistical analysis from the ever expanding view of a very large universe, that other beings exist and may have either visited earth in the past or, at the very least, pose future contact potential with us, he asked, "So where is everybody?" 

That was also partly his intention to tease purveyors of science fiction, new-age philosophers and ordinary folks, who are quite exuberant in their opinions on the possibility that someday ET will indeed show up. The now famous Drake Equation, first postulated and presented widely by Frank Drake, an astronomer, who handily "proved" that it is extremely highly probable, based on an equation using several "reasonable" assumptions, that indeed not only is the universe teeming with habitable planets, the likelihood that there could be countless worlds out there that had developed highly intelligent beings, some having civilizations even far more advanced than ours. Others took that one step further by predicting, even if only as wishful thinking, that one day they will come and visit us.

For now I prefer to be an agnostic when it comes to UFO's and alien  encounters of the first all the way to the fourth kind. Not that I am not convinced by the Drake equation on the possibility of extraterrestrial beings elsewhere but for the simple reason that the universe is so incomprehensibly vast that it precludes the possibility of such an encounter. I look at it this way. The Drake equation may help one amoeba  floating on  a droplet of water at the water's edge of Lake Michigan understand that there is another amoeba across the other side of the lake  but that single-cell creature holds little hope of ever getting anywhere near that other amoeba. Earth, in the context of the entire Milky Way, is insignificantly smaller than the amoeba as it relates to Lake Michigan. The sun is just one of two hundred billion stars in our galaxy that are so spread out that our nearest star-neighbor, Proxima Centauri, that happens to have an earth-size planet orbiting it, is 25 trillion miles away, or about 300,000 times the distance between our sun and us. These distances and the time it would take for us or anyone from anywhere among the two hundred billion or so other stars in our galaxy to "run into each other" boggles our feeble mind.  I am going to admit if proven wrong at some future  ET arrival event and will willingly eat crow but, at a minimum,  proof will have to be more than a hazy photo or an interpretation of an artifact or ancient art work. It will have to be no less than the final scene depicted in "The Day The Earth Stood Still".

Universally speaking, interplanetary travel (limited to within our solar system) would be like a trip to the corner store, right? So, let's go to Mars.  That trip right now is  formidably challenging because first, the space launch will have to be timed when both planets are closest to each other - about 34 million miles. That will take 40 days, but astronauts, once there, will have to wait for the next opportunity to depart the planet for the return trip,  which will not be for another several months when the planets closely "re-approach" each other again. There is no doubt we will develop the technology and  perhaps evolve the human capacity to withstand such a long perilous journey and live through the inhospitable Martian environment, but can we afford it financially. Or, put another way, are we not going to be better served by first investing our resources to solve the myriad human crises the world faces today that are more existentially vital?

Stranger than fiction would be the mildest of sentiments to ever confront us when it comes to extraterrestrial visitation. Our normal idea of what a stranger is or whom we consider strangers in our lives will have been altered  beyond comprehension. An extra terrestrial - friendly, benevolent, fearful, menacing - would either be a welcome savior or oppressor. 

The Creator had set limits. The laws of physics cannot be altered. The speed of light can not be violated. God must have intended for the universe to have separate histories for each discrete location. Let me explain. If it was God's intention for these wishful human encounters to occur, distances between stars and galaxies would have been a little closer. Why would it take several thousand years to get to the nearest star-neighbor? Even if we travel at the speed of light it would still take us four years, and then even a mid-fraction of the speed of light is unattainable.  Even if we increase to ten, even twenty times the current velocity of our space vehicles, the trip to the nearest star would still take centuries just to traverse empty space with nothing in between. We may someday know how but clearly not achievable with our physiological limits and limited technology.

In this universe it is not just the needle in a haystack but threading the needle of time as well. If we go by the Drake equation our galaxy and billions of other galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars each, civilizations should have emerged and evolved and developed but not all at the same time or at the same rate. So, 67 million years ago and earlier before that for 150 million years all this earth had to offer any alien visitors was one lush world dominated by dinosaurs. Or, anyone sending radio signals from somewhere towards here would not have gotten any response during that long period of time because T-Rex had no radio. Similarly, everything we've broadcast so far since the invention of radio and television may not be detected by any advanced civilization for hundreds and thousands of years, or just four if that planet orbiting Proxima Centauri has anyone living there that had also developed the ability to receive radio and TV broadcasts at the exact bandwidth of frequencies. With light and radio as the ultimate speed limit, civilizations from anywhere to anywhere will have the daunting task of detecting or being noticed by others at the right moment of their development and by then the ability to make contact is naturally hindered by vast distances; consequently, by time.

Here on earth alone and during our relatively brief history we, modern homo sapiens, already missed out on contact with earlier human-like creatures, such as the Neanderthals and cro magnon and others. Running into one another, as between alien worlds from different corners of the universe is the ultimate jackpot of picking 100 correct numbers in a lottery that has a million ping pong balls. Time in the cosmic sense is as formidable a  barrier as space.  

For that reason, "Where is everybody?" is a question we need to ask only of ourselves about where everyone is.  Here on earth, that is.

The ocean depths  have as much enticing mystery as what occurs inside a nebula. The latter is a view of the past (hundreds or thousands of years may have elapsed before the image of a nebula reaches our telescopes) while the health of the oceans holds our future. Just to clean up all the plastics and flotsam that beleaguer all the seas, even including the area closest to Antarctica,  is significantly more earth-changing than a trip to Mars. I have not suddenly turned environmentalist but a dead whale found recently that had a stomach full of plastic is a micro-image of a far larger problem.

So, we ask, where is everybody, where is every snow leopard, every narwhal, every endangered species today. Granted, the odds are grim because what we see today, alive, is less than 5% of all living things that had ever lived. In other words, extinction was, and even today, a common occurrence on earth. While natural disasters and  failure to adapt were the main causes then, we have far more to worry about today  - from nuclear and chemical warfare to over population, diseases and famine, etc. 

"Where is everybody?" should be the emblematic question we should all be asking ourselves but must be confined to within this small orb of a vessel, a very tiny one indeed, that is hurtling through space right now with nearly 7 billion other passengers.

The prospect is real that the last survivor's question could  be, "Where is everybody?". 

The Freaky Economics of Income

My apologies to Levitt and Dubner - two famed authors of Freakonomics that sold over four million copies worldwide.  While their analysis of the  hidden sides of everything was well researched, this sadly was not. But it does not mean that I had no ardent reasons to muse about everything too.

Near the medical center in Houston is a section known as the University Area. Rice University - the Harvard of the Southwest (I am not sure if this is self awarded or  by popular acclimation) - is nearby and so is the City of Bellaire. And just like its counterpart in California and maybe other places  so named, this one here in Houston is also a very affluent neighborhood where they  seem to really enforce the posted speed limits; often about 35 miles per hour, 20 during school time. 

Both areas are what we'd call old neighborhood.  Meaning, they both got built up probably in the 1950's with bungalows and standard lot sizes that were appropriate for 2 to 4 bedrooms, 2 baths, often just one-car garage, a shallow front yard and  a decent one at the back. At that time, households likely had one bread winner but the family enjoyed a fairly comfortable lifestyle.

Beginning in the 80's (remember, I'm just guessing here), or perhaps by the following decade, both areas were slowly transforming. Professionals and the ever increasing population of doctors and oil traders began moving closer in as the commute to the outer satellite cities and towns became less attractive for folks who didn't want to waste too much time driving. There are no subways  like in New York and London so mass transit was a guaranteed time waster, if not barely tolerable or worse, inefficient. But the bungalows in Bellaire and the University area were not exactly the homes these high earners wanted. 

Well, realtors are not known to not notice the trend as soon as even an inkling of one starts to percolate. By that time, the bungalow owners were either retiring, if not already retired, so those properties were slowly but surely becoming prime areas for development. Suddenly, the homes whose values by then were far less, much less, than the land they were sitting on were target acquisitions.  Not to be lived in but to be demolished first as new contemporary ones were being drawn in drafting tables in modern architects' lavish offices. The "average" population who used to live in those homes slowly begun to migrate out. They  just can't resist what they were offered for their 50's homes. One by one they succumbed to either the temptation or the pressure of having to keep up with the new Jonesses who were moving in with their BMWs and Jaguars.  The old owners went suburbia or into retirement homes while the previous suburbanites moved in.

As subtle as the transformation became, this was by definition as described by those who complain, a case of income inequality displacement of population. This is happening in Seattle, in Vancouver and every place where the haves simply come in to buy up properties, increase the taxes and cost of living that only the new arrivals can afford.

This is not being discussed as an activist issue but clearly it is all about income inequality, isn't it? I don't particularly subscribe to the idea that this is a bad thing because in a free market system this is the only way the system can work. In downtown Tokyo today, shops - small, really tiny cubbyholes - that do business selling cigarettes or hot soup and fast food, the areas they occupy are priced close to 15,000 yen per square inch. For those who like it in US Dollars, it is almost $145/sq inch. That, like everywhere else the free market economy is practiced, is how values are assessed.

Somewhere else in the U.S. is a place beloved by boat owners and weekend seafarers. The population of boats of all sizes had gotten so high that places to park them had become premium luxuries. If one were a new boat owner waiting for these spots to open up could take years. Boats, regardless of condition, were tied to those spots and ownership or the rights to those spots were "grandfathered" into the whole "system". However, there is a loophole for new owners to get to those spots. Buy the boat that's tied, pun intended, to the spot and one owns the spot. So what happened? Some speculators started buying up those rust buckets and water logged boats no longer even sea worthy at values the owners were only willing to accept. Soon, of course, other grandfathered boat owners wised up. That further escalated the prices of those tired boats that perhaps even the U.S. Coast Guard would not have allowed to leave the harbor.

That's the same story as those bungalows in Houston's University area. Termite infested homes that were likely to have been abandoned were worth a quarter of a million dollars. That, of course, only meant that that was the price of the land plus the cost to exterminate the termites.  Both the Houston real estate and the boat docks somewhere else in one U.S. coast simply went by this cliche'd principle: Location, location, location.

This brings us to the $15 dollar per hour minimum wage demanded by activists for the fast food workers. Short of that amount is less than a "living wage".  From the everyday locations in all of America where these fast food restaurants abound we go to North Dakota at the height of its economic boom due to the windfall brought by natural gas through fracking technology. The sudden fortune brought the unemployment numbers to the low negatives - if there is such a thing.  Suffice it to say, the companies can't fill all the jobs at the oil field. What happened? People still need to eat but the fast food restaurants were abandoned by minimum wage earners for the natural gas jobs. It wasn't long when restaurant operators not only were willing to pay $35 an hour they were offering signing bonuses to kitchen workers who used to settle for $6.50 an hour in the pre-fracking era.

That's the free market system. Fast forward to today when the heated competition for workers cooled down after thousands of people descended upon the prairies of North Dakota  from all across the country to get to those jobs and everything settled down calmly. Restaurant owners no longer pay $35 an hour but still substantially more than those in downtown Chicago or Akron, Ohio. Again, it was location and timing of events that dictated what the market can bear. That is the free market system.

Nurses and pharmacists  are pulling down six figure annual salaries in Alaska and if they    settle there for over a year they get oil bonus from the State. That annual windfall depends upon the price of oil.  Again, the free market system operates flawlessly. Sometimes one only has to take advantage of that with a willingness to live where "warm weather" is a foreign phrase but "the land of the midnight sun" means exactly that. Or, put another way, there will be no sunsets for six months. Only a sun that seems to skip and peek over the horizon for half the year. If you're okay with that and you decided to make  a living operating a fork lift, or such other menial job, you can own a boat and fish and hunt whenever you like, or can, but not have to pay for outrageous dock fees like those folks described  above. Location, location, location.

Back to the 50's. My aunt who was a nurse came to the U.S. on a work program to work at a hospital in New Jersey. She and nurses like her lived in the hospital dormitory so their expenses were low and they saved as much as they could, knowing full well that in six years they will be heading home. She saved a lot, used some of the money to buy some properties back home while paying for college for two of my cousins. She came back after her contract expired and by that time I needed to go to college myself. She paid for my 5-year engineering education at a very good university. She told me a story about life in America. At the hospital worked a middle age African American as a janitor who was the sole earner for his wife and one child. One day he offered to take several nurses, my aunt included, to the nearby shopping area. When he came down to pick them up in front of the dorm, they didn't recognize him. He was  in civilian clothes sans the hospital janitorial garment and was standing by a huge Cadillac of a car. As they were driving along my aunt felt then what it must have been like for those rich landowners, sugar barons, back home in the Philippines riding these big cars - an opportunity less than 2% of her countrymen then would have had the pleasure to experience.  There she was in a Cadillac that one of their janitors drove to and from work. That was income inequality across twelve thousand miles of ocean. Again, location, location, location.

A generation later, fast forward to 1979, my family and I, with two sons 5 and 6, came to this country with newly minted green cards through the port of entry of Chicago. All our possessions were in three suit cases and one box and very little money. By the time I accepted a job that meant moving to Houston from staying temporarily in New York, the company did not even have to spend for our move, except for airline tickets, because all we had were in suitcases. We had to live in a furnished apartment because, well, we had no furniture, not even toys or personal effects like kid's bicycles or a barbecue grill that long haul drivers are familiar with when families moved. The apartment had to be by a bus stop because we had no car. We had no car because we cannot buy one  since no car dealer will sell us on term because we had no credit history. I had a hard time understanding that at first because how can we have a credit history if we couldn't start buying things on credit. Fortunately, after three months (the minimum required) the company credit union vouched for my credit worthiness and we got a car.

We saved and saved so we can afford a down payment for a new home and did do that after a year working. The timing couldn't have been more perfect. One day, still in the apartment with two months to go, we came home to discover white specks of wall paint and debris of sheet rock by our bedroom wall. On the carpet next some of the specks was a slug that  came to be from a 32 caliber hand gun. We called the apartment security to investigate and who later came by to tell me  that next door a wife took a shot at her husband but missed. Not to worry because they were being evicted soon.  That was the neighborhood, just so you know why I had to tell that story.

It was a starter home but we ended up living there for 24 years. We saved and avoided the temptation to move up a scale or so. When it was time we moved to our present home at a time when home values were down, even for a nice neighborhood like the one we liked. After just a dozen years the same home has appreciated in value  beyond our expectation. Again, professionals of doctors, dentists and lawyers and business people moved to this small city 17 miles from Houston. Ten years ago Money Magazine published this city as one of the, if not the top, livable city in the country and a name no other can claim more sweetness than Sugar Land, TX. Not far from the airport, the medical center or national sports stadiums, and has great public schools, and it was developing rather well as new medical offices, stores and hospitals opened up. The local government  is being run well and crime is very low. Again, location, location, location.

Looking at the bigger picture as in way above from where the International Space Station is, America is again all about location, location, location. Beginning with the first settlers, long before Columbus, this land was a place to go as climate began to change in their original habitats, Yes, indeed it was true. NOVA, the TV show  from the network not generally known as conservative - PBS Television  - just last week aired a program on the "Great Human Odyssey". In that show it explained that early human populations went on to settle all the different parts of the world as a way to cope and adapt to changing climate conditions over thousands upon  thousands of years. It is geologically well known by evidence in fossils and geology that earth had gone through several ice ages and alternating warming. It was those changes that compelled early humans to move into places unfamiliar to them but provided the conditions for them to survive and flourish. The same drive propelled early Europeans to re-settle here although mixed with those motivations were other factors like religion, political persecution and economic incentives and the promise to own their own land when much of it in Europe were owned by royalty and the powerful elite. The journey was far from easy then for every new comer and it is still not easy today.

As early as then people went where they thought to have a better life and opportunity to do well.

When they got to the place there was no notion of income equality as a way to better their lives. I never thought that coming here.  All I knew was that there was opportunity for those who wanted it. What I earned was going to depend solely on what I put in to the best that I knew how and do it consistently and continually.  When the first car salesman I encountered rejected my appeal for credit because I had just started to work for an oil company, thinking it was the ticket to mention in a state with an oil based economy, I felt bitter at first because his words stung. He said, "Yeah, you could be working there but, I don't know, you could be working there as janitor so until you can afford the down payment there is no car to be bought here".

I still remember that but instead of moping I felt it an obligation to prove to him that someday I will indeed buy a car despite his words of "encouragement". For years, thoughts infrequently entered my mind wishing we had kept in touch, wishfully perhaps, just so he'd know how I did relative to where he was at that point in our lives but I'm sure he would have complained about how unequal the opportunities were accorded me instead of him.

Income inequality to me is one of those "neither here nor there" nonsensical buzz words unencumbered by serious thinking. But this we can conclude. There is always and there will forever be inequality in how people pursued their dreams. Individuals will always put in unequal efforts, most will always see unequal results even when opportunities were the same. To get the very notion  of "equality of income for all" deeply ingrained in our psyche  defeats the very principle of the free economic system. 

Socialism is the illusion created by those in power so all their subjects will feel as if indeed they are all getting equal shares provided by the state. When Mao prescribed that everyone wear the same jacket style that came to be known as the Mao jacket, little did the general populace know that while they were wearing the same style, theirs was from coarse cotton while Mao and his entourage had theirs made from the finest silk or linen. 

Every would-be socialist must ask this question. Is income equality good for me as an individual? Is it so bad that I strive to have more income than the next person if I am capable of working harder to earn it?  Will socialism be as inspiring to entrepreneurs and innovators in a country like the U.S. that was built solely on the belief that "if we try harder we can be better than anyone else".

We should ask these or we get ourselves into an even freakier world only Halloween-ers can imagine.