"WILD TURKEYS, PORPOISES & BUDGETS"

The older I get, the more accepting I become that things I seem to see or think I experience are not necessarily what they turn out to be. This is particularly true when my perception is based partially on the statements of others one might expect to be both reliable and better informed then myself. Recent events, and by recent I mean over the last 15 to 20 years, have left me questioning much of what I hear and almost as much of what I see with my own two eyes.

Turkeys are a case in point. For a number of years, from time to time, I’d read that some folks were intent on reintroducing wild turkeys throughout Maryland counties, coming eastward from the remnants of the species relegated to the wilder areas of Western Maryland. I’ve heard tell of them on the Eastern shore, but nowhere near land’s end down here.

Most certainly, unlike in my youth, we now have imported deer down here in epidemic proportions. Despite official contentions of their extinction, the bald eagles we always had seem also to be increasing in numbers. The bobwhite quail, so prevalent in my youth have disappeared completely as far as I can tell without apparent official notice, but geese and ducks appear everywhere and most year round. Turkeys I’d never seen and never expected to. Yet, one day not long ago, I glanced out a window and saw what had to be three wild turkeys making their way across the lawn. Alone in the house at the time, there was no reason to holler "come quick and see!" I have no facility with a camera and therefore have none – not even one of these "idiot" cameras whose technology is no match for my ineptitude. There was nothing to be done, but simply sit there quietly and watch in wonderment at what to a turkey must be the most mundane of activities. I must have sat raptly for five minutes watching their every move with fascination. Three wild turkeys on my front lawn in suburban Drayden! Just think of that.

They all appeared to be toms and one in particular had a particularly impressive wattle under his chin. I guess he was like the cock of the walk and the other two were about learning their trade. All three were very alert even as they scratched their way snatching at whatever they found on the ground to eat. At some point, they somehow sensed they were being watched and became even more alert, looking in my direction ‘though I was behind a closed window and hadn’t moved a bit. As if flushed by a gunshot, they were off, half running, half-flying, hell-bent for the sand plum grove and out of sight. They were wild turkeys I tell you, sure as you’re born. I saw them right there. Just like the school of porpoises I saw several summers ago making their way up the St. Mary’s River. I saw both with my own two eyes, but did I really?

I similarly saw, as the Maryland Constitution requires, our Legislature just pass a balanced budget. But did they? Budgets, porpoises and wild turkeys may have more in common then we’ll even know. I wonder. Bears in the Baltimore suburbs. Black panthers near Salisbury. Coyotes now reported most everywhere. Whos to say what or what next? The other day I heard someone say that they had figured this fella Obama’s chances of success in his first 100 days were about as remote as "when pigs fly." Then we pick-up the paper and all we read about is pig flu! You just never know.

TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES:
News of Hospital

That brings to mind the old saw about the word "assume" (you remember, "an ass between u and me") and how the giving public assumes that "not-for-profit," "charitable" entitles behave differently than what’s been revealed about executive compensation packages in supposedly "for-profit" Corporate America, which in many cases turned out to be for the profit of executives only who’d put these corporations on the ropes or under water.

So long as everything was going along just dandily on our financial bubbles, those who could, took full advantage, rode those bubbles, lined their pockets with other peoples’ money and golden parachuted gently to their next opportunity. Stockholders meanwhile took the purely voluntary gamble, rode the bubble too, then it burst, and they crashed – that’s American capitalism compounded by the supposed watchdogs being sound asleep, comatose or bought-off and now all of us will pay for generations.

Contributions solicited and paid by all of us directly or indirectly to charitable, non-profits are another breed of cat – or so most assumed. Unlike rosy-pictures painted in stock solicitations and by those peddling shares, charities operate just the opposite, emphasizing always how they need us to chip in before they and their worthy services go out of business for want of funds. There’s no such thing as a flush charity. They’re always teetering on the brink of oblivion, we’re told, over and over again. And yet, the select few among their executive class always somehow seem to make out well financially – thank you very much. Everywhere, what used to be callings for these folks have become highly-compensated sinecures, the grunts still doing the heavy lifting for little or nothing and asked to "contribute" in time and money to-boot.

Some years ago, it came out that while the Red Cross was going begging, its head-man was living high-off-the hog and he was tossed-out after years of piracy and maybe went to the hoosegow – I don’t remember. These Eron-like revelations, however, led to no real look-see at other charities, who’ve simply kept doing business as usual ever since. Just like our head-in-the-sand inattention to the "for profit" corporate world until everything gushes out.

And now, in this little corner of the world, all hell breaks loose at the mini-gusher revelation in ST. MARY’S TODAY that some of our local, non-profit hospital honchos are cleaning-up. Everyones’ stunned and amazed.

All one ever had to do to see this was to click-on the U.S. website and the mini-gusher names and dollars (naturally, two years old since our government watchdogs can’t seem to get it up on the web with any currency) magically appear. Guess what, they’ve been there all the while, but no one noticed or perhaps wanted to. Just like big-time corporate Boards of Directors, hospital Trustees had to know all the while ‘cause they gave their okay. So much for their stewardship too.

This brings me to what’s likely becoming a real "not-for-profit": ST. MARY’S TODAY

Like all print media, and while I don’t have its balance sheet in front of me, ST. MARY’S TODAY has to be struggling to survive. Newspapers everywhere are downsizing like crazy and others are dropping like flies. Inveterate newspaper readers watch as their papers get thinner and thinner and maybe disappear completely. What then? Blogs? Twitters? A 3-second hyped-up happy-chatter gabble on cable news or a crisis-mongering weather report? A real "in-depth" 20-second rundown on the latest massacre by some nut-case or terrorist, or an Obama visit hopefully hundreds of miles or oceans away? Another snapshot lament at a closed factory building and 1,000 workers walking away from their jobs? A blur, shake of the head and then just rush to the next happy-talk capsule? No thoughtful analysis or contextual discussion or connecting the dots? No pro’s and con’s? No screaming bloody-murder except the same-old shrill choruses on talk-radio?

Well, I’m here to ask you: How many of you have the misfortune of being ill or having to go to a hospital in Southern Maryland? How many of you work at these facilities or have friends or relations who do? How many of you take the time to wonder what the folks who give you the hands-on care you need there are getting paid to save your life or get you so you can get back to work? How many of you think these folks are over-paid for their services? And how many of you wonder what these lifesavers are paid when compared with the glad-handing, bean counter desk jockeys in hospital executive suites who never see, let alone touch a patient and whose contacts with the blood and guts of everyday life in the facilities they sit atop is avoided like the plague?

Maybe you don’t want to even think about such unpleasantness and are happy to just assume the bucks you’re importuned to cough-up in unending fundraising drives go for better care of you and yours? Maybe yes, maybe no.

All I’m saying is that without a newspaper like ST. MARY’S TODAY, do you think the person putting the arm on you for a contribution would lead with the boast, "Our hospital exec. makes a half-million a year and more! And we want a contribution from you."?

To expect that is to "assume" too much, just as to "assume" ST. MARY’S TODAY will continue to be published if folks like all of us don’t fork-over a few bucks once in a while to keep it going.

And while you’re at it, next time you get one of those calls, ask the solicitor to send you the last IRS 990 form filed by the charity or non-profit. And then decide what if anything it encourages you to give, remembering all the while that were it not for St. Mary’s Today you’d not have known to ask.

They are mostly good-hearted folks who slaved for years extracting those letters from the education hierarchy. It’s almost required that you have those letters and every college aspires to become a university so it can meet the marketplace demand.

However, so many of these folks spend so much of their lives climbing the ivory towers, they don’t know what it’s like to feel ground under their feet or how things are out there in the real world. And yet, there is no shyness in their posting solutions to real world problems and for expecting the greatest deference and acceptance of their views.

Their connection is to the virtual world projected on their computer screens and their experience is found mostly in the digital proof of their electronic studies. While I admit to a prejudice in favor of dirty hands and what my eyes and ears, out in the real world, teach me what is is, they are educated to work within their own reality whether it be real or not and expect others to accept that for what is, whether it is or not. They, with the weight of these three letters behind them, sometimes disdain the views of others without them and even sometimes even others with them, but not granted by the right place.

We have Ph.D’s waging wars with others’ children dying. We have Ph.D’s (or their business equivalent, MBAs) setting disastrous courses for the largest of businesses and committing highway robbery even when they ruin companies their shareholders and employees. We have these same folks messing with the economy and best interests of the country and they don’t have a clue or care to. Anyone who thinks you can just keep spending more and more then you take in, year after year after year, is a fool no matter how many degrees he or she possesses. The real world just doesn’t work that way and in the end, things must be paid for, be it in money, blood or both.

But back to the degree-laden to compare them with the degree-challenged majority – people who actually work with their hands using skills the letter accumulators just can’t appreciate until their plumbing clogs, their cars fail, then electric malfunctions, a button comes off, their roof leaks or any one of a multitude of the mishaps that intrude on comforts everyone seems to take for granted. And where are the multitude of "mechanics," skilled artisans and craftspeople in their trades when we need them? Why they’re off in some college or university somewhere working on some level of degree. Get their hands dirty or work in the jobs their parents and grandparents did to earn the money to pay for their education? Not only your life! Too much parental striving to make sure their children enjoyed "better" lives than they did? One wonders what’s to be demeaned in an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work for doing things for others they’re not qualified to do themselves or disdain doing and can pay for it? Calling an 800-help number to Timbuktu doesn’t cut it for the everyday problems that plague everyone. We all need these folks with magic in their hands and analytical mechanical abilities to scope out and solve things these multi-lettered folks can’t even begin to. And what have we done, we’re now about giving them letters after their names too. Everyone is told to "get certified" or "go back to school for continuing education" and a certificate to prove it. Things once learned through years on the job are sought to be somehow absorbed in days or weeks in a classroom. Skilled work is sought to be duplicated by machines and to run the machines you have to be computer-literate. Ordering parts formerly just by walking up to a counter becomes the work of multi-digit serial numbers only to find they’re out-of-stock, no longer made or it’s simply too expensive for suppliers to maintain the inventions they once did. Then, it’s to the Internet and "Big Brown" who’s expected to win yet another race, but may finish out-of-the money and dead last again. And the dryer won’t work so you just have to buy a new one, scrapping the old, for want of a part or two and the corporate MBA’s rejoice at your forced contribution to their bloated compensation. The grunt on the assembly-line just gets what he gets until it’s decided the machine can be cheaper made in some third-world country and no extra parts available when they get you next time. They get you coming and going – the American way today.

As those who can actually make something or fix it pass by the wayside, one wonders where this’ll lead us in the future. For answers to the questions of the curious, where does one turn? To the "experts," of course. And who do these experts turn-out to be – the self-same Ph.D’s and MBA’s who got us in this in the first place!

Ain’t that a fine kettle of fish!

Hospitals and physician groups moan and groan about not enough docs staying in Maryland to practice?

A reason why? Just peek at the rolls of exotic names of med-school students and you might wonder where all those children, grandchildren and great-grand children of local physicians, bred to medicine, go to med. school. Deep-rooted Maryland dynastic doctor families of earlier times must survive to some extent, so perhaps their scions are relegated to the Timbuktu or Guadalajara Med. School now, and their practices elsewhere.

Maryland taxpayers foot a good part of the bill at the University of Maryland Medical School, so why not give qualified Maryland-born applicants a big break on admissions and financial aid? We need to re-align our "preferences" with Maryland’s needs and, as once was the case by geographic happenstance and less-global transience, give priority to those that have deep roots here and are least likely to pick-up and leave.

Maybe, just maybe, its high time – at least for all State-supported schools – to concentrate on turning-out home-grown docs (Nurses and a multitude of other short-supply Health care and non-health care professionals) and forget "diversity," "grant-chasing,"esoteric "research," and "national rankings" as these schools’ real reasons for existence. Leave that for Johns Hopkins, maybe.

Tax payers suffer these gratuitous ambitions at their expense and pray they’ll not fall victim to the results of all this self-promoting, political correctness. And naturally, the poor docs, always overworked, impoverished and avoiding inconvenience to themselves, in chorus with put-upon hospitals suggest others foot the whole bill. Nothing new about that.

Are we so lacking in qualified Marylanders wanting to become physicians that we need look elsewhere to fill State-subsidized med. school seats? I hope not, but if we are, a shortage of physicians is but another symptom of a much more disastrous problem for our society as a whole.

Even to suggest such is isolationist, even Xenophobic or reactionary, and will bring forth self-righteous howls from comfortable, devoted aherents to these same prevailing pretexts everywhere in State professional and undergrad schools. That said, it doesn’t make things other than they are or provide any kind of solution to the public’s unmet needs.

CHASING OUR TAILS

I respect education, even have a good bit of it myself. Even got myself a kind of professional doctorate – certificates to prove it. I even know and respect some Ph.D.’s., although my old Dad termed them "Piled higher and deeper."

They are mostly good-hearted folks who slaved for years extracting those letters from the education hierarchy. It’s almost required that you have those letters and every college aspires to become a university so it can meet the marketplace demand.

However, so many of these folks spend so much of their lives climbing the ivory towers, they don’t know what it’s like to feel ground under their feet or how things are out there in the real world. And yet, there is no shyness in their posting solutions to real world problems and for expecting the greatest deference and acceptance of their views.

Their connection is to the virtual world projected on their computer screens and their experience is found mostly in the digital proof of their electronic studies. While I admit to a prejudice in favor of dirty hands and what my eyes and ears, out in the real world, teach me what is is, they are educated to work within their own reality whether it be real or not and expect others to accept that for what is, whether it is or not. They, with the weight of these three letters behind them, sometimes disdain the views of others without them and even sometimes even others with them, but not granted by the right place.

We have Ph.D’s waging wars with others’ children dying. We have Ph.D’s (or their business equivalent, MBAs) setting disastrous courses for the largest of businesses and committing highway robbery even when they ruin companies their shareholders and employees. We have these same folks messing with the economy and best interests of the country and they don’t have a clue or care to. Anyone who thinks you can just keep spending more and more then you take in, year after year after year, is a fool no matter how many degrees he or she possesses. The real world just doesn’t work that way and in the end, things must be paid for, be it in money, blood or both.

But back to the degree-laden to compare them with the degree-challenged majority – people who actually work with their hands using skills the letter accumulators just can’t appreciate until their plumbing clogs, their cars fail, then electric malfunctions, a button comes off, their roof leaks or any one of a multitude of the mishaps that intrude on comforts everyone seems to take for granted. And where are the multitude of "mechanics," skilled artisans and craftspeople in their trades when we need them? Why they’re off in some college or university somewhere working on some level of degree. Get their hands dirty or work in the jobs their parents and grandparents did to earn the money to pay for their education? Not only your life! Too much parental striving to make sure their children enjoyed "better" lives than they did? One wonders what’s to be demeaned in an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work for doing things for others they’re not qualified to do themselves or disdain doing and can pay for it? Calling an 800-help number to Timbuktu doesn’t cut it for the everyday problems that plague everyone. We all need these folks with magic in their hands and analytical mechanical abilities to scope out and solve things these multi-lettered folks can’t even begin to. And what have we done, we’re now about giving them letters after their names too. Everyone is told to "get certified" or "go back to school for continuing education" and a certificate to prove it. Things once learned through years on the job are sought to be somehow absorbed in days or weeks in a classroom. Skilled work is sought to be duplicated by machines and to run the machines you have to be computer-literate. Ordering parts formerly just by walking up to a counter becomes the work of multi-digit serial numbers only to find they’re out-of-stock, no longer made or it’s simply too expensive for suppliers to maintain the inventions they once did. Then, it’s to the Internet and "Big Brown" who’s expected to win yet another race, but may finish out-of-the money and dead last again. And the dryer won’t work so you just have to buy a new one, scrapping the old, for want of a part or two and the corporate MBA’s rejoice at your forced contribution to their bloated compensation. The grunt on the assembly-line just gets what he gets until it’s decided the machine can be cheaper made in some third-world country and no extra parts available when they get you next time. They get you coming and going – the American way today.

As those who can actually make something or fix it pass by the wayside, one wonders where this’ll lead us in the future. For answers to the questions of the curious, where does one turn? To the "experts," of course. And who do these experts turn-out to be – the self-same Ph.D’s and MBA’s who got us in this in the first place!

Ain’t that a fine kettle of fish!

Time was that most everyone kept chickens for eggs, Sunday dinner and Church homecomings. Today they’d be called "free range" and bring big prices at the fancy markets, but then they were just chickens and Perdue, Holly Farms and other large chicken factories, if they even existed, peddled their birds to the City folks who didn’t know any better and paid more for them than they did beef. A roaster was an old hen past egg-laying or a rooster only fit to eat, and boy were they fit to eat, after hours of slow cooking. A few kept ducks and geese, but they were generally disfavored in St. Mary’s to the wild varieties shot in or out of season. These were all what I’d term the everyday fowl.

Now guinea fowl, they were far less-prevalent. Like chickens, I’m sure they ended-up on the table and they laid eggs too. I never had the pleasure, at least as I recall.

What I do recall, however, is that those who kept them recognized another element of their character and put it to good use – they were watchfowl. Just drive up a farm lane and the guineas, out there scratching for their food with all the rest, would immediately fly to the upper reaches of trees in the yard and raise the alarm. Other birds might scurry out of your way, but only to quickly return to their search for bugs and seeds to peck-at. Not the guineas – they just raised cane for a while before finally quieting down way up in the safety of the tallest branches.

Today, most everyone sends a monthly check to an alarm service because they feel the need to. And they’re by no means alarmist in these times, whether they’re to home or miles away at their day jobs. Guinea fowl won’t cut the mustard any more and they’ve been replaced. That’s progress, I guess.

And one other thing about guinea fowl – and I don’t know whether it’s true or not – but my cousin who kept them, always ran out for them when a heavy rain was coming, claiming that if she didn’t get them in they’d put back their heads, open their beaks wide, and drink so much they’d all drown. They were not noted for their intelligence.

Perhaps this is the origin of the old saw that "he didn’t have sense enough to come in out of the rain!"

Just like all these motion sensors and other electronic security gadgets, Guineas weren’t perfect, but they did provide eggs and meat for the table. And no monthly "maintenance charge."

Dry-rot finally took-out one of a friend’s Allis-Chalmers front tractor tires beyond repair. Imagine that, after 60 years he found he was out-of-warranty! Oh well, it was off to Mr. Curtis’s place, that family-run tire emporium on the Great Mills Road, expecting to have to order a new one. No one would have it in stock. Tire, wheel and all into the pick-up and off he went. Expecting the worst, he assumed it’d take weeks of unmowed grass for UPS to bring one in.

When he got to the store, the youngsters just looked at him like he’d brought them something from another planet. After a bit of standard head-shaking, an elder looked in, allowed as how there should be one up in the eaves and sent a youngster up a ladder. He emerged with the new-old stock in hand and my friend was in business. Smiles all ‘round, I tell you.

They wrestled it and a new tube onto the wheel and he was merrily on his way, inflated and elated, the bill less than he ever imagined it would be.

My friend should have known it was too good to be true as anyone who favors old (or new) equipment, or who thinks he’s only making one trip to Lowe’s to complete a repair, will tell you. Life just ain’t that way! Seems burrs inside the rim punctured the new inner-tube and during the trip home the tire went flat again. Back to Great Mills, and after some de-burring and another new tube, he was again on his way, humbler but happy.

It was then about the hour, so he turned-on the radio to get the news of the outside world that had come up since the paper the day before and give him something to occupy his time as he wandered down Flat Iron past that wind-torn shed hesitantly determined to eventually fall into the road.

Well, the news being over, he just didn’t pay much further attention to what was coming out of the speakers.

Country Music is not his (or my) cup of tea and the AM band of his radio sees little use in St. Mary’s as a result (especially now that station that mysteriously played uninterrupted classic rock’n’roll from the sixties changed its format).

St. Mary’s is Country country and both our Country repertoires are limited to "Ring Of Fire," "I Can’t Get No Satisfaction, ‘Cause My Tractor Ain’t Got No Traction" and "She Got The Goldmine…" Such being the case, he paid no real notice to the hymn-like tune that seamlessly succeeded the news, but at some point the chorus that followed each verse jarred his consciousness with its incongruity. It was but one word: "Meangod." Was this some kind of echo of Calvinist Jonathan Edwards’ "Sinners InThe Hands of An Angry God" sermons, he wondered to himself?

That odd chorus for a hymn got his almost-complete attention as it was repeated a couple more times. My friend was listening so intently, he almost blew past the Stop sign at the Drayden Road (imagine that!). But safely stopped there, for the first time, he realized that chorus was actually a mush-mouthed rendition of "ME AND GOD." Incongruous no more!

A few days later, I related this story to a group of City lady-professionals, several of whom immediately broke into the whole song, verbatim, verse-by-verse, until they collapsed in laughter. Tom T. Hall fans all, they said.

So much for lapses in education. Or did he just need a hearing-aid?

LIFE GOES ON

I went looking for frogs’ eggs in the ditches today. It’s something I do, if only to remind myself that even with a couple of momentary spells of winter yet to jolt us, spring will be upon us before we know it. And the tree frogs know this far better than we and will be briskly making their plans accordingly.

For the uninitiated, frogs’ eggs are gelatinous globs about the size of the palm of a man’s hand. Sometimes pretty clear, sometimes a bit milky or sometime even greenish. Embedded in them are many little black spheres like the "fisheyes" in old-time tapioca pudding. Each of these nascent dots is a tadpole and if lucky, ultimately a new generation of tree frogs. While they look slimy (just like snakes aren’t) they aren’t and you can find them most anywhere there’s a couple inches of water collected.

And since frogs seem to be threatened by all this Global Warming that everyone hears about, we’ll just have to wait and see. With a wet Spring, my bet’s on the toads and I hope I’m right. With all the ruckus their come-to-me courting songs produce in the woods, their tadpole progeny play hell with mosquito larvae and those of us out at dawn and dusk can be thankful for their appetites and favorite menu choices.

I recall many years ago, my father, being a mischievous sort, collected a bucket-full of these eggs, took them up to my City Sunday school class and gleefully distributed them among my classmates, equally gleeful, in paper cups.

Everyone thought this was wonderful except their mothers who found them about as disgusting as anything they every saw. My Dad was confronted by more than one Christian mom who informed him in no uncertain terms that there was no way those nasty things were coming into her house! I suspect that those that fluoride-treated tap water didn’t finish off ended up out of sight at the ends of yards somewhere and were visited religiously by children (they were Sunday schoolers, after all) looking to see if tails and then free-swimmers had formed. And just maybe one or two lived to hop away and survived to begin the whole process over again a hundred miles away from their home ditch. At least that’s what I’d like to think, even though I’m sure my father’s real purpose was devilment towards the squeamish mothers.

For me, I’ll just leave them all be, this time.

It wasn’t so terribly long-ago that anyone who thought about it knew that working folks earned their living employed in three different types of places: private industry or businesses; state, local or federal government; or charitable or non-profit entities.

If you were looking to ascend in the private business end you were either an entrepreneur or you climbed the corporate hierarchy as high as you could and the business paid you well for this if it could.

If you chose government employment, you made what would be termed "decent money" for the level of your responsibility coupled with job security, longevity, government benefits and a generous retirement package when the time came.

Those who chose careers in charitable, non-profit or not-for-profit pursuits had a "calling" to do so and while they naturally hoped it would provide them enough income and retirement and other benefits, "getting rich" there was neither expected no even thought of to be a possibility.

Members of Boards of Directors in the for-profit business sector, frequently constrained by their own company’s Boards who set their own compensation, kept the lid-on compensation they allowed those they themselves set; entrepreneur business owners were self-controlling as money scooped from their company’s treasury hampered its continuing growth and lessened its cushion in bad times they knew would come eventually.

Legislatures, Congress, Town and County Councils and those who oversaw government budgeting also kept the lid on there and maintained responsible taxing policies to fund at that level.

Non-Profit, not-for-profit and charity volunteer Boards and Trustees, desirous of devoting the maximum resources to the purposes of their tax-privileged categories (not to mention their having to convince donors that their dollars would go to intended recipients rather than the executive class) were more conservative, but hopefully fair, in handing-out money for employee compensation at all levels.

At some point, all this seems to have changed.

Publicly held companies’ Boards of Directors (largely hand-picked by management) were handling out tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars in retirement or severance to company big dogs who either departed rich in early middle age (or a better deal down the road) or because the company went to ruin on the dear departed’s shift. Board Members were ratcheting-up golden parchute after golden parachute, each adding the last one they heard about until their own time came and their Directors at home did the same for them! Not a bad way to go with other peoples’ money, but how could this get past any smell test of each company’s "Compensation Committee" whose "recommendations" were apparently rubber-stamped by the whole bunch wholesale? As with most folks who don’t really want to take responsibility for their decisions, they hired CONSULTANTS to provide them "expert" advice when they already had to know what their executive class colleagues should be making. These "Consultants" simply provided them a smoke screen to hide behind, and whatever "Consultants" are, they don’t prosper by not knowing which side of the bread is buttered. "This guy or gal made this so you have to cough-up at least that much and more to get as good or better than the one that left or you tossed-out on the street." Consultants "made" the market for executives and the "marketplace" bought it hook, line and sinker. And things just went from there, despite Sarbanes/Oxley; repeated downsizing in the grunts making comparative fraction who actually make the places run to beef-up balance sheets of a quarter or three; and some shareholder grumbling. It continues as you read this.

And what about the government employment sector? Putting aside the fact that its insane growth every day masks massive losses of jobs elsewhere, when was the last time any of us heard it referred to as "public service"? While not taking down the big millions of the Wall Street types, it seems everyone’s forgotten the reasons people once chose government employ. In fact, it’s now those very reasons PLUS a ratcheted-up compensation program particularly at the upper end of the public trough. Its rationale now is "we need the best-qualified people and look what they could make in private business." Consultants again? First of all, many of these officials making very nice money are merely prepping for the big-bucks in private business when the revolving door to there presents an opportunity to trade on their time in the government’s employ. Career public employees at high levels are doing quite well also, thank you, with their total packages eschewing the pressures and uncertainties of private business, and along with the short-timers, rise with the tide, again the grunts doing all the day-to-day work for relative crumbs. Taxpayers foot this bill.

And charities and non-profits, there’s the same dynamic in play, out-of-hand in the private sector and relatively so in government employment. Why? These same consultants, again fronting for Trustees and Board Members, (largely corporate executives themselves), don’t see any reason not to apply here the same standards applied to themselves. Charitable recipients are short-changed and those actually providing services get relative peanuts, no wheelbarrow trip to the bank for them. Legions of volunteers, nothing but a pat-on-the-back.

Whether it be as a stockholder, a taxpayer or as a donor or payor to a charity or not-for-profit (and that hits almost everyone) we’re paying for all these bloated executive-types. And to add insult to injury, we’re also paying the very CONSULTANTS (who sometimes inveigle the very positions they "consult" on) who have so blatantly built this whole outrageous pile in the first place.

Will no one bell-the-cat?

First of all, there wasn’t all that much business to be minded anyway. Other than seeing folks of a Sunday at Church, "other people" were pretty much immediate family of those, while sleeping under another roof, were living on the same place or just across the lane and one saw and worked with them there dawn to dusk. A few people came and went but most just stayed-put. And most of those who weren’t firmly rooted in the soil of their birthplace, seldom took root very far away.

Church affiliations and races separated the citizenry to a large degree and although one of one sect might take up with one of another, the separation of the races was not even a matter of question or thought. All went about their own business free of much interference from the others.

There was not much cash money here and a man’s worth was measured in land, his skill at his trade and his reputation in the community. The land and water provided even the most-impoverished with a safety-net against starvation and there was always a tree for house for boat building or burning in a fireplace or stove. People died much younger and the elderly were cared for by their children and neighbors as were the sick, assisted by the rudimentary medicine of the day. Much of the currency was in the form of barter, exchanging what one man had for what another had need of. There were a few persons or families of "means," but even they didn’t approach the tremendous gap between rich and poor today. Other than a County health nurse who might get by once in a while and the local clergyman’s home visits, there wasn’t much in the way of what became to be known as "social services" programs. The community was the safety-net and folks made do with what could be scraped together as best they could. Very small pensions and Social Security came along to augment savings accumulated dollar-by-dollar over lifetimes. Wage-earning children and grandchildren chipped-in what they could and somehow folks got by, even paid their real estate tax bills. They asked little of government and that’s what they got.

The Great Depression came, but people even got by the even tougher times it brought with it. Then came Mr. Roosevelt and his New Deal programs which have evolved today into the massive intrusions of government into the most minute aspects of our everyday lives as the cost for pretty-much replacing the old ways of self-reliance and community help of the worthy needy.

Folks now look to government for most everything and hardly realize the price paid in exchange for government’s largesse. To meet those expectations, government has grown from an almost skeletal framework to its current overwhelming, bloated size. Confusion in the populace between benefits as privileges and benefits as inalienable rights, with the Courts backing them up, have created a dependent society who cannot even grasp that things might be otherwise. Top to bottom, we have become inured with the thinking that we all have entitlements, ignoring that each of them come at a cost, not only to the recipient, but others and society as a whole. That cost comes in two forms, money-out-of-pocket from those who pay, and lost independence and freedom for all, even the most-privileged among us. The basic incentive that made this nation what it is was the general acceptance embodied in a few simple credos:

1. You worked hard to provide food, clothing and a roof over your head;

2. You, at the same time, sought to better your lot, and even more compellingly, worked so hard in the hope that your children and grandchildren would have an easier time than you did; and

3. When all was said and done, you hoped for a sincerely large crowd to follow your coffin to your gravesite.

For generations here in St. Mary’s and mostly elsewhere in this Country, following these rules led slowly and steadily, for the most part, to betterment and prosperity.

However, sometime mid-twentieth century, with the explosion in size of government at all levels, these attitudes began falling into disuse, with the possible exception of emigrant populations who’ve recently reached outlandish proportions. And as these immigrants become absorbed in our ways, in a generation or two, they fall into them also. Government has become, if not the major employer everywhere, certainly among the top-ten no matter where you go. While there’s little talk these days of the "welfare system," the likely reason is that so many are on it! Top to bottom. Corporations owned by others, even foreign governments, are on the dole, no different than the archetypal "40 year old welfare mother with six kids, 35 grandkids and 5, great-grands and no man in the house." A Social Security "Retirement Trust Fund," pillaged over-and-over by politicos to balance bloated budgets, leaving little there but IOU’s to be "repaid" by later generations. Profiteering defense contractors feeding on the bones of dead youth in wars we never should be fighting in foreign lands where folks only come to hate us for it. And our own, our elderly, our sick, our children going without the most basic of services, some starving and many dying, while we ship food, medicines and money out of the country, much of which ends up in the hands of the ruling class there. What doesn’t line their pockets only gets through, it seems, in amounts calculated as just enough to prevent an uprising that would run them out, or, if their escape plans failed, up against a wall. Like I said, welfare at all levels everywhere and we have become expert at its export based on our experience here.

So, the next time you see a vehicle coming your way, normally with but one person in it and you notice it’s tagged with government license plates, consider this: what is that person there to do to or for you and what has it cost you to be the object of that attention? And then you might thank the God in heaven there’re not three or four in the car; with that you’re really in for it!

Whether it’s a Sheriff’s car or a Trooper or just simply one of the government functionaries out burning fuel to justify their pay, it’s more than likely not a social call and it’ll cost you something in either your time, your pocket book or meddle in your own dammed business!

There was a time when automobiles here were few and everybody knew everybody and whose cars belonged to whom. They traveled County roads without much notice, and with few exceptions, without any alarm except for the livestock which still viewed autos as frightening novelties and were inclined to make for the ditch when they appeared.

Strange cars, however, caused a real ruckus, particularly in Prohibition days since they were almost always bringing the revenuers down to disturb the citizenry’s natural acceptance of what was considered a very legitimate calling, pursued by many pillars of the community. A "strange" car passing through Leonardtown would set the party-line telephone exchange in frantic ringing down-County to Great Mills and thence Valley Lee and, the word out, everyone cut and ran for the safety of their woodlots, parlors and porches. The high-speed motor boats that did pickups of the imported stuff out on the Bay on moonless nights would be further camouflaged and secreted in blind-mouthed creeks known only to a very select few. Stills in the woods would be quickly shut-down and a multitude of Mason jars and "makin’s" carefully hidden, or in a pinch "squeegin’s" just emptied if time was too short. Once done, everyone just played nonchalant and smiled knowingly without a word until the coast was clear, the "strange" car having safely returned up old Rte. 5 through Leonardtown past the watchful telephone operator who always sat in a window at her switchboard facing the road.

Famously, one time they got past this up-County night-and-day watch and by the time the alarm was raised in Great Mills, the feds were almost there. The story is told that the matriarch of one of the County’s first families was seen out on her porch roof pouring contents of Mason jars into the downspouts as the touring car full of agents roared into her door yard. Strange cars, anticipated or unexpected, caused short-lived disruption of the peace and quiet that St. Mary’s had so-long become used-to, but only once in a while and only momentarily.

Today, everyone has a vehicle, and few are recognized as belonging to someone everyone knows. Yet, there are a multitude of "strange" ones that wander the roads unnoticed, and appear in the dooryards of those about minding their own business. These cars and trucks are owned by an alphabet of government agencies, state, county and federal and they more often than not bring more trouble and confusion with them than the revenuers once did so long ago. They’re thick as fleas on a dog’s back and we pay for them, their salaries and their gas. Minions of the tax people, environmental folks, planners, zoning officials, health department, agricultural busy bodies and a host of others with tractor trailer loads of regulations, permits, fees, violations and other methods of maintaining their job security descend on the unsuspecting citizen who simply cuts a tree down, wants to build a house on his property, plans put in a crop or not, or who has somehow run afoul of their rules, or even if not, failed to clear it with them first. Even were you able to find them in their offices to contact them to ask permission or whether permission was even required to do something, only a fool would inquire in the first place since this will more likely than not trigger a site visit that will find a violation of something or other and paperwork, expense and always a permit fee or a tax increase or time out-of-pocket. Just doing their job, thank you, the job they’re supposed to do.

Well, the rum-runners are all dead and buried and their speedboats long-gone. Maybe some folks may run dope dropped-off in the Bay and likely a few harvest marijuana where the stills once were, but these don’t attract the public participation and support once so prevalent a few generations ago. Yet the proliferation of these fleets of strange cars on our roads causes the same havoc for everyone the revenuers once did for a few and all of us continue to pay for the unending privilege of being their self-justifying targets on a grinding constant basis.

Nothing has changed in St. Mary’s except we now bring this upon ourselves, doled-out by folks that live here and those we vote for. Their jobs depend on us and we pay though the nose. High-handed bureaucrats administering minutiae selectively (almost always the little guy) is an escalating plague that won’t go away and let a man or woman do with his or her property or person as he or she wishes, are nothing more than the end of this County and country. I say, leave us be and so long as what we choose to do doesn’t really hurt someone else (and not just another’s tender sensibilities) government should butt-out, save the paper, save the gas and have the bureaucrats stay in their cozy offices ‘til retirement, their seats to remain unfilled after they’ve gone. At that vainlessly hoped-for time, maybe the presence of "strange" cars may again become more of a novelty, albeit always unwelcome.

Rather than all this talk of slots, why not simply take-over the whole industry already out there that has developed around loopholes in our gambling laws.

For example, slot machines were supposedly banned in Maryland years ago. Yet there seems to be a proliferation of operations out there using hardware really no different than the old one-armed bandits, but not deemed within the prohibition’s definition.

Technology changes moment-by-moment, but it should not be too hard to define the prohibition based on what a device does or a process accomplishes. Oddly, but understandably, none of our politicos have really tried and the public has not forced them to.

Charities’ supposedly getting a piece of the action also masks the real picture and players. Politicos divert attention to large venues and the few high-dollar operators when the real "business" goes out-the-window at these below-the-radar operations.

It’s well-known that corner bars live-off poker machines that pay-off in their premises. Now instead of two or three machines in a location, we’re seeing many, many more and will see even that multiply. The "charity" front gets a cut, the bar owner gets a cut and the machine man gets a cut – what about the State of Maryland tax collector? Putting aside a piece of the action for State coffers, does anyone believe much if any of the cash in play is reported as income by anyone or that the "charity" has a real chance at getting a true payout!

Let the little guy keep up to say three machines. Any more than three, the State controls and operates them and collects the cash just as it does for Lottery Terminals. Other than these, no machines, period – they’re contraband just like everyone thought slot machines were. And assuming no one would want to deprive anyone of the ability to evade income taxes, simply tax what’s played minus what’s paid out, something the machine itself should be able to document electronically to the Lotto Agency or State Comptroller’s Office. Amounts actually paid to legitimate charities would not be taxed and only those operations where machines were its biggest cash generator and real reason to exist would bear the freight.

How much money this would bring in should be big-time and even were the machines to be "leased" from others (who should get something by way of "rentals"), their dispersal throughout the State already wouldn’t require construction of any new venues. And finally, the racing interest could get their piece as fashioned by the Legislature as part of its law(s) setting-up the whole shebang. And "the children…," they’d get their cut too.

Any more than Lotto did not succeed in killing-off the numbers game, this will not kill off machines that pay-off outside the system. It will, however, as with Lotto give the State a seat at the counting table and a hand in the till.

"ERSTERS AND TROUTLINES"

Likely long-gone now in St. Mary’s is the peculiar dialect many were once heard to speak here. I say peculiar, not in the sense of strange, but rather in the sense of singular, not spoken elsewhere in my experience. The closest to it would be the patois of the backwoods Appalachian mountain folks I’ve heard on ethnologists’ recordings and in introductions to old-time fiddle and banjo tunes they sang. The St. Mary’s dialect was different however, more Elizabethan English with that sort-of gentle Tidewater slide to it.

In my youth, there were still some elders puttering around in fields and on deadrises that spoke in that fashion. For better or worse, these folks (the men, at least) were people of few words anyway and nods of the head, a wink here and there and some very short, simple sentences conveyed about all they saw fit and found necessary. And since most of those they spoke to were of like dispositions and they were so well-known to each other, they’d long-ago said much of what they had to say anyway, and there was little need for much detailed discussion.

These were pretty much "gee" and "haw" folks and simply "supper" conveyed what was required to tell one where they were headed. And "supper" was to be had "come hame." "Sturm comin’," uttered quietly meant making a run for it if it appeared to the weepy red-tinged expert eye (no sunglasses they), barely visible under a broad-brimmed and tattered straw, that your day on the River was at end.

All this was due to a geographical reality: St. Mary’s was long on the way to nowhere else. These folks had been born and raised here for generation after generation, on the same land and among those just like them. Remember, just as St. Mary’s, Solomon’s also was the end of the road and a recent trip up what’s now Rte. 2 to Annapolis, reminded that the "Old Solomon’s Island Road," which now crosses the "New" road 8 or 9 times, followed farmers’ field lines, not anything like straight line. Crops and livelihoods they provided were much more important than roads! Imagine that.

And in St. Mary’s the same applied. Not much need to go "fur" up the road anyway. They did put that draw-bridge in at Benedict in the late 20’s, but the Thomas Johnson Bridge wasn’t even an idea. You crossed the Patuxent by boat or not at all. Old Rte. 5 from Leonardtown and Three-Notch Road from what became Lexington Park weren’t much more than what passes for a poorly maintained farm lane of today. Pot holes, alternating dust and mud, washouts and rising freshets were always in contention with the traveler who didn’t come and go the old-fashioned way – by water, by sail or steamboat.

There was no radio or television and even when they came, reception was sketchy. Telephones came, roads were macadamed, the Base was established and St. Mary’s gradually became connected to the outside world. With the influx of new people and more convenient access elsewhere, folks more and more heard others who spoke what we’d call either "standard English" required of media voices or the multitude of other dialects used by those who came from elsewhere. Gradually, but ever so surely, the St. Mary’s County dialect died-out in a couple of generations with the exposure to those who spoke differently. Increased years of schooling, mandated by law, and machines’ reduction in the need for children to work the family farm, kept kids in school most through high school and under the sustained influence of teachers whose speech patterns were maintained with a rigor unknown among today’s educators. Their parents’ and certainly their grandparents’ way of speaking was likely viewed with respect, was understood, but was not taken up as theirs. It’s almost like what I’ve observed with many second and third-generation emigrants who can understand their parents’ or grandparents’ foreign tongue, but can’t speak it themselves.

Despite this, especially among some of our older natives even today, a bit of the old way sneaks in, almost unnoticed unless one’s ear recognizes it for what it is.

The likely most common of these is the word "ersters." Sometimes heard still in the remoter parts of the Eastern Shore also, this refers to the sorely dimmished bivalve which once was the backbone of the whole Chesapeake Bay fisheries industry.

The other coming readily to mind, having heard it just the other day, is "trout line." As best I know, this is the same as a "trot line." Don’t bother to look either up in your dictionary; they’re not there, neither of them. For those uninitiates among us, what we’re talking about is a long length of string or waxed cord which is anchored at both ends marked by floats, from which at intervals bait is suspended below the water surface. Working this whole get-up is a waterman in a small boat with at rolling pulley-like mechanism attached to the gunnel, which raises the line above water as the boat proceeds down-throttle, slowly and methodically back and forth the length of the line. As the baited line rises with a crab hungrily hanging-on to his bait meal, the waterman gently dips him up by net and into a bushel-basket. This process is repeated until no crabs appear or the waterman tires of the task. A "trout line," you say; no trout in this any way. No rainbows, browns here and our sea-trout aren’t the prey. Best I can figure, "trout" is indeed "trot" and this refers to the slow pace the boat must travel to successfully work the line. It likely reflects the boat speed, more than a walk, less than a run. Before outboards became universal, I recall watching with awe a neighbor working his rig propelling his skiff by skulling with one hand and dipping the crabs with his net in the other. That was an ancient ballet now sadly lost that I’m sure had been performed for hundreds of years, prosaicly and without notice on the St. Mary’s and everywhere down here. Its pure beauty on a glassy surface, virtually soundless, is a memory I retain fondly to this day.

For those uninitiates who wonder what a "gunnel" is, it’s the side of the boat. As to "skulling," it’s likely a lost art of actually propelling the boat forward by an oar set in an oarlock at the stern and magically rotating the oar in sort of an elongated figure-8 fashion. I can describe it; I despair of doing it; and so likely will anyone who’s reading this. Like a magician’s tricks, you see it with your own eyes; it was done; but dammed if you could do it yourself.

Trout lines and ersters stubbornly remain. Skulling, except in name, done gone.

Thus ends my lesson.

A Doc. Shortage:

Hospitals and physician groups moan and groan about not enough docs staying in Maryland to practice?

A reason why? Just peek at the rolls of exotic names of med-school students and you might wonder where all those children, grandchildren and great-grand children of local physicians, bred to medicine, go to med. school. Deep-rooted Maryland dynastic doctor families of earlier times must survive to some extent, so perhaps their scions are relegated to the Timbuktu or Guadalajara Med. School now, and their practices elsewhere.

Maryland taxpayers foot a good part of the bill at the University of Maryland Medical School, so why not give qualified Maryland-born applicants a big break on admissions and financial aid? We need to re-align our "preferences" with Maryland’s needs and, as once was the case by geographic happenstance and less-global transience, give priority to those that have deep roots here and are least likely to pick-up and leave.

Maybe, just maybe, its high time – at least for all State-supported schools – to concentrate on turning-out home-grown docs (Nurses and a multitude of other short-supply Health care and non-health care professionals) and forget "diversity," "grant-chasing,"esoteric "research," and "national rankings" as these schools’ real reasons for existence. Leave that for Johns Hopkins, maybe.

Tax payers suffer these gratuitous ambitions at their expense and pray they’ll not fall victim to the results of all this self-promoting, political correctness. And naturally, the poor docs, always overworked, impoverished and avoiding inconvenience to themselves, in chorus with put-upon hospitals suggest others foot the whole bill. Nothing new about that.

Are we so lacking in qualified Marylanders wanting to become physicians that we need look elsewhere to fill State-subsidized med. school seats? I hope not, but if we are, a shortage of physicians is but another symptom of a much more disastrous problem for our society as a whole.

Even to suggest such is isolationist, even Xenophobic or reactionary, and will bring forth self-righteous howls from comfortable, devoted aherents to these same prevailing pretexts everywhere in State professional and undergrad schools. That said, it doesn’t make things other than they are or provide any kind of solution to the public’s unmet needs.