Month: November 2003

Categories
Culture Places

Dixie Land

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I wrote last week about visiting the Johnson Shut-Ins, trying to get some photos of unusual rock formations. This was my first visit to this part of the state, heading southwest rather than my usual northwest.

It was a great day with cool weather but clear skies. As I drove South from St. Louis on I-55, I marveled at all the parks I passed along the way – fresh adventures, and I hadn’t exhausted all of the parks in my usual hiking territory. I tried to make note of them as I passed, but there were too many.

From I-55 I took US Hwy 67 to Framingham, and from there I needed to take Route W. Missouri has all of these back country routes that they’ve named after the letters of the alphabet, and it makes it hard not to miss them – they all look alike. Why couldn’t the state use something like “Missouri Arcadia Highway” or “Iron Road”, for Iron Mountain through which it traverses.

Route W was a beautiful 2-lane road in excellent condition, with hardly any other cars on it that day. As expected in the Ozarks it was hilly, and curvy, and green – even in the late fall, there was still green along side the road. I went through one small town, can’t remember the name, and a road crew was working on an old iron bridge that looked like it had been around forever. The men all wore uniform outfits of white t-shirts and baggy blue jeans, brown leatherwork boots and bright orange work crew vests and hats. One of the lanes was closed and as the sheriff waved me through, I couldn’t help staring at the men because to a person they all had brown hair, mustaches, and mirror sunglasses. The only difference between the men was height and build.

Several of the men saw me staring and tipped their hats. This is the backcountry of Missouri and these men’s mamas raised them to be polite. I tried to reciprocate the politeness by nodding back with slight, dignified smile, reminding myself that these men were not a raree show and to stop staring.

Not long after the workmen, I topped a hill and started passing what looked like some kind of farm supply company. Nothing unusual, except for a tall flagpole flying an old confederate flag. I was surprised, but I shouldn’t have been. When you live in St. Louis, you sometimes forget Missouri’s civil war roots. Why, an estimated 1500 confederate soldiers had died in the battle of Pilot Knob, not but a few miles from my final destination.

I didn’t think much of the flag, or more of the flag then to think about its historic significance, until I passed another home in the woods and this one also had a confederate flag, but a much newer, more vividly colored one. And then I passed another house flying the flag, and then another, and then another.

I once wrote how disturbed I was by the homes flying the huge American flags with yellow ribbons in Kentucky. I think of them as examples of unthinking patriotism. Well, none of this exists in the iron country of the Ozarks, but I don’t believe what takes its place is an improvement.

From Route W, I had to take Highway 21 to reach the Shut-Ins. When I got to the park there were some people there, including other photographers. Normally I’d say hello and smile at folks, maybe chat about the view or the rocks or our cameras. That day, though, I kept my head down and found I couldn’t make eye contact with any of the other people. In fact, I found myself getting irritated with the people, the rocks, the water, and finally just left.

Of course, all of this surfaced this week with the uproar surrounding Howard Dean’s remarks about wanting to be “…the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks.” Oh my.

I know where Dean is coming from, though he sure can stick his foot in his mouth at times. It wasn’t that long ago that I and others criticized Dean for surrounding himself with east coast college educated liberals. Can’t get more uncoast and unliberal than trucks with confederate flags. But what is a white man from the North going to know of the confederate flag? Kerry and Lieberman, for all of their outrage, they don’t know about it either – except as some symbol of backwoods inbred hicks that pollute this great nation of ours.

(I think I’ll get that put on a shirt. “Hi, I’m a backwoods inbred hick from Missouri and I sleep with my gun.”)

Gephardt is from Missouri, so he’s probably seen a truck, maybe even one with a confederate flag. But what’s his response to this issue?

“I don’t want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks,” Gephardt said in a statement. “I will win the Democratic nomination because I will be the candidate for guys with American flags in their pickup trucks.”

So then we’re back to Kentucky, and home after home covered in American Flags and yellow ribbons. Or we’re back to a White House lawn, with Gephardt standing behind the President, promising his support for this war on terror in Iraq.

As for Clark, another man who might have seen a flag draped truck or two with his Arkansas background – cookie cutter responses with “NRA.” “Racially Divisive.” Basically it boils down to “Bad Mans. Pick me.”

I’m voting Democrat, but it’s damn hard at times. These men, they don’t have a clue what this is all about.

Along I-55 on the way home from my trip to the Shut-Ins, I passed a sign identifying that section of the highway as the Rosa Parks Highway, named for the black woman who refused to give up her seat to a white person during the civil rights movement. The reason for the highway being named after her is an interesting story.

Back in 1994, the Ku Klux Klan wanted to adopt that stretch of I-55 as part of the adopt-a-highway program. If allowed, a sign with the Ku Klux Klan on it would have to be displayed along the side of the road. The Missouri Department of Transportation denied the request, and the KKK filed a freedom of speech suit. Eventually the U.S. District Court ruled in favor of the Ku Klux Klan, and its right to free speech. Once the Supreme Court refused to hear Missouri’s case, the KKK was free to become part of the program.

But you know, the folks of Missouri never were the type to just take defeat. The Highway Department, with much fanfare, renamed the section of the Highway that the KKK claimed, as “Rosa Parks Highway”. If the KKK persisted with their insistence on being part of the program, they would be cleaning The Rosa Parks Highway.

Missouri. God, you have got to love the folks here at times.

Back to the trip and the flags, those symbolic flags. Last week, the worst part of the trip and traveling past those confederate flagged homes wasn’t that the flags were some kind of symbol of the NRA or racial hatred, whicheveryoneisagainst. The worst part of the day, for me, personally, was when I saw all those confederate flags and thought about walking in those woods all by myself, and remembered those men and their mirror sunglasses – and I felt relieved that I was white and not black. The year is 2003 and it was the middle of the day in the middle of the United States and I’m driving in my car thinking to myself that I’m glad I’m white and not black. No wonder I couldn’t look anyone in the eyes at the park.

After all the shouting and finger pointing, that’s really the issue. And I bet if Dean, or Gephardt, or Lieberman, or Kerry, or Clark, or even President Bush for that matter, had been in the car with me, they would have been relieved they were white, too. At least, this is my hope. I’d hate to think I was the only moral coward around.

The solution could be to just make flying the confederate flag illegal. But then there’s that free speech thing, and I’m not sure what’s scarier: the flags flying or the flags not flying because the government steps in. Open the door to that sort of thing and all sorts of bad stuff will start crawling out – like our current Attorney General, Ashcroft. You know, he’s from Missouri, too.

(The ACLU doesn’t have a problem knowing which is the better – they were the ones that filed suit for the KKK.)

The KKK dropped their claim on the Rosa Parks Highway, but then in 2001 applied to adopt another section of road. They’ve again been denied because the Highway department has instituted new rules that won’t allow groups to participate if they discriminate. When the KKK member applied and was asked whether his group discriminates, he answered, “Yes”. The issue is again heading back to the courts. Good thing there’s lots of civil rights worker names to call upon if need be.

As for the road the KKK wants to adopt, it’s in the Ozarks, in a place called Iron Mountain. A stretch of asphalt on Highway 21, near to some famous landmarks known as the Johnson Shut-Ins and Elephant Rocks.

Categories
Weather

The ephemeral crystal

There’s something magical about seeing the first snow flake falling. At that moment, you and nature are joined in a special secret only shared by those who look out their windows at just the right moment. The first flakes are few, and dance lightly about in the breeze, like the tip of a tongue during foreplay. Moving here, no there, no here.

As the snow falls I watch the pattern of the wind, no longer limited by my crude perceptions that tells me the wind is blowing in a straight line from here to there. The snow traces the currents, a waltz of breezes.

During the day, through my window I watch a father take his child for her first walk in the snow. Hesitant footsteps made a little more unsure by suddenly uneven footing that shifts about and causes her to fall. Cruel! But then there’s that moment when tiny face is turned up into the snowfall for the first time; gently, cold touches sweep across cheeks and wisps of cotton at lashes and falls and melts in mouth opened to cry out in pure discovery. All is forgiven, and another child is found winter.

Better than watching the first flake, I love to go to bed with bare streets and wake up in the mornings knowing that snow has started falling. You can hear it by the absence of sound, and you can see it through your window as streetlight reflected. Pulling back the curtain, you look out on a world of white, lines softened between objects until the differences are erased. All you see is soft, crystalline mounds, sparkling in the light.

Snow brings with it a hint of Mother tucking us in against the cold, and a promise of waking.

Categories
Photography Stuff

State of Geek Postponed

I’m postponing releasing the rest of the State of Geek essays. The timing puts them too close to other events that have happened around the immediate weblogging vicinity, and I really want them to stand alone as what they are – expressions of my thoughts and offerings of my writing.

I didn’t write them to jab at or otherwise egg on some people who are seeing these as nothing more than a reflection of them and what they’ve done. They aren’t. They are a reflection of me, and what I’m doing. And thinking.

Anyway, I apologize if you’ve been waiting for the second essay. I’ll republish the first and the rest in a week or two.

Not publishing that long essay saves room for….another rock photo! This one’s Aquamarine, and is one of my finer pieces. A big one, too, larger than my hand formed into a fist.

Aquamarine has an ancient history, including being the stone worn by sailors to protect them on the seas. It symbolizes youth and happiness, and in ancient times, people used Aquamarine to protect them from wickedness. Not evil, surprisingly, but wickedness.

The Medieval era was a time rich in emotional nuance, and every act was seen as a battle between good and evil. Since these acts varied in commonality and impact – from the devastation of the plague to everyday sneezing – the emotional context associated with each was finely defined and detailed. Wickedness was ‘bad’, but it wasn’t evil.

Oddly enough, this subtle difference has lasted to this day, right along with saying “Bless you” when someone sneezes. Except now, wicked has a good facet, as well as a bad one.

Have a wicked night.

Categories
Technology

The State of Geek: Part 1 — Temp Job, No Health

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

This week a rising tide of optimism is beginning to fuel hopes that that the the United States is finally on the rebound economically. The GDP was at a staggering 7.2% and for the first time in 18 months, jobs were added in September rather than lost.

Yet the only people popping champagne corks were among the senior White House staff, declaring a victory for President Bush’s policy of tax cuts. The rest of us see these statistics and we think, and hope, that times are better; but then the majority of us know at least one person who is unemployed and we ask ourselves, “How can bad times be over when (Sally|Mark|Joanne|Tom) is still unemployed?”

Jobs are returning, as the figures show in September; but they’re not the jobs we used to have. If you’ve lost your job because your plant was closed, you’re a technology worker and your company has downsized, or you were part of a call center that’s no longer in operation, chances are you can kiss that job good-bye permanently. According to the folks who know these things, the number of jobs in these industries in this country will never recover to pre-recession levels. As reported in the Daily Gazette in Massachusetts, a state that’s a major center for both tech and manufacturing jobs:

The state’s job market has just started to stabilize and should begin some job growth by the end of this year, said Michael Goodman, director of economic and public policy research at the University of Massachusetts.

Still, even by the end of 2005, the state is likely to recover less than two-thirds of the 150,000 jobs lost during the recession, he said. Many of those new jobs will be in sectors other than high-tech and manufacturing, those hardest hit during the recession.

But this doom and gloom doesn’t take into account how inflated the economy was before the recession; how tough it was to find workers to fill jobs created by bloated expectations –particularly in the high-tech fields, when companies used to give BWM cars to tech workers signing on. In addition, states like Massachusetts and California and Oregon that had a higher than average percentage of high-tech jobs are going to feel the tech downturn more acutely than other states with a more balanced job market. Based on this, adding up all the factors, if the job market for high-tech recovers to even 90% of its pre-recession boom-time across the country, then we should still be looking at a relatively stable employment situation. Shouldn’t we?

We should. But the dot-com explosion fueled a lot of changes that are going to continue to negatively impact on technology jobs in this country, and the rest of the world, for years to come. This impact is going to be significant enough that if people were to ask geeks like me whether we would recommend that their little Bobby or Susan study computer science in college, we would have to honestly say, “No”; an answer that has serious consequences to the state of geek.*

Temp Job, no Health

Recently the grocery workers at the one of the three major chains went on strike, and workers for the other two were locked out because the same union covered the employees of all three stores. There were over 10,000 workers out of the job and on the picket lines, a scenario repeated in other parts of the country including California, Utah, and on the East Coast.

I expected the stores to severely limit their hours and services, and was consequently amazed at how quickly the stores returned to something approximating their state before the strike occurred. In less than a week, nine thousand workers had been hired, trained, and put into service at the stores in St. Louis alone. This may not seem like much in a city of 370,000 people — nine thousand is barely 3 percent of the populace — but that’s nine thousand people willing and able to cross picket lines, to be labeled scab labor, an epitaph abhorred in this country even with the loss of union power over the years.

I have no doubt that if the companies continued hiring after the first week or two, the number of applications for the jobs would have doubled. Perhaps even tripled.

A vote ending the strike was taken yesterday and the workers will be returning to their jobs — an awkward time as the regular employees come on and the ’scab’ labor gets pushed out the door. The irony of the situation is that the contract the workers voted on yesterday is virtually no different than the one they rejected four weeks ago. According to the St. Louis Today:

In the end, union workers voted on two contracts that were identical in cost, supermarket executives said.

But several workers said they wanted to strike to make a point with their employers.

Shenika Bishop, a bagger at Schnucks in Cool Valley, said the strike taught her that workers should “stand up for what they need and deserve.”

Yes, but they didn’t.

Union officials say this strike, as with so many others among the grocery workers in the rest of the country, was about one thing — the lack of a National Health Care system. According to weblogger Joe Kenehan:

A semi-national strike by grocery store workers in California, Missouri, Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia in defense of health benefits is pushing a broader American anxiety over the cost and accessibility of health care for regular people into the open.

It would seem that restaurant workers in New York may strike for the same reasons — just in time for the holidays. However, as with the grocery workers, I don’t think there will be much delay in bringing in ’scab’ labor.

What does this have to do with the state of geek, you ask? Because these strikes are a sign of the times: two few jobs, too many workers willing to work temp jobs with no security, and a growing national obsession with health insurance.

If there’s one label I could attach to the jobs I’m seeing out on the market for tech workers now, it would be “Temp Job, no Health”: temporary or contract job, no health insurance or other benefits provided. I’m not sure the state of the rest of the country but the job market in St. Louis consists primarily of contracting jobs; many of them for far less money then the good old days, and none of them with health insurance. Where before we could hope for a car, now we hope for a temp job that will last at least a couple of months and give us enough money so we can buy our own health insurance and still pay rent.

Economists say …

(Wait a sec. Who are these ‘economists’? Have you ever met an economist? Do economists really exist, or are they figures that publications invent so that they can provide their own predictions without having to back up their statements? “The economy is improving by a 15%”, the report says. We look around and don’t see an improvement and ask, who says the economy is improving by 15% and the report answes back, “The economists say so”, and well go, oh, well, if the economists say so. But I digress…)

Economists say that contract work is the harbinger of an upswing in permanent jobs as companies expand their labor pool cautiously in advance of better times. Where contracts go, permanent jobs are soon to follow. According to an WebTalkGuys Radio Show interview with techies.com president, Paul Cronin, increased numbers of contract jobs are a Good Thing:

The tech worker should see this as a great opportunity. One of the best ways of finding permanent work is through networking. When you’re out there talking to people and building relationships, it just seems to me that if someone offers you a project that is going to last 30-60-90 days and it’s a project that you’re qualified for and may even challenge you, it would make a lot of sense to take that project. The opportunity of staying with that company is increased by the fact that you worked with them already.

A few years back I wouldn’t have contemplated a permanent job, preferring the adventure and change that contract jobs provided. In most cases, my gigs would start out at the traditional 3 months, but in actuality they were usually extended indefinitely. I never worried about finding work because I received calls constantly from headhunters, always on the look out for new talent. I have to admit, I wasn’t always good about calling them back.

However, people who used to like contracting in good times are now looking for permanent work because the freedom of contracting is countered by the increased level of anxiety in jumping from short-term gig to short-term gig in an economy where reports are regularly published about the number of jobs permanently lost in high-tech. Today’s contract market is tighter, with more competition for jobs; today’s buyer, the employer, can offer less money and still get the same level of talent.

If you’re not a tech worker, you’re probably going, so what? The tech workers are a small job market compared to other jobs. We’re hit, but the rest of the country is doing okay. Right?

Wrong. If tech workers had money, we also spent money, especially on high ticket items that eventually ended up fueling entire industries. Once the first domino fell — the death of the dot-coms — other dominos fell in a display of cause and effect to bring down the house. This isn’t guesswork, you can see the impact in the record record number of bankruptcies filed this year. According to the Contra Costa Times:

Many Americans are struggling to pay their bills, and those out of work find job opportunities bleak. Research by the Federal Reserve indicates that household debt has risen to a record 14 percent of disposable income. Personal bankruptcies are on track this year to surpass last year’s all-time high of 1.5 million, says the American Bankruptcy Institute.

This country has pushed people to buy, buy, buy, and they bought, bought, bought. Now that times are tough, they’re no longer buying, which is impacting on both service and manufacturing communities and leading to yet more loss of jobs. Pity the poor American geek who can no longer shop at Disney and Warner Brothers, you think. But you don’t pity us because, as you see it, our own greed has caught up with us.

So the mighty have fallen and we log on to monster.com and hotjobs.com and we send resumes out and network, and we network; hungry flocks of birds all looking for the last worm. We’ll be thankful for what we get.

In the Sacramento Bee an article (featuring among others, weblogger Ross Mayfield) talks about the downturn in the Silicon Valley, and people being happy to get work:

At the Calvary Church in Los Gatos the other night, the weekly Need a Job Support Group drew its regular crowd of more than 60 unemployed tech workers.

They mingled over cookies and coffee, many wearing name tags spelling out their technical field: Hardware. Software. Marketing. It was mostly a male crowd, middle aged, casually dressed, folks like Kent Conrad.

A 41-year-old engineer from San Jose, he has started a handyman business after six months of unemployment.

“There’s more than one way to pay the rent,” Conrad said. “That whole dot-com bust, boom and bust, has damaged the whole industry. Companies are real cautious about hiring people.”

On this night, technical writer Milt Brewster was a star of sorts: He just got a job after 32 months of unemployment.

The job will last only six months and represents a 30 percent pay cut, but he wasn’t griping: “I consider that a stroke of luck — it’s only 30 percent.”

Times are getting better, we tell ourselves. And when the headhunters call us, we pretend we don’t hear the satisfaction in their voices when they tell us thanks for the resume, they’ll add it to the pile.

Perhaps we need a Union.

*And as I was writing this part of the essay, Meg wrote a comment to my previous post:

Globalization is here and I change my mind a few times a day about what we should be doing about it, especially in the IT industry. For the most part I think it is not wise to enter the IT field in the US right now, while others think that women should be encouraged more to enter into this ever-changing industry.

“Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be IT workers..”