Sobriety and snow

Our daughter got her permit on her birthday, and was itching to drive. We went out on Saturday. She drove a couple parking lots and was doing well enough for me to consider her driving a fairly untraveled road. She was doing pretty well. At one point she turned right on a side road and didn't compensate the steering enough and we found ourselves in on-coming traffic.

I pulled on the wheel to move her over into her lane. Being new to driving she put her foot down on the thing she could feel which was the gas pedal. The car accelerated and we landed in deep snow. Snow dust blasted across the windshield. We were good and stuck and it took some friendly neighbors to help free us.

The deep snow kept us from running into a pole or a fence. It was a valuable lesson learned at a relatively low cost. Not all life's lessons come so cheap. My daughter's itch has been modified by a greater sense of sobriety.

As I see it, part of the maturing process is an increase in sober thinking. Sobriety does not have to rob joy from life, but it can temper it. My daughter increased her driving skills because of her chance encounter with an on-coming truck and a snow bank. I believe balancing enthusiasm with sobriety puts us on the path to competence and wisdom.

Bailing out the car industry

Much has been made about the "Big 3" auto makers and how they may not be able to remain in business. What does that do to our country if they go down?

A friend of mine had an idea. (Thanks Steve T.) He thought that a bail-out of the car companies should progress as follows. Every family in the United States could be given $20,000 of credit to be used to purchase a new car. They could purchase the car from any company they wanted to. Money would flow through the economy, car companies could open production lines again which would be good for the employment numbers. It would become apparent which cars are most desired and emissions would be cleaner, which would be a move toward a "greener" America.

The market that would suffer under this plan may be the used car market, "why buy used when buying new will do"? 

One major difference between the auto manufacturers and the used car businesses is that if they were to go to Washington to ask for bail-out money themselves, they would not be flying in on their own corporate jets.

In debt

(This is a post that I wrote a month ago. I thought I posted it, but realized today that I hadn't. In reading through the verbiage, I think it still has relevance today.)

A student of mine had to leave school because their spouse was laid off and this person had to go and get a job. The student makes the sacrifice. Day after day that story is repeated with peoples' lives getting torn apart and people have to make sacrifices to survive. In the month of January 2009 news sources report that 552,000 jobs have been lost. How the little people suffer when at the top, greed is not restrained.

And then I read of companies carrying on like there is no pain in our country. Wells Fargo is the latest to pull back plans from a junket in Las Vegas because of media exposure. Not because they feel any responsibility for the billions the government has given them to bail their sorry butts off! Nope. They pull back because of the negative publicity it generated.

I am angry! How dare they? Our government is saddling us with mountains of debt with or without our permission,  to keep these banks solvent. And when money is thrown at the banks from the tax payers in peril of losing their own jobs, to mitigate the crisis, they act like complete ingrates. They may may be aware of their massive monetary debt, but appear to be completely ignoring a massive debt of gratitude.