Again? Really?

Memorial Day is the unofficial start of summer here in Northeast Ohio.  June is the unofficial start of art festival season.  Legacy Village in Lyndhurst will be hosting the ex-Beachwood Art Fair tomorrow.  In the coming months we will have the opportunity to see arts and crafts at Cain Park, Boston Mills, and in almost every suburb.  Some of the works on display will be absolutely incredible.  But no matter how incredible the photograph, painting, or even sculpture will be, you are bound to hear someone look at the efforts of a skilled artist and scoff, “What’s the big deal?  I could do that”.  And all you can do is shake your head and hope that the creator of the work doesn’t hear the remark. 

I’m sure we have all done something like that.  We have the silly and totally unfounded notion that we could paint the picture, catch the football, or run the country.  Karaoke is proof that nothing is as easy as it appears.  Sometimes painful proof. 

AOL, the huge internet / communications company, has an online daily community newspaper called The Patch.  There are separate publications for Mayfield Hts, Beachwood, Solon, Lakewood, etc…  Each has its own editor and at least one staff person.  The Patch does a terrific job with breaking news. The design is simple and clean. The publications also include a lot of local bloggers.  Health Insurance Issues With Dave has appeared on the Patch for almost two years.    

AOL decided to update the Patch this week.  The new format would improve the editing functions for bloggers and make the publication easier to read.  That was the plan.  The results were quite different, almost New Coke different.  At one point the entire site was down.  Two days into the change and the site is still not running smoothly.  Hit a button and you may encounter a frozen screen or you might be ejected from the site.  I suspect that this will take a few more days to resolve and by this time next week all functions will be completely restored. 

I bring this up for a reason.  This is AOL, a tech giant, scrambling to update an existing site, an online newspaper.  You know that they completely tested this before it went live.  And you know that there are far more complicated sites.  Yet this roll-out was hardly successful.  This stuff is harder than it looks. 

The Insurance Exchanges are supposed to be live on October 1^st.  This excessively complicated, Rube Goldberg creation is destined for failure.  How you view that failure will say a lot about how you view all of the rest of issues surrounding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA).  If you curse the system from the moment of the first crash, you may well be witnessing the results you were hoping for.  But if you understand that something this complicated will probably have difficulty getting off the ground initially, but may still fly in time, then you will allow the Exchanges the opportunity to solve their problems. 

It is just another website, another picture, another song – something else that looks so easy that we could have done this ourselves.

Good-bye – alteration of G-d be with you.  First Known Use: circa 1580

Merriam-Webster 

Tom Lehrer knew a good obituary when he saw one.  In 1965 he sung about Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel (1879-1964) a woman who had been romantically involved with the best and brightest of 20^th Century central Europe.  She married three of these successful men.  Her obituary detailed all of this and Lehrer gave us Alma: 

Alma, tell us

All modern women are jealous.

You should have a statue in bronze

For bagging Gustav and Walter and Franz.  

As noted last week, I read the obituaries every day as part of my job.  Most obits are predictable and of little interest to anyone but the deceased’s friends and family.  The words beloved, dearest, and devoted are liberally sprinkled throughout these 50 – 75 word essays. 

This is it.  This is the family’s last chance to tell the world how great their dad was, how much they loved their mother.  Obituaries are optional.  The newspaper publishes a death notice, the names of everyone who has died in the paper’s service area.  It is up to the friends and/or family whether they choose to memorialize the recently departed. 

That is how it usually works.  Every once in awhile a little truth sneaks in.  And sometimes, sometimes the family uses the obituary page as a vehicle to set the record straight or to get the last word.  The following obituary appeared recently.  I don’t know the family and never met the deceased.  I have redacted the names, even though this was published in the Plain Dealer, for reasons that will soon be apparent.  This is how the family chose to spend $250. 

XXXXXX XXXXX XXXXX, from Parma, OH, died on April 19. He was a better grandpa than he was a dad, but he had some decent moments with his kids that involved nature walks, Geauga Lake, and watching campy horror films. He enjoyed working at the local deli, with his friend Al, and he made really good sandwiches. He put a lot of thought into it and always put the sliced tomatoes separate so they didn’t make the bread all wet and soggy. He could cook anything on the grill, and he could grow anything in the garden. He liked animals, especially birds, as well as flowers, trees, and well-tended gardens. He knew a lot about these things, as well as astronomy and metallurgy. He also enjoyed reading National Geographic and the Smithsonian. He hated rap music, people who took too long to make left turns, and the invention of the breathalyzer. He loved his parents, Jack and Dorothy XXXXX and enjoyed his grandchildren. He is survived by his mother, brothers, Gary and Keith XXXXX, and children, Heather, Meggin, Aaron and Hilary. In spite of everything, he will be missed, especially by his grandchildren, xxxxxx, xxxxx and xxxxx.

He is dead.  It is now up to each of us to keep those sliced tomatoes separate and the rye bread dry.  And the family has had their say. 

The one thing they didn’t say was “Good-bye”.

DAVE

Is there a DNR order?  Is there a hospice for a newspaper?  After suffering from years of benign neglect, the (formerly Cleveland) Plain Dealer is patiently waiting to die.

The real changes kick in later this summer.  In an effort to make its death more painful, Advance Publications, the absentee owner of the Plain Dealer, has decided to continue to print the paper daily.  They just won’t deliver it four out of seven days.  Three days a week the paper will be at your door.  The rest of the time it will be hide and seek.  Three days a week your ads will be seen.  Four days a week the paper will shrink to the size of a seventh grader’s book report.  

You might think that this would be enough.  You might think that making the paper harder to access is the business equivalent of a pillow held firmly to your sleeping face.  Advance Publications isn’t taking any chances.  If relevance is the Plain Dealer’s challenge, terminating fifty-three people from the newsroom this summer only hastens the paper’s demise. 

Newspapers can not be duplicated online.  There are wonderful, successful newspapers.  There are wonderful online publications.  They are not one in the same.  I read the daily paper of wherever I am everyday.  Most days that is Cleveland and the Plain Dealer.  But I travel for both business and pleasure and I have the opportunity of reading ten to twelve different papers each year.  There is no greater window to a community than its daily paper.  I also get the New York Times delivered to my email everyday.  Great national and international news, but as a connection to the City, it might as well be the English version of LeMonde.   

Connection.  Newspapers, tangible, deliverable, old fashioned newspapers, provide a clearer picture of the city.  This truth was brought home to me yesterday. 

I was sorting the Sunday Plain Dealer.  I scanned the front page.  No mention of Korea or bombs.  Good.  I then grabbed the Metro section for the obituaries and the Forum section.  I normally hunt for the comics and the Business section, too, before I start to read.  While looking for the Business section I saw the front page of the employment portion of the classifieds.  There, big and bold, was a picture of my client Randy DeMuesy and an article about his profession, copywriting. 

I don’t read the want ads.  But I got to read an interesting article about someone I know.  In fact, this isn’t the first time one of my clients has been featured in this space.  I’ve even read Terri Mrosko’s pieces about people I don’t know.  She’s a good writer and these are interesting columns. 

Bump into that online.  You can’t.  Go to Cleveland.com and yes, if you knew that there was an article about Randy, you might find it.  But there aren’t any pleasant surprises.  You search for specific things online.  You bump into nothing. 

Getting your information online is much like watching cable news and expecting to get the whole story.  The broadcast channels are forced to attempt balanced reporting.  Sometimes they succeed.  Sometimes they fail.  Balance isn’t even a goal on most cable outlets.  If I lean politically in a certain direction I can tune into FOX.  They will tell me what I already suspect and confirm what I think is true.  If I lean in the other direction, MSNBC is waiting for me.  No surprises.  The familiar guests are outraged on cue.  The conclusions are perfectly choreographed.   

The Plain Dealer is not G-d’s gift to journalism, but it is more than adequate and there are moments of greatness.  The writing is consistently good, though we have lost some of their best due to budgets and politics.  Page 2 of yesterday’s paper had Regina Brett utilizing all of her skills to justify this new change.  I wonder when she drew the short straw that got her this assignment.  On the same page was Grant Segall’s much more interesting interview of Lisa Nielson, a teacher in Case Western Reserve’s SAGE’s program.  I would link the interview for you but as is so often the case with Cleveland.com, it is lost in their system! 

I would never have seen that Nielson interview online.  Or Randy’s.  Or any of the other articles that make the Plain Dealer worth reading.  And it is worth reading, or visiting, before it dies.

Can you be cornered at a round table?  Clearly the 62 year old woman who was glaring at me through her tears, her hurt, and her anger felt cornered.  She turned to her husband – three weeks from turning 65, two weeks from Medicare – and asked, “Is this working for you?”  “Yes”, he replied.  “I’m learning something”.  That really got to her. 

            I’ll wait in the car, Harry.

            Sit down Rachel.  He’s trying to help us.

            But I’ve done three months of research.  We already know what we need to do.

            No, we need to ask him more questions. 

Clutching some of the booklets and brochures she had brought to my office, she returned to her seat.  She only threatened to wait in the car one more time over the next 90 minutes.  Through her outbursts and his more restrained rage I learned about their long history of victimization.  The insurance companies had screwed them!  The hospitals had ripped them off!  The details were fuzzy and contradictory, but their emotions were red hot. 

Harry and Rachel (not their real names) had contacted me and had asked for an appointment.  I didn’t want Rachel to wait in the car.  I wanted them both to leave.  But her behavior was so erratic and unpleasant that I had to wonder if her outbursts were medically related.  The smartest thing I could do was to try to calm them down, listen to their bitter litany of complaints, and ease them out of my office.       

We have all had our share of victories and defeats, allies and adversaries.  In a perfect world we learn from our mistakes, create more friends than enemies, and spend our lives moving forward instead of reliving our past.  There are, however, some people who obsess about every time that they have ever been wronged. 

If you believe the armchair shrinks, ex-FBI profilers, and the spokesmen for the various law enforcement groups, Christopher Dorner collected grudges.  And when his head ran out of room to store them all, he unleashed a revenge based assault on the system that he felt had failed him.  Four people have died, countless traumatized, and a fortune was spent to keep others from being harmed and to bring him to justice.  Was he returned to the courts to face a jury of his peers?  No.  He died alone, in a cabin that was on fire and under siege, possibly with a bullet from his own gun. 

Could we have prevented Christopher Dorner and, more importantly, future Christopher Dorners from losing control and becoming a danger to themselves and others?  Probably not.   

Christopher Dorner wasn’t just another loser with a gun.  Dorner graduated from Southern Utah University with a degree in political science.  He was an officer, an ensign, in the Navy and served in Iraq.  While not on active duty he also joined the Los Angeles Police Department.  The Navy had evaluated him.  The LAPD had evaluated him. Every step along the way there were people authorized to say, “No, this guy might abuse his position”.  That wasn’t done. 

If the U.S. Navy and the LAPD couldn’t see this coming, didn’t know that they were arming and training a future killer, how can we believe that we can prevent the future slaughter of innocents?  We can’t. 

The first two victims were truly innocents.  On February 3^rd Monica Quan and Keith Lawrence were executed while sitting in a car in a parking lot.  Quan was the daughter of Randall Quan, the LAPD officer who had unsuccessfully represented Dorner during his termination appeal.  Lawrence was Ms. Quan’s fiancé. 

Christopher Dorner wrote that Quan had failed him.  The price of failure was Quan’s daughter. 

So we are left with four dead and three seriously injured.  In a case of mistaken identity, two of the injured were people shot by the police during the Dorner manhunt.  But the biggest toll, the biggest cost for the rest of us, has been that once again we have been reminded that there are people amongst us who can not process defeat.  And as their losses mount and their sense of entitlement increases, their anger and hurt take over. 

And the human animal, armed, dangerous, and unbound by social restraints, is truly scary when cornered.

The gun enthusiast thought that he was making his point.  He posted a picture of Adolph Hitler with two young children.  The caption was, “Take all of the bad guns from the people…to save the little children”.  The message was that restricting access to guns was necessary to protect children. 

Our Facebook buddy was trying to tell us that it is our patriotic duty to allow every American with an inferiority complex and a couple hundred dollars to own an arsenal. 

BULLSHIT 

Hitler’s German army walked through much of Europe, but a couple of tailors with pistols could have prevented the Holocaust?  This ignorance, and the people who propagate it, does not denigrate the memory of those who were murdered in the Holocaust.  The Six Million are beyond their reach.  No, the people who post this trash disgrace the memory of their fathers and grandfathers who served in the war and risked their lives to fight fascism. 

And isn’t that really one of the problems?  Do you really want some of these Yahoos to be armed?  G-d knows they are already dangerous. 

The National Rifle Association (NRA) would like to have the teachers packing heat.  I remember my junior high and high schools.  I can think of several teachers who might have jumped at the chance to carry a gun.  My children attended public school in both South Euclid and Shaker Heights.  I had to confront a bully, one teacher still working long past his sell-by date, and warn him to leave my kids alone.  He would be the first in line to carry a gun. 

Would our children be safer with more guns in schools?  I don’t think so.  An armed guard might deter some intruders, but certainly not someone on a suicide mission.  Do we hire rent-a-cops and let them carry service revolvers, or do we provide off duty policemen with assault rifles?  Do we limit our school buildings to only one door and eliminate all windows on the ground floor?  What do we need to do to keep our children safe while allowing just about anyone capable of fogging a mirror to possess unlimited firepower? 

And as I write this I know, I know, that there will be some people who will read the above and say, “Not Me.  I will be prepared”.  They might be licensed to carry a concealed weapon.  They might keep a gun in the car – just in case.  Or one in their bedroom.  And if we are lucky, no one will steal their guns.  And their kids won’t play with their guns.  And they won’t overreact and accidently shoot someone.  And they won’t feel threatened by an unarmed kid in a hoodie and shoot him.  And they won’t… 

The Supreme Court has determined that Americans have the right to keep a gun in their home for security. OK.  We all know people who hunt.  Again, not my thing, but I understand that hunting is part of the culture. 

I have no interest in eating a ham sandwich, but you having one has no impact on my life.  An assault rifle with a large magazine puts us all in danger. 

Last weekend we had the spectacle of Larry Ward, Chairman of Gun Appreciation Day, actually wonder if we would have had slavery “if the African-Americans had been given the right to bear arms”.  How do you respond to such ignorance? 

And it is many of those same people who are, at best, friends of convenience to both African-American and Jewish-American causes who would post this picture of Adolph Hitler with small children.  That picture of ignorance.