Justmypolitics

Just My Opinion

I am not a gun control fanatic.  I do not have a crystal ball to know what new gun laws might do, but common sense tells me we have too many guns in circulation.  It is time we did something about it. Maybe I am wrong, but I hope that I have a right to my own opinion on this.

Both the gun lobby and gun control fanatics could argue about what works and what doesn’t work until this moment passes.  It would be a tragedy if we let public support for doing something just disappear.

Common sense tells us that we are in an out of control arms race in the United States.  To me, it is reminiscent of the mutually assured destruction we somehow bought into during the cold war.

Today’s criminal could be armed with a Glock pistol and/or a semi-automatic rifle.  There are places where this is a reality.  To a number of folks, it makes some sort of weird sense that the only solution is to be better armed than the best-armed criminal.

Unfortunately, too many weapons bought by these people worried about their own safety end up destroying the safety of others.

We do not need regulations that would prevent my wife’s 84-year-old aunt or any other sane person from having a shotgun or other weapon in their house to provide a sense of security.  

It also makes no sense to take guns and rifles away from hunters.  We have a deer problem along much of the east coast.  I am happy to see hunters continue to thin the herd. I am also not averse to a nice deer tenderloin on my grill.

Being a boy growing up in the rural South, my best friend, Mike, and I often headed off into the woods around Lewisville, North Carolina, with our shotguns looking for small game when we were barely teenagers.  It was nothing unusual.

I went off to military school when I was fourteen.  We marched with M1s and learned how to clean them. Eventually, we even got a chance to shoot them.  Guns were a part of my life.  

When a college roommate and I spent a summer in Alaska, there were guns legally in my pickup truck.  We flew into the Kenai Peninsula by floatplane that summer of 1970.   Because of the presence of brown bears where we were camping, they would not even fly us in without guns. We were glad to have the guns at night when we could hear the bears wandering around the campsite.  While I was fishing for trout with salmon running between my legs, I had a 44 magnum pistol strapped to me.  After some practice shots with it, I was pretty sure the only way it would protect me would be pulling the trigger just after the bear closed his mouth on my gun hand.

After college, I built a cattle operation in the rolling hardwood hills north of Fredericton, New Brunswick.  We had salmon in some of the streams and we had lots of bears.  One day I was checking the cattle in a field far at the back of a nearby farm that we rented.  The herd ran past me and my pickup truck instead of stopping for the taste of grain as usual.  In an instant, I figured out that the last calf was actually a 400 lb black bear.  I got in the truck and chased it into the woods.  That afternoon the area ranger told me to shoot it on sight if I ever saw it again.  The bear had lost its fear of humans.  I never saw the bear again but I rode around with a 30/06 five-shot semi-automatic rifle in my truck for a few weeks.  That summer 29 black bears were trapped along the Tay River which bordered our farm.

A year or so later I had a 2200 pound bull go bad and start stalking me.  The rifle went back in the truck, but luckily I tricked the bull into a handling chute and loaded him onto a truck headed to the meat packers.

I never had to use my rifle in any of those incidents but I was glad it provided a sense of security at the time.  In 1982 we sold all our cattle, and I went to work in the city.  In 1984 we moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia where I worked for Apple Computer.  Halifax was a peaceful Canadian city, but America and the grandparents were calling so we headed south.

Our time in Canada which ran from 1971 until 1987 ended when my wife and I along with our three children moved to Columbia, Maryland.  My Remingtons, Winchesters, and Mossbergs all stayed in Canada. I don’t even remember the regulation that kept them out of the country. It was obviously harder to bring American made guns into American from Canada than it was to just buy new ones.

Living between Baltimore and Washington, DC was a culture shock for us.  After years in Canada where I would have been hard-pressed to recall any gun deaths, we were dropped into a world where the local news was mostly the nightly shootings and murders in DC.  While the news was disheartening, we did not go out and rearm ourselves. There were plenty of priorities that took precedence.

We only lived in Columbia for a couple of years before heading down to Roanoke, Virginia. There were far fewer gun incidents in Roanoke but I did work closely with people at Virginia Tech so I got to suffer along with them after the mass killings there.

Sometime while we were living in Roanoke, we inherited a shotgun.  We still have it with us but it has never been fired since it came to us, but we survived many years without a gun.  I didn’t feel any less safe those years.

Canada is a different society than the United States, but Australia which I have also visited might be a little closer in culture to the United States.

However, it is unlikely that either the Canadian model or the Australian model of gun control would work here, but we have to find something better than what we have.  Maybe that better is buying back assault rifles and pistols and stricter licensing. Certainly, better is not more guns.

We should look very closely at ourselves and realize that we have to change.  Getting rid of some of the guns in our society is just the first step.  We should talk about what is reasonable protection for a homeowner?

We need honest dialogue on a few gun-related topics. Do we really need more handguns in circulation?  I never met a Canadian who felt the need to protect their home with a handgun.  Does carrying a handgun really make you safer?

Are assault rifles a legitimate hunting weapon?  Last time I checked the territory for brown bears is pretty well confined to Alaska and even I might rather have something besides an assault rifle if I faced a big bear.  Certainly, if you need more than five shots to shoot an animal, you should not have a gun in the first place.  While assault rifles might be fun to shoot, wouldn't you give up a little fun to prevent the next mass shooting? I would do just about anything to make sure my granddaughter could be safe in school.

There used to be a law that you could only have three shots in a shotgun magazine.  No serious hunter I knew complained of that being a problem.  I have shot and butchered animals for our own consumption, but you only need a .22 rifle for that.  

As to needing assault weapons to protect us from a government out of control,  most people living near Camp Lejeune as we do might argue that if you think an assault weapon will save you from the Marines whose ordinances sometimes rattle our windows, you likely are not going to qualify as a sane individual in the first place.

The truth is that the best weapon to protect us from a tyrannical government is the ballot box. I focused on Colonial American History in college, our founding fathers would be shocked at the level of armaments in our homes.  They might even argue that we would not need all the guns in the home if we would just disband all our standing armies.

So can we just ditch the nonsense about the average American needing an assault rifle?

Before someone tells me to pack my bags and go back to Canada, understand that our neighbor to the north has more similarities to life in the United States than it does differences. Living there is not a punishment. I would love to ditch my US health insurance with its $5000 annual deductible and $9000 a year premium.  However, I would hate to give up my life in the warmth of North Carolina’s Southern Outer Banks

David Sobotta is an author, photographer, and serious fisherman who lives along the White Oak River just upriver from Swansboro, North Carolina and not far from the beaches of Emerald Isle, North Carolina.  David grew up in the Piedmont area of North Carolina just as it was poised for massive change.

His most recent book, The Pomme Company, was released in Kindle format this past November.  David’s articles on technology can often be found on the Internet pages of ReadWriteWeb. 

Taking away once in a lifetime opportunities

I have never doubted that the educational opportunity that I got as student in North Carolina’s public schools had a major impact on my life. 

I am also positive that removing programs like the Governor’s Schools will harm not only students but also North Carolina.

Perhaps I am lucky to be over sixty and long past the days of worrying about education for my children, but I do have a granddaughter who will be turning three soon,  and I hate to think the educational opportunities that have made North Carolina a great state are drying up before she has her chance.

I never attended one of NC’s Governor’s schools, but I did get the opportunity in 1962-63 to attend a gifted program run by Forsyth County.  I think it made a huge difference in my life.

My mother was raising me as a single mom In Lewisville, NC.  The first year I attended Lewisville School, all twelve grades were housed under one roof.  I did well in school, and my mother who never finished high school drummed into me at an early age that getting a good education was important.

However, it wasn’t until I was chosen in a countywide search to participate in a year-long gifted program that I learned to really believe in myself.   Lewisville in my youth was a very rural spot, and the highlight of our summers was always the two weeks when the ancient activity bus carried us daily for swimming lessons at Tanglewood Park.

The Forsyth gifted program gave me a different summer.  We went everyday for several weeks to the Graylyn  Mansion near Winston-Salem.  That summer I got exposed to some great teachers and very intelligent classmates.  I learned to type, and I figured out that I could hold my own in a room of smart students.

When the next term of school rolled around, my mother arranged the schedule at her beauty shop so that she could drive me 25 minutes each way to Oldtown School where I got to attend the county’s gifted class for my eighth grade year.

I learned a lot that year, but mostly I learned that hard work in school was really worth the effort.  From that gifted class I went on to the McCallie School in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and eventually to Harvard.

I managed to graduate with honors from Harvard, and I think my mother was pleased that her son was the first of her family that graduated from college.

Arguments could be made that going away to prep school got me into Harvard, but in my heart I know that the year in the gifted program is what flipped the switch for me.  It showed me that learning could be fun and rewarding.  It was a great life lesson.

My careers have been a little unusual.  I ran a cattle operation for ten years after Harvard, and then worked for Apple for nearly twenty years.  Since leaving Apple I have done things as diverse as selling ultra high speed networking and real estate.  Through all the career changes, a love of learning first kindled in that Forsyth County gifted class has kept me successful.

For the last few years, I have also been interviewing potential Harvard students from North Carolina.  I cannot count how many times graduating seniors have mentioned to me the impact that programs at the  Governor’s School  have had on them.

As Apple’s manager for higher education in the Southeast, I once had the opportunity to sit down in one of the rocking chairs in C.D. Spangler’s office when he was President of the UNC system.  I will never forget his passion for providing a low cost, high quality education to university students.  Those high educated students coming out of the UNC system have been critical to North Carolina moving forward.

Mr. Spangler’s belief in the power of education was not any different from my mother’s.   Belief in education has been at the heart of North Carolina’s success.

A lot of people and companies have chosen to locate in North Carolina because of our education system.  Budget cuts which destroy the Governor’s School and weaken NC’s higher education system are a huge step backward for North Carolina.

Speaking out against those cuts is the least that I can do for the state that gave me such a great start in life.  Mother would accept nothing less.

Good government, little or big

In response to the "Best-laid plan flopped" by David Brooks, published September 15, 2005 in the Roanoke Times, and originally published in the NY Times.
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David Brooks seems to think that the failure in New Orleans can be attributed to an inevitable failure of "big government."   I don't think the  Katrina cataclysm has anything to do with big government.

Katrina shows us that those with little faith in government aren't exactly the best ones to make government of any size work.

Admittedly it is harder to make a large organization function effectively, but there are government organizations that have come out of this mess, looking very effective.  I think both the Coast Guard and the National Weather Service have done their jobs very well.  Mr. Brooks also seems to forget that FEMA achieved some great success under President Clinton.

Anyone that has been in a large organization can explain that it is quite possible for even massive organizations to be very effective in spite of all those PowerPoint presentations and plans.  All that is needed is a strong alignment between the top leadership and the goals of the organization.  Obviously it helps immensely to have a clarity of purpose, but aligning organizational success with the personal passion of a leader is one key factor that is fundamental to creating effective business or governmental units.

In fact in large organizations often the only successes are those divisions or agencies which really mirror the goals of the leader.  Trying to create a success when you aren't on the same page with the leadership, is much harder that just swimming against the current. In fact it rarely works.

Building a successful team is an organizational and a leadership challenge, not something driven by whether you are a liberal or a conservative, a big outfit or a small one.

Some of the most revealing examples of organizational success and failure actually come from the business world which I'm sure Mr. Brooks believes functions better than government.

It is hard to miss the success that Apple Computer has had in the music world.  Not surprisingly all music products at Apple come out firing on all cylinders.  Music is Steve Jobs' passion right now.  There is no doubt  that whatever red tape that needs to be cut on a new Apple music product happens with few if any questions.  Perhaps some might have noticed that Apple hasn't been nearly as successful in selling computers as iPods.

Having spent a long career at Apple, I can tell you that Steve Jobs isn't nearly as interested in selling computers as he is iPods. In fact he is not even very fond of his computer sales organization. Accordingly his computer sales team has a lot of the characteristics of today's FEMA, complete with the cronies whose resumes don't exactly shout computer hardware sales.  Not surprisingly they haven't made nearly as much progress against the Windows world as one might have guessed given the quality of Apple products, both hardware and software.

Governments are even more in need of strong leadership than businesses since public service below the crony level isn't as rewarding monetarily. Governments also require agency heads with a passion for what needs to be done and a true clarity of purpose.  When that happens, people don't worry about whether something is their job or not,  they just get the mission accomplished.  By all accounts  we have an immensely successful and a very large military working for this country. They have more than their share of PowerPoint presentations and plans.  Yet when you give them a clear objective with strong leadership and guidance, they can achieve almost anything.  When they got to New Orleans, things started happening. However, when no one can explain their mission like in their ever changing mission in Iraq, it's a lot harder for them to be successful.

You can bet that if the military were planning for New Orleans they would not have been late for a date with a hurricane by a few days.  Having a love for what you're doing and the skills to be successful  is hard to beat. It's only the rare college roommate that has all the qualifications to be successful in every field.  Wouldn't if have been great to have had a FEMA leader as clearly focused and skilled in emergency management as Steve Jobs is at bringing out portable music products?  I can bet resources would have been to New Orleans a lot earlier.

When you have a leader who really believes in what you and they are doing, all sorts of magic can happen.  The size of the business unit or agency has little bearing on the potential for success.  What really counts is the strength of the leader and the passion for what they're doing.  To have successful government, you have to start with people who believe in government.  Then perhaps if we had more high level people in government focused on their agency's true mission instead of just helping to re-elect the person who gave them a job, we would have a more effective government irrespective of it being liberal or conservative, big or small.

Critical Thinking

Recently I saw that forty percent of Americans believe that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. This brought a favorite Thomas Jefferson quotation to mind.

“If a Nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be...if we are to guard against ignorance and remain free,it is the responsibility of every American to be informed.”

Are there many people in the Roanoke Valley who really believe that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq? I am puzzled by how people can be so unconnected with current events to hold on to that notion. Is there perhaps an alternate reality out there that I am unaware of? Certainly anyone reading The Roanoke Times, one of the national newspapers, or listening to network news should have picked up this fact by now.

It is easy for each of us to have different ideas on whether or not the invasion into Iraq was a mistake or something that had to be done. We can have opinions on whether or not it has made us as a country safer or more at risk. Surely, however, we can agree on one fact, there were no weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq.

With the polarization of everything, are people losing the distinction between fact and opinion? In the rush to corroborate our opinions are we becoming slipshod in how we check our facts? Articles both in print and digital medium that are a little lax on fact checking or even in vetting their sources are not hard to find.

Just before the holidays an article was published in the Roanoke Times. It happened to be in my field of expertise, technology. I felt the article which was not on the opinion pages was off base on a few points so I attempted to engage the author to see if perhaps he was just unaware of some of the facts.

It was interesting in that when he finally responded his answer was that he did not have time for a debate and stood by the points he had made. It reminded me so much of the old saying, “Don't confuse me with the facts. I have already made up my mind.”

Certainly we live in an age overwhelmed with information, but that makes it all the more important that each us not only learn the skills of critical thinking but that we also pass it on to our children. We also need to demand that our newspapers carefully monitor for objectivity and correctness of facts the articles that they publish. In general I believe The Roanoke Times does a very good job, and perhaps this article being an exception to the rule is why it has bothered me so much.

While an article on technology might not be as important as an article on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the relevance of getting the facts right is just as important. If I were a technology executive visiting Roanoke for the first time, and I happened to read an inaccurate article, my opinion of Roanoke would be colored. If the article happened to be the recent one that concerned me, the conclusion could be made that Roanoke had missed about five years of what has happened in the technology world along with the thought that Roanoke just might not be the smart place to start or move my company.

The printed word has a great power and with the power comes responsibility. I was fortunate to spend summers of my teenage years sometimes in the company of R.J. Berrier. R.J. spent over fifty years writing and editing pieces for the small newspapers in Mount Airy, N.C. His commitment to correctness and facts was one of his core beliefs. As he often told me, "Most people only have the opportunity to be in the newspaper three or four times in their lives, when they are born, when they graduate from high school, if they marry, and when they die, so it our responsibility to make certain that we spell their names right and get the facts straight."

At a time when there is so much misinformation and polarization in the world, I still depend on the R.J.'s of today to make certain the printed word that I read each morning has more credibility than what I might find wandering the Internet.

Our local paper is my real connection to the world. It is my first step to staying informed each day. It is also “our” paper because it is our responsibility to challenge articles when they get the facts wrong.

If we all make a renewed commitment to carefully checking our facts while preparing for a respectful debate of differing opinions, the process can lead to a more tolerant and successful future for all.

Maybe we can even figure out the next step in Iraq if we start by agreeing on the one fact, that no one found any weapons of mass destruction.

The Best of Times, the Worst of Times

Today we might well be witnessing the death of the basic underlying fairness has helped America to a position of power and riches never before witnessed.

One thing has stood out about America since the late twentieth century. It has been the basic sense of fairness that permeates the American character. Education, hard work, and perseverance have more often than not let to a measure of success. Not that life here has been perfect by any means, but for a time there has been an amazing effort to create fairness in everything from our educational system to our workplaces.

In what has turned out to be the best of times and the worst of times, we face another year uncertain not only of our place in the world but also of what to expect next in this exceptional experience we call America.

There are no shortages of challenges. We need to create jobs for our children and make certain Social Security is there for retirees. Yet we also have to deal with our own crumbling infrastructure while rebuilding Iraq and helping the millions made homeless by the recent tsunami. We appear to be a deeply divided country with no clearly delineated course for the future.

One thing has stood out about America since the late twentieth century. It has been the basic sense of fairness that permeates the American character. Education, hard work, and perseverance have more often than not let to a measure of success. Not that life here has been perfect by any means, but for a time there has been an amazing effort to create fairness in everything from our educational system to our workplaces.

Today we might well be witnessing the death of the basic underlying fairness has helped America to a position of power and riches never before witnessed.

Thursday in an opinion piece in the Times, Andrew Rosenthal said “the Bush administration's legal counsels have been turned into the sort of cynical corporate lawyers who figure out how to make something illegal seem kosher - or at least how to minimize the danger of being held to account.” He went on to say, “Now America has to count on the military to step up when the civilians get out of control.”

Having hired more than a few people with military background and having seen many of them in corporate environments, it started me thinking of the transitions that military personnel make when coming into corporate America. I can easily remember a number conversations that started out, “things are not necessarily fair in corporations.”

The military world where fairness and achievement are highly valued is very different than the American corporate world where money is the ultimate altar and your value is often determined by the people you know not how well you do your job. This was not always the case.

Now that I look back on it, it is clear that at least in my experience, there are factors at work in the corporate world that have the basic American trait of fairness in full retreat. “Doing the right thing” has been redefined as “doing the right thing for the corporation” or even worse “doing the right thing for your buddies.”

Corporations have become more like feudal empires governed mostly for the good of the few. Some corporations are now run by groups of “business associates” where decisions are made mostly based on the impact on their buddies. A promotion more often than not goes to the person who is a friend of the right person, not necessarily the most qualified person.

In theory there are laws to protect employees in corporations. In practice corporations do mostly what they want to do and employees have little real protection.

In a recent “Sally Forth” comic strip from my local paper, one of the characters wondered how to handle an improper firing. It was really a moot question since it was impossible to report an improper firing to HR since HR did the improper firing.

There are no laws to cover many of the injustices that employees in large corporations often face. Many companies have become rampant examples of favoritism and governance by people far too closely intertwined. Their impact is to make corporations a place where improper management thrives instead of being eliminated.

Once your corporate compensation moves into the world of incentive compensation, expect math unlike any you have learned. While it is true that corporations need to control costs so that they make a profit. It should also be true that people should always be treated fairly. If you are in corporation where effort and success really mirror your compensation, consider yourself very fortunate.

If anyone believes that fair compensation is the norm in corporate America, you should talk to the workers who are only supposed to work only forty hours but end up putting in hour after hour of unpaid overtime. Why do you hear so little about it? Because if the employees reported it they would lose their jobs.

Unfortunately America corporations are driven by quarterly results. Whatever makes the analysts happy is now kosher. Often that means finding clever ways to get rid of older more expensive employees or having employees work additional hours for which they receive no pay.

If you have ever tried to report a violation to a corporate human resources department, you probably know well that their first priority as one HR legal consultant once told me is “to protect the company.” Basic fairness for employees is often at odds with protecting the image or the cash horde of the corporation. Corporations have become so large that typically institutional investors only care about bottom line results not how line employees are treated.

As more and more Americans are put through these corporations, those American values that we hear so much about are often challenged. Many come out of their first corporate experience convinced that they have been treated unfairly. Some leave the corporate world in frustration. Some stay and abandon their values. Even military people, schooled for years in basic fairness, often cannot survive the temptation throwing everything to the wind for “the good of the corporation.”

This almost sounds like a situation where we should turn to our legislators for help. That challenge in itself might be another essay Of course we started out with the premise that government lawyers are getting like cynical corporate lawyers so it may well be that we stand at a precipice.

Either we reform the engine that has made America so rich or watch helplessly as bad corporations make it harder and harder for the good organizations to keep being fair to their employees while remaining competitive and profitable.