This essay is going to be a little short of words compared to most on The Pontificator. Brevity will relieve friends who might read my essays to be polite or feign interest. I wish I had more readers like them, but most who read I will never meet. I don’t know what they love or hate.
I know this. If the GOP retains its lockdown on all branches of the government after Tuesday’s “election”, the Confederates will have won their Civil War. It took 150 years, but they will have won. Donald Trump is a modern Jefferson Davis — the first president of the new Confederacy.
Trump is bigger than Jefferson Davis. Like Davis, the president works for a coalition of revolutionaries who despise democracy. They support a modern version of slavery, on which they pin the heroic title of Capitalism, right?
They are eager to kill to protect it. It’s why they are rabid Second Amendment advocates; it’s why they harass and threaten liberals on-line, on the phone, in the press, in the churches, and inside state legislatures.
It’s a system where everyone works for the wealthy to manipulate and exploit ignorant people who actually believe they are going to be rich and powerful oligarchs themselves, someday. All that is required is to work hard and prepare, prepare, prepare.
Sure, that works. Ask any brick layer or steel worker. Ask an auto worker. Ask a teacher or a nurse or a restaurant busboy. It isn’t going to happen.
Get real.
The only chance working people will ever have to earn high incomes is if rich people share the wealth by paying fair wages and taxes, which is the opposite of what they decided to do when they rushed through the recent “tax cuts.”
About 90% of the cuts went to the one-percent, right? Of course, the poor can buy lottery tickets. Lottery tickets sometimes work, don’t they? Doesn’t everyone in the USA have someone in their family who has won millions in the lottery? The lottery has been going strong since the early 1970s — almost fifty years. It must be working, because more people play the lottery than ever before.
Divide hard-working folks — who after long days at work don’t have the time or energy to think things through — with any number of issues that make no sense. The classic issue is abortion, of course. It always is.
Any woman can secure an abortion. It only takes two inexpensive pills or a boyfriend who has watched a couple how-to videos on the dark web. The only political question is whether abortions are going to be legal and safe or illegal and risky.
Legality or Constitutionality makes no difference to desperate women, but it might mean that a few unfortunates will spend time in prison away from their families should they get caught. Fear of prison increases anxiety, but it won’t stop a female impregnated by a man she hates. She will abort.
It’s been this way since the beginning of history. Before the process of abortion was known, women took their unwanted babies into the mountains to be eaten by wolves and crows.
The president has promised to punish women who have abortions. Judge Kavanaugh, the drunk sex addict and party animal who terrorized Dr. Ford during an alcoholic rut, promised Senator Susan Collins that he won’t overturn Roe v. Wade. He made the promise to secure her vote.
As the president likes to say, “We’ll see what happens.”
There are so many other fabricated issues; so many “scary” people — immigrant rapists, immigrant invaders, gays and their spouses, black political candidates, Mexicans who vote, socialist doctors, Obama and his ACA, Muslim terrorists, Muslims who aren’t terrorists, native Americans who don’t live in houses or apartments who want to vote, unindicted Hillary and her co-conspirators, lying reporters, homeless people, immigrant children who must be separated from parents and confined in cages, angry mobs of Democrats, and on and so on…. The list of imagined “terrible people” who everyone must fear is as long as America itself.
It’s a white supremacist’s wet-dream — burning crosses with any number of “horrible” people duck-taped to the raging firewood. Ethnic and cultural cleansing of “evil” Americans seems to give supremacists a certain cathartic release. It’s what lynching and castrating were all about decades ago.
Read Trump supporter twitter feeds, anyone who doesn’t believe it. They will terrify the uninitiated. It’s always pics of automatic weapons, Confederate and American flags, photos of prominent progressives with target-crosses on their faces, and a little blurb about how much the tweeter hates liberals and loves Jesus and President Trump. Often a Bible verse is added for righteous measure.
People who hate gravitate toward demagogues. The USA has enough haters to elect Nazis to every office in the land. On Tuesday, those of us who have a different opinion of right and wrong are going to find out who is right and who is wrong.
Are we going down like lemmings off a cliff into the maelstrom below? Will Americans drink the Kool-Aid of a Jim Jones sociopath?
We will soon know the truth about our country — if the Russians (or the Republicans who own the voting machines) don’t manipulate the results, as some in our intelligence agencies say they have already. In Texas early voters report that some machines are flipping votes for certain candidates. It’s a bad sign of problems to come on voting day.
Reality Winner is the incarcerated NSA worker who exposed voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election. She is serving a five year sentence.
NSA worker Reality Winner is in prison with no access to media, reporters, phones, or computers for a reason, right? Once people lose confidence in the integrity of the electoral process, the alternative is Civil War. We did that once. The war turned into a bloody mess that destroyed a generation of Americans. It’s a war that continues to be fought.
What if a miracle happens? What if the election is fair?
What happens if suppressed voters manage to get to the polls to cast provisional ballots when necessary?
What if all votes are counted; no one tampers with the computers nor the voting machines; everyone stays in line and votes until midnight if necessary in those states where the GOP disrupts minority voting to make it as difficult as humanly possible?
What then?
What if the GOP is thrown out and the Democrats take control of the Senate and the House of Representatives? It seems like a hopeless pipedream, but stranger things have happened.
The president will question the accuracy of the count, of course, and a countdown to revolution will begin by alt-right fanatics who are itching for a fight. They’ve already killed a dozen Jewish people inside a Temple in Pittsburg; they’ve threatened the lives of the most influential Democrats in the country — including two presidents. Right?
Does anyone think that white supremacists are going to end their bloody rampage short of total victory or defeat? Winning is going to be as problematic as losing, unfortunately.
An added burden is that everyone who has an ounce of political sense knows that the president is working with Russian and Israeli mafias to lockdown the country. We are going to become Russia with our own Vladimir Putin if certain oligarchs get their way.
Anyone who isn’t afraid has a false confidence reminiscent of passengers on the Titanic or the Jews who waited eagerly for the Nazis to cleanse them with warm showers.
Are Americans out of their minds? This election shouldn’t be close.
How can evangelicals support the GOP? An impeachment victory by Democrats will ensure that Mike Pence, a sincere Christian by all accounts, will replace a president who had no history of association with any church or group of believers until he made his convenient Faustian covenant with Jerry Falwell, Jr. and Franklin Graham.
NOTE BY EDITORIAL BOARD: On August 25, 2020 Jerry Falwell accepted a $10.5 million severance package from Liberty University to step down. Like Adam in the Garden of Eden, he blamed his wife for the sex scandals that followed him pretty much everywhere during his tenure.
We can impeach and remove our demented president. Some Democrats say Mike Pence will be worse. But sensible people must know that his hand on the nuclear button will be a safer hand, because he isn’t completely crazy like the Donald. Who can’t see it?
Is this lunacy what Americans want? Is this insanity what our brothers and sisters in arms fought and died for in all the wars we’ve won to keep freedom alive?
I don’t think so.
We’ll find out soon enough.
This election is a litmus test. Pray that all of us on both sides can survive and endure the results, which are sure to change America for good or ill.
The words “You’re fired!” are among the most painful I’ve ever heard.
I’ve lost a lot of jobs during my life, so the pain has accumulated to the point where I would rather die than re-live my life—unless I could arrange things so that no person would ever have the power to drive a stake into my heart, because that’s what being “let go” feels like.
I never followed Trump‘s television show The Apprentice because hearing the punch line “You’re Fired!” always felt like a hard slap to the face. Watching young men and women suck up to a powerful boss who gut-punches all but one was never harmless entertainment. Not for me, anyway.
The number of people fired during the Trump administration is staggering. How many of these 24 high-power individuals can anyone identify? They are the tip of a mammoth iceberg of graft, corruption, incompetence, ignorance, and suffering. Who disagrees?
I’ve fired people. I understand why our president won’t do it in real life. He always assigns the task to an underling, right? The White House employment line churns like a stormy ocean but the president stays above the froth.
Firing someone is more painful than being fired because it stays with you forever. It’s not something you can overcome by getting a better job, for example. You can’t take it back. I’ve always wondered whether I might have found a kinder way to address the problems I thought firing others solved.
Those who read my essays might remember that I managed some restaurants when I was in college. Back then finding good help was hard, because everyone worked.
I needed a cook really bad. A roly-poly guy with a sweet face applied for the job. He explained that he was a slow learner, but he would try to become the best cook he could.
After three days, I realized that he was slow, like he said. He would never be able to keep up; he lacked the intelligence to memorize the menu and prepare the food properly.
I called him into my office.
“Ruby,” I said. “I don’t see how we’re going to be able to make this work. I’m sorry, but I have to let you go.”
He said, “Mr. Lee, I understand. Uh, you gave me a chance. Uh… uh, it didn’t work out. It’s happened before. It’s not your fault. Uh, don’t feel bad. I’m to blame. I’m slow, uh… that’s all.”
He offered his hand, pivoted, and walked out. He had obviously memorized his exit speech. I put my face in my hands and sobbed.
It was clear that Ruby suffered from a disability of some kind. My need for a cook blinded me. Until he recited his sentences, I didn’t see it. No matter how hard he tried he was never going to make it in a world that demanded quick wits and fast problem solving.
What made me cry was that he wasn’t going to give up. It seemed like no reversal mattered. Success would forever elude him, but he had just enough resources and determination to pick himself up, give his speech, shake hands, and strive to find the next opportunity.
Ruby was willing to fight against the odds to become a hamburger cook. He took great pains not to traumatize managers, including me, who inevitably would be forced to fire him to protect their bottom line. In his effort to spare my feelings he failed—like he probably failed at everything he tried.
I felt sick to my stomach. I felt remorse. Ruby gave everything he had. Nothing worked. Something wasn’t right. There was nothing I could do.
It’s been decades. My heart aches. I wonder if by some miracle Ruby ever made his dream come true. I’ll never know.
At the time, I managed two restaurants. Because I was a student at the university, assistant managers and other responsible employees helped me to keep operations running smooth.
At the second store a couple of waitresses complained that a busboy I hired was stealing tips.
I called the kid into my office. “Are you stealing?” I asked. The boy immediately began emptying his pockets. His pockets were deep. He dumped big handfuls of quarters and dimes on my desk. I didn’t say a word. When the last dime dropped, he ran out of the store. We never saw him again.
It felt good. The waitresses didn’t seem to mind either.
I hired a rather attractive waitress at the first store. She had the annoying habit of talking too much to other waitresses. She was loud, and it irritated me. After a couple of months, I started to hate her because she didn’t seem to feel an urgency to follow through on the things I asked. I felt disrespected.
One day she said something that rubbed me the wrong way. I called her back to my office and fired her in almost the same way Trump would years later on his TV show. I was cold and matter of fact. “You talk too much and don’t do what you’re told,” I said. “You’re fired!”
The girl broke down and began wailing. “How will I get money for my trip to Europe this summer?” she begged.
I would be in Italy that summer myself to visit family living in Naples at the time. I had no idea until that moment that her job was a means to an admirable end.
A wave of nausea swept over me. I was making a terrible mistake. It seemed somehow impossible to backtrack. I’d played my hand. From now on things could never be good between us. “It’s time to leave,” I told her.
She went to court over it, but the owners of the restaurant knew the judge, so nothing happened. I feel like a worm when I remember this act of needless cruelty.
Big Boy Restaurants were among the first in a wave of fast-food chains to capture the hearts and pocketbooks of a public too busy to cook home meals in the 1960s. The Big Boy Slim Jim sandwich remains one of my all-time favorites.
I hired a cook who caught on fast. “I’ve been been vacationing in Florida,” he answered when I asked about his tan.
After a few weeks the owner approached to tell me the cook had pulled him aside to explain that I was a terrible manager who should be fired. The cook expressed his belief that he was the best choice to replace me.
I said to the owner, “That’s interesting. He is a good cook and smart enough probably. Maybe he could help out at another store.”
The owner looked at me like I was crazy. “Are you out of your mind?” he said. “This guy is trying to get you fired so he can take your job in this store—a store you manage! What are you going to do about it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I can start training him in other parts of the job and someday he will know enough to help us.”
“No!” the owner said. “You are going to fire that back-stabbing son-of-a-bitch. When I come in here next week, he’s gone, understand?”
When the new cook came in for his shift, I asked him to walk outside with me. I said, “The owner tells me you think I’m incompetent.” The guy threw up his hands like he was being arrested for something and said, “I screwed up. You’re right. Fire me! No hard feelings, OK?” He wheeled around and disappeared down the street.
I felt surprise and relief. I didn’t fire him. He fired himself. I think I remember someone telling me he hitchhiked back to Florida.
Well, this essay is supposed to be about me being fired, not me firing others so let’s get on with it.
I was an athlete in high school. I played football and baseball. I was an All Star third baseman. In football I played tight end. Because my dad was the commander of a Navy jet-helicopter squadron in Key West, we lived on the Florida island during my eighth-grade year and the first half of ninth grade.
Key West High School had a good reputation, because it graduated several big-time athletes back then—George Mira and Boog Powell are the two I remember because they had younger brothers who were close to me in age. We called Boog’s brother “Boob.” He took the joke with grace and good humor. Athletics was a big deal.
Toward the end of the fall season, our freshman football team lost an important game. In the locker room the coach dressed down the team to the point of being profane and abusive.
He was more than unfair. I felt degraded. We played our hearts out. I piped up to defend my friends, “Maybe if you knew how to coach, we would have won!”
The coach turned purple. “Billy Lee, you will never play sports again at Key West High School. You are done.”
I cried on the bus ride home. I reminded the coach about how good I was at baseball. He had seen me play during an All-Star contest between the civilian and Navy leagues. He knew I was good.
He remained stoic and unmoved. Fortunately for me, the Navy promoted my dad and we moved to Arlington, Virginia where he led some group at the Pentagon not known to the public. I would play sports again, after all.
More is under the Pentagon than above. It’s a big place, which I was fortunate to visit and tour—under supervision, of course. My dad worked several years within a labyrinth whose mission was to protect and defend the United States of America.
Unfortunately for me I missed out on a season of baseball. Ninth graders went to junior-high; my new school didn’t field a baseball team. When high school try-outs finally came, a year later, I made the JV team.
The suburban schools outside Washington DC were big. A thousand tenth grade boys tried out. Eighteen made the cut. I thought, This is great. I’m back on track.
Then, disaster. It got cold in northern Virginia. I was used to playing in the heat of the deep south. My legs and arms seemed to stiffen-up in the frigid temperature, and I endured a terrible scrimmage. I made costly errors and went hitless. The coaches announced after practice that they had agreed to bring three varsity players down to JV to give them more playing time. Three JV players would be cut.
The names of the final “final roster” would be posted in the gym. Anyone whose name wasn’t on the list was cut. The decisions were final. There would be no discussions, no negotiations.
I must have looked at the roster a dozen times before I could accept that my name wasn’t on it. I told my dad on the ride home from practice. Visibly shaken, all he could manage was a barely audible, “oh.”
I experienced my first nervous breakdown. It lasted a few months. I told my mother that I was terrified all the time. It never stopped. She confessed that she had a breakdown when she was younger, but in time she got through it.
In ninth grade I lived in Key West, where my dad defended America against Soviet subs with a squadron of jet-helicopters during the Cuban Missile Crisis. My mother stands next to me. When my athletic dreams unraveled the following year, I had a nervous breakdown. Mom led me safely through to the other side of hell. After aging she suffered memory loss, but she remained a happy, optimistic person to the end of her life.
It made me feel good to know that my mother understood. I waited for healing. Eventually, I got better.
Dad was promoted again. The president sent him to Paris to represent the United States Navy at NATO. The French planned to withdraw. Dad tried but was unable to change their minds. A year later he would lead war games in the Mediterranean Sea for an ineffective coalition of nations called SEATO (now disbanded), and the family would follow him to Naples, Italy.
But my senior year would be spent in France. It would be a welcome change from the Washington DC suburbs, which to this day I associate with “fear and loathing“—bad mental health.
It’s hard to believe, but I did get fired from high school—in Paris of all places.
My girlfriend’s dad was Secretary of the Embassy in Paris. Sandy attended a French high school and spoke fluent French. It made getting around easy because not only was she connected and accepted everywhere, but she also made a gifted translator. I had no communication problems when we explored the twenty or so arrondissements together.
Because I went to the school for military-dependents (populated mostly by Army kids) I couldn’t invite Sandy to our senior prom. It was a school rule, a stupid rule, but that was the Army way in those days.
Someone got the bright idea to hook me up with the ranking General’s daughter—a sweet girl, but I didn’t know her. Because I already had a girlfriend who I sort of loved, I had no interest in the arrangement with the General’s daughter.
I made some stupid decisions that involved selling sleeping pills that were freely available (at nominal cost without a prescription) in the French drugstores (les pharmacies) near our house. I sold the pills to friends to raise money for Paris prom expenses, which I expected to be, well, excessive. It turned out that the pills were illegal on American military property, which included the high school.
A big kid I didn’t know bought three and started running around the campus yelling to everybody that he was high on LSD—a kind of joke, I guess. Anyway, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) locked down the school, did a sweep, and found discarded pill wrappers.
After a number of interrogations, they got to the truth and had to decide how to handle me and two other kids who had nothing to do with anything except that they “confessed” to buying one pill each.
One of the kids was the only black at the school. It didn’t help at all that his dad was an enlisted man—his dad was not, sadly, the highest-ranking Naval officer in Paris, like mine. He and his family were put on the first flight out of Paris. His family was uprooted over a sleeping pill.
The verdict was that I would not attend the last week of classes but would receive a diploma and be allowed to go to the graduation ceremonies—including the after-party.
The senior prom was off-limits. It was my punishment. The Army would send a West Point cadet (from the academy famous for its overlook of the Hudson River fifty miles north of New York City) to accompany the General’s daughter.
For me, the punishment was a reward. Yes, I was expelled from high school, but I was going to graduate, and I didn’t have to hang around during the last week of classes. I was free.
Sandy’s civilian high school reserved the Eiffel Tower for their prom. No one had a problem with me being her guest. Yes, the tower was amazing. After the celebration, we club-hopped through Paris night spots with the money I had made, which the DIA didn’t bother to confiscate.
As for my own high school graduation party, school-rules didn’t permit Sandy to be there. It took place on a large estate, which was romantically lit and well-attended.
A beautiful girl I had seen at school but not yet met walked-up to introduce herself, and somehow, we found a way to make love behind a grove of trees in the backyard. Until then, I hadn’t understood how much comfort some women are able to provide to a man who seeks reassurance.
Sometimes I wish I’d run off with the girl like she said she wanted, but her dad was an enlisted man. I couldn’t see a way to make things work. In those days officer families and enlisted families didn’t mix. It was like segregation of the races, kind of.
Speaking of race, as I told readers, the Army sent the black kid who had nothin’ to do with nothin’ and his whole family back to the states on the first plane out of Paris. They forbade him to graduate or visit parties. I thought his punishment was outlandishly unfair, but it was the 1960s. Most high-powered white people hated black people at the time. It’s the way things were back then.
It wasn’t possible for me to set things right.
This essay is getting kind of long, isn’t it? Maybe I should write a Section-Deux someday to cover the horrors I suffered as an adult working at a dozen companies for 35 years.
No?
Ok.
Here is a summary, then:
After returning to the states and entering University I got myself fired from the Army Officer program (ROTC) a few weeks before I was scheduled to receive an officer’s commission.
My mistake was to speak a few lines over a microphone and loudspeakers to about 15,000 fellow college students who were protesting against the Vietnam War. Although I received a wild ovation (people jumped up and down, screamed in my ears, and hugged me) it didn’t go over well at headquarters. It ended my military career.
The Lieutenant Colonel who fired me was a good enough guy. He gave me a failing grade in Foreign Relations—the last class requirement for an officer’s commission. As a result, my military record was spotless. I was too dumb to be an infantry officer. That’s all.
After being released by the Army—like every other civilian guy—I became subject to the military draft. It was a lottery system designed to determine who would be inducted.
I drew a low number, which the colonel must have known, because it was based on date-of-birth— information in my personnel file he possessed. A low draft number meant that I had no way out. A grunt tour in the agent-orange saturated undergrowth of Vietnam was certain.
Unknown to the colonel, a friend of mine sat on the draft board. By the grace of God and help from my friend (he was an uncle, actually), the Army never called.
After he retired the colonel became a player in township politics. By all accounts he did good things for his community. Years later I ran into him from time to time when shopping. He always smiled and asked how things were going. He seemed surprised to learn that things were going well.
I did get fired from my first three jobs out of college. One company told me to my face that they couldn’t retain employees who opposed the military, which is what a four week long investigation into my background by their crack investigators had uncovered.
Fortune 500 companies closed their doors to millions of young Americans whose crime was protesting an undeclared, genocidal war at the end of the world: the Vietnam War. The Vietnamese lost every battle and suffered millions of casualties. They won the war. Who can argue with success? I often wonder how much better-off America and Vietnam would be if the people who were smart enough to resist a cruel and senseless war had been allowed to take their place in leadership when the fighting ended. No one will ever know.
After three investigations and three firings by Fortune 500 companies over a short period of two years, I suffered catastrophic depression. I couldn’t muster the energy to look for work. I decided to return to the University to upgrade my skills, while I underwent counseling.
I took a part time job as a busboy for an upscale restaurant. The tips were fantastic. At a company Christmas party, my beautiful (and fearless) wife acted “inappropriately” according to a complaint by the owner’s wife; when I returned to work her husband fired me. In those days, men were responsible for the behavior of their wives.
I got a better job, and life went on. I sharpened my skills, started a family, and garnered engineering-design experience. After several years, a packaging-machine builder hired me to investigate cost overruns on their flagship machine line. I discovered a kick-back scheme by top execs that involved powerful suppliers. The CEO quit to avoid arrest, and I was fired to provide cover for those who had no intention of quitting.
The upside was that I received the most lucrative severance package of my career.
I don’t feel good about it, because justice wasn’t served. It rarely is, right? I wanted to stay alive, protect my family, and not get blacklisted in my profession (engineering), which would render me unable to earn a living. My only option was cowardice, and that’s what I chose.
Life would continue, but I learned how power and fear twist justice in the world of plundering by civilians. It was an eye-opener, for sure.
The highest paid job I ever held required that I work seven days a week. I made a ridiculous amount of money, but under the pressure of too many hours and unreasonable demands from our biggest client, General Motors, my supervisor started drinking more than usual. I told him he was an alcoholic. We argued, and he fired me. He told me he couldn’t work with someone who thought he was a drunk.
The lowest paid job was Bible-study leader at church. It paid exactly nothing. I sat on a planning council with other leaders where we discussed things. The “elders” revealed that they intended to sever their ties to the national denomination, because they didn’t think the denominational leaders had punished sufficiently a pastor who had presided over his daughter’s wedding to her girlfriend.
The elders seemed to possess a morbid hatred of Christian heretics who favored gay people. They intended to join another, more conservative denomination to set things right.
I told the leaders they were stupid; it was a bad move that would have bad consequences. I was right, but the bad consequences were directed at me—personally. They disbanded my Bible group, barred me from leadership, and forced me to shut down my website for six weeks.
Eventually, many shunned me. I got a lucky opportunity to resign my membership without the misfortune of being excommunicated. It’s complicated, but the part of the story that I can repeat is told on this site. Click the link or look it up. I was able to leave in good standing, which was an answered prayer—in my grateful opinion.
The week after we decided to leave, my wife and I found a church with lovely people who were, many of them, crazy conservative, but we didn’t care. They talked to us and treated us nice. Nice goes a long way with us both. My wife made and continues to make a lot of new friends.
God does only good things, I learned.
It’s true.
My work experiences weren’t always negative. I cooperated with the FBI on some important investigations involving national security. I invented or helped to invent products used by everyone everywhere—including the first tear-spout coffee lids and tamper-resistant caps for juice cartons (for which I received $1,000 and a patent).
I also helped design and tool the first generation of run-flat wheels used on Hummer combat vehicles. I kind of got trapped on that one. I vowed I would never apply my talents to warfare but I did—I was a single parent raising a family of kids at the time. For their sake I couldn’t quit.
As the highest paid union worker at the factory, my career would be toast if I wasn’t on board. I used state-of the-art design software to solve many production problems. Everything that anyone designed went through me for corrections and approvals.
Company executives invited the press and directed me to appear on a television news show to demonstrate an important production technique that made the wheels possible. The execs were soon in deep trouble with the FBI over what turned out to be a national security screw-up; the program was, after all, classified.
The damage was done, but the FBI didn’t interview me. The FBI didn’t want certain people to know, because I happened to be working with them on another more important investigation that they wanted to keep secret.
I was able to retire at age 60, which to my way of thinking wasn’t soon enough. In all the years I worked, I never spent more than five-and-a-half years at any one company.
I get called frequently with job offers, but I turn them down. A few years ago a company I worked for early in my career called to offer a lucrative three-month assignment, which I accepted.
Once rehired they kept extending my quit date. I put my foot down and gave them a date certain. The company put a person near my office to facilitate my every move to make sure they got the last ounce of production from me before I returned to retired life.
On the last day, they honored me with a luncheon party.
I bought a lot of things with the money they paid me including a stair-climber for my wife, a new car, a garage rebuild, a new concrete driveway and sidewalks front and back, and landscaping. What my wife and I didn’t spend went in the bank. It is amazing what five months of work can buy, I thought when everything was finished.
I was glad I went back to work but decided I would never do it again. The time to pontificate would never be more right.
What is the lesson from all this self-disclosure?
As my hero Doug Flutie once said, “Each person makes their own way in this world.” Who disagrees?
Anyone who can think understands that no life can be explained within an encyclopedia, nor a book—even a long one. People who think know that accomplished people are complex, but so are the less accomplished.
Even a simple dog or cat—a pet—has a complicated life, which becomes apparent to anyone who takes the time to write it all down. Try it, any skeptic who doubts the truth about the complexity of living beings.
Even after decades of blunders, any bloke who is able to hide beneath their thick skull an undamaged and flexible brain should be able—if they reflect on their experiences and are lucky, as I was—to make sense enough sometimes to pass on to others what they’ve learned, both good and bad.
My process is called PONTIFICATION.
It’s what I do.
The people I most want to rescue are the ones I love. True to those who pursue authentic lives passionately lived, these are the kind of folks who generally resist pontificators.
Oh, well.
My life unfolded for whatever reasons the way it did, and I’m OK with it.
What choices did I have?
I ask those I’ve hurt to forgive me.
No one wants to die evil. With the help of Jesus, people can be forgiven, can’t they? Who believes it?
Despite all evidence to the contrary—may God help me—I always have.
In another life someone said, YOU’RE FIRED! over and over. It gave me nightmares.
PTSD.
Hell, it was me who said it, sometimes.
…forgive them. They are clueless… is what Christ said before they killed him. He held no grudges. He defended those who hurt him most.
Billy Lee
NOTE FROM THE EDITORIAL BOARD:
Billy Lee’s account, You’re Fired! contains omissions of events, some of which are included in other essays on this site. A few details are arranged in non-sequential order.
The full story about Billy Lee’s separation from the army is known only to the author and the army; Billy Lee simplified the narrative. (No harm to truth intended or done.)
We advise readers to refer to other essays on this website to fill in gaps and resolve contradictions.
WE THE EDITORS changed some of the names to protect anonymity.
Some are simple to answer, but people who have missed their opportunity to be broadly educated sometimes can’t separate the simple queries from the hard. I’m in that group, more times than not.
I rummaged through an old safe the other day. I found its key tucked away and forgotten in the back of a drawer in an antique desk. I asked myself: what might be in that old safe? Why not take a look? What harm could there be in searching a dusty safe for forgotten objects?
I found old papers and school reports. I found Christmas and birthday greetings and expired credit cards. I found a rectangular tin-foil-wrapped object pressed flat and smooth and a quarter-inch thick — a pamphlet of some kind, perhaps.
I would unwrap it later.
I reviewed a report card from the seventh grade. It held up well during the past 58 years. My geography teacher wrote a comment that caught me by surprise. “Billy Lee is a thinker,” he wrote next to the “A” he gave me.
I remembered back. Mr. Holden drove a taxi-cab nights to make ends meet. Memories flooded in.
He complained that teachers weren’t paid enough. Between taxi fares, he read books. He recited titles and authors, but I knew I would never read them. The writers’ names were unfamiliar — foreign, some of them, which I couldn’t remember or pronounce; the titles? — incomprehensible.
How could anyone read books whose content was unconnected to anything they knew or were able to understand? I couldn’t. I was sure of it.
I found a letter from a girl I once loved. She explained why we could no longer be together. Despite all my wonderful qualities, I was needy, she explained. I needed to turn my needs into wants by finding others to fill in the gaps she couldn’t.
It was odd, I thought. I didn’t realize how technically expert was her craft the first time I read her note. Who knows? Maybe today she is a famous author who writes under a pen-name. Stranger things have happened in the history of literature, right?
The writer of Jane Eyre comes to mind. Charlotte Brontë published her novel under the name of Currer Bell. I always thought a writer of her depth might have come up with a better name. I did, and I’m not half the writer Charlotte was. People have to admit, Billy Lee has a nice ring, no?
Lately, I’ve been writing answers to questions on Quora to which no one can possibly know the answers. I call them mystery questions.
Many of the questions remind me of the sailor’s dilemma where a seaman finds himself stranded and adrift on a raft in a vast ocean of swells during a raging monsoon. The man clings to a few pieces of wood and prays to God for deliverance.
He asks God why was he born when it is clear that his life is going to end in terror, alone on a raft in a bottomless sea with no chance of rescue. If God by some miracle answers his prayer; if God saves him and the storm clears, the sun will bake him alive; eventually the sharks will eat him.
Why? Why? Why?
What sin did he commit that drove him to his fate? What decisions did he make that were ill-advised and unwise?
What might he have done differently to avoid the horrid end he knows will befall him in the few moments that remain before his strength is sapped and he loses his grip on the last piece of wood, which will disintegrate once he’s sucked beneath the churn.
Well, one answer that comes to mind is this: he didn’t plan for his birth; once born he didn’t plan for his death. He never really believed that he was doomed to a lonely, fearful death — the destiny of all living creatures; humans are no exception.
The answer to his cry for answers is that there are no answers. No one avoids losing everything they love. It is every person’s fate. No scheme, no matter how cleverly constructed, avoids it.
And yet the sailor begs God. He shakes his fist and screams against the gale: God, why did you forget me? Why my pointless life? Why did I suffer to the very end?
Amen.
Here are six mysteries I will struggle to explain.
Mystery 1 — What caused or initiated the Big Bang, if there was nothing before it?
95% of the mass and energy of the universe that theories and observations say must be “out there”, no one has been able to find, right?
Does anyone anywhere know anything at all about what the universe is or how it works?
The big bang is a verbal “analogy” used to help folks visualize what a few theorists have worked out mathematically to explain a lot of observations that otherwise make no sense.
Here is the hard part: the mathematics is also an analogy; it isn’t real; it’s just numbers. Mathematics cannot make a model that reflects fundamental realities without simplifying a lot of important stuff — and no one as yet knows what the missing stuff is that human speculation and observation is overlooking.
We all know it’s true.
Mathematics is a way of reasoning — like language but minus its ambiguities and textures. An argument can be made that mathematics and language are not adequate to the challenge of describing reality.
Humans seem to be lost in a mystery of existence from which they will never be rescued. They lack certain fundamental tools that they must someday discover and develop to give them any chance at all to climb out of a very dark hole of ignorance.
It might be possible to understand the cosmos — if the secrets of consciousness are unraveled. Consciousness is the magic-water in the desert of ignorance which — when found, understood, and imbibed — could quench the thirst-to-know that every thinking person suffers. That is my hope, anyway.
Consciousness might be fundamental and foundational. Most people won’t accept it, but almost every brilliant person who has thought the problem through seems to have written that it must be so.
Mystery 2 — Assuming we can completely separate religion and faith from pure science and fact, then speaking from a purely scientific point-of-view, what form would life after death take?
The consciousness that people experience today is the consciousness they will experience after death if consciousness is the fundamental foundation of all reality.
Conscious life-forms plug into universal consciousness like televisions plug into the cable network. TVs come and go, but the cable network is forever broadcasting. The conscious experience it creates appears in the televisions that are connected to it and can be observed on their screens by independent observers.
The reality of television comes from its fundamental foundation, which is a broadcasting system — in this analogy. As long as a television is plugged in and turned on somewhere, the reality of the cable network will continue.
Consciousness does not belong to the TV, but is experienced by it. When the TV “dies”, this consciousness will continue to be experienced by other TVs. The unplugged television will never miss it, and the consciousness it shared with other televisions will never die.
This view of reality has been described in analogous ways by Erwin Schrödinger, John Von Neumann, John Archibald Wheeler, and other brilliant physicists.
DNA is a reservoir of bases that RNA draws from to build sequences that are processed in RNA-built structures called ribosomes. From them polypeptide “necklaces” are fashioned which are folded by Golgi structures into proteins. Proteins become the tissues of the body and the catalysts of cell metabolism, right?
In humans, 10% of DNA is used to make the templates of proteins (2%) and catalysts called polymerases (8%). The rest (90%) is not used as far as anyone knows today.
A lot of extraneous chemical structures play at the edges of DNA to influence what is expressed and what is suppressed. It’s called epigenetics and is an active field of research.
DNA is neither a code nor a cipher. It’s not that simple. A lot more is going on that scientists know about and which scientists know nothing about. For example, proteins exist in the body for which no DNA sequencing has been found in the genome. It’s called dark DNA.
Mystery 4 — If the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, won’t it reach infinite speeds? What does an expanding universe mean after the heat death of the universe?
The universe is expanding like a balloon that is being inflated by the force of something that exists inside it, which no one understands. I’ve heard mainstream physicists say that they believe this expansion is uniform and accelerating; it will lead to a “Big Rip.”
The Big Rip will tear apart everything — including atoms and parts of atoms. Energy will dissipate and the universe will flat-line and disappear. It will be as if the universe never existed when the process is complete. Space, time, energy, and matter ripped to shreds will leave nothing behind.
I’ve always thought that the accelerated expansion of the universe is caused by the gravitational tug of trillions of parallel universes that surround our own like a swarm of fireflies. Accelerated expansion is evidence for massive parallel universes, it seems to me.
As seductive as this idea is, no one is proposing it as a serious explanation for the observations of expansion. I don’t know why, but suspect that many of the smartest people don’t think the parallel worlds model clears up enough of the mysteries in the cosmos to be worth pursuing.
Neither does the Big Rip model. It can be argued that the “rip” model explains nothing. It describes what happens when everything is driven apart by an unknown force to its logical conclusion. Somehow, the description doesn’t seem helpful. It doesn’t answer the biggest question of all: how did everything start in the first place?
How did we get here? Where are we? Is anyone in charge? Will the universe live and die without the benefit of any living thing — any conscious life, including itself — understanding the why and how of it all?
How can something on the scale of a universe exist and then cease to exist whose mysteries were forever out of reach — impossible for conscious-life to grasp or comprehend?
Mystery 5 — How could the precursors to the origin of life move or assemble with intent? At what point would this intent become actual life?
Anyone who says they understand how the precursors of life assemble is telling fibs, because no one has any idea how life started. I’ve heard convoluted conjectures about how clays, for example, might have got life started, but they are unconvincing and not reproducible, at least to my way of thinking.
Based on evidence in ancient rocks it seems more likely that comets and asteroids carried prokaryotic cells to Earth. These cells are thousands of times smaller than the eukaryotic cells that are the building blocks of all animals and plants.
Because these cells are small and are, internally, a disorganized mess (no organelles, no nuclei, tiny amounts of RNA & DNA mixed together like scrambled eggs along with everything else they contain), it seems reasonable that prokaryotes could be abundant in the universe and have existed since the first generation of stars and planets.
These cell types were firmly established on Earth (a third generation star) by Earth-Year one-billion. Oxygen didn’t exist, nor did oceans. Some geologists believe Earth was bone-dry at its start.
Now comes the really hard part to understand. It took two-billion years for these tiny cells to branch-off into the much larger and more tightly organized cells called eukaryotes. During that time an onslaught of ice-balls from the outer reaches of the solar-system created a deluge of water on both Mars and Earth.
Earth — having 2.65 times the gravity of Mars and a magnetosphere (which Mars lost when its iron-nickel core froze) — was able to hold onto both its atmosphere and its oceans.
Oceans are probably the incubators where highly unlikely events occurred that made humans possible. Cells grew in size and complexity. Some engulfed prokaryotic granules that became the mitochondria that every eukaryotic cell uses like mechanical batteries to add the energy necessary for big cells to survive.
Somehow these big cells learned how to use sunlight for power. Photosynthesis released oxygen, which poisoned almost every other kind of living cell on the planet. The survivors, the remnant, took another billion-and-a-half years to become space-exploring civilizations of highly intelligent animals who call themselves humans.
It’s a process that, because of its duration and a number of sporadic near-extinctions, seems unlikely to have happened at all, but here everyone is on Earth to prove that the impossible is possible.
Although I agree with Freeman Dyson that prokaryotic life is going to be found to be pervasive in the hundreds-of-thousands of methane-and-water ice-balls in the outer reaches of the solar system (called the Kuiper Belt), it seems unlikely that the much larger eukaryotic cells (or the animals and plants that evolved from them) will ever be found anywhere else but on mother Earth.
It’s possible that intelligent life has evolved in some other place, but the odds are small enough that by the time humans suffer their inevitable extinction it seems unlikely that they will have found and identified beyond Earth any non-prokaryotic life at all.
And now, at last, the final mystery. Mystery number six.
Who forgot what it is?
Remember the foil wrapped object found in the old safe? What was inside, anyway?
Any guesses?
I took the shiny object to my wife, Bevy Mae, and we carefully peeled away the foil to reveal the contents within.
And of course, dear reader, you guessed right. A stack of money is a wonder to behold. It makes living feel real good, at least for a while. A sufficiently large amount provides the freedom to buy any old thing at all.
Will we buy a sailboat and take our thrills from a roiling ocean?
