MOMENTOUS YEAR REACHES ITS HIGH POINT WITH GODCHILD REUNION

This is an appropriate time to be reviewing the events of 2008. The start of a new year is just a week away, and it is normal at a time like this to be looking back and asking, “What kind of year was it anyway?”

One word sums it up for me. “Momentous.” The election of the first African American as President in our history made sure of that. As long as anyone will care about American history, the year 2008 will have its special consideration—as the year Barack Obama got elected. It was also a year that the high flying U.S. economy started unraveling, but let us hope that that end-of-year phenomenon will be short lived under the management of a new Obama Administration.

Second Bone Marrow Transplant

For me, 2008 was a year of special significance for several other reasons. It was a year during which I underwent the second bone marrow transplant of my life. The bone marrow transplant, which I had first gone through in 2002, was again urged on me to fight the reoccurrence of the blood cancer called lymphoma. It was also a year during which I managed to publish two books of poetry (see my website for more details: http://www.sasaftwrites.com), and it was the year that I was reunited with Stephen Johnson, my godson. In fact, the latter proved to be the most dramatic event of all for me.

I was lying in my bed in the bone marrow transplant ward on the ninth floor of the Reynolds Tower of Baptist Hospital, Winston-Salem, North Carolina sometime in mid July when the phone on the stand next to my bed rang. I picked it up, and the caller on the other end introduced himself as someone I had not spoken with in many years. He said his name was Stephen Johnson. He said he was my godson.

Hearing Name Is Enough

As soon as I heard his name, even before the word “godson” registered, I knew who he was. The emotion surged in me. Indeed we hadn’t spoken in many years—over 20 in fact. When we were last in touch Stephen wasn’t quite a teenager, probably 12 years old. And yes indeed he was my godson, my godson who I had abandoned for reasons, however misguided, around 1987.

His mother, a single black woman who had worked for my first wife and me as a cleaning lady in Brooklyn by name of Martha Jean Johnson, had asked me to serve as Stephen’s godfather just before he was born in 1968. He was a baby boy coming into the world in Harlem Hospital without a father, and it seemed to me that the least I could do was say “yes” to Martha Jean’s request. My assumption was that a godfather was expected to serve as a role model, and this was a responsibility that I felt flattered to be asked to fulfill. How could I refuse?

Share Room With Stephen

Even after I moved away from New York City, first to New Jersey, then to Maine, and then to the Washington, D.C., area I had kept in touch with Martha Jean and Stephen—at the very least sending them presents at holiday time. At some point when my first marriage was falling apart I fled Maine for New York City and spent at least one night with Martha Jean and Stephen in their Lower East Side apartment where Stephen let me share his room with him.

Just before wife Harriet and I were married in 1980, the second marriage for both of us, we met in New York where she was taking computer training. By then I had relocated to Washington, and both Harriet and I were working for a Washington, D.C. corporation in the satellite communications business. During that visit, we got together with Stephen and Martha Jean in Brooklyn Heights, and as best I can remember the four of us walked around this old Brooklyn neighborhood together, a neighborhood famous for its Promenade overlooking the Lower West side of Manhattan and New York Harbor. Brooklyn Heights had been the first place in the city where I had lived just after leaving graduate school at Yale in 1963.

Go To The Boat Show

Even earlier Stephen remembers my taking him to the New York Boat Show at what was then called the New York Coliseum up on Columbus Circle when I was still living in Maine and working for a publication called National Fisherman based in the Penobscot Bay town of Camden. National Fisherman would have an exhibit booth at the New York Boat Show every year as a base from which to sell advertising space in the publication and to drum up subscription sales, and those of us on the editorial side of the operation would also have our chance to be present at the show and to take advantage of what the big city had to offer.

The break with Stephen and his mother occurred in the mid 1980s, and it was entirely my fault. I fell on hard times, first losing my job with the satellite communications company, then a little more than a year later losing a new job as director of communications for an association in Silver Spring, Maryland. I had been sending Stephen and Martha Jean presents at Christmas time, as I indicated, but with the loss of the second job I felt devastated. By this time I had taken on the responsibility of trying to put my son through an expensive eastern college, and I had no idea how I was going to be able to manage it now with the loss of the second job.

Low Opinion of Myself

Not only did I stop the presents to Stephen and Martha Jean, but the communication as well—an act of extremism that didn’t have to be. I felt embarrassed that I was in such dire straights financially, and I’m afraid I overreacted. In my mind at the time, presents and caring about another human being were one in the same thing. It didn’t occur to me that Stephen needed the continuing attention of an adult male far more than he needed some extra dollars at Christmas time. Yes, I was suffering from a very low opinion of myself at the time. The loss of jobs will do that to you.

Now we jump ahead to July 2008. It struck me as a miracle that Stephen had gotten in touch with me. It struck me that I was being given a second chance to make amends to this man, now in his early 40s, to make up for my failures as a role model the first time around. I didn’t want to mess it up. I wanted to be the godfather now that I felt I had not been before.

Hyatt Hotel Jersey City

In the course of that fateful telephone conversation from my bed in Baptist Hospital, I learned that Martha Jean had died at least five years before. Stephen was married now, he told me. In fact, he had an 18-year-old daughter, but amazingly he was still living in the same Lower East Side apartment where I had once stayed and shared a room with him. Yes, I was older now with a much stronger idea of the responsibility that we bear each other. I wasn’t going to be so cavalier about my relationship with Stephen Johnson ever again.

Since then we’ve been together twice, first in Greensboro, North Carolina, where we met after one of my follow-up sessions at Baptist Hospital, then in New York during Thanksgiving when Harriet and I stayed at the Hyatt Hotel Jersey City and were treated to the breathtaking views of Lower West Side Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island and where Stephen played the role of chauffeur and drove us all around the city. During the first visit we met Stephen’s adopted sister Melissa, and during the second Marsha, his wife, Camille, his daughter, and Cita, Marsha’s mother from Trinidad as well as Melissa, all wonderful people who we thoroughly enjoyed being with. And now we are just about to go to the Big Island of Hawaii with Stephen where we will be getting together with son Scott, his wife Yumiko and our grandson Sebi (Sebastian).

38 Year Reunion

As best I can figure—and I took the photographs that are a record of the event—Scott and Stephen were last together in 1970 when Scott was four and Stephen was two. Now they’ll be getting together again 38 years later.

Thanks entirely to Stephen’s courage and initiative, I’ve been given this second chance to make a whole new relationship with him, and I’m not going to squander the opportunity this time. This time I’m going to be the godfather that fate has meant me to be.

Thanks for tuning into Mind Check. For a look at my other writing, see the website http://www.sasaftwrites.com. Please note that my two latest books, Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat and City Above The Sea And Other Poems are now available online. They would make wonderful holiday presents for people you care about. They’re both available from the sasaft website. Have a healthy and happy 2009.

Copyright © 2008 by Stephen Alan Saft

WE MUST HELP THE U.S.AUTO INDUSTRY, BUT WE MUST INSIST ON FAIR TERMS FOR THE U.S. TAX PAYER

The fiscal crisis spreading like influenza throughout the world has for the moment infected the U.S. auto industry. Should the U.S. Congress use tax payer funds to bail out the U.S. auto industry just as it is currently bailing out the U.S. financial industry and attempting to bail out the U.S. housing industry?

Like each of the bail-out plans that has come before Congress, the U.S. auto industry bail-out score has been accompanied by a howling chorus of nay sayers singing an angry counterpoint. The negative lyrics of this chorus include such lines as “let them fail. We don’t care if they go out of business. All they know how to build is over sized gas guzzlers that pollute the environment.”

UAW Blamed

Still another set of lines pertains to the United Auto Workers (UAW) Union and unions in general. These lines say something like this: “It’s the UAW with a long history of sweetheart contracts with management, the result of the repeated capitulations of management over the years, that has brought the U.S. auto industry to the low state it finds itself. Now is the time to get rid of the UAW and maybe the industry itself will revive. And while we’re at it let’s get rid of all labor unions.”

What is to be done? The higher pay and benefits won by the UAW for its worker members over the decades of union contract negotiations has helped to make these workers and their families even more valuable contributors to society as tax payers, as consumers of products and services in their respective communities, and as involved citizens active in community affairs than would have been possible had they been members of an oppressed working class as they once were during Henry Ford’s time.

Good Pay Hurts Competitiveness

On the other hand, the case can be made that these same workers with their middle class pay and benefit packages have contributed to the declining competitiveness of the industry of which they are part as that industry attempts to compete with the products of foreign manufacturers with a work force often earning much less and receiving much less in benefits. They’ve accomplished that simply by doing what all of us humans do by instinct, that is, to seek to improve our situations in life.

Nor can we remove from blame the senior executives of these organizations with their obscene pay and benefit packages and the corporate jets at their disposal costing $35 million or more. They too have played a role in keeping the U.S. auto industry less competitive than it should have been.

Horrendous Ripple Effect

Do we let this industry employing hundreds of thousands of people throughout the country just go out of business? The ripple effect would be horrendous with not just assembly line workers but all the people who make the tires, the glass, the batteries, the electronics, and other parts as well as all the people employed at the dealerships out of work as well. No, we simply can’t let that happen. The unemployment figures are already alarming enough. Imagine those figures two to three times as high.

Do We Attach Strings?

And so I ask the question again. What is to be done? Now is a good time for a reexamination of the economic and political principles that lie at the heart of our most sacred assumptions. Do we attach strings to the bail-out funds for the industry? Do we say to both senior management and union rank and file, “We’ll give you several billion of taxpayer money. Now you agree to substantial pay cuts and benefit cuts until this industry can turn out affordable products that will compete with the products of the Japanese and the Koreans—products that have less of a negative impact on the environment ”

The answer in my opinion is a resounding “yes.” These same strings need to be applied, in my opinion, to all organizations receiving taxpayer hand outs. Communism is dead and good riddance to it. Even socialism has significantly less standing now than it did during the middle of the last century. We don’t need to be guided by these left wing philosophies, but what we do need is to uphold a middle ground philosophy that accounts for individual rights, but which still encompasses the interests of all of us as a group with common needs and interests as citizens or taxpayers—a community of common interests.

Survival With Healthy Economy

Our common need and interest is the survival of this country, survival with as healthy an economy as possible. This, I believe, is part of the concept of “happiness” as stated by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence—our “unalienable rights” including “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

A political philosophy that comes closest to expressing this concept of a middle ground philosophy that respects both individual rights and the common needs of the members of society is called Communitarianism. One of its spokesmen is the philosopher Amitai Etzioni, who for many years was associated with George Washington University in Washington, D.C., my former employer. Etzioni has done a lot of critical thinking about supposed conflict concepts such as the rights of pedophiles versus the rights of society to be protected against pedophiles.

Etzioni’s Golden Rule

Etzioni proposes a new Golden Rule, which goes like this: “Respect and uphold society’s moral order as you would have society respect and uphold your autonomy.”

Okay, so what do we need to expect from the auto industry—both labor and management—in turn for the bail-out? Here are the terms I would impose:

• Cars and other vehicles must be built to the highest safety standards

• Cars and other vehicles must be built to last as long as possible. No more planned obsolescence.

• Warranties must be fully guaranteed and protected by federal law and fully transferable from owner to owner, that is, if the vehicles are fuel efficient

• There must be across the board commitment to hybrid technology including hybrid and electric car combinations. No new vehicles getting less than 20 miles per gallon. Outlaw them.

• A federal board—the Fair Executive Compensation Board--established by Congress to review and approve (or veto) all executive compensation above $250,000 per year, criterion number one for this board, the effect on car prices and competitiveness

• A federal board—the Fair Labor Contracts Board—established by Congress to review and approve (or veto) all labor contracts, criterion number one for this board, the effect on car prices and competitiveness.

Thanks for tuning into Mind Check. For a look at my other writing, see the website http://www.sasaftwrites.com. Please note that my latest book, Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat, is now available. It would make a wonderful holiday present for someone you care about. It can be ordered on line. I am also happy to announce that still another new book by Stephen Alan Saft, City Above The Sea And Other Poems, is nearing completion. In fact, you can also order it on line right now. You’ll learn more about both books at the sasaftwrites website.

Copyright © 2008 by Stephen Alan Saft