Time To Leave

Time to leave teaching. It’s been thirty-six years - two in Lowell, Massachusetts teaching juvenile delinquents and thirty-four in Maine public schools. I’m going to miss it because I love teaching US History and current events to fourteen-year-olds, most days. They can be trying sometimes. When I tell people what age I’ve taught, they often say, “God bless you. I could never do that.”

What I’d come to like about fourteen-year-olds is that they’re capable of learning virtually anything and most of what I teach they’re hearing about for the first time. They don’t have many biases or preconceived ideas about the wider world and they’re very bright. Each year I’ve realized that many are brighter than I am. But I’ve been around longer. I’ve had more time and opportunities to learn, often the hard way. When I teach them classic concepts, they ask extremely perceptive questions I never hear in discussions with jaded adults. Their questions have forced me to consider fresh perspectives on ancient enigmas and those have been my biggest rewards in this work. When I didn’t enjoy teaching, it was often because of some fault of my own - usually my attitude.

Never did expect to be at it so long, but that’s how it unfolded. There were times I wanted to do something else but circumstances prevented career change. Twenty-five years ago, I was diagnosed with a medical condition for which I needed several expensive surgeries, each requiring about six weeks of recovery. With a young family, a mortgage and a pre-existing condition, no other insurance company would take me on. So, for a while, I felt stuck in the job. That wasn’t good for me or for my students until I managed to I change my attitude by counting my blessings - of which there have been many.

For the past few years I’ve met with a retired history teacher to chat about the trade. I asked him how he knew when to give it up. “When the time comes, you just know,” he said, but it didn’t feel right the last time we had lunch. My five-year teaching license was due to expire in July and I went through the process to renew it.

Soon after doing that, however, I went to CPAC - the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, for the fifth time. I renewed contacts and new opportunities opened up. I decided to call the Maine Public Employees Retirement Service and inquire about what my pension would look like if this were my last year.

The numbers didn’t point to a cushy life with medical insurance looming as the biggest expense. The economy doesn’t look promising for the foreseeable future either, but I could be dead by the time that changes. My wife and I are physically in good shape right now and we have no debts. She’s gotten her counseling practice down to a manageable pace, and I’ve been the one who is too busy. I’ve maintained a small property-management business for the past twenty-six years and written a regular weekly column for twenty, and I intend to continue with both. My income will diminish. I won’t be able to travel as often, but I’ll have time to pursue other interests which I expect to enjoy more than teaching.

There’s at least one book in me about what it’s been like as a controversial columnist in the same community where I’ve taught. Early in my career I was a liberal and I annoyed conservatives. Then I morphed into a conservative and annoyed liberals, who have been by far the most intolerant of opposing views. Public education is a very liberal profession which doesn’t abide conservatives well, so it’s been lonely. I started writing the book a few years ago but my life has been just too busy to make any progress. I’ve saved most of the paperwork generated by adversaries - most of it in the form of letters to various principals, superintendents, the school board, the state licensing board, and so forth. There are angry letters to the editor from various newspapers in which my column has appeared, and they number well into the hundreds. I don’t know if I’ll be able to sell the book to a publisher once it’s written, but hey: Nothing ventured, nothing gained.There’s been no shortage of people who have publicly declared me unfit to teach and who have tried to have me dismissed over the years, but I’ve weathered it. I’m leaving now because I want to. I expect I’ll have a few pangs when I see school busses roll by in September and I’m not part of it anymore, but I’ll get over it.

Humpty-Dumpty

When I was seventeen, some friends and I got in trouble with the police for illegal possession of alcohol. Both friends pleaded guilty. I wanted to also because I was guilty. I wanted to pay the $35 fine and get it over with, but my father insisted I pay $150 for an attorney to get me off - and he told me fee would be coming out of my bank account on which his name appeared under my own.

“Why should I do that?” I asked him.

“Because with this on your record, you won’t be able to get a government job,” he said.

The clannish Boston-Irish-Catholic-Democrat culture I came from was extremely involved with government. It worked for you if you cooperated with it, if you knew the right people, and especially if you had an Irish name. You could get a job when you needed it that would pay fairly well and wouldn’t be too difficult. Little did I know then that I would work over thirty years at a government job as a public-school history teacher.My father is standing with his jacket open. To his left is JFK. Seated in front are Congressman (and later Speaker) John McCormack, Kenneth Lyons of NAGE, and Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers - all from Massachusetts.

My father grew up in the Irish enclave of Boston known as Charlestown. Counting his military service during World War II, he worked thirty-three years for the federal government, mostly as a civilian procurement officer for the US Air Force. After claiming a work-related disability, he retired a GS-13 in 1974 at age fifty-two with generous pension and medical benefits. Early in his career, he helped form NAGE - the National Association of Government Employees, which has since morphed into SEIU - the Service Employees International Union which has been supplying thugs for Democrats at Tea Party rallies of late. Government unions like SEIU, NEA (National Education Association), AFT (American Federation of Teachers), and AFS-CME (National Association of State, County and Municipal Employees) are the biggest public employee unions. Public employee unions now dominate the American labor movement.

These unions have been negotiating contracts with cities, states and the federal government containing extremely generous pensions and medical benefits that even in the best of the times would be unsustainable. Both sides must have known it would eventually become impossible to deliver on the terms of those contracts, but they were approved anyway. Employees contributed to the pension fund and the city or state contributed as well for what are called “defined benefit” plans. That means if the pension funds’ investments aren’t sufficient to pay certain specific benefits for each pensioner and spouse - taxpayers are on the hook for them. State and municipal officials who signed those contracts had to know there would come a day when the fund would be insufficient, but it would be far enough off that they’d be out of office and others would have to deal it.

Well, that day has arrived. Dozens of cities and states are on the brink of bankruptcy because of those contracts. Prichard, a small city in Alabama, has simply stopped sending checks to its retired employees because the pension fund dried up and the city doesn’t have the money. According to a New York Times article: “‘Prichard is the future,’ said Michael Aguirre, the former San Diego city attorney, who has called for San Diego to declare bankruptcy and restructure its own outsize pension obligations. ‘We’re all on the same conveyor belt. Prichard is just a little further down the road.’”

Mr. Aquirre mixed his metaphors, but he’s absolutely right. If a city or state goes bankrupt, union pension contracts would be nullified, just as they are when corporation does. Had General Motors been allowed to go under, its generous pension contracts with the UAW (United Auto Workers) would have also. Is that why Democrats in the Obama Administration bailed out GM? Unions are the Democrats’ biggest constituency after all. Even in bankruptcy though, taxpayers may still have been stuck with the bill because there exists another federal agency called the PBGC (Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation) which underwrites pension programs for bankrupt companies the way Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac guarantee foreclosed mortgages.

Government encouraged shaky mortgagees through the Community Reinvestment Act and then couldn’t pick up the pieces when it all came crashing down. The economic mess we’re in now is the result. In spite of what the Obama Administration and its media minions claim, this recession/depression is far from over. In fact, it’s likely to get a lot worse when the pension bubble breaks as it inevitably will.

So maybe I better not retire from my government job after thirty-four years. My pension wouldn’t be all that generous, especially the medical benefits, which would be paltry. With part time employment elsewhere to supplement I could get by all right, but The Maine State Employees Retirement Fund I’ve been paying into all that time is underfunded by billions. What would I do when I’m sixty-five or seventy and the checks stop like they have in Prichard? My father’s generation enjoyed a comfy retirement, but us baby boomers aren’t likely to. Humpty Dumpty is about to fall off the wall. All Obama’s horses and all the Democrat men won’t be able to put their massive entitlement programs together again. They won’t be able to bail out all the cities and states - not with a debt that’s $14 trillion and climbing fast.

Will there be riots like there are in Greece? People in France rioted when President Sarkozy said he'd raise the retirement age from 60 to 62. What will happen here when the checks stop?

Looks like we baby boomers are going to have to keep working until a few years after we’re dead. One consolation is that I won't be arrested for illegal possession of alcohol by a minor in my old age. That's good because I expect I'll be needing a snort now and then after I get home.

Unsustainable Benefits and Entitlements

Teachers are being laid off. People are having fewer children and enrollments are declining. That, together with state revenue cuts, is forcing a RIF - a “Reduction In Force.” Now, the detested (by me) teachers’ unions are applying their cherished (by them) contract rules so that younger, lower-salaried, and often more-effective teachers will get the ax, while older, higher-salaried, and, oftentimes, sclerotic teachers will not. It’s “last-hired, first-fired” regardless of the effects. All of us - students, parents, administrators, and teachers - know who the good teachers are and who the bad ones are, but thanks to the unions, little of that knowledge will apply in the RIF.

As the most-senior teacher in my school district with 33 years of service, my position is safe. I’ll decide whether to continue teaching year-to-year and, as of now, I’m planning to sign a contract for September, 2010. One factor in my decision about retirement will be whether I can depend on the Maine State Retirement System I’ve been paying into for more than three decades. I simply don’t think I’ll be able to rely on it if I live to be 78, or whatever the average life expectancy is for heterosexual American white guys like me.

Why? Because the Maine State Retirement fund has declined with the economy, just like everyone’s IRA has. Public employee retirement in Maine and other states is guaranteed by the taxpayers if the fund is insufficient to meet the “defined-benefit” obligations to people like me. Therein lie my doubts. If I retire at 60, I’m supposed to get around $40,000 a year and a third of my individual medical insurance premium until I’m dead. That’s not too good compared to what public employees in other states and in the federal government get, but very good compared to what the average Maine taxpayer can expect. Maine is not only one of the poorest states in the country, it’s also one of the highest-taxed. That’s not a good combination. How long will Mainers be willing and able to continue supporting retirees like me and my fellow baby boomers should the retirement fund run out of money? Not too long would be my guess.

Governments at every level are rapidly reaching the point where they cannot continue to deliver what they’ve promised, and millions of people have, unfortunately, learned to expect. It isn’t just me and my pension. It’s Medicare for everyone. It’s Social Security. It’s disability payments, welfare payments. All of it. We know this, but we pretend not to. We put off the day of reckoning as if maybe it won’t really arrive. Rather than cut back on entitlements before the system collapses completely, we increase them. We borrow money from a country like China, which can’t afford to provide these benefits for its own people. Up to now, they’ve lent it to us because we obviously can’t afford it either. Lately, however, they’re getting reticent. They see that we’re printing money so they’re abandoning the dollar along with everyone else in the world.

While the number of students in my school district has remained fairly constant over the past three decades, the number of employees has about doubled. We’re looking at layoffs for next year, but around the country government jobs are increasing rapidly while private sector jobs decline. Government employee unions are now bigger and more powerful than private sector unions. One big reason General Motors and Chrysler went bankrupt is because they couldn’t pay the generous benefits of retired United Auto Workers, which amounted to almost $5 billion in 2006 alone. For every active worker, General Motors was supporting 3.8 retirees and dependents. President Obama and congressional Democrats took over the auto companies to protect bloated union contracts, not to help our economy. Now taxpayers are on the hook for them.
States and cities are going bankrupt. Government unions are strangling taxpayers just as private-sector unions have strangled stockholders. Unsustainable entitlements are growing and Democrats are trying desperately to prop it all up while blaming Bush for it all. Ordinary Americans, however, are seeing through that. The growing Tea Party movement represents grass-roots citizens who want to stop the madness before the whole country goes over the cliff. The November elections are going to be very interesting indeed, just as special elections in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts have been.

Since I can’t expect government to take care of me, I’m being a lot nicer to my children. Meanwhile, I anticipate that I’m going to have to keep working until about five years after I’m dead.

Getting Seasoned

Last Saturday I turned 56 and it’s beginning to look as though I may never become president. I have, however, outlived my father who died of a heart attack at 55. That’s something, I guess. If I make it to the average life expectancy for an American heterosexual white guy - 76, I think I’ll be satisfied. Twenty more years.

Several people have asked me lately when I’m going to retire. It’s a good question but I don’t have an answer. I’ve been teaching for nearly 32 years. It keeps me busy and with two other jobs as well I’m seldom idle. I’ve taken care of a few vacation properties for more than twenty years. My clients are great people and the schedule is flexible unless a windstorm blows over some trees or there’s some other act of God I have to deal with right away. I could pick up a few more clients and retire from teaching. That would give me more time to write - my third occupation for the last sixteen years. It’s nice to have choices, but I see myself working at something or other until I’m either drooling in a rocking chair or dead. I like what I’m doing though and I don’t want to give up any of it right now. Poet Robert Frost put it well:

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and the need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.

It’s the last stanza of Two Tramps in Mud Time, one of my favorites. I don’t read much poetry but Frost has always spoken to me. This year’s mud time is longer than most and his words are particularly appropriate to put Spring, 2007 into perspective. The third stanza of the piece reads:

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You’re one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you’re two months back in the middle of March.

My vocation has been teaching and my avocation is writing. I want more time to write, but I don’t want to give up teaching entirely. My curriculum is twentieth century US History - weaving in civics, economics as well as current events. It all fascinates me, and even if I weren’t teaching it I’d still be studying it. So why not teach a bit longer? I’ll be back next year, at least. After that, who knows what will come along? I sure don’t.

Meanwhile, I’d like spring to come along a little faster than it is - just as everybody else in New England would. As Frost says in the fourth stanza:

A bluebird comes tenderly up to alight
And turns to the wind to unruffle a plume,
His song so pitched as not to excite
A single flower as yet to bloom.
It is snowing a flake: and he half knew
Winter was only playing possum.
Except in color he isn’t blue,
But he wouldn’t advise a thing to blossom.

It’s been snowing a bit more than a flake during this year’s mud time. As I look out the window to the snow-covered Kearsarge and Baldface on the western horizon and listen to the cold wind howl this Easter Sunday, I wouldn’t advise anything to blossom either. Not today anyway. I know the crocuses and daffodils are coming up under all that white though. My wife and I saw them sprouting in her garden just before last week’s snowstorm covered them up. This week’s storm will bury them even deeper, but I won’t lose hope.

There’s always something getting ready to blossom, even when all we can see is dark and all we can feel is cold. Frost knew that. New Englanders know that. During the Easter season, Christians know it too.