Looking in the Crystal Ball

There's a lot Joy and I still don't know about what is going to happen in the next few months, but for anyone interested, we do have some decisions made at least. So here's a rough timeline, if everything works out the way we think. It brings to mind the old line, "If you want to hear God laugh, tell Him your plans." These should be worth a chuckle.

We hope to have heard back from any school still interested in me this week. Within the next couple weeks I will be flying out to visit Nigeria. We hope to have a final decision about where then or very shortly thereafter. So we'll stop being silent/coy/private in a few weeks.

Baby Lavinia arrives June 24 and we begin a frantic dash to get her passported and visad.

Early July we will move out of Ithaca and visit our families in California and Utah, blessing Lavinia in my parents' ward.

Late July or early August we leave for our grand, three year adventure.

I'm sorry we've been keeping rather quiet about things online. It's certainly not for lack of interest as we can find precious little else to talk about that is quite so engaging. Until a decision is made, though, we would rather not jinx anything. The places still on the table are each very interesting prospects that we are excited about and we'd love to tell you more ... soon. We just know we probably won't be in Ithaca for more than another 10 weeks.

DC - A Policy Guy Wanders

"Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek." -- POTUS

As interesting as the economic landmarks were, I was much more interested in making a tour of the Presidents. I have no idea if Pres. Obama was 'at home' when I came calling, but it was very interesting to imagine him or one of the kids pulling back the curtains to look out at the small crowd of photographers, families, and protesters (below) standing vigil. I wondered how long it takes before the novelty of omnipresent amateur paparazzi wears off. Imagine looking out your windows every day and seeing a throng of people. Then I wondered what it would be like if the White House lawn was armed as well as the X-Mansion and decided I wasn't dignified enough to be sticking my camera through the bars and moved on.

"Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential." -- POTUS

Washington and the Distinctive Unit Insignia of the The Big Red One from near the FDIC and Red Cross HQ. Being a Cornellian, I'm rather fascinated by that nickname for the First Infantry Division, the oldest division of our army.

I marched across the green between the White House up to the Washington Monument and was amazed at the number of baseball games going on. Game after game of coed softball all over the parks! I paused once in a while to cheer on a batter or applaud a good outfield catch.

From Washington, you can see the Capitol Building (Congress, pictured right), the Jefferson Memorial, Lincoln and the WWII Memorial, and the White House. It is a fitting layout in tribute to our first president. There are so few people who have been put into such high office with so much humility, so much willingness to put it all down to return to a simpler life, and so many excellent first examples. John Adams, our second president, had apparently wanted to make the President serve a life term. Yet as Washington peacefully laid down the mantle, so Adams also turned them over in one of the world's first peaceful exchanges of power between political parties.
I gazed up from the foot of the monument. Yes, he stands that tall today. This is what he said:

• Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.
• Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence.
• Friendship is a plant of slow growth and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.
• Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.
• Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
  
• Happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.
• If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.
  

Of similar bold assertions was our third President, Thomas Jefferson:

• A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
• Errors of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.
• Every generation needs a new revolution.

• Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.
• Experience hath shown, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.
• He who knows best knows how little he knows.
  

Sauntering around Jefferson, I visited a remarkably flat memorial, that of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President during the only economic crisis of the last 100 years worse than this one. I walked it backwards and spent much of it wondering where a statue of the man himself was. The walk consists of his more famous sayings carved into stone, with occasional reflecting pools and waterfalls or statues of Depression-era bread lines.
His dear wife, Eleanor, gets a statue of her own as our first delegate to the UN. Since she is rather less often quoted, here are some of hers:

• Do what you feel in your heart to be right- for you'll be criticized anyway.
• Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility.
• Happiness is not a goal; it is a by-product.
• In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.

And so finally, after more than two hours of walking I came round to the lanky Illinoisan himself, whom I trust you will read with as deep a voice as you can manage:

• The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty. Plainly, the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of liberty.
• My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.
• How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.
• I care not much for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.
• Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.
• No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent.

What a debt of gratitude we owe to these men and their wives.

Glad to be Alive

And here's one of the people to whom I owe that: Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces lieutenant colonel Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov. The full story is here with a hat-tip to economist Brad DeLong who got it from someone else I don't know from tnsgrl64.
To summarize, in 1983 Petrov was filling an extra shift for someone else who couldn't show up at work ... watching over the BIG RED BUTTON for the Soviets. The computer announced that the US had launched a nuclear missile at Moscow. That didn't make strategic sense to him: why only one? He guessed that it was a computer error and, despite protocls that told him to fire first and inform his superiors after, held off.

Then a second, third, fourth, and even a fifth missile showed up. Realizing that it could potentially be millions of Russian lives on the line and knowing it would definitely be millions of American lives if he gave the orders to fire, he held his ground as the rest of the officers present said he had to fire.

Seconds turned into minutes and it became clear that he was right. It turned out to be a computer error from some funky sunspots and satellites. He saved the world.

Bureaucracy being what it is, he was first praised and then censured for his actions. The above link claims he was forcably retired; Wiki indicates he always claimed otherwise. His story apparently broke in 1998 and a documentary is expected later this year.

From Wiki: "Petrov has said he does not regard himself as a hero for what he did that day. In an interview for the documentary film The Red Button and the Man Who Saved the World,^[5] Petrov says, "All that happened didn't matter to me — it was my job. I was simply doing my job, and I was the right person at the right time, that's all. My late wife for 10 years knew nothing about it. 'So what did you do?' she asked me. I did nothing.""

Wow. Another beautiful example of God putting the right person in the right place at the right time.