Mother may I....

            One of the things I remember from my time at Millville Grade School many years ago was the system the teachers and administrators had in place for bathroom breaks. I guess when I got to Millville, I was supposed to call them restrooms instead of bathrooms, but old habits are hard to break, so it took a couple of years to make the change. Anyway, when I was in the first grade, my teacher, Mrs. Dilling, who had also been my Sunday School teacher, informed us that if we needed to use the restroom, we were to raise our hands to ask permission, and in addition to that, we should also raise one finger or two fingers in order to signify which bodily function was necessitating the break.

            I never really understood why it was any of the teacher’s business if a student needed to go number one or number two, or why they even cared, but that was the way things were done at Millville. I often suspected some students were embarrassed to announce to the entire class that a number two was imminent, and might have held up one finger as a decoy. I believed at the time, as I still believe today, that number two is best taken care of in the privacy of your own home, but when that wasn’t possible,  two fingers did seem to take a higher priority when Mrs. Dilling was selecting who would be the next to be excused. My old buddy Stinky Wilmont could be quite theatrical, waving two fingers while making grimacing facial expressions and a worrisome audible, all in hopes of gaining permission ahead of a less animated number one somewhere else in the room.

            I can’t recall the teacher ever denying permission, or even verifying if was actually a number one or a number two she dealing with. I think it was pretty well accepted that when a first grader decided he or she needed to go, it was going to happen with or without permission, and whether they made it down the hallway to the restroom or not. I don’t think anybody really wanted to take that chance, even if they suspected a number two was actually a number one, or even if they suspected it was a false alarm. I suppose it did serve to put us into the mindset of asking permission before we did anything for the next twelve years. Or fourteen, in Stinky’s case.

            I guess it also gave us the mindset most of us have carried through into our adult lives, though now, most of the time we are asking permission from the government instead of Mrs. Dilling. If you want to be a barber, or a beautician, or a member of about any trade or profession, you have to get permission and a license from the government before you can ply your trade. If you want to get married, or add a room to your house, or sell hotdogs on the corner, or even go fishing, the first thing you have to do is obtain permission from the government.

            Last March, a buddy of mine decided he wanted to build a home on some land that he owned. He had to get permission from the Department of Natural Resources, and the highway department, and the health department, and the building department. He finally received permission in October. It’s not that he couldn’t build a home on his property, but that he couldn’t build a home on his property without asking permission.

             For a supposedly free society, we sure seem to spend a lot of time asking our government for permission. Maybe it’s time for us to realize we don’t really need their permission for most of the things we do. Maybe we need to start collectively showing them one finger once in a while, but not to signify we need to go to the bathroom.

Lead us not into temptation....

            When I started this construction business forty years ago, one of the first purchases I made was a six foot step ladder from Drakes Hardware in Hagerstown. Shortly after that, my parents gave me a 16 foot Craftsman extension ladder from the Sears Roebuck store on Broad Street in New Castle, presumably because they didn’t like to see me trying to reach certain projects by standing on top of that six foot ladder. The wooden step ladder is long gone, but I still have to top half of that extension ladder, and it still comes in handy from time to time, as long as some OSHA inspector isn’t hanging around.

            Over that forty years, we’ve gone through a lot of ladders, and a couple of bucket trucks, and several combinations of each, trying to reach parts of jobs that sometimes seemed like they just weren’t meant to be reached. About twenty years ago we purchased a heavy duty forty foot ladder, because we were working on a job that just couldn’t be reached with any other means at our disposal. It was what my Dad would call a “family ladder”, because it took the whole family to set it up. We finished that job, and then hung the ladder at the back of the rack, hoping we would never run into another job that required getting it out of storage.

            Occasionally, however, we would run across a job that our thirty-two footers wouldn’t reach, and we would dig out old number forty again, wrestle it into place, and then wrestle it home again once we were finished. My brother Ross, who I’ve worked with for most of those forty years, strongly suggested that if we would get rid of that ladder, we wouldn’t be so tempted to take on jobs that couldn’t be reached with our regular guy ladders. I thought it would be a shame to get rid of it altogether, but I did agree to relinquish control to my son Jonathan, who took it to his house and hung it on the back of his ladder rack. That agreement worked out well until we took on a job that required a longer ladder than we had, and I had to convince Jonathan to get the ladder down and bring it to our job, and then convince Ross to help set it up and climb it again.

            The other day Jonathan told me he was getting rid of the ladder so he couldn’t be tempted or coerced into getting it out again. I have my suspicions that Ross was involved in that decision somehow. At any rate, now when we look at a job the ladders we have won’t reach, I won’t be tempted to think otherwise.

            I was reading a story a while back about some of the scandals politicians and lobbyists have been involved in over the years. It appeared to me that most of them occurred because we have allowed the government the ability to make too many decisions, and the politicians figured out how much their decisions could be worth to certain people. P. J. O’Rourke said something along the lines of  “When legislation is bought and sold, the first thing to be bought is the legislators.” I’m convinced P. J. is probably right.

            I’ve also noticed over the years that people don’t seem to be as upset when their party of choice is in control and awards legislation favorable to their side or point of view, but they tend to get all bent out of shape when the other party takes charge and starts enacting legislation they oppose. Rather than having half the people mad half of the time, and the other half mad the other half of the time, I often wonder if we wouldn’t all be better off once again limiting the federal and state governments to their Constitutional powers, removing the ability and temptation from our legislators at the same time.

             They can’t be tempted to sell power they don’t have, and if we would do a little bit better job of holding them accountable every election, they wouldn’t be tempted to pass legislation they don’t have authority to pass.

            Just like I can’t drag out that forty foot ladder anymore. No matter how tempted I am.