Just how good were the 2009 predictions?

1 comment October 29th, 2009 10:44am Linda Grist Cunningham

Here we are at the end of October with Christmas and New Year’s on the horizon. I could sound like a crone and wonder aloud where the heck the year has gotten to. Instead, I went back to December 2008 and dusted off my predictions for 2009. I wrote them on New Year’s Eve.You can read the whole list here; I was most interested in these:

“First, we’ll start with a brutal fact. The next six months are going to be terrible, as the global economy contracts and sheds jobs, cash, security and sanity. By mid-year, we will begin to adjust to the new realities though we will remain hunkered down; by the end of October, we’ll begin to think we will be able to manage; by Christmas we will have traded multiple gifts for a single one that means something.”

So, at the end of October, are we beginning to think we can manage? Most days I think we are. That’s good.

“By March 2010, we will be adjusted to the new way and by Christmas of 2010, we’ll understand that peace on earth is a far better goal than a new iPhone or X Box. We will make less, spend less, value quality, chose charitable over capital, and begin replacing cars, repairing the roof and buying a home.”

I remain hopeful that that will be true.

“When 2011 rolls around, we’ll feel we are back in control — sort of — and that we can handle what’s thrown at us — sort of. By 2012, assuming we do not blow ourselves away in some nuclear snit, we will begin to build again.  By 2013, new normal will be “the way it’s always been.” It will be five years of hanging on as best we can, letting go of any thought that the future will be like the past. But, we will do it.”

That’s what it means to have faith; do not despair.

As Alice might wonder: Curiouser and curiouser

2 comments October 26th, 2009 04:21pm Linda Grist Cunningham

Today those two Northwest pilots say they were so engrossed in a computer scheduling program that they didn’t realize they were past Minneapolis.

First they say they weren’t sleeping. Then, they weren’t arguing. And, now they were immersed in a scheduling program. OK, I’ll actually buy that “lost in cyberspace” thing. Been there, done that.

Get so totally engrossed in what’s happening in my digital world that I lose track of time. Makes sense. But, here comes the but …..

I still don’t understand how they didn’t HEAR all those ground folks, other pilots on radios and even some bells ringing — and presumably a flight attendant or two on the cockpit phone or banging on the door.

If they said they had their headset ears in while playing Warcraft, now that would make sense. So, guys, dribble out some more of the story.

Tightening belts at $500,000

1 comment October 22nd, 2009 06:11pm Linda Grist Cunningham

Gee, I hope the seven CEOs can live on $500,000 a year, plus up to $25,000 in perks. Most people I know won’t see that kind of dough in 10 years, much less each year.

But that’s as far as the feds are willing to go with annual compensation for the  executives at the seven companies that got the biggest bite of the federal golden parachute. It’s a complicated deal announced formally today, and, yep there are a ton of loopholes, but, still….

These are the companies whose execs-with-no-souls snatched up every nickel they could steal from the rest of us, created a thousand and one crooked, crazy schemes and then played economic roulette until we all went off the cliff last fall.

I am totally and revengefully delighted at their consternation. Imagine having to cut back on things like jets and drivers, chefs and multi-million dollar vacation homes.  Crikey, they might have to recycle the plastic sandwich bags from lunch. I hope they get a taste of what unemployed Americans have been swallowing for a year now.

Here comes the but…. But, I am not so sure this “cut their pay” plan is much more than window dressing, and it could be a disaster. There’s every reason to believe that many of these soon-to-be-”poor” execs will just decamp for another company that doesn’t have salary caps.  That kind of exodus could be devastating to a company. And, there’s still the “small” matter of what’s going to happen to millions upon millions of cash bonuses promised to these guys.

Just as I started feeling  sorry for the poor execs and started sounding like a pro-big business shill,  wondering aloud who in the world would take one of those jobs for a miserly $500,000 plus $25,000 in perks, an executive-type friend stopped me in my tracks.

Said he: Well, I’d take one of those jobs in a heartbeat. I mean, he said, I couldn’t screw it up any worse than those guys did.

Hummmmm. Maybe I’ll dust off the resume.

Medicare: We should all be so lucky

Add comment October 21st, 2009 09:32am Linda Grist Cunningham

On Friday, 87-year-old Maggie was on her tractor mowing grass, pulling the summer plants and planting the fall mums, chopping down the tomatoes and taking the dog to the vet. On Saturday, she was flat on her back in the hospital’s stroke wing wondering exactly what truck had squashed her left side.

Over the past week I have learned a whole bunch about stroke, rehabilitation, hospitals and assisted living. I’ve developed a new appreciation for health care professionals and legal things like living wills, trusts and powers of attorney. And, then there is Medicare. Maggie swiped a card and instantly everything was taken care of, from admission to rehabilitation. She paid for the hairdresser to come to her room. That’s it.

So, tell me again why we ought not have a single payer, government run health care program for everyone in this country?

You can learn more about health care reform at HealthyRockford.com. I’ve made up my mind. I want Medicare and I am more than happy to pay for it. And, I don’t care if all those bureaucratic insurance companies go out of business. The care my mother-in-law is getting courtesy of Medicare and the ease with which the paperwork is handled ensures she’ll spend her engery in rehab and not in fighting the insurance companies.

Is it a guy thing or just a result of numbers?

1 comment October 19th, 2009 04:18pm Linda Grist Cunningham

Surely, the reason so many men get caught with their hands in the cookie jar — and end up in headlines around the world — is because there are just so many more of them sitting around the board room tables. Maybe if those tables were filled with women and just a token guy or two, then women would be in the headlines.

That’s got to be it. Otherwise, we’d have to assume these male powerbrokers are incapable of learning that stealing is a bad thing. Take these guys, for instance. One of them is among the richest people in the world. One was headed for the CEO spot at IBM.

I mean, these guys are not your run of the mill, stop to pick up a quart of milk after work types. They are simply the latest in a long string of guys with holes in their souls who created the economic mess we’re cleaning up these days.

It’s a numbers thing, right?

Have faith; do not despair

5 comments October 9th, 2009 04:30pm Linda Grist Cunningham

U.S. President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize this morning — and the naysayers went off the deep end. Even the mildest responses were along the lines of a disbelieving “huh?”

Let me offer up another thought: Throughout his campaign, Obama’s message was hope-filled. In the months since his November election, there’s been much to weigh on that hope. The price of change can be a diluted sense of hope. That Obama wins the peace prize, while eye-popping in surprise, is a global re-affirmation of that hope.

I think what makes me feel hopeful is that OTHERS feel hopeful. Too often we come down so hard and so cynically about “our own” that we cannot appreciate the ways outsiders see them and respond to them.

Clearly, those who select the peace prize believe in their souls that this man’s singular approach to peace is one that can, if nurtured, make us a better world.

Instead of wailing that he undeservedly won it, perhaps we should be seeking the faith to pursue that peace and set aside the despair that we cannot achieve so lofty and illusive a goal.

Gimme, gimme, gimme

Add comment October 9th, 2009 09:51am Linda Grist Cunningham

The RiverHawks, our local, professional baseball team, are good for the community. So is Target, Macy’s and Beef-a-Roo.

So, too, the Park District and the Forest Preserve. Ditto Amcore, Alpine Bank and Anderson Automotive. Same for Hamilton Sundstrand, the police and firefighters, Woodward and, darn it, the Rockford Register Star. And, OK, yeah, government is good for the community, too; well, most of the time anyway.

Do you see a trend here? If not, let me clarify: Businesses and government that create jobs, support quality lifestyles, get work done or save lives are, well, good for the community.  It takes a village, so to speak.

We all bring something to the table, so let’s not argue about who is the most important. These days there’s scant food to be shared. Learning to do more, much more, with much less is not a cliche. It’s today’s way of life.

I am annoyed, though not particularly surprised, this week at the attempts by the Winnebago County Board chair and others to extort the Rockford School District: Pay us, said the county, to keep our workers employed so that you (the school district) will get your property tax revenues on time. Then, there was the attempt by the RiverHawks to get its tax bite reduced by warning that if taxing bodies didn’t lighten up on them, there’d be no baseball.

Chair Scott Christiansen, apparently irritated by the lack of support for his plan from the Register Star, tried to tell us that it was just like the city and the school district sharing costs for a truancy reduction program. Lands, Scott, most of the time I respect your creative and smart approaches to problems, but that’s just nutty desperation.

At least Rockford Mayor Morrissey had the good grace to say his own ultimatum City Council was just that: raise the garbage fees $3 a month or layoff more than 30 more city employees. And, when some City Council members went all wiggy about being “threatened,” surely they were just being disingenuous? You have to have to be clueless not to know government finances everywhere are half a step from the bankruptcy cliff.

If it weren’t so serious, if so much were not at stake, it would be fun to watch elected officials and public employees try to increase productivity, improve quality performance, improve customer service, streamline operations and cut expenses — all at the same time. Private businesses have been at that for the past20 years.

So, where do the RiverHawks fit in this? Gotta love ‘em for trying. Private business asking for a government handout. I guess they saw everyone else getting in line and figured they might as well queue up, too.

Welcome, guys, to the “government ought to be run like a business” world. You better get over that learning curve fast.

Anonymous comments or registered for real

5 comments October 6th, 2009 09:20pm Linda Grist Cunningham

We’re doing — unintentionally — an experiment here in the News Tower: Does requiring full online registration put the kibosh on comments and what we call “community conversation”?

Nope. If anything, the quality of the comments and the civility of the conversation goes way up. We didn’t set out to experiment; it was an unintended consequence of how we manage the status update posts (aka social networking) on our RockfordWoman.com Web site.

Comments on rrstar.com can be posted anonymously. All you need is an active e-mail account and a screen name. You can call yourself John Smith or “goofer” and post away as long as you stay just this side of overtly offensive.

On RockfordWoman.com, you can’t post a “hello” without fully identifying yourself.  You can’t read anything except the original posts without full identification. You can’t post a response. If you want to be part of the RockfordWoman.com site, you’ll share name, addresses, phone numbers, e-mail addresses and assorted other identification — and even after all that, you’ll hear from us directly confirming who you are. If you pass all that, you must post with your real name.

The full registration annoys the heck out of some rrstar.com anonymous posters. They’re irritable because they can’t post comments and we have severely restricted access to the site — unless they register. (I get angry e-mails about how I am censoring their free speech, etc.)

There is no anonymity on RockfordWoman.com. So, did all that Draconian registration scare folks away? Quite the contrary. There are more than 600 registered users of the site and the number grows steadily.  The number of anonymous posters who load up the story comments can be counted on a handful of fingers and toes.

RW users post regularly, comment on their lives and share information. The conversation is civil, civic, supportive, smart and frequently important.  Coming to RockfordWoman.com is like walking into someone’s welcoming, safe kitchen or office, kicking off your shoes and talking over the news of the day with friends.

Dropping in on story comments at rrstar.com is, well, not like that. So, will I finally make the decision to require full registration at rrstar.com? I don’t have the technology to do it. But, when I do? Yep, full registration. I’m just tired of the anonymous posts.

Rein it in, guys

1 comment September 30th, 2009 08:55am Linda Grist Cunningham

There’s nothing like an old-fashioned political dustup to juice the word wars. The better one’s word skills, the more likely those perfectly crafted words become the ones real people remember — even if they’ve no idea what’s behind them.
Consider these from the national archives: “Evil empire.” “Nattering nabobs of negativism.” “Death panels.” “Ask not what… (surely, you know the rest?).

And, these from the current local archives: “Warrior cops.” “…This mayor is a threat … somebody should start … impeachment proceedings.” OK, so the last one is a bit clunky, but it’s a yet another in a round of salvos between the city and the two unions represeting the firefighters and the police.

There are those who believe this explosive war of words is nothing more than posturing while the city and the unions move apace on contract negotiations behind closed doors. This may well be the case, but the word wars polarize the community and do nothing to reach solution.

I love words. Always have. I make my living with words. The thrill of satisfaction we word folks get from that perfectly crafted phrase is unimaginable to those for whom words are utilitarian tools to order a burger, explain a budget shortfall or cuddle a loved one.

The unions and city spokesmen need to turn down the volume and get back to the table. All this outrageous swaggering does nothing to get uswhere we need to go.

Two things are indisputable: The city’s revenue stream (that’s we taxpayers) has dried up, and the unions are in a to-the-death fight to keep what they’ve got. Bridging that chasm will take every compromising, collaborating, smart-thinking, forward-pushing brain cell.

Let’s not waste precious time nattering. Rein it in, guys. Get back to the table now, please.

Sit up straight, please

5 comments September 18th, 2009 10:27am Linda Grist Cunningham

Let’s start with the obvious: Body language can be a screamer. We watch what others say with their hands, with the way they hold their heads, the way they sit in a chair.

No one misunderstands the difference between a listener who sits up straight, leans forward a bit and makes interested eye contact — and the one who slumps in his seat, arms and legs akimbo with a smirk on his face. First one? Respectful. Second one? Disrespectful.

We had seven guests at our Thursday Editorial Board meeting. Each of the seven had been invited to talk with the board about the proposed “cap-and-trade” legislation in Congress. The format was similar to a simple debate, each side presenting timed information with responses from the two “sides” and then questions from the Editorial Board.

I learned a lot about cap-and-trade, about the contentious issues underlying the legislation. I am grateful to the seven for taking almost two hours to help us wade through the complicated legislation. We will continue to research before we take an editorial position.

That said, there was one lasting and disturbing impression: About halfway through the 90-minute meeting, one of the seven apparently decided it was OK to disrupt other speakers by slumping and wiggling in his chair, huffing and puffing, rolling his eyes and wiggling his hands and feet. This from a 60-ish man in a suit with an important job and a big title and a strong message to make.

His actions were those of a recalcitrant teenager. They were disrespectful, embarrassing and shocking. And they were deliberate. He stopped just short of behavior that would have made me ask him to stop. And, he knew that, too, because he’d do something, then look to see if I were watching.

Childish.