Thoughts on Death – A New Beginning

So, as noted on my Facebook post last night, I learned of the passing of my old college roommate and friend Jeffrey Soderberg yesterday morning.  I will not repeat all of that post here, except to say this is a man that was full of life; life in abundance, and I am glad to have known him.

This morning however, I have been mulling over the meaning of death for me both emotionally and spiritually and I feel the need to script it out to have a way to share some of this inward dialogue outwardly, especially for those that know me and wonder what goes on in that calcium chamber between my ears.

Let me begin with my first dramatic encounter with death.  When I was young, my parents, before I was aware, had adopted from my Aunt Carla and Uncle Bob in Bridgeport a male pet dog named Brandy.  From my own experience, I can say every boy ought to grow up with a dog (not trying to be gender exclusive, I just cannot speak to the other side).  Being the older brother, Brandy was often my playmate and run-around mate, at least as early as I remember, until my little brother was able to be a running buddy as well (Donald, born 3 years and 6 hours apart, thus sharing the same birthday, talk about superior family planning).  Well, after a time, this not so young dog ended up having some health issues, to the point that he burst a blood vessel in his ear.  My parents, after having paid for one surgery on the ear to correct the problem, were not in a position financially to do a second (Dad being a full time Industrial Arts teacher and summer/spare time contractor, and Mom being a stay at home mother, who worked for the teachers union part-time once we both were in school).  Thus, they opted to put Brandy down.  Timing, however, could not have been worse, as it was the day or two before my (our) Birthday; what a present.  Needless to say, I was a wreck, I remember bellowing and crying for a long while.  I was angry with my parents, blamed God for this, and thought that if I had only been able to be there I could have worked a miracle (being the son of a modern day carpenter, albeit not Jewish, did occasionally give me illusions of grandeur).

Once I had this torrent of emotion subside, I do not recall how I came around.  I do recall the sullen celebration of my (our) Birthday that year and I do remember that not too long after this (a year or so, if I recall correctly), my Great-Grandmother Backus passed on, causing much family in-fighting, which seems how the Backus’ best celebrate the passing of the family matriarch.  But I do know that this is the last time that I became emotionally wrought with the pain of loss to the point of having tears flow in rivers.  Something in me changed, and I think it really had to do with my outlook on death, that it wasn’t the end, and I needed to get on past my selfishness regarding holding onto a tangible notion of life.  Many of my spiritual and emotional growth points, I owe to maxims taught to me by my mother.  For those that don’t know her, she is an intelligent woman, with a large heart, one that sometimes gets her in trouble.  However, she also is a woman of faith, in its core a simple faith, informed well by being a Lutheran Christian, but really more universal than that.  She will tell you plainly, “God is love;” not even contextualizing that this comes as a direct quotation from John’s letters.  In this case, she really believes that everyone goes to heaven, and from there, they that pass, are active in our lives speaking to us and guiding us.  Again, this is not a nuanced or systematic statement of believe, but more of a heartfelt purposely naive maxim of truth for her, and one she passed to me (I will refrain here from going further in my current reflections on this, but see more on this at the end of this post).  But this leads me to the next death experience that has gotten me where I am.

Some years later, when I was in High School, another family death occurred that called us to Long Island, NY for a gathering of the Seaberg clan, my mother’s side of the family.  My Uncle Alan Seaberg had passed on at an age much younger than most would call standard, and being a contemporary (10 or so years older, but no more I think) of my parents, it was oft said that he had gone too early.  This is memorable to me for a lot of reasons.

Alan was a very wealthy self-made man.  His wife, my Aunt Martha, and he had built up the family business from what had been a small immigrant machinery company, to a firm that was building machines and components to feed the growing factories in Japan, China, and throughout the world.  Alan was actually my Mom’s first cousin, being the son of her father’s brother.  Both my Mom and he were first generation Americans, being that my grandparents and siblings all had emigrated from Sweden in the 1920s to the 1940s, seeking a better life for them and their eventual children.  My mother says that my grandfather Carl and his brother Victor worked to help build Holland Tunnel in NY, and were men of their hands.  Victor, Alan’s father, was a machinist, and it is for that reason that the Seaberg Precision Corp, machine company was to be, what it became.  All this history being good, it only begins to describe my Uncle.

Alan, even though he was a multi-millionaire (in a time before billionaires), didn’t carry himself as being one so much as I could tell.  Sure he had a big house in Middle Island, Long Island, NY, with an awesome pool, an old horse farm barn and track, a private pond on his property and lots of toys (adult (e.g a gun or two) and otherwise) to play with.  Nevertheless, he never held himself better than others, nor did he take care to pinch pennies, especially with family.  He had talented kids; one is now a professional musician and, another, an artist.  Moreover, he was a great cheerleader for whatever it was we were passionate about (I even recall him giving my Dad some sage advice about getting out there and expanding his business).  Therefore, when he passed in his late 40s, I can recall the outpouring of love to the family and for him that was shown.  But I also recall, that I never cried.

When he passed, albeit early by many measures, I reflected that his temporal work was done.  I am convinced that Alan was taken from us in bodily form, only because his earthly work was complete.  Not that his efforts were complete in the sense of being done and ready to ship out to the next customer, but that he, like my friend Jeff, had touched so many lives in such a way as to never truly die, instead God has called them home to do other work and to empower other actions.  I can tell you for my own part there is a specific portion of me that continues to emulate and follow in his footsteps.  As I indicated, he was a generous man, especially with family (trust me, his lobster barbeques are still recalled with much admiration).  To this end, while not being of his means, I give as generously as I can, to my church, and especially within the family.  Luckily, my wife is very much of the same mind, and we have had the privilege of being able to host her brothers here at our home in the DC area for large stretches of time, which I continue to see as a greater gift to us, than to them, in many ways.  This gets me to my next confrontations with death.

As can be told by the time spent on them, these two passings probably had the most impact on my life.  But I have had others that have taught me lessons that really extend beyond these primary experiences.  One was the passing of my grandmother Harriet Hall (formerly Backus).  Born in the Depression era, having lost her first husband, my natural grandfather (when my Dad was a pre-teen), she raised two boys, became a known local English and French teacher (so much so that my HS Junior year English teacher came to her funeral and recalled to me how much she had learned and tried to pass on from her) and Librarian, and eventually remarried a gentle, honest man, Stuart Hall.  Having survived both of her husbands, she eventually suffered a stroke that slowly sapped the life out of her.  My father, being the primary actor in her later years, carried the immense stress of not just dealing with her various legal and financial matters but coalescing things to the point of a decision that her time was done.  As she passed and understood all that was going on (her mind was keen, even if weakened by the strokes), it was in her rest that we saw again that gleam that was a hard fought life.  So I learned in this that life isn’t simply breathing, and having a heart pumping physiologically, it is a spark, an essence, a soul that carries us forward; one that we should be very careful about trapping in the confines of the corporeal for our own selfish reasons.

Another, nugget came from the death of a student at Clarkson University in my senior year.  This student, Remmi, had succumbed to alcohol poisoning and passed on at a very young age.  I had only known him in passing, but knew of him in the sense that he was active in the social scene that was in Potsdam, NY.  While there are several facets I can discuss about this situation that can lead to a stigmatized conversation, I believe the lesson that I learned here, is that death can spur action and cement convictions.  For me this incident, this loss of life, was one that fits into the “could have been prevented” column.  However, in the larger sense, while perhaps true, his death has had life now as we contend with the issues that surrounded his passing and determine a path forward to address those issues in our society.  Again, for me, God has a reason for how things happen; this isn’t pure pessimism that we can’t control our own destiny, but it does say that we are given the tools, abilities, and concepts to grapple with this world, and that, in death, we continue to be an active part of that grappling.

Finally, I cannot forget to cite my near death experiences and their effect on how I see the end of corporeal life.  As can be seen from the outset, I am a soldier, and I identify with that profession as much as I do of being an engineer.  Having had two combat tours to Iraq, I have had my brushes with my own mortality.  Sometimes (like the first instance) someone had to tell me we were shot at, and then deal with the possibility, other times (like when Paul Drezen pulled me to the ground during one artillery attack) it was utterly clear.  During the first year of the war, while phone privileges were limited, I made a point of calling Jackie, my wife, before I would “drive across town” (a.k.a. convoy across Baghdad and its environs) to let her know I was alive, and try to call her as soon as I got back (having done several dozen such missions, this wasn’t always possible).  My combat experience has taught me several things about death in this light.

First, we should not try to go out and get ourselves killed, but the randomness of violence in war, makes this possibility very real.  Thus, I am not about to hide on the FOB (Forward Operating Base, as those on my second tour can attest) because we cannot possibly win the war from the FOB (we have to engage with the population and grapple with the enemy), but I am also not going to just jump at the chance to run out and commit suicide.  While I know there is a providential nature to death, and life goes on well beyond the grave, we have a responsibility to do the work we are called to do, through the hazards taking the precautions that are reasonable to the task.

Second, we should assure that we have a plan so that the temporal nature of things does not become the burden for those around us in our passing.  The Army has taught me to have a battle book for the spouse when I leave, and we do that.  She has all of the key info, so if the worst happens, she knows how to contend with the legal, financial, and other aspects, and there is plenty there to do what needs to be done (and even if she can’t, there is a tool that can help another do it with/for her).

Lastly, we need to get our priorities straight in life.  Once you have had these kinds of experiences, certain things in life change.  Somehow, the excitement over inconsequential minutia fades into nothing, and the desire to spend time with loved ones and engage in passions that you have become more critical.  Answering one last email becomes so less important than being there for your wife’s surgery from beginning to end.  Stress and how you deal with it changes, and I know that your reliance on others, and especially something greater than yourself, becomes critically important.  This all enables you to see death in a very different light.

Closing out, I want to get back to the maxims that my Mom spoke, less in wisdom and more in blind faith, as a child.  “Everyone goes to heaven.”  Again, this is simple and profound.  As I have grown and experienced, the more and more I get back to this myself.  Years of study of church theology, especially Lutheran and Catholic fathers, as well as the Bible, reveals a dividing line between the damned and the saved, but this line is as fuzzy as it is defined.  The truth that all are saved who believe in Christ Jesus, and his is the only road, is not to be denied by me, as this is my belief.  Nevertheless, what is Christ Jesus and further what “belief in” means, these are ageless questions.  A fellow soldier once described God as if he were a full sized statue in a rotunda.  From each angle, you get a different view, yet not complete and yet still the same God.  Therefore, for Christians, God looks like a Jewish carpenter from Nazareth, for Muslims he is Allah, for Buddhists he is enlightenment, yet the same statue.  I am not one to say relativism is right, and I am not trying to contend that there are not real differences between faiths, but there are kernels of universal faith that exist throughout (e.g. as St. Paul says, “[t]hat piece of Christ that passes all understanding …”), and thus, “everyone goes to heaven” isn’t entirely without theological basis.  Another: “God is love.”  Not being a Christian Scientist, but having two adoptive grandparents who were, I am highly appreciative of Mary Baker Eddy’s exploration of the love chapter in Corinthians.  She takes the word “Love” in this chapter, and replaces it with “Faith”, and then “Hope” and then, finally “God” (e.g. God is patient, God is kind, …).  While on a whole of scripture perspective this beautiful rendition of this favorite chapter cannot be taken literally in every aspect (e.g. “God does not anger, …” would be refuted in the Old Testament through such examples of his anger with Moses or with Abraham), it does reveal something about the divine.  It says that you can bank on “God is love,” as being your cornerstone.  He is one with creation, and therefore creation is love.  He is one with our hearts, thus we are loved.  He is the great parent, and he loves us in the same way.  And if you take that beyond the temporal example, we recognize that a God that loves, loves us so much that we can die and yet live.  When someone dies, it is my love for him or her that continues forever to speak to me.  So in reflection, part of me continues to believe that death is not the end, mainly because how can my love ever end?

As Jeff is the latest person to be called home that I know, I again am not saddened as much as resolute.  I know he has done his work, it is not how I would have thought his life would have ended, but I know it was not without meaning.  I am not sure what I will take away from this experience, but I am convinced it is not the end, but another beginning, one that will not end, at least in the way we can comprehend.

Thoughts on Economic Growth

I meant to post this earlier this week, but didn’t get to it until today.  Earlier this week, James Stewart, a fellow member of Omega Lambda Tau Social Society (a co-ed Greek organization that I helped found at Clarkson University) shot out a note about Warren buffets recent opinion piece on “Coddling the Rich”.  James is an unabashed conservative thinker, especially in regards to economics, and after my response to his tweet, he threw out the following:

“As a thought exercise, what policies would lead to a larger middle class while not increasing the number of poor or rich?”

My response follows, addressed to him directly, but I think worth sticking up here as a post.

Stew,

Thanks for the spelling help.  Good question and one I wish we would focus on.  Here are my suggestions, which are not all complete, but some are stabs that can help or concepts to start with that can be fleshed out:

1)      Lower the Corporate Income Tax rate to circa 15% or so, or at least drop it to a point that it makes it competitive with other major industrialized countries.  Rational:  We need to encourage business growth, within corporations not sidelining monies to offshore or other non-US locals, to keep investments domestic.  When tied with my other ideas, the concept is to not pay out dividends, but grow business and markets with the goal of increasing exports in the long term.

2)      Segment and split capital gains taxes.  For instance, I would increase capital gains taxes on payout of dividends, but drop or moderate them on the gains made on the trading of securities.  Likewise, I would lower the rate on real estate transactions, so that is becomes attractive to invest again in real estate.  Right now we are painting capital gains with a wide brush, and this needs to be looked at carefully.  The goals we need to have are to allow business to grow, but not pay out huge dividends to those that hold the securities and, rather, encourage them to reinvest in either that company or other emerging companies (thus expanding capital venture options).  Likewise, we need to jump start our real estate market by making it attractive to make gains that derive from that market.

3)      Alter the progressive tax code to add at least two more tiers at 500K and 1M, and cap the amount that can be offset by donations (and this shouldn’t be minute, but also not too large an amount (a.k.a. circa $250-500K)).  Individuals holding wealth does not breed more wealth, it stuffs it under the mattress.  The goal ought to be to discourage holding sizable personal income, but instead invest that money in businesses (see above) and look to derive gains from sources that spawn more wealth.  I support progressive personal income taxation, as there is a distinct opportunity benefit derived in this economy/this system from one being able to incorporate and “make it” based on your own merits with relatively limited interference/control by the government in your endeavor, and those that benefit the most have gained a disproportionate amount of that benefit.  This is antithetical in some circles, but I would also indicate that if we allow individual incomes (please make note I am not talking about corporations) to climb and concentrate in a few hands, in a near-fixed wealth environment/resource constrained world, then there will be less that have the means to buy the products and services that are produced, thus decaying the ability to generate wealth through the creation of said goods and services.  In other words, having a group to sell your goods to that has the means to buy them, enriches the seller, and, if reinvested, creates more buyers to sell to and further enrich.  This is not socialistic, it is precisely why and how Henry Ford was successful.  He made a car that his line worker could afford and paid wages to them that enabled them to pay for the cars made, building a working class, enriching Ford Motors, and, honestly, having a drastic effect on the macro-economy as a result.

4)      Preserve the home mortgage interest deduction for your primary residence and up to one other property.  The value of this deduction, however, would have to modulated and caped at the median rate of the cost of homes in the geographic area you live in.  Ergo, if you have a house at medium value for the area you live in, you get the full deduction for the interest payed.  If however, your home is 25% above that median value, then your deduction is on the interest paid is reduced by 25% (so a house at double the value of the median price in that market would not get a deduction on the interest paid).  Simply this allows a double investment in real estate, to help spur that market, but controls the market from over building, especially at the high-end, by keeping housing values somewhat homogenous as the value of the benefit decreases.  This helps grow the middle by encouraging home ownership, but also not outpacing the growth in housing values with income.  The measure of assessed value would need to be looked at, but given that almost all jurisdictions do some sort of assessment, it could be the full value assessment of your local municipality as the basis.  Lastly, this helps elsewhere, by allowing a second deduction, to enable rental properties to be available and attractive, thus giving a stepping stone and method to buy-in.

5)      Remove targeted tax breaks unless they support investment in infrastructure or commercial competitiveness that is already in evidence and creates domestic jobs.  I support an infrastructure bank concept (e.g. tax outgoing transfers of capital from the country to enable the building of revenue to put into infrastructure here at home) and short term, up to a threshold, assistant breaks in federal taxation for specific technological or market innovations that employ people here at home.  Infrastructure is a sunk cost to doing all of our business and also enables the commerce to flow, thus we need to invest and reinvest, constantly, in improving and rebuilding the fundamental pathways to do this (e.g. ports, rail, roads, electrical systems, networks, water, energy flows, damns).  Ideally, spend on infrastructure so that it is truly sustainable, not just environmentally, but socially, economically, and from a protective perspective.  Critical to this would be to convert our oil based transit systems to some other domestically available fuel (gas and electric) by developing programs and incentives to build natural gas stations to enable natural gas cars to take off, for instance (e.g. the Pickens Plan).  We need to kill things like long term oil tax breaks, or farm subsidies like we have today, that result either in gluts in markets (depressing prices and reducing jobs), or that are not in our best interest, long term, to invest in (e.g. oil infrastructure).

6)      Address long-term entitlements, specifically Social Security.  There needs to be several things put in place:  a) Means testing that says if you are able to support yourself over a certain floor you will have scaled back benefits to a certain ceiling.  The floor should be set at a level that accommodates a median income level within the geographical area of the person in question as compare to an active worker, and the ceiling would have to be at some percentage (say 25%) above that level.  The essence of this is that we should not be paying out social security to those that are socially secure.  b) recalibrate the full benefit age (for the old age portion of the benefit) for anyone that was born after 1975 to be 5 years earlier than the life expectancy for them at their 40^th birthday, and partial benefits at 3 years prior to that.  I have mentioned this before elsewhere, but the point is social security was not intended to be your retirement income, and at the time of its original passing life expectancies were much lower than today.  The goal ought to be to allow for a reasonable time for folks to terminate work and enjoy the end of their life, and have social security in doing so, but allowing folks to get 10 or more years of benefits is well beyond the original scope, or what we ought or can afford.  c) remove the cap on payments into Social Security over so much in income (I am not certain as to what the exact number is, but I think its circa $120K).  This program is to ensure that we don’t have to pay for other social welfare programs for the elderly/disabled when they are unable to earn anything on their own to support themselves.  Thus what is happening is that essentially everyone in society is hedging against having to derive other methods of taking care of the elderly and disabled by ensuring they have enough minimal income in order to support themselves.  Paying in dollar for dollar, accordingly should apply for all income levels and ranges, and not be regressive in requiring the income earned below a level to be taxed fully and above the cap not at all.  This will help with the long-term solvency.

7)      I would delve into the medical realm, but I don’t have concrete solutions to these problems, but they are problems that need to be addressed.  The problem is we have a belief socially that healthcare ought not be about the ability to pay for it, but available when we need it as a response to fundamental human needs.  But we also believe that healthcare is a service that is provided in an economic market that shouldn’t be exempted from supply and demand factors merely because of our compassion (however, we don’t want to acknowledge the cost, either, of the clean-up of bodies from streets from those unable to get healthcare).  I don’t see healthcare as a right, personally, but many do.  Much of this is from seeing how the other half of the world operates.  Until we can deal with the fact that we can’t afford to keep everyone alive forever, and get past saving life vice saving the quality of a life, we won’t solve this easily.  But, this needs some answers, and I am not sure repealing the Healthcare Law helps, nor keeping it as it is.  One last point, and I mean this sincerely on this issue and that of Social Security.  Our generation needs to get on board with the idea that neither Social Security or Medicare may be around when we need them (mainly because the supposed fixes have already been mortgaged).  Thus we need to understand that while we are going to pay a boat load for these programs, what the programs really end up being is a way for us to facilitate paying for our parents to grow old and pass-on, which we would otherwise have to pay out of our pockets, anyhow.

8)      Rethink the wisdom of defined contribution programs for American retirements.  The going trend, for many years, has been to go from defined benefit (traditional pensions) to defined contribution (401k and 403b) programs for retirements.  The challenge with this, long term, centers on the question of, is it wise to have the vast majority of Americans retirement security based on the whims of the market (bond, stock, or otherwise)?  The discussion on social security above, presumes that, like today, the majority of Americans have some sort of nest egg available to draw on when they retire beyond Social Security.  Given that the stock market is speculative, the bond market depends on the faith and credit of the institution that is borrowing, and that commodities (especially futures) can be highly erratic, putting more and more individual investors into a market they poorly understand, as a way to secure their future, creates an unwieldy situation where there aren’t strong enough economic poles that can steer the private economy away from a titanic crash.  I would submit, that there ought to be a look at creating a mix of social security, defined benefit programs and defined contributions, such that the capital markets have better direction in making investments rather than simple speculation as to the potential value increase in this or that security (or bond, or what-have-you).  It gets back to ensuring that we have some market control mechanisms, where fundamental business value trumps market value in decision making.  I believe that the old pension fund managers did well in this, as they had to get constant returns rather than speculative returns over time, and hence, defined benefit plans, while somewhat over generous in some cases, brought market stability, ergo enabled middle class growth through companies that had fundamental value rather than market value, per se.

9)      Fix immigration policy and re-look minimum wage laws.  I personally believe we ought to liberalize our immigration laws in the sense that if you are here illegally, you have no protection in the form of a minimum wage.  Honestly, we need folks that are cheap labor to compete with China, India, and so forth.  The artificial floor of the minimum wage is great, but only in so much as it is applicable to those that are citizens.  And lets be honest, are we saying that citizens really are going to want to compete with those that are willing to work for less the minimum wage (why pick fruit in California when you can supervise a crew doing it)?  Part of building a middle class up and growing it appropriately, is to spur economic activity at income levels below the minimum wage, so as to have ways to get more in the market to buy goods and services.  In the initial plug, this will add more to the “poor” side.  But as labor costs drop, companies can sell products cheaper (and overseas more readily), they can invest in increasing the worker base to get more produced, and workers are able to have a path upward to climb into the middle class as more cheap labor enters the market place below them.  There needs to be some careful analysis done in order to control the cost of:  a) housing folks so they don’t become a burden elsewhere; b) providing worker protections to not burden them health wise and from a moral obligation to not subjugate them to hazardous working conditions; c) the cost of potential criminality and, d) how to address the transition from illegal to legal, with some corresponding penalties that actually are not merely punitive, but enable the borders to be secured to better control the flow.

10)  Step back from national standards in education, and develop a Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) educated pool.  Simply put, we need Clarkson grads and the like to get us going.  When we continue to churn out more English Lit and General Business Admin grads than Engineers and the like, we are going to loose our edge.  I suggest we create a program that gives States a pool of funds to get folks educated in STEM areas and provide start-up grants for entrepreneurs that come out of these pools to continue our innovation edge.  National testing and other prescriptive solutions in education hurt us, we need to be performance and outcomes based, and create incentives to not choose the easy History major over the harder Chemical Engineering degree.

11)  Repeal the 17^th Amendment.  By having state legislatures select Senators, it will modulate the federal government’s power to send unfunded and other mandates to the States, as well as provide stability to the federal legislature with regards to influences and lobbying (it would be at the state level, and actually make it more responsive to regional issues).  While seemingly un-democratic, this would actually take some of the power in Washington and deliver it to the States.  As it worked before, since Senators were sent by the legislators, they were not responsive, as much, to national lobbying efforts, because they were not beholden to popular support for their candidacy, thus didn’t need to spend as much to campaign (rather they had to curry favor with their state party reps in order to get sent to Washington).  As it is right now, the Federal Government runs roughshod on the States, and is only bound by the letter of the law, not the influence of vote.  States can then also have the power to better deal with local economic issues and be responsive to those needs with help from Washington instead of inapplicable mandates that cost States jobs.

12)  Pass a Line Item veto amendment to empower the President.  Likewise, repeal the current budget law and replace it with a budget law that budgets portions of the government for more than one year, while others are approved annually.  This way, budgets passed with deals for 10 years from now have to meet line item scrutiny and have to be lived with over several administrations.  It also forces us to live by our choices in the long and short term.  I really think that part of the government’s problem in its economic effect is that it is always planned a year out and everything is revisable.  This breeds instability, and consequently, minimizes investment in future efforts.

Again, these are ideas, and not necessarily fully fleshed out.  I think that each has merit, but each has consequences.  I tend towards Keynesian economic principles, but in the classical sense, not as described today (e.g. giving a tax break can spur economic activity, much as JFK did in the 60’s).  I also recognize what corporations and the private economy is critical to this, but I also think that government has a role to keep it within some bounds.  I think you can see here some ideas from both sides.

Yours,

Erik