Brent Nyitray
Fairlington Blade
Let the mutherfuker burn!
jnc4p
Kevin S. Willis
Michigoose
lmsinca
markinaustin
Arcanaut
novahockey
quarterback
ScottC
yellojktWhy They Fought
By DAVID BROOKS
Tuesday is the 150th anniversary of the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg. In his eloquent new account, “Gettysburg: the Last Invasion,” the historian Allen Guelzo describes the psychology of the fighters on that day.
A battlefield is “the lonesomest place which men share together,” a soldier once observed. At Gettysburg, the men were sometimes isolated within the rolling clouds of gun smoke and unnerved by what Guelzo calls “the weird harmonic ring of bullets striking fixed bayonets.” They were often terrified, of course, sometimes losing bladder and bowel control. (Aristophanes once called battle “the terrible one, the tough one, the one upon the legs.”)
But, as Guelzo notes, the Civil War was fought with “an amateurism of spirit and an innocence of intent, which would be touching if that same amateurism had not also contrived to make it so bloody.”
Discipline was loose. Civil War soldiers were not used to subordinating themselves within large organizations. One veteran observed that in battle “men standing in line got in paroxysms of laughter.” But many were motivated by the sense that they were living up to some high moral ideal. Words like “gallant,” “valor” and “chivalric” dot their descriptions of each other’s behavior. Upon being taken prisoner, one Union soldier shook his captors’ hands and congratulated them on the “most splendid charge of the war.”
Another officer remembered battle as a “supreme minute to you; you are in ecstasies.” A Union artillery officer confessed that throughout Gettysburg “somehow or other I felt a joyous exaltation, a perfect indifference to circumstances, through the whole of that three days’ fight, and I have seldom enjoyed three days more in my life.”
In our current era, as the saying goes, we take that which is lower to be more real. We generally believe that soldiers under the gritty harshness of war are not thinking about high ideals like gallantry. They are just trying to get through the day or protect their buddies. Since World War I, as Hemingway famously put it, abstract words like “honor” and “glory” and “courage” often seem obscene and pretentious. Studies of letters sent home by soldiers in World War II suggest that grand ideas were remote from their daily concerns.
But Civil War soldiers were different. In his 1997 book “For Cause and Comrades,” James M. McPherson looked at the private letters Civil War soldiers sent to their loved ones. As McPherson noted, they ring with “patriotism, ideology, concepts of duty, honor, manhood and community.”
The soldiers were intensely political. Newspapers were desperately sought after in camp. Between battles, several regiments held formal debates on subjects like the constitutional issues raised by the war. “Ideological motifs almost leap from many pages of these documents,” McPherson reports. “It is government against anarchy, law against disorder,” a Philadelphia printer wrote, explaining his desire to fight.
The letters were also explicitly moralistic. “The consciousness of duty was pervasive in Victorian America,” McPherson writes. The letters were studded with the language of personal honor, and, above all, a desire to sacrifice, as one soldier put it, “personal feelings and inclinations to … my duty in the hour of danger.”
One of the most famous letters was written not at Gettysburg but on July 14, 1861, on the eve of the First Battle of Bull Run. It was written by Sullivan Ballou, an officer from Rhode Island. Ballou had lost his own parents when he was young and, having known “the bitter fruit of orphanage myself,” he declared himself loath to die in battle and leave his small children fatherless.
“My love for you is deathless,” he wrote to his wife. “It seems to bind me to you with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break; yet my love of country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me irresistibly on with all these chains to the battlefield.”
It’s not just love of country that impels him, but a feeling of indebtedness to the past: “I know how strongly American Civilization now leans upon the triumph of the Government, and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and suffering of the Revolution. And I am willing — perfectly willing — to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain this Government, and to pay that debt.”
These letter writers, and many of the men at Gettysburg, were not just different than most of us today because their language was more high flown and earnest. There was probably also a greater covenantal consciousness, a belief that they were born in a state of indebtedness to an ongoing project, and they would inevitably be called upon to pay these debts, to come square with the country, even at the cost of their lives.
Makes today’s special interest politics look kind of pathetic.
Filed under: Open Thread | Tagged: Civil War |
All Things in Moderation 
A nice essay spoiled by a glib non sequitur coda.
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“Since World War I”
This strikes me as the true watershed between the old world and the modern one, even more so than World War II.
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This strikes me as the true watershed between the old world and the modern one, even more so than World War II.
Absolutely. Although the American Civil War with all its advances in armament was a pretty chilling prelude.
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I had trouble downloading the WSJ this weekend and so missed this interesting article on the imperial judiciary.
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Interesting polling numbers on SCOTUS. I suppose it makes sense to track polling numbers on SCOTUS given that it has become just another political branch of the fed govt.
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Mark Steyn on the DOMA decision, being his usual acerbically humorous self:
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I pointed out yesterday that July 1 was the anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of Gettysburg, but I failed to mention that yesterday was also the anniversary of the beginning of a different battle in US history. It was on July 1 in 1987 that Ted Kennedy, responding to the nomination of Robert Bork for a seat on SCOTUS, took to the Senate floor and, proving himself to be the complete scumbag that he was, lied through his teeth to the American people about Bork, beginning a battle that would end with the rejection of Bork’s nomination and a hyper-politicization of both the nomination process and the court itself that we live with to this very day.
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Mark Twain reveals that Sir Walter Scott with all his lofty pretension and purple prose was the person who started the Civil War.
Edit: Fixed the bad link.
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The DOMA legislators who were driven by their need to “harm” gay people include notorious homophobe Democrats Chuck Schumer, Pat Leahy, Harry Reid, Joe Biden, and the virulent anti-gay hater who signed it into law, Bill Clinton.
This sort of blather drives me nuts. DOMA was the watered down version of the Federal Marriage Amendment and as such was a triangulated half loaf designed to head off institutionalizing homophobia within the Constitution. It was craven and cynical and sold out their more liberal supporters but it was not the work of anti-gay bigots but of those who were trying to rein them in.
In its day Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was also seen as a partial victory for gay rights advocates even though it eventually came to be reviled as being anti-gay.
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yello:
DOMA was the watered down version of the Federal Marriage Amendment and as such was a triangulated half loaf designed to head off institutionalizing homophobia within the Constitution.
LOL. A classic attempt to absolve favored politicians of responsibility for the things they vote for.
Do you have any idea what kind of widespread political support it would take to “institutionalize” anti-gay bigotry and animus in the constitution via the amendment process? If what you say above is truly what motivated all those fine, upstanding non-bigoted liberals who voted for DOMA, I can think of no better confirmation of the caricature of liberals as morally preening, self-righteous elites who peer down with contempt on the ignorant masses in whose interests they so often proclaim themselves to be motivated.
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I can think of no better confirmation of the caricature of liberals as morally preening, self-righteous elites who peer down with contempt on the ignorant masses in whose interests they so often proclaim themselves to be so motivated.
Tough to argue with when you put it that way. You did notice I called them craven and cynical?
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yello:
You did notice I called them craven and cynical?
Sure, but I wasn’t referring just to “them”. I was talking about anyone who thinks passage of DOMA was somehow necessary to prevent an even more “homophobic” (and presumably even more morally reprehensible) constitutional amendment from being passed.
To reiterate, in order to think that such an amendment might come to pass, one has to believe first that two-thirds of both houses of congress would vote to send the amendment to the states. Which means that, given the 1996 makeup of congress, one has to believe that all Republicans in the Senate and House, plus at least 14 of 47 Democrats in the Senate and 90 of the 205 Dems/Indies in the House were morally backwards “homophobes”. Then one would have to believe that fully 75% of the state legislatures were comprised of at least a majority of popularly elected, morally backwards “homophobes”. That is a pretty low opinion of the moral underpinnings and motivations of a very large majority of your fellow citizens, making it clear to me that anyone who thinks such a thing must view themselves as being somehow uniquely enlightened relative to the vast majority of the rest of their fellow Americans.
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Ted Kennedy, responding to the nomination of Robert Bork for a seat on SCOTUS, took to the Senate floor and, proving himself to be the complete scumbag that he was, lied through his teeth to the American people about Bork,
Don’t hold back. Tell us how you really feel about Teddy who is now destroying the judiciary from the grave.
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Scott,
I assume this is the speech you were referring to:
By my count five of those six things have come to pass without Bork.
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yello:
By my count five of those six things have come to pass without Bork.
Your questionable accounting notwithstanding, that doesn’t turn them into truths about either Bork’s desires or his judicial rulings. This was a shameful performance even for the likes of Kennedy.
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Who wrote this?
By 1954, when Brown came up for decision, it had been apparent for some time that segregation rarely if ever produced equality. Quite aside from any question of psychology, the physical facilities provided for blacks were not as good as those provided for whites. That had been demonstrated in a long series of cases . . . The Court’s realistic choice, therefore, was either to abandon the quest for equality by allowing segregation or to forbid segregation in order to achieve equality. There was no third choice. Either choice would violate one aspect of the original understanding, but there was no possibility of avoiding that. Since equality and segregation were mutually inconsistent, though the ratifiers did not understand that, both could not be honored. When that is seen, it is obvious the Court must choose equality and prohibit state-imposed segregation. The purpose that brought the fourteenth amendment into being was equality before the law, and equality, not separation, was written into the law.
1] Antonin Scalia
2] Thurgood Marshall
3] Robert Bork
4] Ted Kennedy
5] Louis Powell
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MarK;
Who wrote this?
Bork, of course. Tempting was am interesting book, I thought, although I haven’t read it in a long time…probably worth re-reading.
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While we are doing quotations, who said this?
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What are my choices?
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What are my choices?
Same set as yours above.
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Early Ted?
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Pre-Roe Ted.
Here is some editorializing by the Catholic League:
Frankly, I find that kind of rhetoric unnecessarily graphic even if he did vote against the Partial Birth Abortion Ban.
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yello:
Frankly, I find that kind of rhetoric unnecessarily graphic…
This from the same guy who calls a marriage license a “fucking license”?
BTW, the purpose of posting the TK quotation was to show what a shameless and disingenuous hypocrite he was, raising the specter of back alley abortions with respect to Bork’s legal opinions on state’s rights while he himself had opposed legal abortion outright.
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I thought TK’s remarks were just blatant crap when he made them. I truly disliked TK, truth be told. But it was TK’s slur of Bork as a racist that got to me, in that tirade.
I did not like Bork because of his pro-trust views on anti-trust, that have now been adopted by the federal courts. Richard Posner, of the 7th, is a great Judge, but b/c he shares Bork’s pro-trust views in spades I never favored him for the Supremes, either.
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Mark, your post makes me wish Emily were here. She had so many letters that it would be interesting to get her take on all of it. I will say that from reading my Dad’s diary from WWII he was proud of what he was doing over there and flew an awful lot in support of Patton and his chasing the Germans back into Germany but he was also counting down the missions until he could come home. When he had the chance to pilot a plane in Korea he turned them down flat because of me.
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Lms, I thought of Emily as soon as I read the letters in Brooks’ column.
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the government can’t get all up in yo grill.
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The Money Shot.
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Scott:
Why the endless need to debate abortion?
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http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-02/health-law-employer-mandate-said-to-be-delayed-to-2015.html
Breaking. Aca employer mandated to be delayed. I’m not sure of the authority to do that. But here we are
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Good god almighty. There is no such thing as “80 percent born”.
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Still the definitive mid-life TK piece. He actually got better later (with Orin Hatch’s help).
“TED KENNEDY ON THE ROCKS
The once-strong voice of liberalism is now slurred, but the bibulous Kennedy boyo remains the life of the party”
GQ, February 1990
http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/200704/kennedy-ted-senator-profile
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That Ocare continues to amaze. I did not know the Executive branch could unilaterally suspend a law.
But Bush was the unitary executive?
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McWing:
I did not know the Executive branch could unilaterally suspend a law.
Welcome to rule by regulatory agency.
The implementation of Dodd/Frank, which but for Obamacare would be the worst piece of federal legislation in a generation (congrats Dems/Obama…an incompetent twofer) has been a true education for me. No one knows what the totality of the law is, or rather will be once Gensler and his unaccountable crew actually get around to deciding what the “rules” (ie law) will be. Quite literally not a day goes by that I do not receive an “no-action relief” e-mail from our lawyers telling us that the CFTC has decided to provide “relief” for some period of time from the enforcement of one of the thousands of idiotic and mindless rules cooked up by the CFTC in the absence of any thought about the difficulty or even impossibility of conforming to it.
The idea that we live under a rule of law passed and enforced by elected representatives is increasingly a myth.
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Oh my.
http://mobile.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/07/02/national-intelligence-director-apologizes-for-lying-to-congress
Luckily I’m not in Austin so I link this.
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George, the Facebook kid is in New Braunfels, as different from Austin as night from day. 48 mi wsw of Austin, 25 mi ene of SA. Republican. Law and Order. German small town with good BBQ. Wurzfest in October.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/07/03/198129617/teen-jailed-for-facebook-comment-reportedly-beat-up-behind-bars
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Obama is simply altering the deal. Pray he doesn’t alter it further.
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Ed Rogers sure looks prescient now:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2013/07/01/the-insiders-democrats-are-trying-to-suppress-the-confusion-and-hide-the-cost-of-obamacare/?tid=pm_pop
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Ezra on this:
“Obamacare’s employer mandate shouldn’t be delayed. It should be repealed.
By Ezra Klein, Published: July 2, 2013 at 7:44 pm
Delaying Obamacare’s employer mandate is the right thing to do. Frankly, eliminating it — or at least utterly overhauling it — is probably the right thing to do. But the administration executing a regulatory end-run around Congress is not the right way to do it.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/07/02/obamacares-employer-mandate-shouldnt-be-delayed-it-should-be-repealed/?hpid=z1
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Looks like obama put as much thought into obamacare as Ed Snowden put into his escape plan….
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Brent:
Looks like obama put as much thought into obamacare as Ed Snowden put into his escape plan….
In fairness to Obama, I’m not sure any amount of thought could have turned this debacle into something sensible. But I wonder, in his lengthy (snicker) career as a legislator, did he author any legislation of any complexity or consequence whatsoever?
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Brent – wait for it – BHO did not think up the ACA. Remember? Give credit and blame where it is due: Baucus + the insurance lobby for writing ACA. BHO signed it, approved it, but did not think it. Ds passed it over unified R resistance. If it fails, it is a D failure.
I am not apologizing for BHO. Just saying the joke makes a faulty parallel.
Ezra makes some of the points NoVA did about this provision and I think one other that I didn’t recall hearing before. It’s a good read.
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If ACA fails then a lot of us are f’d. I don’t really understand why postponing the mandate on 50+ businesses is a bad thing. Most of those businesses already offer benefits.
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Lulu, read Ezra’s article. It is not a bad thing that it is being ppd for a year. It is a bad precedent to refuse to enforce a law. As George wrote, we bitched about the unitary executive (since Nixon), especially when Cheney revived it with a vengeance, but that is what BHO is doing too.
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lms:
If ACA fails then a lot of us are f’d.
I’m not sure what would constitute failure, but even if it “works” as designed, it is going to do great damage to the fiscal well-being of the nation, cost lots of people at least some income and in many cases their jobs entirely, raise the cost of health care, be a drag on economic output, and eventually spawn new regulations that will diminish the quality of health care available to many if not most people.
In other words, a lot of us are f’ed regardless.
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Significant butthurt over at DailyKos.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/07/02/1220722/-Breaking-Obama-White-House-puts-Employer-Mandate-put-on-hold-until-2015#
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All I’m going to say is there is a difference between being f’d financially and being f’d as in life or death. I’m not in the mood tonight to debate the finer points…..sorry.
I’ll check back in Sunday……Happy 4th. y’all.
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” I don’t really understand why postponing the mandate on 50+ businesses is a bad thing.”
2014 Election. This is pure politics, not policy.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/07/02/the-politics-of-delaying-obamacare/?hpid=z1
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Mark/jnc (or anyone else who might know):
Are there any other examples besides DOMA of an attorney general refusing to defend a law duly enacted by congress and signed by the president?
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Mark, I read Ezra’s piece and pretty much agree. I thought this was interesting though.
the regulatory solution reflects the fact that the legislative process around the health-care law is completely broken. Republicans won’t pass any legislation that makes the law work better. Improving the law, they fear, will weaken the arguments for repeal. But Democrats, of course, won’t permit repeal. So Congress is at a standstill, with no viable process for reforming or repairing the Affordable Care Act as problems arise. And so the White House is acting on its own.
Big PARTY here manana and a beach trip Friday and Saturday. Have a good 4th everyone…………………see ‘ya on the other side.
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From Ezra:
the regulatory solution reflects the fact that the legislative process around the health-care law is completely broken.
It is funny…whenever liberals can’t pass the laws they want it means the legislative process is “broken”.
First of all, the regulatory “solution” reflects the fact that we are no longer governed by a legislative process, but rather by a regulatory process run by unelected bureaucrats. Second of all, Dems are now reaping what they sowed by passing such a complex and far-reaching law in the absence of bi-partisan support for it. The R’s have absolutely no political investment in ACA, and therefore have no incentive to help “fix” the myriad of problems the D’s didn’t consider when rushing this monstrosity through the system via reconciliation the way they did.
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The modest Justice Anthony Kennedy has put together a list of reading materials for young people under the heading “Understanding Freedom’s Heritage: How to Keep and Defend Liberty“. Among the many pieces he recommends: The Declaration of Independence by T. Jefferson, The Gettysburg Address by A. Lincoln, Their Finest Hour by W. Churchill, and…..Lawrence v Texas by A. Kennedy. (snicker)
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It’s cute that Ezra doesn’t consider a repeal of the employer mandate.
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I can’t wait to read the reg they push on this. should drop today or Friday.
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“Troll McWingnut or George, whichever, on July 3, 2013 at 7:19 am said:
It’s cute that Ezra doesn’t consider a repeal of the employer mandate.”
Yes he does. That’s what he flat out advocates for in his column and he’s been consistent on this since 2009.
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“Republicans won’t pass any legislation that makes the law work better. Improving the law, they fear, will weaken the arguments for repeal. But Democrats, of course, won’t permit repeal. ”
Swap Republicans and Democrats in this sentence and it perfectly describes their original political position on the sequester before the Democrats caved on the FAA.
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I’m so old I remember when Juicer said the Employwr Mandate was the key to Obamacare.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/07/cbo_gives_us_the_key_to_health.html
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Fair point, then apparently he contradicted himself.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/08/is_this_health-care_reforms_wo.html
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I smell a new Doc Fix.
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he was for it before he was against it.
if they were smart, which they are not, they’d go for repeal and replace with healthy american act.
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@ScottC: “I’m not sure what would constitute failure, but even if it “works” as designed, it is going to do great damage to the fiscal well-being of the nation”
I’m not sure how we define “works as designed”, as something can work as designed, yet have tertiary consequences unforeseen (at least, by those supporting it). The likely consequences of the ACA are going to be to limit as much healthcare as it provides, and to do as much to prevent the people who need healthcare from receiving it as it does to provide it to people who might not have otherwise gotten it previously. Something that was extremely expensive to the nation, yet created an environment where everybody was healthy and productive, might find the “fiscal damage” being offset by improvements in health and productivity, but it seems more likely to me that we’ll get some variation of the NHS, where every person served is offset by dozens of others lost in the bureaucracy, mishandled, and delayed. Not intentionally, but because it’s a big problem not easily resolved by governmental fiat.
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@ScottC: “It is funny…whenever liberals can’t pass the laws they want it means the legislative process is “broken”.”
Just as democracy has failed when conservatives and/or Republicans win. Of course, neither side feels great when they aren’t getting what they want out of the deal.
I do remember a Think Progress piece on “moving beyond democracy”, as it was clearly not serving the public interest, given all the Republicans it kept electing. 😉
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Here’s the biggest difference, though: Republicans elected since 2010 simply do not feel they need to answer to K Street,
http://m.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2532633
But Tea Partyer’s are bad.
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@MarkInAustin: “BHO did not think up the ACA. Remember? Give credit and blame where it is due: Baucus + the insurance lobby for writing ACA.”
And the ACA is reminiscent of the healthcare proposals a minority of Republicans offered in opposition to Clintoncare.
And keeping a proper perspective here is important. ACA may be a net negative in the long run (I tend to suspect, given the history of such programs, that it will be), but it is still much better and the consequences much less dire than what we’d be facing right now, had Clintoncare come to pass and, by some miracle, not been repealed or completely butchered by subsequent bills.
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Kev, there is much there I agree with. I remember pouring through Hillarycare and thinking WTF?
I wanted the Congress in 2009 to take up Wyden-Bennet, a 65 pp. bill that was comprehensible, if not quite comprehensive.
But I am not ready to give up on ACA. If the insured population expands to include many more young people the insurance part of the scheme can work to the advantage of everyone who was not free riding. IF comprehensive immigration reform passes we will get more young folks paying into the system, as well. The modest regulation of med insurance carriers and the exchanges can work, and some folks already got rebates.
As Ezra pointed out, there were two alternative employer provisions on the floor in 2009 that he favored to the employer mandate that passed and which will prove to be a continuing problem.
I consistently do not like the expansion of executive power. That is my objection to the one year delay of enforcement while the executive branch bargains with industry about the regs. Legit delays run 30-60-90 days, typically. A one year delay looks like a deal between NAM/USCoC/NASB and the Admin. Or alternatively, a political punt til after the midterms. Or both.
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Mark:
Legit delays run 30-60-90 days
Those are the kinds of delays that I was speaking of seeing on a daily basis yesterday re D/F.
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In the employment law area, we would regularly get a set of proposed regs that every employment lawyer I know on either side would comment upon. Flood of comments. Delay of reg.
I can only imagine what financial service industry lawyers are busy with re: D-F’s proposed regs.
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“simply do not feel they need to answer to K Street,”
those bastards.
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@markinaustin: “But I am not ready to give up on ACA. If the insured population expands to include many more young people the insurance part of the scheme can work to the advantage of everyone who was not free riding. ”
I hope you’re right. I think, if we absolutely had to go this direction (I’m not sure we did), then I’d vote for tinkering: expanding Medicare coverage to the unemployed, offering individual or corporate buy in, and just messing with medicare (single payer, right?) to grow coverage slowly. I understand the theory behind ACA, and I like much of what it aims to accomplish, not just in terms of coverage but in limiting what insurance companies can refuse to cover (often, the things a patient most needs coverage for) . . . it’s just that (a) those things will have to be paid for and (b) when the government mandates business people to do something that loses them money, they will usually find a way around it, and usually that way isn’t exactly beneficial to the consumer. So, I worry.
But, it’s what we’ve got, and if it can’t be repealed, then hopefully it will at least marginally work as advertised.
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I didn’t think we had to go in this direction either. And I would not have wanted single payer. There were a number of alternatives that made more sense to me.
I thought the Swiss model [private but regulated insurance and hopitals, private medical practices] could work for us. Imposing profit reg on the insurers was a step in that direction.
Regulating the insurers and hospitals as if they were utilities came to make more sense to me over time. Like TR, I think a regulated private business will do better than a publicly owned one and American telecom was the shining example of that. I only favor regulation in non-competitve markets and Scott’s arguments notwithstanding I think this is largely a non-competitive market.
I thought Wyden-Bennett was sensible tweaking.
I thought some proposed patent reforms on pharmaceuticals was sensible tweaking.
I thought we could much more cheaply deal with this on a national basis over time just by subsidizing health care education in return for clinic residencies for some period of time – in other words, by increasing supply and pressuring hospitals to run more efficiently to the standards of Mayo, say, and by staffing enough clinics to get all the poor out of the freaking ERs. Would have taken ten years to show results but it would have been cheap in comparison.
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BTW: I suppose I should update (for any interested): the mergers of the two school systems is complete, officially, for now. There’s still a lot of practical stuff to work out (I’m understanding we may end up with two badges to get in and out of buildings, as the systems aren’t exactly compatible), but we are merged, and I still have a job . . . though I no longer have an office, and I much preferred working out in the ex-urbs, instead of the middle of Detroit–I mean, Memphis. 😉
But, I am employed and insured, so . . . it’s all good. 300+ central office staffers didn’t get a position (fortunately, many of them were in a position to retire, and did so, so there isn’t much hardship). And working for a government entity can be a lot more attractive, even when getting laid off, than the private sector. Everybody here who has worked for more than a year gets some form of severance, up to six weeks for folks who have worked 10 years or longer. Which ain’t going to pay the bills forever, but is much better than I’ve ever seen anywhere else I worked, where getting laid off meant you were told to go home, and that was that.
First time I got laid off, I practically built the company I was working for and got bupkiss (including losing the money that had been put into a golden handcuff in my name, in lieu of pay, and some other stuff . . .), so that’s nice. These folks offer severance, pay for unused sick time, and job counseling. Fortunately, I didn’t need those things!
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Kevin:
Glad to hear you are still employed.
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I second Scott’s sentiment Kevin. I knew it would go your way. Congrats.
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+1 on your continuing gainful employment, Kevin.
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+2
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