My Sunday Feeling

During the pre-vaccine days of the pandemic,  I could count on one hand the number of folks I knew at the time had COVID.  It turns out there were more.  But I didn’t know many at the time.  Now I know all kinds of people that have had it.  Both of my brothers have gotten it.  Bob, a nurse practitioner who works on the respiratory floor at a local hospital, was the last on his unit to get it.  He has no explanation for why he held out so long.  Unfortunately he gave it to his wife.  Any of a number of my teacher buddies have had it.  My cousin and her husband, along with Aunt Marlene. My young friend Nathan with whom I am privileged to act as a mentor at the law school (and in my case it really is “acting”) got it twice.  

Most folks reported that it was not much worse than your average cold or flu.  Like the flu, it’s nothing you want to get. But unlike the grim reality of 2-3 years ago you are less likely to wind up on a vent assuming that you have had the sense to be vaccinated.  As were the folks described hereinabove.  

Anyway, our luck ran out over here last Saturday when the Deacon tested positive.  She had retired to the den earlier that morning with what she thought was a stomach bug.  She had sensibly banned both Joe and me from that space when she thought all she had was a bug.  That’s probably what saved us as she didn’t have no bug.  Naturally she couldn’t get through to her doctor on the phone.  So Bob put her on musinex, Zyrtec and Tylenol. “She’ll power through this,” he said. 

So for 3 days or so Joe came down to the kitchen though the guest room.  I took her rations and fluids just as far as the coffee table while wearing a mask.  She was sick as a dog for 36 hours or so.  Fever, muscle aches, coughing.  Her skin color, usually like unto a perpetual tan, was ghastly. Her voice was reduced to a squeak.

I called Bob about day 2 to report what I viewed as alarming symptoms.  “Sounds pretty typical,” he said. “She’ll be fine.”

“What about antivirals?”

“Eh. Besides its probably too late. She’ll be fine.”

And by day 4 she was much better.  And last Thursday she went back to work.

Bob was right for once.

Amazing.  The scourge of this earth two years ago, “the worst public health crisis of my career” according to my PCP who called me in at the start of the pandemic to give me a years worth of prescriptions and to teach me breathing exercises, had finally found our house.  And, amazingly enough, did not find me.  He Who Catches Everything.  Me or Joe.  At least not yet. Knock on wood.

I’m not going to credit entirely the Deacon’s vegan diet for her return to the living.  But it didn’t hurt any.  I credit her generally modest and healthy ways.  That and she doesn’t smoke. 

Most importantly, and not to beat a recumbent equine mammal, she had the sense to get vaxxed up and remain up to date on the boosters.  That’s why I’m not typing this from Baptist Medical Center.  It’s mostly why Joe and I didn’t get it.  That and we stayed away from each other for a good 4 days.  The former scourge of this earth has been rendered manageable for most people.  Thank God for medical science.  I’m referring to real science.  Not Facebook science or science as practiced by Jim Bakker.   

But I’m gonna have to disagree with the noted epidemiologist Joe Biden.  COVID is still a thing.  A treatable and preventable thing.  But a thing.  What was he thinking?  

So it’s back to masks in public for me.  No more handshakes.  Gonna take the flu shot next week and the latest COVID booster next month. I’ll still have a cigar maybe once every 6 months.  I figure the smoke will keep the germs away.  Makes as much sense as reposing trust in ivermectin and tonic water.

We are lucky.  The Deacon was spared.

And I don’t take it for granted either.

  

  

     

  

My Sunday Feeling

  

Last Friday was the first meeting with the 1st year law students assigned to me or “1Ls” which is the term made popular by the biographical novel Paper Chase.  I have been a mentor over at the local law school for 6-7 years I guess.  Maybe longer.  I forget.  A young lawyer named Nathan and I are partnering up again this year to inflict ourselves on these poor bastards (I refuse to use the word “mentees”) for another school year.

I don’t know much.  But I know I’m glad that I’m not in law school.  If there is a more grueling, dehumanizing and demoralizing experience than the first semester of law school, I don’t know what it is.  Telemarketing annuities comes to mind.  Perhaps you have your own thoughts.  

The first semester of law school they are learning a new language while getting impaled in class by the Socratic method of teaching the law.  They are competing against one another for the privilege of making it to second semester, which means some of them will go deeper into debt, which doesn’t exactly help the anxiety level a damn bit.   And in three years they get to experience the exhausting terror of sitting for the Bar exam and then enter into a terrible job market.  Did I mention Continuing Legal Education?  They will have 10-12 hours of that uselessness to look forward to each year.  I forget exactly how many hours.  I am now exempt since I have-God help me-held a license to practice law for 40 years.  Which is one of the few comforts of old age I have experienced thus far.  

Further there is this.  As my buddy Don says, with considerable understatement, law school does not do a very good job of weeding out jerks.  Tulane sure wasn’t very good in this regard.  He and I can readily name 5 or 6 guys off the top of our heads-and they are all men-who were lousy excuses for human beings back then and most likely never changed.  As one of my favorite former students, a fast rising M and A type named Katie (who had the good sense to never listen to me) once said of 1st semester law school “It’s like being back in kindergarten but with sociopaths.

And not to flog the recumbent horse, some of them are going into debt to finance this amusement.  

So what do Nathan and I do?  Not much to tell you the truth.  The law school has a script for us to follow as we progress through the forced march of 1st year law school.  Which we mostly follow.  But mainly we try to be there for them.  To listen.  To reassure them that all sickness is not death.  That they will get through it.  

As I said in a speech I was foolishly invited to give at the awards banquet last spring, “I’m just the kill switch.  I cut off the juice before something blows up.” I can’t speak for Nathan but I think he would pretty much agree with that job description.  Pearls of wisdom they do not require.  2 guys that have been there before they do.  2 guys that are always available that is.  And know when to throw the kill switch.

So we start another semester.  Face to face for the first time in 2 years.  Standing in front of these bright young folks last Friday I was reminded how hard-harder than hard-the last two years have been.  I don’t know how we did it.  But we got through it.  

And so will the Class of 26.  

Wish us all luck.  

BTW I want to apologize for the weird font.  Blogger wouldn’t let me change it to Arial for some damn reason.  Go figure.

    

My Sunday Feeling

 I had to take out student loans for law school and to finish up at Hendrix.  My father died a week before Christmas during my senior year.  My brother Dave was a year behind me in college at the time and Mother had 2 more in the home.  Buck had life and mortgage insurance so she didn’t have to return to the workforce immediately.  But she couldn’t pay the horse-choking tuition bill for law school.  

So, I took out loans from the Guaranteed Student Loan Program and the Methodist Student Scholarship and Loan program.  And so three years later off I went into the world of work with $30,000 or so on my back.  Which was a not insignificant amount of money in 1981.  But you know what?  I paid them all back.  True, I got some help along the way. I did work study at Hendrix and at Tulane.  The law firm I clerked for back home sent me stuff to research from time to time.  Mother paid the rent for the flophouse I lived in.  And since I was a Legal Services type in my first job, I was allowed to pay interest only for a year.  Which really came in handy.  

Anyway, I paid them all off.  Every penny.  But those payments, taken off the top as stuff like the rent and the car note that had to be paid first kept me out of the housing market when I moved back to Little Rock.  In retrospect, that wasn’t such bad thing.  I distinctly recall my friends that were first time home owners back then bragging about locking in at 15% which is damn near a loan shark rate given the present market.  And I came out with a good credit rating especially when you consider the default rate on student loans even back then.  That was never an option for me as I spent the bulk of my career as a debt collection lawyer for a Federal agency.  That sort of fiscal indiscretion would not have been looked upon favorably during my annual Ethics in Government.  

Besides, if I stiffed the Methodists I would go to Hell.  Which, depending on who you’re talking to, and what Bible he or she reads, observes no statute of limitations for payback.

And so the question that has been put to me is whether I resent the fact that certain folks will be eligible for up to $20,000 in student loan debt forgiveness under President Biden’s proposal.  My answer is simple.

No.

I figured the government eventually would have to do something along these lines.  Last time I looked there was a trillion dollars of student debt floating around out there.  If you think anywhere near that is going to be repaid you are nuts.

Sure, I would have liked to have my debt written off.  But I didn’t.  And that issue is water way far under the bridge at this stage.  So I don’t resent it a bit.

But boy, some of our politicians, sure want me to.  Like the always-good-for-a-laugh Congresswoman from Georgia Marjorie Taylor Green who said, and I quote, “For our government to say  “OK, well your debt is completely forgiven’ it’s completely forgiven’ is completely unfair.”

First of all if a particular student’s debt is under $20,000 then, yeah, it would be completely forgiven.  They are still on the hook for any balance over that.  Secondly, she has got a lot of nerve to pop off about this proposal seeing as how her PPP loans were forgiven to the tune of $188,504.  And her Sovereign Liege, the sticky fingered collector of documents he should not have in his possession, has sent entities he had interests in to Bankruptcy Court 6 times.  Further, he has a well deserved reputation for stiffing people on top of that.  It is hoped, for their sake, that the armada of lawyers he has toiling on his behalf in multiple venues got it up front.  

Facts are troublesome things, Marge.

Look.  To make a morality play out of a commercial transaction-albeit a crazy commercial transaction-is just plain stupid.  Subsumed in every contract is the right to breach.  The question remaining is what are the consequences that flow from that breach.  Not whether the debtor goes to Methodist or Baptist Hell for doing so or gets locked up.

Neither is it immoral or unfair to those that are current on their payments for the government to write off debt.  It does it every day.  I know.  I approved it in certain cases if the facts warranted it. Just as somebody at the Treasury wrote off Congressman Taylor’s debt.  She obviously qualified under the rules of the program and took advantage of it.  Am I supposed to resent that too?

Actually, my biggest problem with the recent proposals by the administration is that it didn’t address what I perceive to the two biggest problems in the Student Loan program off the top of my head from whence most of my notions originate.

1)  A student loan debt is the only one that I am aware of that cannot be negotiated down or Discharged in Bankruptcy. Well, you can get a Discharge if you can prove “undue hardship’ which Congress has yet to define or that you are dead, which has a generally agreed upon definition.

2) There are too many lousy post-secondary institutions of “education” that convey completely worthless degrees to those that actually fulfill the course of study at these diploma mills.  I’m talking primarily about “for profit” schools that primarily exist on the Internet to sponge off the Student Loan Program and VA student loans.  The government needs to either kick them off the program or tighten up the eligibility rates based on retention and job acquisition.  And, to be fair, I can think of think of a couple of “traditional” State schools here in Arkansas that would literally cease to exist but for the various student loan programs out there.

I suppose I could go on and on about higher education in this country but I’ve made my main point.

Again, do I resent the fact that current student loan debtors are getting a writeoff and I didn’t?

Of course not.  I could not have gone to school without taking on student loan debt.  I paid the damn things back.  I’ve had a nice career during which I paid back in taxes exponentially more than the loans I took out  It all worked out pretty good for me.

What’s there to resent?