My thoughts on health care reform.

Everybody else seems to be weighing in with their views on the health care situation, so I might was well also.

My personal health care plan is simple – don’t get sick. That has worked just fine so far. I workout, watch what I eat, and don’t do much hazardous activity. For 61 years and counting that has kept me out of hospitals and kept my health care costs to near zero. I have never filed a claim for health care and I pay for any doctor’s visits, which are few and far between, out of my pocket.

And it is a good thing because I have been self-employed my whole life. That means that I have never had an employer to pick-up the tab for my health insurance. To me being self-employed is worth the risk of not having employer paid insurance. For most people it is not. In fact, lack of health care is the biggest deterrent for not starting a new business and it is the biggest expense for existing businesses.

The United States is the only country in the world where health care is tied to a person’s employer. This situation makes it extremely hard to leave a job with good benefits. Existing conditions force many people to be slaves to a job they don’t like and stifles new businesses.

When I have traveled to other countries, I have been amazed at the number of small shops and businesses there are compared to the US. I eventually realized that running a small business is much less stressful when the entrepreneur doesn’t have to worry about health care or paying health benefits. Health care is the principle reason that locally owned businesses have trouble competing with national chains.

The US is number 37 in quality of health care according to the World Health Organization, yet we pay about 40% more than anybody else. (See YouTube) This is partly because we have unhealthy lifestyles, but also due to a host of other issues. We think that more health care is better health care, therefore we tend to have more tests and procedures than are necessary. Doctors frequently order more and more expensive tests to cover themselves in case of lawsuits which are regular, often frivolous, and always expensive.

When insurance companies try to limit procedures to cut costs, they are seen as the bad guys. In truth, in an ideal, or even slightly better situation, there would be no need for insurance companies at all. After all, they are one of the biggest players in the health care system and they add nothing at all to the system except control the flow of money.

A huge amount of health care dollars go to paper work. This is due to the myriad of insurance companies, health care organizations, and government agencies. A lot of the paper work is due to the pay-for-services system where every little thing is charged to somebody. If doctors were salaried instead of being paid for each item and procedure, billions of dollars would be saved.

Americans are afraid of their government and thus the term “socialized medicine” strikes fear. The truth is socialized medicine works better in at least 36 other countries, and virtually every industrialized country, than our convoluted system of independent doctors, lawyers, hospitals, pharmacy companies, and insurance companies.

I expect that most people are willing to pay a percent of their income for health care. It should make little difference if that money is in the form of taxes, insurance, or income that they don’t get because their employer is forking it over to the insurance company instead of their employees.

I am not optimistic. We have too many people making too much money, and too many organizations with vested interest in keeping things the way they are, for there to be any kind of real reform in the near future.

Taxes and Happiness

A few days ago I wrote about how angry Americans are. This sparked a discussion with a fellow writer about why this is and what surveys have been taken. I haven’t come across any surveys about anger, but there has been a lot written about the happiest nations. The USA is never mentioned in the top ten, though Canada comes in at number eight.

The happiest people are generally found in Denmark, followed with Switzerland, Austria, and the Scandinavian countries. As I was reading about the world’s happiest countries I came across another interesting statistic. The world’s highest taxes are generally in the same countries as the happiest people.

Denmark is the happiest and has the highest taxes. Sweden, Austria, Finland, and Luxemburg are all in the top ten happiest countries and are in the top ten highest tax list. This has to be more than a coincidence.

The United States is well below average in taxes paid, but is also well below normal on the happiest scale and may be one of the angriest nations in the world. Obviously, low taxes don’t make you happy and in fact, the evidence points to the opposite.

I am quite sure that people aren’t happy just because their taxes are high. Happiness come from things like good education, outstanding health care, good transportation, efficient government, and so forth. These things all cost money which come from taxes.

The next time you hear that someone is unhappy because their taxes are high, or that they don’t want to pay more taxes, think about the countries that provide good services to their people. Think about the Danes who are among the highest educated in the world and never have to worry about student loans because higher education is free. Or about the many countries that have high-quality free health care for everybody. The amount Americans pay to go to college and the huge chunk of many people’s paychecks that go to health insurance (and many people, myself included, don’t even have that option,) and it is easy to see that paying a little more in taxes and whole lot less other places, could be a pretty good deal.

A Wealth of Friends

If a measure of wealth is how many friends you have, and I believe it is, we are among the world’s richest people.

Saturday night we had a few friends over for a party. No special occasion, just a gathering of friends. Ninety people came. We live in a modest apartment in the ‘burbs, so the place was packed. We had no idea who or how many people would come, but we knew that we had a variety of friends and that the mix would be eclectic.

Sure enough we had musicians, artists, antique dealers, sales people, financial planners, doctors, and everything in between. Some came on motorcycles and some in mini-vans. It was a great time!

We realized how truly blessed we are to have a community of friends that care about us and are willing to stand around our cramped apartment and enjoy each other’s company.

I believe that life does not consist of what we own, but rather who we are and the relationships we have with others. Sometimes we need to just get everybody in the same room to confirm those relationships and remind ourselves of what is important.

Anger

The Kansas City Star today carried a front page story about anger. (http://www.kansascity.com/637/story/1395915.html) The story was primarily about health care reform, but the article suggested that Americans are just angry in general. In fact, we have always been angry about something. America was born out of anger toward the British Crown.

This came home to me again when I was in Europe recently, and I was reminded that not every place in the world is as angry as the US. I noticed it most when we were in England, but it is also apparent in the Scandinavian countries as well as other places. There is a peacefulness among people that doesn’t exist here. For reasons that I don’t understand, Americans are just always angry at something.

This shows up in our high crime rate, our high levels of incarceration, in entertainment, and even in the high cost of health care. We have more attorneys than anywhere else in the world because we are much more likely to want to sue somebody.

As we were riding the subway late one night in London, I realized that I would not get on public transportation after midnight in any US city. In London everybody was friendly and having a good time after a pleasant night on the town. The lack of fear and anger was startling compared to any similar situation in just about any US city.

Some people argue that Jesus showed anger when He turned over the money changers tables in the temple, but a close reading will show that that was a planned protest and not an angry outburst. And even that was the closest thing to anger or violence that Jesus showed. (Matthew 21:12)

I think it comes down to contentment. Our constitution guarantees life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Pursuing happiness as an ideal almost guarantees that we will never be happy. Lack of contentment, never being happy with our circumstances, breeds anger and resentment. Anger and resentment show up in all sorts of ways from the highest murder rate in the industrialized world to perpetually low ratings for our politicians.

I don’t see any solution short of divine intervention, but being aware of the problem and committing to personally make our little bit of the world a little less angry will certainly go a long way.

"Getting to know you, getting to know all about you"

A friend of mine named Bob was telling me about a situation involving another friend, Ray. Bob told Ray that he would like to get to know him better, develop a relationship, and ultimately become better friends.

A few days later, Bob received an autographed copy of Ray’s autobiography in the mail with a note suggesting that this should tell him whatever he wanted to know. If he had any questions, feel free to call.

Needless to say, Bob felt cold and rejected. He didn’t want facts, he wanted a relationship.

I have written a short autobiographical book and have written extensively on other subjects, and I sort of assume that my friends have read at least some of what I have written; but I wouldn’t confuse that with friendship or a meaningful relationship.

Relationships are built on shared experiences and time together, not just information and facts.
I think there is a parallel here with the Bible. God has written an autobiography. Like most autobiographies, it contains history, some teaching, poetry, and solid insight into what the author is all about. Reading about God and all He has done, should not be confused with a relationship with Him; nor should we worship His book more than Him.

My mother has written her memoirs and I love the book, but I love her a lot more than I love the book. Having read the book, I feel I know her better and understand some of the things she has been through a whole lot better than if she hadn’t written it, and if I hadn’t read it. But the book does not define our relationship.

It is the same with God. I would have very hard time understanding who He is if I did not read and study the Bible. But a relationship is different. I must spend quality time with Him and share my life with Him in a significant way while living it in such a way as to please Him and bring glory to Him in the end.

A number of years ago a friend told me that he was having a hard time finding a church he liked. He pointed out that some groups loved the Bible, but didn’t know God; and that others loved God but didn’t know the Bible. Since then I have sensed a lot of validity to that observation. It seems odd that there is such an either/or situation.

It is a puzzle that some of the most Godly people I know don’t seem to know all that much about scripture and that some of the most knowledgeable people on the Bible, display very little love or compassion for others.

I have tried to keep a balance, learning about God through the studying the Bible, but at the same time, not becoming so hung up on study that I miss God and His purposes in the process.

Firefox

A while back I was talking with a web designer who assured me that everyone uses Mozilla Firefox as their primary browser and that I should optimize my site for that browser. According to him, Internet Explorer was blasé and I could pretty much ignore it.

I am often reminded by my Mac friends that everyone important uses Macs and to stop fussing with Windows.

I did a little research, which is quite easy to do, and determined that 8% of people accessing my sites use Firefox. Over 90% use some form of Internet Explorer. Also, about 7% of the total are Mac users.

With over 90% of the people using Windows and Internet Explorer, this reminds me to always take other people’s opinions with a grain of salt. It also reminds me to be careful about the opinions I express when the facts are easily verified.

Since then I have downloaded Firefox and have found that it has a few advantages. Internet Explorer also has some advantages and I find myself switching back and forth depending upon the situation. They are both just tools and there is no universal tool. The more tools you have in your tool box and the more you know when to use them the better.

Three points to remember: don’t believe everything you hear, use all the tools that are available, and don’t get stuck with only one approach.

Road Trip

Main Street - Eldorado, TX

This weekend we dusted off my wife’s Cadillac and made a road-trip to deep in the heart of Texas. My wife has a long lost cousin who lives just under the “X” in west Texas. We drove to Wichita Falls, Texas Friday and then on down to Eldorado on Saturday. We returned home to Kansas City on Sunday, so it was a quick trip.

It was good to get some “windshield time,” to talk and listen to music. The Cadillac purred along and turned in 27 mpg at Oklahoma’s 75 mph speed limit.

We are, however, slow learners when it comes to Holiday Inn food. Of all the times we have walked out of a restaurant because we couldn’t get waited on, or our food never came, 100% of the time it has been at a Holiday Inn. This was another time. We lost an hour waiting for breakfast before we gave up, walked out, and stopped at a 7-11 for muffins. We considered stopping on the way back to see if our food was ready, but we passed.

We had a good visit with Louise’s cousin, learning that they had spent the past 30 travelling almost continually. We couldn’t think of anyplace we had been that they hadn’t been twice, and they have been a whole bunch of places we hadn’t. He moved to Texas as a petroleum engineer, and there are still a few oil wells around.

Eldorado is the only town in the county and there isn’t much there. There are a few cows, but mainly goats. The land is so barren that cactus and mesquite is the main scenery.

Since we take turns driving, 1600 miles in two and half days is no big deal. In fact, this trip reminded us of how much we like to just get out on the road and see what we can see.

God's Faithfulness

For several years I have felt that I was being obedient and faithful to God but He was not returning the favor. I prayed and tried to do what God was calling me to do, but the fruit of my labors just weren’t what I was expecting. Everything was too hard with minimal results.

When I expressed my frustrations to my wife she suggested that we sit down and write out some of the ways God has been faithful over the past ten years or so. Specifically she suggested that I list everything that has happened that was apparently God working in my life, things that I had no obvious control over.

As the list grew to about ten things, I saw the obvious pattern. Nine out of ten cases involved people and relationships. The vast majority of instances where I saw God working in my life involved Him bringing people to me that I didn’t expect. He brought new friends in unusual ways, He brought people that would solve problems, and He brought people who would encourage and teach me at just the right time.

My frustration with God, in every instance involved material items; things that I knew were only temporary in nature. His work involved permanent things like people, relationships, and truth.

I knew that God’s priorities were people and that material things are only secondary at best. God will provide all our needs, but I was still expecting to be rewarded with luxuries and the result was frustration.

The long list of wonderful people in my life makes me embarrassed that I ever doubted God’s love and faithfulness to me.

Customer Service - Part 2

I was thinking more about our conflict with the telephone installer yesterday. I believe that it comes down to a culture clash - corporate vs entrepreneur point of view.

His attitude was that he didn't cause the problem, AT&T didn't cause the problem, therefore it was not a problem. Fixing the problem may or may not have been in his job description.

My attitude was - our phone dosen't work - we need to fix it. I don't care who we blame, but there is no other choice, no plan B, we need a working telephone.

It became a battle of the wills and since the phone now works, guess who won. But in all fairness, if you work for a big corporation where there is always someone else to pass the buck to, solving someone elses problem on a Saturday morning is not going to be high on your priority list.

My background as a business owner is that there is no one to pass the blame to, so problems are solved no matter what it takes or whose fault it is. Period.

In this case there were several possible solutions. Completely rewiring the apartment with new phone jacks was one solution, but when we narrowed the problem to an open circuit in a ten foot area and he would still not wire around the problem, I knew I was going to have to force him to find the problem. Total time 90 minutes, and he said it was the most difficult problem he ever had. I wish all my problems could be solved in ninety minutes.

Customer Service

My mother now has a telephone in her bedroom. This may not sound like a major accomplishment, but it was. You see she had just moved, and having spent two hours on the phone, and having to wait a week, she was in no mood for the installer to tell her that she would not be able to have a phone because there was a problem with the wiring in the building.

I called and made an appointment for the installer to return, confident that we could solve the problem. I would like to know what he was thinking, and whether he really feared for his life when my wife, my mother, and I surrounded him and assured him that he was not leaving until we had a working telephone.

I remembered a story about my former employer who had just bought a new furnace. A few weeks later, on the coldest day of the year, it quit. A repairman came out, took a look, and said he would be back the next day. My boss, pulled a Colt 45 from a drawer, and laid it on the table and said, “If I’m freezing, you are too.” The furnace was repaired within the hour.

I didn’t have to stoop to that, but it did cross my mind. After a few more threats and with my help, the problem was solved with the phones working within about an hour and a half.

This situation was complicated by the fact that my mother worked for SW Bell for 40 years retiring about 20 years ago. She knows that people would have got called on the carpet and probably fired for things that are now standard operating procedures. Things like putting a customer on hold for thirty-minutes or an installer telling a customer that a wiring issue was an insurmountable problem, would have resulted in dismissal forty years ago. Times have changed.

Having suffered through 10 years of dealing with Sprint, I was ready for anything, but long time AT&T people are still getting used to lousy service.

William Henry Fox Talbot

I’ve been reading the biography of William Henry Fox Talbot. Talbot was one of the inventors of photography and the prime proponent of the negative/positive process. He was an Englishman who lived between 1800 and 1870. During that time he had many accomplishments. Besides being a wealthy land owner and Member of Parliament, he invented the halftone process and published the first book illustrated with photographs. He was also a noted mathematician.

The biographer noted, almost in passing, at how much some people of that era were able to accomplish, especially considering that they lacked many things considered essential to modern society.

It seems that part of the answer is that modern society has reduced our ability to focus our attention on any one thing for very long. Over the years our attention span has been reduced. Personally, I have noticed in the past few years, I become restless after even a few minutes of concentration. I am always checking my email, getting up for a cup of coffee, or discovering a mindless task that needs to be done. Being able to sit down and work on a single task for hours at a time has become very difficult.

Talbot didn’t have email to check every few minutes or a telephone to interrupt his thoughts. He didn’t spend his evenings watching television. He didn’t have to maintain his Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn accounts. I am pretty certain that he didn’t follow anybody’s “tweets.” Times were slower, which meant he could spend hours, or days, working on complicated problems without distraction.

Today being able to multi-task is considered an asset. Multi-tasking really means not giving 100% attention to anything. Most of us are trying to do too many things and running in too many directions to give much attention to any one thing.

A few years ago I decided to define myself as a photographer, musician, and writer. What that really means is that I am not a gardener, golfer, or woodworker. By limiting my activities, I believe I have the ability to achieve more in a few specific areas.

Colossians 3:23 says, “Whatever you do, work at with all your heart, as working for the Lord not men.” To me, heartily or “with all your heart” means to give it all you’ve got. Don’t be distracted.

I understand that the Japanese have a word “muda” which generally means unproductive or simply, a waste of time. Of course, sometimes we don’t know when we are wasting time. Is spending an afternoon on the golf course a waste of time? What if it was with an important client? What if you were a golf pro and a few more hours of practice would mean more money in your pocket?

Playing music might be a waste of time for some people, but since God gave me a passion for music, not practicing would be disobedient, and probably seen by God as squandering a gift. Figuring out who were are, how God made us, and what our purpose in life is, goes a long way in helping see the best use of our time.

Vandals

For the second time in three months, while setting in my usual parking place in front of my apartment, my car was vandalized - at a cost of $2,000 each time.

I can understand why someone on drugs might hold up a convenience store to get money for a hit. Or why a desperate person might try to rob a bank. I can even understand how someone might resort to violence in a fit of anger, but to intentionally damage someone else’s property as entertainment takes a particularly sick mind.

Personally, I would recommend drug treatment programs for druggies, or job training for people who think stealing is the only way to get money, but vandalism reeks of an illness in the culture that is far deeper. It is not related to poverty, greed, or substance abuse like so much crime is. There is nothing to be gained by the perpetrator except the knowledge that they have caused harm to someone else or someone else’s property.

A psychologist might look for a diagnosis of mental illness which is somehow the opposite of compassion. Learning to feel somebody else’s pain is a learned experience and somewhere along the line, this can get corrupted to the opposite where a person might get pleasure from someone else’s pain. Sociologists might look to society and see a person crying out for attention, and doing so in a very juvenile way of striking out at random. As a Christian, I see it as a sign that Satan is still in control of this planet and that my home is in heaven, and that I will be required to deal with evil as long as I am still on Earth.

However you view it, it means we’ve got a problem. I have to admit that my first reaction was to electrify my car with high voltage so if anybody touched it with a metal object, they would be knocked on their keester. This is doable and could probably be made to only react to a metal object on bare metal, not a casual brush by. A car alarm might be a more practically choice, but I hate those things going off accidentally and a blaring horn doesn’t quite have the satisfaction of knowing a vandal tazered himself while attacking my car. My insurance company may have better suggestions.

Obviously none of these are good solutions when the root problem is a sick society that encourages violence through media and video games and does little to teach respect for property. Moreover, how can we continually teach young people that they descended from apes and then expect them to behave like humans? Did I mention that this world is not my home?

The Red Cadillac

When I was seventeen and preparing to leave for college, I needed a different car. It was 1966 and a local car dealer had a couple of good choices. There were two solid low mileage cars in my price range. One was a gray 1958 Oldsmobile Super 88. The other was a red ’57 Cadillac Coupe deVille. My father strongly suggested that I buy the Olds. Since it was mainly his money, I did.

The Oldsmobile got me through a year or two of college, and it would be another 25 years before I would get my first Cadillac. There is hardly a month goes by that I don’t remember the way I felt when I saw that red Coupe deVille sitting on that used car lot. I wonder if my life would have been different if had showed up at college in a red Cadillac instead of a gray Oldsmobile. I am sure that it would have been much different – how I am not sure.

With 1957 Cadillacs selling in the $50K range and red Coupe deVilles being among the most desirable, that is one of several pieces of bad advice my dad gave me. It was right up there with “always clean up your plate.”

Of course, if I had bought the Cadillac then, it would have been long gone and I would be regretting having sold it, like so many other cool things I used to have.

An interviewer once told a famous race car driver/collector, “If you still owned all the cars you’ve had, you’d be very rich.” The response was, “No, if I’d been rich, I would have kept all the cars I’ve owned.”

The reality is that it takes a lot of time and money to maintain an old car, just like it does all of our personal property. And in the end it will be rust. You don’t see many ’57 Cadillac any more, or ’67, ’77, ‘87’s for that matter. They were made to be driven, used-up, and replaced, which is exactly what happened.

Putting our trust in temporary material items is the very definition of our materialistic society. Peace and contentment comes only from placing our trust in the God that created us, not in the things that we created ourselves.

Bethany Medical Center

My first commercial customer, when I first started in the photography business in 1973, was Bethany Medical Center in Kansas City, Kansas. I started out processing High Contrast Copy Film for making slides from X-Rays, but soon began photographing employees, doctors, banquets, and even surgery. Bethany was very advanced in those days, having developed CPR and the world’s first coronary care unit. The term “Code Blue” came from Bethany.

While working with Bethany I had the privilege of photographing some very early open heart surgery. When Bethany Medical Center got one of the first CT Scanners in the Mid-west I was there to photograph its installation.

This week I was in the area and drove by 51 North 12th. There is no sign that there was ever a hospital there. I distinctively remember the beautiful buildings and photographing the construction photos of the multi-level parking garage where there is now just dirt and grass.

Bethany was the victim of an idiotic health care system, one of the worst among industrialized nations, where they were unable to survive because they had too many uninsured patients. In other words, by providing essential high-quality care in an underserved area, they went bankrupt. What a waste of resources, talent, and money.

Oddly the junkie houses that surrounded the hospital thirty years ago are still there and appear to be unchanged. Driving through the neighborhood I felt a sense of despair remembering the hope and excitement that surrounded this hospital not that many years ago.

The nine acre lot sold for $50,000 not long ago to a non-profit that hopes to build a senior living center, but so far, it remains an empty lot.

Relationships

I found out very early in my business career that business, like everything else in life, is all about relationships. When I first started in the photography business in 1973, an older gentleman named Elgin Smith took me under his wing and introduced me to people I needed to know.

Since that day I have seldom done business with anyone other than friends. I believe that friendship, or the potential for friendship, is the first priority. It is all about whom you know and who knows you.

I am a member of the Overland Park and Leawood Chambers of Commerce and other organizations primarily to meet new people and figure out who I want to do business with and count as my friends.

It has been said that your best friends are those that bring out the best in you. Looking for people who can encourage me, who I can learn from, and want the best for themselves and those around them are pretty good criteria for new relationships.

I have learned that being a person that people want to hang out with is far more important than specific skills. In music, the musicians that get the best jobs are not necessarily the ones with the best chops, but rather, the ones that other people want to be with. The same is true to varying degrees in other professions as well.

I send out a weekly newsletter via email. I think it is good marketing, but more importantly, the responses tell me who I might want to do business with. If somebody isn’t interested in what I am doing, I probably won’t be interested in doing business with them either. That seems pretty straight forward to me.

If you want friends, be a friend. If you want people to be interested in you, be interested in them.

Eight years and three crises ago

With the election looming, I thought I would give a little bit of perspective on the past eight years without endorsing either candidate.

When George W. Bush came to office he faced at least three major issues. First there was a small bunch of terrorists living in the mountains 10,000 miles away that wanted to kill Americans. Second, there was an education crisis looming with an increasing number of people dropping out of high school. Very soon large percentages of the population would be unemployable and on welfare. Third, there was a debt crisis. Millions of people were in debt up to their eyeballs with overextended mortgages and credit cards. This would sooner or later cause a credit crash, causing many banks and financial institutions to fail, resulting in economic disaster.

September 11, 2001 proved that the terrorist had the will and ability to carry out their threats. The Clinton administration had already identified Bin Laden as the leader but failed to act on his threats. Out of retaliation as much as anything, we are now involved in two expensive and drawn out wars.

“No child Left Behind” was enacted to try to stem the tide of high school dropouts, but has had questionable success because the problem is a culture issue not lack of money or testing.

Republicans tried unsuccessfully to regulate the mortgage industry fearing massive bank failures if subprime and freewheeling mortgage markets continued unabated, but the Democratic congress didn’t want anything that would making it harder for low or middle income people to buy a house or have easy access to credit, so nothing was done.

Here we are: the credit crisis happened, largely due to a Democratic Congress, but the Republicans didn’t really help either. The high school dropout rate is higher than ever which nobody seems to have any good answers or is even addressing. Wars continue that we should have never been involved with in the first place and we have done nothing to try to convince the terrorists that they need to reconsider their agenda.

I don’t see a lot of answer for these questions from either party. Just my opinion.

Learners vs learned

Photokina was last week. Photokina is the gigantic world’s fair of imaging held every other year in Cologne, Germany. In 2006, 162,000 people attended from 152 different countries. When my wife and I attended Photokina twenty years ago, there was no hint that the future of photography was anything but film and chemistry.

At the time, I was one of the country’s experts on what is now an archaic technology, black and white film and black and white printing. But things change. The news out of Cologne is the reinvention of photography. Everything is different.

The reason I am back in photography after a twelve year hiatus is that everything is new and exciting. The quality and versatility we are getting from digital photography makes film and chemistry seem like ancient times, yet there are always those that hang onto the past. These are the learned people, the experts on the old ways of doing things.

“Learned” people are perfectly suited for the last generation. “Learners” are the ones ready to move ahead with the next generation. This has nothing to do with age and everything to do with attitude. The book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible says that it is foolish to long for the old days. The wise look to the future.

I find myself getting excited on Sunday nights because I realize I get to go to work the next day and do some cool stuff. This may not mean I am wise, but I think it does put me in the minority. It seems like a majority of people are just putting in their time waiting for Social Security to kick in. Their creativity was squeezed out of them in grade school and then the corporation put them in a box. The next step is for the undertaker to drive the nails in the box.

Those who are learners are always looking for new ideas, and new ways of doing things. They are excited about the prospects of the future. They read, look around, and listen to what others are saying. That’s the group I want to be part of. I think Photokina 2010 is calling me.

Six Blocks

For several years my wife and I lived near 47th and Oak in Kansas City, Missouri. I would often go out for walks. If I walked three blocks to the west I would pass Mercedes and Porches along the curb. If I walked three blocks east, I would pass old sofas and refrigerators along the curb.

The contrast could not be more startling. Without leaving my zip code, I could see people in the highest social-economic and the lowest social-economic situations. Within in a few blocks there were people who appeared to be completely oblivious to the other group’s situation; and they certainly didn’t understand each other.

To the impartial observer like me, who cannot really relate to either group, it is clearly not a matter of opportunity in the geographical sense, but possibly lack of opportunity in the culture sense.

If your culture says that talking to the police makes you a snitch, you will live in a high crime neighborhood. If your culture tells you that excelling in school makes you uncool, you will have no education. If your culture tells you that having to be at work at 8:00 takes away your freedom, you will not have job.

If your culture tells you that dropping 100 grand on a car makes you important, you will do whatever it takes to get the wheels. If your culture tells you that a 10,000 square foot house is the definition of success, you will sacrifice your friends to get it.

Jesus came to free the captives from this culture of poverty and also from the culture of more is better. As Christians we need to find ways to point people to the truth that there is a better way to live.

To change the culture, don’t write laws – write songs.

Handing off the baton

I enjoyed watching the Olympics this year. One of the tragedies was watching both the men and women’s 4X100 relay teams drop the baton.

Anybody who has ever participated in a track meet in high school knows that handing off the baton is the most basic and fundamental skill in relay running. How could Olympic level runners drop the baton – twice.

The answer is actually pretty simple, they didn’t practice. The relay teams were all-star teams, meaning they were all the best in their category, but had never really worked together. Just because you put the best people together does not mean that you are going to have a smooth-running team. You see this all the time. Top executives that drive the business in the ground, good politicians that do dumb things, and so-called super-groups made up of great musicians that can’t play together.

Team work is very underrated as we saw on the USA relay teams. Working well with others, understanding your role, and letting others do theirs is fundamental. In more ways than one we drop the baton. We fail to communicate, and we fail to see how we fit in.

We are all given different gifts, different personalities, and different opportunities. Understanding how we fit and handing off the baton at the right time without dropping it is a key to successful living.

Architecture Photography

Back in the Golden Age of rock & roll, when gas was cheap and phones were hard-wired, I roomed with a couple of architectural students. We were all photographers too, so naturally our late night bull-sessions centered around architecture and photography. Of course I became interested in architecture as well, as we made road trips to photography historical and significant buildings. I even took some History of Architecture classes and collected books on architecture. I have since seen and photographed even more famous buildings in Europe and the U.S. of A.

My friends went on to have successful careers as architects and designers while I stayed with photography.

Now days, when I am not photographing business people and performers, I am usually out photographing buildings.

The difference between photographing people and buildings is that with people portraiture, you move the people and the lights until you get the picture you want. In building portraiture, neither the buildings nor the sun are easily moveable, so we have to go when the sun and the building are where we want them to be. This is usually the first few hours after sunrise or the last few hours before sunset, depending upon the orientation of the building and the time of year.
The other rule of architectural photography is no converging vertical lines. The edges of the building and all vertical features should be parallel to each other and to the edge of the photo.

Do you need architectural photography? Give me a call. If you want to photograph some buildings yourself, I hope these tips are useful. Jim Mathis 913 269-6709