Missed the porch last week, so much going on. Have a seat, and let’s ponder a bit, people and things come and go… some leave a mark on time some just fade away as the years go by. Lost my brother-in-law last weekend, fact is as we get older it seems like death is a great stimulater of change…planed or not. I will miss him not because of the things we did together at times but because he was good man and we are losing to many of those these days. With me it is a quiet type of emotion, I am not a sack cloth and ashes type of man. Instead I ascribe to the fact that he is with the God he served and that is my comfort at such a loss. But what about things? You see I believe that death is a natural outcome for those who are blessed to live out their appointed time… we start dying the very second we take our first breath, then life happens and who knows what, when or how? 

Now about those things. We all have or have had something in our lives we never took the time to be happy about until it is gone. This is a hard one for me but one reason I come out to the back porch is to clear my mind and I guess to ease my conscience. I had the privilege of working for a great company, they paid me well affording me a living that my education would never have allowed. There was so much turmoil in my personal life and I’m not using this as an excuse for by behavior at that time. I didn’t have God in my life and there was no sense of direction in my life or standards of behavior. I went to work there in 1965 and somehow by the grace of God 38 years later I retired. Two of my employers favorite words were order and arrangement. I was taught discipline, accountability, dependability and in a very sneaky way which many of us would never admit to…a pride in what we did because of the standards we were expected to adhere to. We were just ordinary guys and gals just off the street that were expected to develop a skill that would produce a… here is another phrase that was also a favorite…World Class Product! Well we did just that. 

Then about 1985 things started to change. We had gone through Jimmy Carter and record inflation and a lot of things in the overall world market also changed. Textile fibers had changed, many of the plants that were into textile products were unable to compete with the new world order of manufacturing. What we didn’t see at the time had nothing to do with world market…we had become a victim of the new social order that looked upon discipline, accountability and dependability as a discriminatory tactic to hold people back. Now I am trying to be nice here as to what happened. Individual accountability was replaced by the Team Approach… we went to the mountain and lay on our backs looking at clouds, climbing towers and swinging on ropes, we went from doing your job to ‘well somebody needs to do it…oh I know it’s a team responsibility.’ Then came the nail, as they say the last one in the coffin. Welcome to the world of self management! I knew wage roll just like me that had a meeting calendar, can you imagine? I soon got to where I actually said to an Area Supervisor at one meeting I was at and I am ashamed to admit it but I too had fell under this new things  spell.… ‘who the hell is putting product in the box’? We never saw it coming. We lost our focus, our discipline and respect for those who would lead us. In short the inmates had taken over the asylum, crude but true. Tonight here on the porch as I write this I regret that I behaved as I did toward management. I never disrespected them or did anything to compromise the quality of the product…What I did was much worse. I did not support leadership and remained quite when I should have said Yes Sir… I remember when I went to work there we had within a year 5200 people employed…when I retired 38 years later there was just 800 left. Today we are seeing the values and customs, discipline and a great nation slowly going back to that mountain looking for something to turn us around. Instead of looking up to that mountain we should be on our knees, tying our shoes, getting ready to run a Good Race.

To put this in perspective… There is no accountability, no responsibility, we live in a do it your self world, as Frank would sing “I did It My Way”… and even Hobby Lobby doesn’t have the tools to get it done. 

jk