Dear Boo and Bubble,
My word, this is the longest spell I’ve ever gone
without writing to you! It’s not been intentional. I’ve been consumed with
finishing Loudest Laugh (the sequel
to Last Laugh) which is now done and
in the hands of my formatter and cover design person. The flurry of activity surrounding
the effort left me a little bit drained and I took a small hiatus. However, the
world never seems to do so, and I find myself compelled once again to open the
laptop and compose some thoughts apropos of the stimulus it offers.
We’ve just come out from under the longest federal
government shutdown in the history of our country. The damage done…both on an
individual level and to the collective society…is still being assessed. Shutdowns
have become the rage of late as a tool to force some political agenda and the
instigators ping pong back and forth between the legislative and executive
branches of government. This particular iteration fell squarely at the feet of
the president (in my mind, at least) because he reneged on a commitment to sign
an appropriations bill that passed both the senate and the house. The rationale
of why he did it is a continuing subject for debate, but I’m not going to opine
on that. No…the whole sad episode brought back a memory that I want to share
with you about Captain.
I met Captain in the summer of 1973. He had just
finished law school and was working as the assistant director in the office of
Pre-trial Intervention for Richland County, SC. Pre-trial intervention is a
program that works with first-time offenders in the court system who voluntarily
commit to a plan for rehabilitation in order to have their crime record expunged.
The underlying philosophy suggests that many of the people who arrive in court
for the first time are neither hardened criminals nor destined for a life of
crime. With proper supervision and
alternative sentencing, they can assimilate back into society and become
productive citizens without the baggage of a negative record. Richland County’s
program was funded in part through a federal matching grant.
At the time, Richard Nixon was president of the United
States and he had a dispute with congress over certain amounts they
appropriated in the federal budget. Rather than spend the money as congress
intended, he unilaterally decided to impound them…which is to say, refuse to release
the funds. This was a tool available to him and he used it. Much like the
shutdown of today, however, there were negative impacts in many places. One of
them was the Pre-trial Intervention for Richland County which overnight found
its budget slashed in half. The director of PTI came to Captain and asked him
to be responsible for making the necessary cuts to personnel to fit the new financial
circumstance.
This was a daunting task…one that Captain knew could
be devastating to many of the hard-working people fulfilling the critical
mission of the program. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that most
people assigned with the chore would start from the top and work down. Not
Captain. He believed that the most important people in the organization were
those who interfaced with the enrollees…not the administrators and management. As
he went about the business of cutting the budget, he cut himself out of job…eliminating
his position altogether to free up money to continue to pay the counselors. He
understood that his law degree gave him options which they might not have.
After leaving PTI, he sought and found employment with a law firm.
This selfless characteristic of Captain’s is one that I’ve
shared with you in another post, dated July 26, 2015, entitled “More Important Than I.” On so many
levels, I yearn for more people in the public domain to exhibit such character
rather than always defer to “what’s best for me.”
Interestingly enough, in 1974 congress passed The
Congressional Budget and Impoundment Act in response to Nixon’s perceived abuse
of the impoundment power. The president’s ability to indefinitely reject congressionally approved spending was thus removed as a tool from the executive
branch’s toolbox. Makes me wish that something similar could be done to
prohibit shutdowns!
