Someone Has to Pluck the Chicken / Someone Gets to Sound the Alarm

Let me take you back in time to simpler days when my fourth great-grandfather ran around with Daniel Boone. Some of your stereotypes may be challenged when I describe an orphaned Indian boy brought to my fifth great-grandfather by Chief Logan at the boys request so that he could be raised by whites in order to become a minister of the gospel. You will learn much about early 1900s farm life. My wifes stepfather was from the mining country in the Idaho panhandle, so I will take you deep down below the surface looking for the ore body. Some of my relatives worked in the open-pit iron mines of northern Minnesota, so they will get some attention. After we had moved to California, we eventually bought a small house on a large enough lot to have a few chickens. When Mom wanted to have fried chicken ready for supper when Dad got home, it was up to me to chop its head off and, with Moms help, pluck it. Thus I learned that someone has to pluck the chicken, and I grew up with a respect for the country work ethic and the ingenuity of the American farmer. My exposure to the diverse cultures of Minnesota farmland and suburban California presented me with a view of the winds of cultural change blowing across the country, which were bringing a demand for lowering standards of behavior and the lessening of punishment. My comments on the source and susceptibility to the push for change are accompanied by anecdotes from history, and the lives of relatives and my own life experiences. I was in the Deep South during the Reverend Kings marches for civil rights. When the antiwar crowd was breaking windows on the first floor of the chancellors office at UC Berkeley, I was on the second floor servicing a mimeograph machine. The time I spent on high school and grade school campuses opened my eyes to the flow of changing standards in our culture. There will be an effort to describe the pivotal changes in my life and destiny, which I believe came about as the result of prayer, the importance of the Southern Baptist Church in my teenage years, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as I became an independent adult. I will also describe the events that led to my leaving the LDS church for twenty-five years and why I came back recently. The challenges of raising a family in a home divided on religious belief will also be covered. On the job, I dared to stand up for the rights of those I supervised to take their breaks. At another company I worked for, I took a stand against corporate greed. It cost me in promotions and raises and eventually resulted in AmeriGas refusing to recognize the Americans with Disabilities Act for me. Rather than sue them, I decided to leave with a two-year disability and have the California Department of Rehabilitation upgrade my clerical skills so I could get a desk job. The promoters of compassion in this country have succeeded in creating so many categories of disability that it was nearly impossible for this middle-aged white guy to get an entry-level desk job with the State of California. The worsening of my disability and my efforts to overcome it with alternative therapies will be covered in my chapter on health. Its just as well that I wanted to work in spite of my disability. My two-year disability policy required me to apply for a Social Security disability (SSI), so I went to be examined by their doctor. When I walked into the crowded waiting room, I was ushered right in to see the doctor. He explained that the people in the waiting room had to wait for an interpreter, so for that reason alone, they would qualify for SSI. Since I was able to walk in, I would not qualify. I believe in climate change, but it was around long before humankind was here to influence the weather. Over a century ago, at least one scientist determined through an experiment that the concentration of CO2 was already past the point where adding more would increase global warming. The global w