Author: Nick Penning

Time was, you worked hard, really hard …for decades… maybe you bought a house, a car, and helped your kids go to school. You gave to others who needed help…and then you retired.

You wonder these days if that still is a part of “the American Dream.”

Hard work, providing for your family, paying taxes for the good of your country and humankind, and then…at the end…a regular, modest income from the retirement pension that was part of the package your employer promised. That was ‘the deal’ we came to expect as return for working and living a good life.

Sometimes that promise was in the form of a binding contract, negotiated by the union that stood up for you at your job. In other cases the pension was a well-reasoned assumption, based on years and years of evidence that saw fellow employees get a steady income after retirement.

Well, there’s lots of evidence these days that ‘the good life’ is only available to those with big bucks; because the news seems to be filled each week with a report that another company, ‘forced’ by ‘excessive costs,’ has decided to unilaterally fold-up their end of the bargain and shut down the company pension plan.

No warning. Not even a hint. And then, Boom! Sorry, sucker; we just canned your pension. Go take a hike.

Here’s how the PBS NewsHour, based in Shirlington, described the scene on January 9 of this year:

“IBM, long a leader in defining the relationship between companies and employees in American corporate life last week became part of a new trend, ending its traditional pension plan,” reporter Jeffrey Brown said. “…even well off companies are making the change. In recent months Verizon, Lockheed Martin and Motorola have all announced freezes on their pensions plans.”

It isn’t just that these monster companies are freezing pensions at a certain level. No, starting with United Airlines, which took an unprecedented 2005 move that stunned the nation, corporate America is flat-out terminating pension programs. Arlington-based US Airways made its assault on its employee pensions the same year.

Congress stepped into the fray some 30 years ago and created an agency that’s supposed to protect us, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) — (http://www.pbgc.gov/index.html) — which is financed by the corporations whose pension plans they protect. But, according to another PBS investigation for the Frontline program, big business has defied its responsibilities to the extent that four years ago corporate America owed $50 billion to the PBGC. This year, the shortchanging is more than four times that amount: $450 billion.

How can business get away with that? I can’t just decide to stop paying my mortgage. Listen to how Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren described the situation to Frontline: “Let’s just be as blunt as we can. They got away with it because the regulators let them get away with it. In all those years in the ’90s, when we were doing well, when it was boom times, the big companies kept a sharp eye on what pleases the investors. … It did not please the investors to put money aside for the employees, and so the big corporations simply didn’t do it.”

“It did not please the investors”? Is that what this comes down to? Is our nation really just about making a buck? Is it true that the prevailing attitude is “What’s good for business is good for America”? Economist Martin Goldberg wrote last year, “The not too subtle message is leave corporate America alone.” And to whom would that warning be made? Why to those who ‘represent us’ across the river.

It’s no accident that business throws hundreds of millions of dollars into congressional and presidential campaign coffers. The pay the piper expects in response for his support is to be left alone, to deal with his workers however he sees fit.

This isn’t the America we grew up with, is it? America the Beautiful seems a pipedream, when you read words like those cited above. Is it all a big joke? Has Uncle Sam changed from a kindly gentleman into a cold, cynical and calculating relative?

P.T. Barnun said “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Is that what it’s about, in the end? Are we all suckers who will work until we die or until we get injured or get sick?

This is a far cry from, “Do unto others what you would have them do unto you.”

Is there any way to turn this around? To stop the relentless pursuit of wealth at any cost? We can start with the folks who occupy that shining, marble, dome-topped building on the other side of the river. If enough of us make a fuss over this, maybe the word ‘retirement’ can come to mean what it has meant for our parents’ generation.

Let’s not let it happen that we became a bitter, ‘what’s in it for me’ nation. Let’s look out for each other and try, as hard as we might, to make this life a good one for each and every one of us.

Nick Penning is an Arlington, Va., freelance writer. His column, “Penning Thoughts,” appears in alternating editions of The Arlington Connection.

As you read this, think for a moment: your nation is committing war, where hundreds kill and die in your name…right now and into this night. There is bravado, there is fear, and, I suspect, some doubt about why our nation’s flag and its tanks and planes and bombs are rolling the roads and roaring in the sky above a Middle Eastern desert.

Not many weeks ago we heard a similar screaming, ear-pounding cry over our heads, here in Arlington, as the new Air Force Memorial was dedicated near the Pentagon. Because the Air Force Thunderbirds were shooting hundreds of miles per hour overhead, their cries turned heads for miles around.

For a split second, if you’d not read the papers or had forgotten the announcement, you might have thought, “What was that!”, perhaps wondering if, in this age of White House-induced fear, we might be under some sort of attack.

Is it possible to imagine armored personnel carriers rolling down Arlington Boulevard, helicopters chopping the air, and rifle carrying soldiers walking the streets and posted at check points near, say, Glebe Road and George Mason? And that, as those planes careened through the air, muffled ‘booms,’ puffs of smoke could be seen in their wake?

Small countries and guerilla bands could never muster that kind of power….but, emerging powers such as China, and a recently rightward-drifting Japan, can bring shudders to our seemingly peaceful lives.

If we are not immune, why did we seek this war? Why did we stir up greater, worldwide hatred toward our beloved country?

Has our silence aided and abetted our elected leaders to continue forcing young men and women to stop their lives and carry armaments overseas, putting their families at great risk of losing the centers of their existence?

Now, weeks after the nerve-rattling spectacle of Air Force might, we hear talk of ‘pulling back’ or ‘pulling out,’ “as soon as they are ready to defend themselves.” You even hear the word “Iraqification” of the war, through which the reins of warfare are turned to those who live there.

If you’re in your late 50s or 60s, that word conjures up “Vietnamization,” the term then-President Nixon used as part of his ‘secret plan’ to end the war. That plan helped him win election in 1968. Yet seven more long years, and thousands of Vietnam Wall names later, it all came to a whimpering end as the last helicopter lifted the last evacuees from the top of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.

As I’ve heard others say, how many Gold Star mothers will be told of heartbreaking loss, while those who started this madness ‘wind down’ our presence in a nation we have destroyed? Now that we know the end is coming, how many widows, how many orphans will be created in these final months ahead?

It has been said before, but is worth saying again, How do we ask another soldier to be the last one to die for a mistake?

Because, at this point, Arlington is being opened for more and more graves, in defense of what?… one man’s refusal to admit the obvious? His pitiful and outrageous attempt to ‘save face,’ as more die, and our nation becomes ever more a target in response to what he has sown.

We can pray for peace, and ask our members of Congress to bring us quickly to that end.

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Nick Penning is an Arlington, Virginia, freelance writer. His column, “Penning Thoughts,” appears in alternating editions of The Arlington Connection.

It has been 43 years; nearly half a century.

Forty-three years ago — November 22, 1963 — I was just another high school senior, finishing lunch period and heading back to the career day assembly. I began to notice groups of guys clustered around those little transistor radios we had back then.

Somebody talked about Kennedy and shots and Johnson. I envisioned them on some sort of outdoor stage and shots being fired. But, frankly, it just didn’t make any sense.

Shots? The President? What? Are you serious?

The mood was apprehensive when the assembly program began several minutes later. Then, one of the priests made a fast-clipped, solitary walk from the back of the gym to the doors leading to the stage. He whispered in the ear of the student leading the session. Jim Egzii stepped to the microphone and announced, “The President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, is dead.”

Dead? Dead? What do you mean, “He’s dead”?

Joe Lofy, who sat in front of me, fell to his knees in prayer.

The next four days found us staring at our black-and-white televisions, watching black- and-white news pictures. There were no commercials. We watched clear into the night, as he lay in state at the Capitol and throughout the following four days: confused reports, arrests, Lee Harvey Oswald, Officer Tippet, Jack Ruby and the Texas Book Depository.

On the third day, Sunday, I was just about to eat a plate of scrambled eggs after getting home from church, when I looked at the television and saw Oswald being shot.

And on Monday Jackie, Caroline and John-John led world leaders in a solemn procession from the White House to St. Matthews Cathedral, where the little boy saluted his father’s coffin. Then the procession to Arlington began; the drums beat over and over and over, interrupted by the funeral dirge and then by the Navy Hymn, which, serendipitously, we’d learned in Glee Club just weeks before.

And now the time has lengthened to 43 years, and you have to be of a certain age even to have recalled that horrific, surrealistic time.

The upcoming anniversary made me search for the facts surrounding the tale I’d heard told of JFK ‘picking out his grave.’ According to an article Kathie Scarrah wrote for the Voice of America News in May of last year, the President had been at Arlington just days before his trip to Dallas; walking near the front of the Custis-Lee mansion with its magnificent view of the river, Memorial Bridge, the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument and the Capitol further in the distance.

His guide at the time, Paul Fuqua, told Ms. Scarrah, “The president didn’t know the story of how the Memorial Bridge links Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee, pulling the two sides of the Civil War together. He had never heard that story before, so we talked about that. And then he was standing about where I’m standing now, looking down between the two, and he said that it was so beautiful that he could stay up here forever.”

Not long after uttering those words, he did, indeed, stay there forever.

That vista had contained the March on Washington scene, where Martin Luther King had given his I Have a Dream speech just a few months prior to Kennedy’s visit. While on television Vietnamese monks were burning themselves alive over religious persecution. Churches in the South were being torched by white racists.

Then, just days after his wistful moment at Arlington, shots tore through our young president’s head. Driven by his duty, a Secret Service agent had climbed onto the back of the Lincoln limousine; and a black-and-white still photograph showed LBJ being sworn in on Air Force One, with Jackie at his side in her blood-stained outfit.

No one knew what to think, except that this could not be happening. Not in the United States. These were peaceful times — peaceful, that is, if you were white — times when life had a steady, ‘normal’ pace.

It all vanished that weekend in November of 1963. The Christmas pageant was cancelled. But soon there would be the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, and then the killing of the three civil rights workers in Mississippi; the rioting at Ole Miss; and radio reports of black citizens trying, in vain, just to register to vote.

Nothing was ever the same. Our young president, who’d, inspired us to give of ourselves for the good of others, had been snuffed out. Tears would well up when you heard Richard Burton sing Camelot. We learned of the ugly side of U.S. policy overseas, the ‘benign neglect’ of African Americans robbed of the basic right to vote…a right still challenged by those who would suppress from our citizens what we demand of other nations.

No. Nothing was or is the same as it had been, during that ‘brief shining moment.’

We’ve been told, “We can do better.” Can we? Will we?

Dare we dream of ever again knowing hope and justice? Is there someone out there who can turn this nation away from selfishness and toward compassion? From “What’s in it for me,” to “What can I do for them?”

Nick Penning (www.nickpenning.com) is an Arlington, Va., freelance writer. His column, “Penning Thoughts,” appears in alternating editions of The Arlington Connection.

Finally. The time has come.

“We the people,” as stated in our founding document, are about to make decisions on how our county, our state and our nation will be operated.

“In order to form a more perfect union” we have the opportunity and obligation — in less than a month — to rise early on perhaps a frosty morning, to drive or walk or bike to the neighborhood school or church or garage or library which will that day become a “polling place.”

“To ensure domestic tranquility” we will line up to give our name, take a ballot, and enter a booth, there to decide what kind of nation, state and county we want to be or to become.

On those fronts we have much with which to be concerned.

Most disconcerting, locally, is the news that a county school bond proposal is facing, as the Connection’s Seth Rosen wrote, an “unraveling” of the usual strong consensus of support for school bond issues. The apparent controversy seems to be taking on an unfortunate “north vs. south” Arlington divide. Toward the end of Seth’s September 27 story he writes, “Those who are publicly opposing the bond package do not believe in the end it will be shot down by Arlington voters,” that through their opposition they just want to ‘send a message’ to elected leaders. That’s a dangerous path to take, when the schooling of the County’s youngsters is at stake. Study the issues, yes. But please give strong thought to what could happen if solid support for public education in Arlington is broken.

Our Commonwealth has no less controversial a question to put before you: the infamous “marriage” amendment to our Bill of Rights. While claiming to make a “definition” of what marriage is; the proposed amendment actually takes away a right some of our fellow Virginians may want to exercise.

Strange, is it not, that we would want to add to our most sacred document, which enshrines that to which we are entitled, wording that would take away a right?

This constitutional amendment, we all know, is aimed at our brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, friends and neighbors who may happen to be attracted to persons of the same sex. Sure, you might not think that ‘normal,’ but we need to ask ourselves, ‘what is normal?’ If you happen to be divorced, would we adopt an amendment denying you the right to marry again? If you are single and living with a person of the opposite sex, would we vote to fine or imprison you for not being married?

By the same reasoning, if two people are so committed to one another that they wish to make vows before God and man to bind that union, who are we to deny them that right? After all, it is called a Bill of rights, not a bill of denials.

Lastly, we are faced with the opportunity to decide who will represent us in the United States Senate; that body of our government which voted to allow our president to take this nation into an unprovoked invasion of another sovereign nation.

One candidate, our current senator John Allen, said in his debate with Democrat Jim Webb, “I stand by my decision” to grant war-making authority to George W. Bush. Webb opposed that decision.

Think what has become of our nation since that invasion: war has become a part of our daily lexicon for a period of time longer than the horrific second world war, and “torture” is now associated with our beloved United States of America.

Is this what we want? Since this unprovoked invasion took place, with Mr. Allen’s blessing, more than two-thousand seven-hundred young men and women of this land have lost their lives in a place far, far away. They were told they were avenging the 2001 attacks in New York and on our Pentagon; and they were told the madman ruling Iraq was about to use poison gas and other “weapons of mass destruction” to rain death upon us.

Over time it became apparent that neither reason was true, and that our president knew it before he made his decision to invade Iraq.

We have nothing more precious than the right to determine how we are to be governed. Please do set aside a part of your time on Tuesday, November 7, to make your way to your precinct’s polling place. Momentous decisions will be made that day; decisions that will tell Arlington, Virginia and our nation what kind of people we are.

What kind of people we want to be.

Nick Penning is an Arlington, Virginia, freelance writer.