What price Unity?

 

A Shot in the Arm

 

The Cola Wars

 

Like the ancient Huns, we Americans are a war-like people. We make war on everything, from the Global War on Terror to the War on Drugs. You name the problem, and we’ll start a war on it. Maybe it’s our love affair with guns or something in our water. Many Americans treasure gun ownership more than they do the right of children to be educated in an environment where they’re not in danger of being shot. We Americans do love us some war; we even tried waging war on poverty.

We even have war over soft drinks, or actually war between soft drinks. Whoa, you say! A war between soft drinks, you’re kidding right? No, dear readers, I’m as serious as a train wreck. For over a hundred years the two iconic American soft drink companies, Coca Cola™ and Pepsi-Cola™ have been engaged in a head-to-head competition worldwide for the taste buds of consumers.

Coca Cola got its start in 1886 when a Civil War veteran in Columbus, Georgia, who was taking morphine for injuries suffered in the war became addicted and sought a safer alternative pain killer turned to the coca leaf. From the 1860s to the 1880s cocaine was a commonly used cure-all. kola nut extract, a stimulant, was added to the cocaine, along with sugar and other flavorings, and Coca Cola was born. Seven years later, a North Carolina inventor came up with a similar drink using kola extract and flavorings which was initially named Brad’s Drink, but by this time Coca Cola was so popular, in 1898, he changed the name to Pepsi-Cola, and the competition began.

This fierce competition wasn’t called the Cola Wars until the 1970s when the two giants of the soft drink industry went after each other in a big way with promotions, ad jabs at each other and the like. But by the 1970s they’d already been at each other’s throats for nearly a century. As of now, they’ve been at it longer than the 1337 – 1453 Hundred Years’ War between England and France. Some of the things these guys do are pretty unbelievable. When I served as a diplomat in Vietnam and Cambodia for instance, the golf clubs where I played either had contracts with Coke or Pepsi as their beverage supplier and couldn’t offer both. They can’t pull stunts like that in the U.S., but with worldwide sales there are a lot of places where they can.

The thing that makes this so funny is that except for sweetness—Pepsi tends to be a bit sweeter—it’s hard, for me at least, to tell the difference. Fact is, I like both company’s non-cola drinks, Coke’s Fanta and Pepsi’s Sprite, but the colas remind me of a worm medicine we had to take as kids. The only way I can stand either is when mixed with rum or bourbon. Of course, they never advertise them as mixers.

Anyway, I digress. My point from the beginning is the warlike nature of my fellow Americans. We’ve had our burger war between Burger King™ and Macdonald’s™ and coffee wars between Starbucks™ and Macdonald’s™.

I don’t know if any side has ever really won any of these wars. The War on Poverty, for example, was a total failure. We still have too many people who make less than minimum wage, and don’t get me started on the War on Drugs or the War on Terror. We still have both.

Will we ever evolve into a peace-loving people, people who live up to the words we use to beat other countries over the head, but ignore here at home? I certainly hope so. But just between you, me, and the gate post, I don’t think it’s ever gonna happen.

I just wonder what we’ll make war on next. – 

Dealing With Bullies

 

Bullies in the work place are one of the principal reasons many people are unhappy with their work and one of the main reasons people leave their jobs. Bullying, however, is nothing new. Heck, they’re probably as old as humankind. I can imagine when homo sapiens started living in groups larger than the immediate family, there was a bully in every cave.

When I was a student back in the 50s and 60s, in a small East Texas town with a population of just over 700, and attending a school with approximately 100 students, we had in our grade 1 to grade 12 school two bullies. One was a boy and the other was a girl. They were cousins, and were the terror of the school, forever tormenting smaller kids, starting fights, and generally making nuisances of themselves. The thing I remember most clearly about them is they were specialists. The boy picked on boys and the girl picked on girls. Even back then people tended to specialize.

Back in those days, despite being tall for my age, I was a shy, skinny kid, with a preference for sitting in a corner reading a book over joining in the rough and tumble activities preferred by my classmates. Since I didn’t mix with crowds of kids during school hours, I seldom encountered the school bullies who preferred to do their thing for an audience. There wasn’t any joy in bullying someone if there was no one to watch.

That’s not to say, though, that I never had to deal with them, and that’s the theme of this article. By happenstance, I learned the most effective way to deal with a bully.

One day, I was assigned, along with three other students, to sweep the concrete steps of our newly constructed red-brick school that had replaced the dilapidated old wood frame structure. As we were just about finished, the bully decided to have some fun and entertain the other students who were hanging about the schoolyard waiting for recess to end. He began tormenting the smallest kid in our work crew, bringing the poor boy to tears. I was standing on the top of the steps with a large broom in hand, and when my little friend started crying, something snapped inside me. I hefted the broom like a baseball bat and yelled at the bully to ‘leave him alone!” Of course, that then drew his attention to me.

Like I said earlier, I was tall for my age, but as thin as a rail, while the bully, who had an inch in height and probably twenty pounds on me, had muscles from hefting bales of hay on local farms. You might think I’d just walked into the bear’s den and set myself up for a thrashing, but you’d be wrong. The bully took a look at the four-foot pole I had on my shoulder, and the snarl on my lips, and backed down. He slunk away like a beaten dog, and for the rest of my time in school never bothered me or my friends again. In fact, he even tried a week later to make friends with me.

What was the lesson I learned from this encounter? I learned that most bullies are really cowards, and when confronted will do what cowards do best – turn and run.

It took me a while to actually come to that conclusion. At the time I was just happy that I didn’t get pounded on.  I did finally figure it out, though, and it came in handy many years later when I was a young army major in Korea working for an army colonel who was a classic bully, and a totally lacking in empathy sociopath as well.

Near the end of my first year working for him he threatened to give me a bad performance review because I’d been selected to be the command briefer over him, which angered him. Hint: that’s not a legitimate excuse for a bad review. Recalling my previous encounter with a bully, I told him to try it, and I’d eat him alive. Not sure what I meant by it – it sounded good, though – and, it worked. He gave me a wide-eyed look, walked away, and when my rating arrived, I got highest marks from him.

And that’s how you handle bullies. – NWI

Neighborliness and shoveling snow

 

On Jan. 31, we had our first significant snowfall in the Washington, DC area. The scarcity of the white stuff is probably a result of climate change and global warming, but that’s a story for another day.

What this snowfall brought to mind for me is the concept of ‘help thy neighbor.’

When I was a kid growing up in East Texas any time someone needed help, for just about anything, neighbors from far and wide would show up. After leaving home and living in cities around the world for over 20 years, I found that I missed having ‘good neighbors.’

Then back in 1988 I built a house in a new community in Maryland, just outside Washington, DC. We didn’t live in it for any length of time until 2012, but over the years I got to know my neighbors, some of whom built their homes the same time we did, while others are relatively new comers.

After retiring from government service and going into fulltime writing –working from home – I’ve gotten to know those neighbors better. We now chat across fences, or when we’re raking leaves. I didn’t realize that I missed that kind of camaraderie.

It really hit home, though, when the snow came. As much as I hate snow, or any other kind of cold weather, I knew the driveway needed clearing lest it turn into a deadly ice rink, so I bundled up, grabbed a snow shovel, and started digging.

My neighbor, David, who moved in a couple of years ago, had just finished doing his driveway, and he and his son, Mikey, volunteered to help me. My neighbor Jim, from across the street, was doing his driveway and sidewalk, so David’s daughter, Rachel, went over to help him.

Since we were using David’s snow blower, we finished first, so we all went over and helped Jim finish, then back to David’s to put the finishing touches on his driveway.

It’s called being a good neighbor, and the conventional wisdom that it no longer exists is just plain wrong. In neighborhoods around the world, I imagine there are other people like us, people who’ve developed friendships over time, and who pitch in to help each other when help’s needed. It’s a comforting feeling.

The only dark spot on the day. An hour after we finished doing our driveways, it started snowing again. I decided to sleep in the following day and let Mother Nature take care of it from there.

That decision held for all of two hours after I finally hauled myself out of bed – late for me, I usually get up at 5 or 5:30, but on that morning, I stayed in bed until 6 a.m. After exercising, cleaning up, and doing my usual breakfast of cereal and coffee, I looked outside and saw that it hadn’t snowed as much as I feared it would.

Finally at 8:45, I shrugged, put on a heavy coat, donned my heavy, fur-lined gloves and went out to scrape the light dusting of snow away before it turned to ice. My neighbor, Jim, obviously had the same idea. We chatted as we scraped, a job that thankfully didn’t take long. Who would ever thought that snow would make good neighbors? – NWI