Lessons at the Half Century Mark

by Duane N. Burghard
©2015


This past was a big week for birthdays in our family. Last Saturday, the United States turned 239. I have no idea what an appropriate gift is for a 239 year old Republic, but the Supreme Court appears to have given it an excellent one in the end of gerrymandered districts. If I could afford it, I’d take away SuperPACs and give it publicly funded elections too … but evidently none of us can afford that (sigh).

Also celebrating a birthday on July 4 was my Mom (so, Happy Birthday Mom). And then on Sunday, July 5, I completed my 50th solar orbit and celebrated birthday number 50. Since this is my 50th birthday, and since I was apparently supposed to have learned some important and valuable lessons by this point in my life (whoops), I understand that it’s appropriate for me to stop here, reflect back, and see if there’s anything I can share that will be of value. So, in no particular order (and with a staggering lack of premeditated forethought), here are some of my random thoughts on life on the occasion of my 50th birthday.

1. Develop and Use Your Imagination

One of the rules that my Mom had for us growing up (one that I really didn’t like at the time but have since come to genuinely appreciate) was that my younger sister and I weren’t allowed to watch TV (other than the rare instructional TV show and the Sunday night routine of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom followed by the Wonderful World of Disney). We were, however, allowed to read as much as we wanted to (and did, voraciously plowing through a fairly ridiculous number of books). This “no TV” rule lasted until I was 10 years old (at age 10 I was allowed to choose a show to watch … I chose the Six Million Dollar Man because … well because Steve Austin is cool that’s why). As a result, I spent the first decade of my life having to make a lot of my own entertainment as opposed to being fed it. Mom was also a big believer in the “get out” method of parenting (as in, “get out of the house and don’t come back until I ring the bell for dinner”). As a result, I had a LOT of time in the backyard and in our neighborhood to run around and entertain myself. There’s no question in my mind that the imagination I have today is a direct result of this rule and the time I spent wandering around and just making stuff up to pass the time.

2. Take Care of Yourself 

So here’s one of those totally obvious things about life that most people REALLY don’t pick up on until about age 30; you know that body you were born with? Yeah, well it’s the only one you get, and it has limits. Sadly, I was NOT a child who had respect for my body. My attitude was that it was a tool to be used and abused as needed to accomplish whatever it was I thought I wanted to do. And, to paraphrase the Emperor, I have paid quite the price for my lack of vision. As I noted in my blog some weeks ago (while writing about my business life), you can in fact work yourself nearly to the point of death … at 32. All it takes is overwork, poor diet and punishing workouts and you will be right there on the Operating Room table just like me. Of course, this is not entirely our fault. Most of us are born with bodies that can take a lot of punishment, especially early on. This is because nature has been making young humans for quite a while now and it’s gotten pretty good at making most of them pretty durable. Unfortunately, many of us take that gift from nature and incorrectly learn that it’s OK to punish and abuse our bodies because they will recover (we can simply work out harder to lose that weight or take some extra time off later to recoup and start over). For most of human history, this mistake wasn’t terribly costly because, well, we tended to die before what were doing to ourselves came back to bite us in the butt. But lately (which is to say in just the last couple of centuries, and really in the last 100 years in particular), a funny thing has happened; our bodies have suddenly been called on to last far longer than nature is used to having to keep them around. The good news is that nature made us incredibly adaptable, and given the speed of this change, we’re doing remarkably well. But nature needs your help. If you’re a young person reading this essay, know that there’s an increasing likelihood that you’re going to live to be far older than you may think and the ability your body has to just recover and rebuild itself? Yeah, that slows down … a LOT, and everything you’re doing to it now will make it harder for it later. Plus, there are going to be things you can’t predict. You might end up with Degenerative Disc Disease that’s so bad that you end up needing multiple artificial disc replacement surgery (that would be me again). Fortunately for me and some of you, science is doing an impressive job of helping us out. I have an awful lot of titanium holding my lower spine together these days, and there are many things that, at 50, I’ll never do again, but the fact is that, as a result, I take a walk around my neighborhood every morning and not a wheel around it. Bottom line; science can help, but no one can do more for your health than you.

3. DON’T Be In A Hurry

Along the same lines, as you grow up, try to remember that you only get to be each age once, so try to take advantage of as many opportunities as you can at each stage. I don’t know anyone who was in more of a rush to grow up than I was. Until recently, no matter what age I was, I always wanted to be older, but in my rush to “skip to the end” I missed a few things that I probably shouldn’t have. As I’ve gotten older, I find that I admire friends who did things that seemed totally crazy at the time. One high school friend left a promising career on Wall Street and went into the mountains of South America to teach math to poor children for a few years. Another friend who is a teacher left his job and decided to teach English to prison inmates. And in one of the craziest yet coolest examples, I have another friend who just decided to go to Thailand for a year, and when she got tired of that, signed on to a cargo carrier as a crewman so she could get to Australia. There were a lot of reasons that most of those things wouldn’t have worked for me when I was younger, but if I could be younger now, I have to say, the ideas are a LOT more interesting to me. The bottom line to this point is that getting going right away on money and a career etc. is nice, but you can’t buy certain experiences, so have a few.

4. NOTHING Lasts Forever, So Enjoy It When You Have It

Few humans are more of a “creature of habit” than I am. I dig routines. I’m not afraid to experiment, but when I find what I like I tend to stick with it. The problem is things constantly change. That restaurant you love? It won’t be there forever, or if it is, there will come a time when it won’t be the same anymore. When cool stuff happens, when you find that place, that moment, that group of friends, make sure to appreciate it in that moment, because it is in the nature of things that it is temporary. I have a lot of “food” based examples of this lesson. I’ll never forget the dessert cart that American Airlines experimented with on the Chicago to Portland run over a decade ago. Seriously, this was a thing (I have no idea if it was sponsored by the Portland Chamber or something, but what an AWESOME idea). They literally had a cart that they brought down the aisle, and every passenger who wanted one, got a scoop of vanilla ice cream in a little bowl with whatever toppings they wanted (the cart had chocolate, caramel, strawberry). It was a crazy good idea, and as much as I wanted it to, I knew it wouldn’t last, so I tried to enjoy every bite. Life is full of cool moments that won’t happen again. You can be sad about that fact later if you want, but when you’re there, love it.

5. Friends Are Important

This one is pretty obvious so I don’t have to say a lot about it. As an adult, I’ve become one of those people who is a gatherer of past friends, and knowing where they are and that they’re OK is important to me. Perhaps the single coolest thing to me about Facebook and other social media is its ability to create a sort of virtual room where all of our friends can be found. It’s a place where they periodically check in and say hi. You know that they’re alive and safe (or having a challenge and need you to reach out to them), you see what they’re up to, what they’re thinking about, every now and then you see a picture, it’s a good thing. But having friends that you can and do talk to and listen to is an incredibly important part of being human. Don’t miss that part.

6. Marry Well

This is a tough one because you can succeed or fail at marriage without that success or failure necessarily having that much to do with you. I will have known my wife for 32 years next month, and we’re only a few months from our 26th Anniversary. Our marriage has, at this point, “worked.” But why it worked is the thing I want to get at. There’s a saying that “women marry men thinking they’ll change and they don’t, and men marry women thinking they won’t change and they do.” In my observation of people over time, I find that it isn’t so much that we were all lying to each other about who we were (when we got married in our 20s), it’s more that we had no idea (and had no way of knowing) who we were going to be as people decades later. The truth, of course, is that we ALL grow and change over time. And the further truth is that here are, in fact, lots of things you CAN do to help your marriage. One of the best pieces of advice my wife and I ever got came from our interview with the Minister who married us. We both did a bit of an eye roll when he insisted on this meeting (we’d known each other for over 6 years already, had lived together for over 2 years, we kind of figured we had all that worked out and that it was a waste of time), but we were wrong. One of the things the Minister talked about was using “I” messages. For example when you’re upset about something … so you don’t say “you did this,” or “you make me feel terrible when…” but rather, “I feel like this when that happens.” It may seem like a subtle change in semantics, but we’ve found it to be a really helpful tool in getting through difficult conversations. But while there are things you can do (and by the way, if you get married, DO THEM), ultimately, when you get married you really are just making your “best guess” and hoping that the two of you change and grow in ways that are compatible. So make your best guess possible and then hope you grow together.

7. If it doesn’t kill you, it’s going to make a great story, (and either way, make sure it leaves a mark)

Have you ever gotten a little cut or something that stings like a sonofabitch and then you look at it and there’s basically no blood and no mark at all. This always depresses me and makes me feel like a wimp for complaining (or just feeling pain). I prefer the accidents where there’s a scar, this way I have a story to tell. But what I really mean by this lesson is that, especially if you’re like me, crazy crap IS going to happen to you. Readers of this blog know that, in the Navy alone, I was nearly killed by helicopters twice, and I ended up being part of a nuclear weapons mishap and a riot in the same 24 hours. None of those experiences seemed particularly fun at the time, but they sure do make great stories now. Basically, the point is that life is often FULL of adventures, and at this point I’ve gotten better at recognizing that today’s disaster stands an excellent chance of becoming tomorrow night’s harrowing, exciting and interesting dinner story.

8. ALWAYS Listen to your “little voice” (especially when it runs counter to “advice”)

I kind of assume that everyone has a little voice, and if you don’t, I’m not sure how you’ve made it this far. My little voice has been talking to me since I was a child. I don’t always listen to it, but I’m ALWAYS sorry when I don’t. My little voice told me that I should move to the desert southwest when I left the Navy half a lifetime ago. I didn’t listen (until two years ago, which was long after I nearly died from exposure to stacchybotrys and subsequently discovered that the desert is where my body is healthiest and happiest). My little voice told me to get out of the stock market in October of 2007. I didn’t listen. That little voice inside you, the one that knows whether you should or shouldn’t say or do something … it’s almost always right, and NOT listening to it can even cost you your life. When I was 15, I was walking to school on a snowy day and, being the rather careless idiot that teenagers often are, I was amusing myself (as I walked under the Winnetka Ave. train underpass) by walking with my right foot on the sidewalk and my left foot in the road. As I got to the far side of the underpass my little voice shouted at me “STEP UP!” It was so forceful that I did so. About one second later a skidding station wagon came up from behind me and hit the curb at about 25 mph. The car came so close to me that one of the rivets (that had held the missing detailing on the side of the station wagon’s doors) actually grabbed and tore a whole in the left leg of my jeans. The force of the interaction also spun me and threw me into a snowdrift immediately in front of me. My friend who was walking with me to school that day (E.B. Dangerfield) was a few steps behind me and saw the whole thing (I, obviously, didn’t) and was amazed I wasn’t killed. Not all of the things the little voice tells us to do are so life and death of course. Many times the little voice is just your “gut instinct.” Well, my advice is to go with it. In my experience, your instinct about the right thing to do is going to be right a LOT more often than any other input you have. This is especially true when you’re contemplating a big decision and seeking advice and input from others. Most of the time, you already have an idea about what you should do, but you’re not sure, so you seek out “experts” and others to either confirm or deny what you think. If you truly have no idea what to do, that’s fine, but most of the time, somewhere in that process, your little voice will start talking to you. When it does, LISTEN TO IT.

9. Let Yourself Off The Hook

If you’re like me, you punish yourself for your mistakes. You relive them a ridiculous number of times and wish more than anything for a time machine so you can undo them. I am still learning that this effort is a complete waste of time, but at this point in life, even if I haven’t quite learned to stop beating myself up entirely, I at least intellectually understand the futility and stupidity of doing so. You WILL make mistakes. Some of them will be BIG ones. If you’re like me, some of them may render you permanently disabled in some way. Others may cost you a literal fortune. They’re valuable lessons (provided you don’t repeat them) and I’m saying you should forget them, but even if you think they’re your “fault,” try to let them go and let yourself up (see lesson 7 above).

10. Enjoy it

This is another HARD one that I’m still working on, but as you hit my age and mortality starts to become more real and you start to realize that “this is it,” the importance of NOT waiting for some later time to enjoy your life starts to really hit you. It’s a good thing to have a bucket list, but it should be a “living document” that changes, and it changes because you’re occasionally knocking stuff off of it. I don’t want you to blow your entire savings account tomorrow or to be completely irresponsible, but don’t wait for “someday” … because someday is TODAY.

Oh Dear God, Not ANOTHER Article About SCOTUS and Marriage Equality

by Duane N. Burghard
©2015

If you haven't yet heard about the Supreme Court's decision last week which legalized same sex marriage in all 50 states, then I'd like to take this opportunity to welcome you back to our solar system ... because you have clearly been in another part of the galaxy for the last several days.

I've been reticent to weigh in on this issue, not because I don't want you to know how I feel, but because I'm reasonably certain that just about every perspective possible has been blasted out across the Internet already. Nonetheless, I am adhering to my "Facebook Rule" this week. My Facebook Rule is as follows: if I post a comment on some topic on my personal Facebook page and I don't think it's any big deal but I get a bunch of likes and comments and shares, then clearly I am wrong about the importance and relevance of the topic and people do want to hear more.

Before I give you my reaction to the decision, let me explain the perspectives that I'm coming from. First, I was twice a candidate for national office. As a result, I had to articulate a position on the issue (a position that, incidentally, managed to please no one, so I'll be sure to cover that again for you in a moment because, apparently, I'm short on my quota of people I need to piss off today). Second, while I am currently more of a spiritual explorer who has taken an increasing interest in Buddhism recently, the fact is that I spent several years of my life as a lay minister in a Christian denomination (I personally delivered two sermons/week for over 5 years) ... this is why Jesus and I remain close friends (please see my blog essay from last Christmas for confirmation). Third, while less unique, I do have several friends and at least one relative (that I know of) who are gay, and one (the family member) lives in what is technically the south and was thus directly affected by this decision. The point here is that I have political, religious and personal feelings about this decision, which I admit puts me in a category that is roughly as exclusive as the white pages (for my younger readers, the white pages refers to  ... you know what, it just means everyone).

So let's start with my political reaction. When I last ran for Congress (2006), I had what I thought was a very careful and well thought out position on marriage equality ... so it shouldn't be any real surprise to anyone that no one liked it and almost no one understood it ... but I'll try again. I've actually LONG been of the opinion that government shouldn't have ever been in the marriage business in the first place. My feeling is that marriage was and is, basically, a religious institution. As such, the state really shouldn't be involved. Ideally, I believe our Republic should have an "iron curtain" like "Wall of Separation" between church and state. In other words, we should have as secular a society as possible, and in such a society an institution like marriage would clearly be entirely separate from the state. But with that said, I would also quickly agree that the state does have a compelling interest in both the existence, health and maintenance of family units, and in having a legal framework which allows for quick, efficient, easy and humane estate and asset management ... aka an infrastructure for civil unions.

HOWEVER! The majority of the people in our Republic have LONG since decided NOT to go with my "ideal" plan above (i.e. we don't have a long standing, well developed and well defined "civil union" infrastructure, other than marriage). We have instead decided that the term marriage is to be used to represent both the religious institution and the civil union legal infrastructure. So my bottom line is this: I support marriage equality. Here's why: in addition to being a religious institution, marriage was, is and will continue to also be the de facto civil union infrastructure in our society (the important point being that the term marriage in our society has two components and it serves both purposes). And this is truly the heart of the disconnect I have with some of my conservative friends: the Supreme Court's decision last week had nothing to do with any religious part of marriage. Instead it had everything to do with establishing the equal rights of same sex couples with respect to the law, and I believe that, on that basis, the Court made the right decision.

It is at this point that a significant number of my conservative friends start taking their long walk off a short pier and end up in the biggest, most ridiculous and frankly most hyperbolic tizzy I've seen since the Court told them that they had to start sharing drinking fountains. They are upset because they apparently don't (or perhaps more accurately don't want to) see and accept the dual role that the term marriage plays in our society. As a result, they choose to see the Court's decision as an attack on the religious definition of marriage, when in fact the Court was merely establishing that the legal part of marriage should treat same sex couples in the same way as it treats opposite sex couples. I think this misinterpretation of the decision (intentional or otherwise) is kind of ridiculous, but I think lots of things are ridiculous, and it's still a (mostly) free country where people are absolutely free to think (and even say) ridiculous things.

Now, you might stop me right there and say, "Duane, you're accepting of the fact that certain people in certain religions may oppose same sex marriage." You're right, I am. "But," you continue, "they're discriminating and that's wrong." Absolutely, you're correct again. Look, I agree that people who run around decrying homosexuality as evil and a sin, and talk about how marriage equality is a sign of the apocalypse etc. etc. are all, well, they're at best ignorant and intolerant (and at worst bigoted and mean) and that they're just plain wrong, but this is America, and one of our freedoms is the freedom to be idiots (it's one I wish we exercised a lot less, but I swore to support and defend everyone's rights to think what they want, not just the people I agree with).

Unfortunately for me, in just these last few days since the decision, my basic philosophy about how marriage and civil unions would ideally be handled has been co-opted by America's neo-conservative far right. This obviously frustrated me because, until the hours immediately following the Supreme Court's decision last week, NO ONE was talking about having separate institutions for the religious and legal sides of marriage except for weirdos like me ... and the ones who are suddenly talking about it now are overwhelmingly people whose motives I distrust. These people, who are suddenly rushing to support what would otherwise be an acceptable idea to me, are clearly doing so exclusively because they're looking for any hustle or dodge which will allow them to get around doing something they don't want to do (which is to accept the equal status of same sex couples). Until last week, the overwhelming majority of people (including the overwhelming majority of conservatives) were completely fine with the dual roles that we had assigned marriage in our society. And that was OK with me. It's not what I think is ideal (again, I prefer a more secular society and clearer separation) but it's really NOT THAT BIG of a deal. I don't have a problem with society's decision to have essentially morphed the definition of the word marriage to include both religious and civil institutions .. and again, conservatives didn't either, until the SCOTUS decision ... and THAT, is why it's hard to take them seriously now (because it's obvious that they didn't mind the dual use of the term until one side of it included rules they don't like).

So politically, I support the Supreme Court's decision because it protects and expands the rights of people to participate in the legal institution that we've chosen to call marriage.


Now, as a religious person, I REALLY don't understand the "freak out" from those who are obviously using religion in general (and Christianity in particular) as the basis for their objection. For those who don't know me, I am often a critic of a group I call "CINOs" (Christians In Name Only). These are individuals who, in my opinion, basically bastardize the words and works of Jesus Christ. They pervert them into positions that have nothing to do with what Jesus came to say and do for humanity. They are not only not Christians, they are accomplishing the opposite of what Christ stood for. They sell, espouse and spew hatred, intolerance, bigotry and everything else that is the antithesis of what I believe it is to be a Christian. But what really scares me about these people is their insistence on attempting to legislate their (in my opinion) deeply skewed view of morality and to impose it on everyone else. To me that is antithetical to what Jesus wanted AND what the framers of the Constitution intended for our Republic.

And boy are the CINOs out in force now! But rather than focus on the negatives of what these people are talking about, let me instead point to what I feel is the Christian way to view the decision.

First, let me hit on the incredibly obvious: Christianity is in NO way "under attack" by virtue of the Court's decision. For the Supreme Court's decision to be an attack on Christianity, the Court would have to have intended or taken a direct action which prevented people from being Christians. Now again, I consider myself, at best, to have been a CIT or "Christian In Training" (because, I gotta be honest, Jesus and I talk all the time, and there are definitely times when he's telling me to do stuff that I have a hard time with) ... but to me, the single most important thing that Christians are supposed to do is to love one another. I'm pretty sure that Jesus was very specific on this point: loving each other was the number one thing that he felt would define people as Christians. So here's the thing: NOTHING in the Supreme Court's decision says or does anything which prevents anyone from loving anyone else.

Jesus was also big on kindness, understanding and forgiveness. In re-reading Justice Stevens' opinion, I find nothing in there that keeps me from doing any of that. Jesus also encouraged us to feed the hungry, clothe the poor and heal the sick. Checking the decision again ... nope, nothing in there that prevents me from doing any of that. Perhaps it's an attack on my ability to go to church. Well, if it is, then enforcement so far is really lax (of course, I do live in Arizona now so ....).

So nothing about this decision prevents me from being a Christian and it doesn't appear to be an attack on Christianity in any way. What it does do, however, is make me look more closely at how I view the religious institution of marriage, and when I do, I see only the opportunity to increase the number of people who are taking part in an institution that we hope is a benefit to families and society. To me the decision is inclusive and loving and ... well, kind of Christian really.


Personally, I'm an egalitarian by nature. In fact, egalitarianism, the idea that humans should have equality in social, political and economic affairs, is definitely one of the most fundamental of my core beliefs. Basically, it's a sense of fairness, and this decision seems fair and right to me. I also believe that our Court system, and in fact our Republic as a whole, does its best work when it is expansive and inclusive in its application of rights and benefits to all of its citizens. It also seems morally right to me. It establishes that it is wrong to stigmatize (and even criminalize) people based on who they want to share their lives with. Further it encourages us to be more loving and inclusive of all people. So I suppose you could argue that I personally support it because the political and religious parts of me support it, but I see it as the right thing from all three perspectives.

Finally, as I indicated, I have a number of gay friends. One of them is a member of a family that has been close to my family for generations. She and her partner have two children. Another is a high school classmate of mine. He and his partner have a daughter. And there are a number of others with no children. Additionally, I have a close family member who is gay (and engaged). As I have seen their reactions to this decision (and the reactions of other friends and members of their community), I see only good and normal people who want nothing more than what all families want, and I am grateful and happy to see them get it.

Why I Haven't Written About Politics (My Life As A Radical Moderate)

© 2015
by Duane N. Burghard

I am very proud of the fact that there are now thousands of people who read my blog. Most of them don't know me personally. At best they've read my little bio on my blog page or maybe they've gotten really motivated and actually Googled me (this act would allow them to read about me on Wikipedia or see one of several campaign videos that are still floating around from my last Congressional campaign in 2006). So for most of my readers, the question "Why Don't I Write About Politics?" isn't one they normally ask. But among my friends who know me and read my blog, it's a very common question. Fortunately for them (and you), I don't have anything else to write about this week, so I'll tackle it for you.

For the record, I do have very specific and (I hope) well thought out political positions on a wide variety of social and political issues. For those who know that I have twice run for the U.S.House of Representatives (twice nominated, zero times elected), that's pretty easy to understand and believe. But when I decided to become a writer last year (OK, let's back that up a bit, when my wife got tired of me not writing all the stuff I had in my head and essentially badgered me into taking myself seriously as a writer and to begin writing as a profession) I specifically decided to avoid writing about politics, and for one key reason; our society is now so incredibly divided along ideological lines that it has become basically impossible to write about any political or social issue without alienating or irritating 50% of the people reading it. That's a real shame, because it didn't used to be like that and it doesn't have to be now.

There are many examples in American political history of people with widely divergent political views still managing to maintain close personal relationships. And it is still possible to do so. I am quite proud of the fact that I have many friends who are both more conservative and more liberal than I am ... but it's absolutely NOT the norm anymore. I have some ideas about why that is (the polarization of American society is based on the desire to separate and divide us, which then makes us easier to divide and conquer), but many people have become so completely attached to their "side" that the moment they read or hear something that sounds like it's critical of their "side" the shields go up and that person and whatever they're saying are immediately dismissed as nothing more than the rhetorical nonsense of "the other guys." And that's a lot more than "too bad." A Republican Democracy (like the United States) requires compromise in order to function correctly. The "best" solutions in our government are the ones that no one is entirely happy with. Nobody gets the solution they want, but everyone gets something they can live with. When we see ourselves as one nation, that becomes a lot easier to accept, but when we're constantly bombarded with "we" and "they" ... when ALL the inputs we're exposed to seek to accentuate the things we don't have in common instead of the things we do (and worse, when we're conditioned to believe that these differences are dramatic, Earth shattering, cataclysmic differences that require us to scream red faced into the face of whoever disagrees), then it becomes impossible to see compromise as a victory.

I have often described myself as a "radical moderate." I genuinely enjoy the fact that my conservative friends think I'm a bit too liberal and my liberal friends think I'm a bit too conservative. I tend to be a social liberal (pro-choice, in favor of marriage equality etc.) and an economic conservative (I do support getting rid of the Bush tax cuts (which all true fiscal conservatives should BTW), but I also think the Fed's policy of QE was necessary in 2009 and 2010, but it's now gone on way too long and that it's causing more problems than it's solving).

Now stop.

How many decisions about me did you just make? Sadly, the closet sociologist in me knows that a bunch of people just tuned out of my writing forever (or at best they will see it forever more through a preconceived lens), and that's too bad. As a writer, I do have something to say about politics and society and I would like to calmly and rationally discuss those issues with both the people I agree with and the people I disagree with. And I'm going to start doing it. I am persuaded by my friends who have argued that my not speaking up about things that I think are very important to us as a society isn't right either. I hope that the people who disagree with me will stick around, and for this reason; I want to be correct when I espouse a political or social position (and I've usually thought my place out pretty well), but I'm far more married to my search for truth than I am to any political or social position, and if I'm wrong, I want you to make your case and tell me why. If your answer is "well, because ... God," ... well, then we might have to agree to disagree (because we might disagree about God's position on the subject), but if you can logically show me an empirical truth that I'm overlooking that would change how I view something, I really do want to hear it.

Another reason I want everyone to stick around is that I also have other things to say. Politics is, and should be, just one small part of our lives together. I am deeply fascinated by astrophysics, and the nature of time and space in particular (my essay "Umbrellas, Spaghetti and Spacetime" is, by far, the most popular and most read essay I've ever written ... I have recently expanded it and may post the whole thing again here soon). I have also had some pretty wild life experiences in my life that I have enjoyed writing about. And I just had my very first novel published (and I'll be publishing an excerpt from that here on my blog in the next few weeks to), a science fiction story called Gopto. To date, everyone has been able to enjoy all of that without associating a particular ideology to me as an author, and I resisted writing about the issues of the day because I enjoyed being able to talk to as broad an audience as possible without having people make assumptions about me as a person.

But the truth is that politics does exist, and while it does play too big a part of our lives, having it play NO role in our lives (or in my writing) isn't right either. If we're going to survive as a nation, we're going to need to learn to disagree again without it being the end of the world and without it so separating and dividing us that we can't agree on or accomplish anything. That's a pretty tall order, but it has to start somewhere. I'll start. You join in when you're ready.

See you next time ... I hope.

A Million Ways to Die In The Midwest OR Why I Moved to Tucson

by Duane N. Burghard

©2015

Before I start, I need to apologize to my regular readers and explain the reasons for my several weeks long hiatus from writing this blog. There are three reasons for my disappearance. The first reason is because a very important and very cool thing has happened: I have finally finished and now published my first novel (Gopto). Unfortunately, getting it ready for publishing, production etc. ended up consuming basically all of the time that I normally dedicate to my blog. Finishing the novel and having it published is a BIG deal in my life and I'm VERY excited. You will see ads for the book soon and there will probably be a number of upcoming blog posts where I talk about it.

The second reason is a little more complex. The fact is that my recent essays focused on my business life have not been nearly as popular as those which preceded it. To be clear, I have intentionally spent these first six months as a blogger writing about a wide variety of topics. I wanted a high level of diversity in subject matter so that I could learn what "works" with people who like my writing style (and what doesn't). An unfortunate side effect of my strategy is that one audience would find my blog because of one essay they like, but then I would move on to something different and they would go away. The series I've been working on lately (my business story) is, evidently, a lot less interesting to my core readers than essays like "Umbrellas, Spaghetti and Spacetime," or "How I Came To Be Interrogated By Soviet Authorities At Age 11." The message is now pretty clear: I need to get back to writing the sorts of things that "worked" for many of my readers.

Finally, the third reason for my delay is that this particular story is a lot harder one to tell. I will try to tell it with as much humor and lightness as I can, but this chapter of my life contains a pretty serious, life threatening and life changing illness. It permanently changed my life and I sometimes find it difficult to find the right way to "frame" it as a story. In any case, the experience is also an excellent opportunity to "skip to the end" of my business story and morph it into the story of how this particular illness reshaped my life and led me to my current home in Tucson, Arizona.

As always, thank you for visiting and reading my blog. My normal blog will resume next week, and I promise to focus more on the things the majority of you have found interesting.

Now ... where were we? Oh yes ......

“We’re goin’ to the End of The Line” (apologies to my beloved Traveling Wilburys)

As I noted in the last chapter, by the spring of 2001, about a year after renovations had turned more than half of our house into office space, the business was continuing to grow and Mara and I were realizing that, even though we had rarely used the rooms in our house that had now been 100% taken over by the business as office space, we still had in fact used them from time to time and we did in fact want to have that space. Additionally, there really wasn't any more space in the building to put any more people (unless we wanted to give up the kitchen (which was already shared with employees) or the bedrooms ... no). So we faced the reality that we had simply outgrown the house and began looking for a new one. On a whim, while driving around and house hunting one day, we turned in to a neighborhood and began driving along a street that served as a dam for a lake. Across the lake were several large, beautiful homes, one had an enormous dock on the lake. And I thought to myself, “I wonder how old I’ll be when I can afford a place like that.” I have simply GOT to STOP asking questions like that because, as we pulled around the corner and by that street, we both saw, to our stunned amazement, that the exact house we were dreaming about was for sale. As a JOKE, I decided that we should pull up. I fully expected the price to be WAY out of our range, and wanted to look at it, show it to Mara, have a laugh, and move on. What I saw stopped me cold. It was just outside what we thought our range was, but from the sticker over the price on the brochure, it had already just come down $20K. My immediate thought was, “OK, what’s wrong with it?” So we walked around and looked in the windows etc. It was decorated in a very mod style (which is to say it looked like what we envisioned the 21st Century would look like back in the late 1970s ... odd given that the home was built in the late 80s, but whatever). We called the realtor (an occasional client of ours) to inquire about it and discovered that they had just dropped the price another $10K that day. It was now at the VERY high end of our range, but it was there. The house was well more than twice as large as our existing house. It had a 1,500 square foot plus walk out basement where we (correctly) estimated we could have up to 6 additional employees working without causing space problems. Our logic in making an offer was that, while it was more than the “next logical step” house we were looking for, it was the “End of the Line” house, the house we could live in for 20-30 years and retire from. Obviously we had no way of knowing how close it would be to becoming my “End of the Line” house in a far more literal (mortal) way. The sellers were desperate, they took our price and even agreed to let us rent the place for a month as a trial ownership period (and apply the rent to the purchase price). 

What happened on the last week of the trial period was one of those completely bizarre moments that happen in life. At the time it seemed like a pretty hilarious and minor hiccup, but it very nearly cost me my life. The house had a water softener that clearly hadn’t been used in years, and I called a plumber to come look at what it would take to reactivate it (as well as some other items). When he arrived, we went to the utility room. The small closet which housed the water main as well as the water softener was on the far side of this utility room. There was an odd sound coming from the closet, and as I opened the door, and you couldn’t write something this slapstick funny, a stream of water literally shot out the door and began striking me in the face (soaking both me and my clothes obviously). The water main came through the foundation wall at about my eye height, and sometime shortly before the plumber arrived, the foundation had moved just enough to tear open the main pipe. As a result, the pressure of the water shooting through the narrow opening in the foundation was significant. In one of the truly comic moments of my life, I quickly slammed the door, looked at the plumber and said, “OK, that is NOT why I asked you to come out today.” The plumber quickly ran to the street and cut off the water coming to the house, but the seeds of my next near death experience had already been sown. The floor of the utility room suffered extensive water damage. The floor was pergo, wood ... very unusual for a utility room, but the previous owner’s son had been a musician and had converted the room in to a recording studio (he had laid the wood floor for acoustic reasons). The other piece of this tragic puzzle came several years before we ever saw the house. The house (more specifically, its driveway) sits on a curve on the road. The road and the driveway are both concrete, and the concrete was, unfortunately continuous. As a result, during the summer months, as the concrete in the road and driveway expanded, it would shove a good portion of the house (the garage to be precise) off its foundation. Over the years, the house had been moved by a couple of inches, more than enough to allow moisture to get into the walls in the portion of the basement under the garage. Over time, the insulation and drywall became infested with a particular type of mold. The mold is called Stachybotrys or stachy (pronounced “stacky”) for short. Stachy is bad for all humans, but it’s quite literally lethal to about of 15% of us (you know where this is going now). With spores in the air, and a wet wood floor, it was only a matter of time.

As the summer ended and fall began, we began closing up the house more and more, and then we started turning the heat on. The spores began blowing around the house. It's very hard for me to talk about and write about this part of the experience, not because it's so painful (although it's not pleasant) but because I literally don't remember a lot of it. I remember losing my voice, but it was fall and I figured I just had a cold. But then I started losing my mind, which is to say, I started losing access to my memory. This is a big deal because those who know me know that I have something FAR more than a normal memory. In fact, let's take a momentary diversion to find out how I knew that.

“We’d like to talk to you about a career in the CIA" ....

In the fall of 1984, the University of Missouri had one of their on campus job fairs. This particular fair was held along my Tuesday/Thursday walking route between classes. One of the vendors at the fair was the CIA, and as I walked by, the recruiter asked me if I had a moment to take a quick test. The test consisted of a reading sample and a few questions. I took the test, completed it and handed it back to him. He looked at it and then asked me if I would stop back by in two days. Since I knew I would be in the same place at the same time (same class schedule) I said sure. On Thursday, right on schedule, I showed up and the gentleman asked me to take a very similar but slightly different test, which I did ... and after he graded it he asked me if I would quietly step aside with him so he could talk to me about a career in the CIA. He explained to me what the purpose of the test was, and that it identified me as having a particular type of mind that they look for in researchers. He described the job of the researchers and I said, "like Robert Redford in Three Days Of The Condor?" and he said "yes," (in retrospect I think its odd that he would admit that since he must have been able to guess that I would then know that all of Redford's friends in that movie who are doing research jobs like the one he was telling me about ended up getting killed in the movie). We spoke for nearly an hour. He took the time to talk to me about how my mind could be trained to do far more than I was doing naturally. He then took the time to actually teach me a couple of mental games that I still play to this day to sharpen my memory skills and to pull information out of my head. The offer was frankly tempting, and their financial aid package was WAY more than what I was receiving from my NROTC scholarship ... but I didn't much care for the idea that I would have a super secret job that I could never talk to anyone about. Additionally, I did actually have some fear about working for the CIA. But ultimately, the fact was that I felt loyalty to the Navy and all of my friends in it and all that the staff at our unit had done to secure my full scholarship (and I had NO idea how easy it would have been to get out of it). After several post event phone calls etc., I thanked the recruiter for all he had done for me, and politely declined the offer. But I never forgot what he told me about my mind and what I could do. I had always known that I had a much stronger and more powerful memory than most people, but now I knew what it was, why, and how to better train and use it.

On November 4, 2001, I was watching the Chicago Bears play the Cleveland Browns. With about 3 minutes to play, the Brows scored a touchdown to go up 21-7. The game was OVER. So over that the announcers were listing and thanking the crew and wrapping up while the Bears were on their final drive. With 30 seconds to play, the Bears scored, making it 21-14. They recovered the onside kick and, as time expired, they scored AGAIN, tying the score at 21. They lost the overtime coin flip, but in that first Browns possession, the Bears defense scored on a "pick six" and won the game 27-21. It was one of the most insane finishes to a game I have ever seen.

And it's the very last memory I have for a VERY long time.

I can't tell you much about 2002. I remember having to fire an employee. I remember the birth of my daughter Jordan and helping my wife through labor. I remember getting into a really emotional argument with my Apple rep. But other than that. Nothing. For a man who can pull so many facts from his life out of his mind in incredible detail, I can't tell you basically anything about that entire year. I know that I was scared out of my mind. I know that I could barely talk. The poison in the house was causing the tissues around my vocal chords to essentially dissolve (and the area below my jaws was sensitive and ached constantly), so I had the ability to speak for about 30-60 minutes per day (which was incredibly hard on the business of course), but more importantly, I couldn't remember anything. In the years since all of this happened I have become friends with a prominent Neuropsychologist at the University of Missouri (our youngest daughters were best friends for years). He took an interest in my case and concluded that something about the toxin was keeping my brain from turning short term memories into long term ones, and only the especially traumatic or emotionally powerful stuff (e.g. Jordan's birth) got through.

Other family members and employees never got sick, so we didn't suspect the house. The Doctors I saw were confused. They had me taking very expensive and powerful medication for months on end. It kept me from getting worse and allowed me to work, but I got no better.

In January of 2003, we made our regular trip to visit Mara's sister out on the island of Hawaii. It was my third vacation since becoming ill. Each time I went on vacation I would seem to get noticeably better, but that seemed only logical (away from the stress of work? in Hawaii? duh!). But when we returned home from the trip, that very first night, I began to reel awful again right away ... and for the first time, I wasn't alone. Our then 3 1/2 month old daughter Jordan, who hadn't been sick a day in her life, showed signs of being sick. And even in my weakened state, I remember that being the day that I I thought, "it's in the house."

I contacted the EPA, and they put me in touch with an air quality testing firm. The firm came to Columbia a few days later. The man conducting the test walked in, and was in the house only seconds before saying, "I know what this is, and you've got it pretty bad." I've now been well for many years, and for the record, I can now do the same thing ... I can walk into your home and tell you within MOMENTS if your house is infected with stachybotrys.

Three days later I was up in Kirksville doing some onsite work for an important client. As I left the parking lot, my phone rang. It was the EPA guy. "Mr. Burghard, we have the test results from your home sir, and, well, we don't think you should go home tonight." Well THAT got my attention. They then told me that they were faxing the results to my ENT Doctor. The Doctor's office called me less than 10 minutes later and said "Dr. Denninghoff would like to see you first thing tomorrow morning." When I walked in he had the results in his hand. He said, "you know, a ton of people think they have this and don't, but you, this is the first thing that makes sense, THIS is what's wrong."

Within weeks we had a significant section of the house completely gutted. And more. The special contractors who did the removal washed down the concrete foundation with some kind of chemical wash, and they left a very odd device that had a particular type of light and made loud clicking noises running 24/7 for several days. Then the rebuilding began. I was militant about never allowing anything like this to happen to me or anyone who ever owned this house again. We installed a special "vapor barrier" along all wall and floor surfaces. The framing was done with pressure treated, mold resistant studs. The sheetrock was a special "greenrock" that is specially made to be mold resistant. Everything we did was focused on not just fixing the problem, but making sure it never happened again. In the end, it was about $25,000 worth of work (and that doesn't count the sweat equity of finishing work that we did ourselves), but when we had the EPA testing firm back out to test the results, they found less stachybotrys in the house than was naturally occurring in the air outside the house (and that is when you know you have it beat).

My health began to improve rapidly. Within 6 weeks I was on about 1/60th of the power of the medication I had been on (and very quickly down to just over the counter drugs to deal with the remnants). And on March 31, 2003, as I was driving back to the office at 8:30am after dropping Taylor at her nursery school, I pulled up to the corner of Forum and Stadium, and Jackson Brown's "Lawyers In Love" started playing on the radio. As I sat at the red light it suddenly occurred to me that I was singing the song in my head along with the music ... and I knew the words! I immediately began taking inventory of my "mind palace" quizzing myself relentlessly about whatever obscure details I could think of ... and it was back! All of it! Just like that, in a single moment, suddenly I had access to my mind again. And I started to cry.

It was the scariest experience of my life.

“Didn't you say something about Tucson?" ....

Yes, I did. So, what the heck does all of THAT have to do with how I got to Tucson? Well, as I said, with the house successfully remediated (and we sold it a year later ... mostly because the business had once again grown beyond those 6 more employees we figured on when we bought it), I got better fast. My medication bill quickly went from $300-400/month to about $60/month. My voice returned, my mind returned, I got better ... but I never did get all the way better. Now, I had been warned by my Doctor that some of my voice loss might very well be permanent (and in fact I did lose about 5 notes off the top of my singing voice range ... although oddly enough I picked up three more on the low end), and I had been further warned that it would take up to five years or more for me to really feel normal again, but since I was pretty close to normal within just a few months, I kind of accepted where I was as "the new normal." And the medication I needed was over the counter and cheap, so I kind of just accepted it and moved on.

In the fall of 2007, I attended the annual ASMC Conference in Tucson, Arizona (the ASMC is a consortium corporation of Apple Dealers and I sat on the company's Board of Directors for six years). It had now been four and a half years since we had discovered and removed the stachybotrys, and the fact that I was still on any medication was frankly annoying and bothersome to me. Periodically I would try to stop, and I'd invariably last a few days before I began to feel awful again, and then I'd restart ... but by the third day of the conference in Tucson, I felt so good that I forgot to take my medication ... and it literally wasn't until the day I left (day 5) that I noticed and realized that I had continued to feel not just fine, but really great.

Hilariously, I did not make the connection between my health and my location ... although, in fairness to me, I obviously did notice that I felt better. My rationale for the improvement came from my conversation with my Doctor years earlier (he said it would take about 5 years,  and it had in fact been about about 5 years, so I thought, "that must be it").

I returned back to Missouri and, after a few days, felt the need to go back to the medication again, but now, instead of taking something every day, I was taking something every 2-3 days or so. This again was the "new normal"

“Would you like to take over a couple of stores?" ....

I received a call from another Apple dealer in the summer of 2009. He had spoken with his Apple rep who had advised and encouraged him to contact me. His family had sold their company (a large electronics and household goods business, which included the Apple dealership) a couple of years earlier, and the company they sold out to had driven their business into the ground and into bankruptcy, so this person's family had come back and bought the company back from the Bankruptcy Court. However, in rebuilding their business, they didn't feel that they had the time, effort, energy or money necessary to rebuild everything at the same time, so essentially they wanted to outsource the Apple part of their stores to me. I, of course, was happy to help. A side effect of this takeover, however, meant that I would now be traveling to New Mexico (the two stores in question were in Albuquerque and Santa Fe) several times per year.

On my fourth trip to Albuquerque, I was paying particular attention to my mood and health ... and I was doing that because on my prior trip I thought I noticed that I seemed to be in an unusually good mood while I was in New Mexico, and that seemed to have happened before. Sure enough, after about 6 hours on the ground, I began to feel noticeably better. I felt healthier, stronger, I was in a better mood ... in just about every way I felt better. I called my wife and reported that, at this point, it seemed unlikely that this was a coincidence (I said something like, "look, I like Albuquerque, but I don't think I like it THAT much ... I think something else is happening here."

So a week or so later I made an appointment to go see my old ENT Doctor. I told him what I experienced, that it seemed like each time I went to New Mexico I would be there for something like half a day, and I would suddenly start feeling physically, mentally and emotionally better. He looked at me without emotion and said, "well, yeah, that makes sense."

Did you ever have one of those moments in life where someone says something and then there's a silent pause after that because what that person has just said makes complete and total sense to them but no sense at all to you? That's what this moment was like for me. After a long pause I said, "why is that?" The Doctor noted that I had suffered from stachybotrys poisoning years earlier. I said I knew that. He said, "well, some of the remnants of that are going to be in your bloodstream for the rest of your life."

"OK," I replied.

"Well," he said, "it's a toxin that gets all of its strength from moisture, so the drier the climate you're in, the less it will be able to mess with you and the better you'll feel." I had read a LOT about stachybotrys by this point. I knew that its global "superhome" if you will is in the Mississippi River Valley (it's worst down in the New Orleans and Deep South areas, but it comes all the way up into the midwest, and certainly into central Missouri). And by this time I had developed quite the schnoz for detecting it (like the inspector who came to our home years ago, as I noted above, I now knew exactly what it smelled like and could immediately feel its affects on me). But I had sort of assumed that some of it was pretty much everywhere. The idea that there were environments on Earth that were so hostile to it that it basically didn't exist hadn't frankly occurred to me until that moment.

"That makes sense," I said. Then, after a pause I added, "you know Doc ... um, just for future reference, that's a tidbit of information I probably could have had years ago." Important life lesson: what's intuitively obvious to you is not necessarily intuitively obvious to those around you.

I went home that night and said to my wife, "I love it here in Mid-Missouri. We've built our lives and our business here. We've raised our kids here, this is home ... but we live once, and if I can be that much better somewhere else, we should go." Ironically, she was as ready or more ready to go than I was.

We took the children to New Mexico during their Spring Break in 2012. We looked around Las Cruces, Albuquerque, Rio Rancho etc. and saw a lot of nice places. The girls all pretty obviously hated it. Oh well. The next year (2013), my Dad offered to take us and our children on a weeklong San Diego to Puerto Vallarta Spring Break cruise (he had done the same for the children of my siblings but not us), so we said sure ... and I asked the family if we could take 1-2 days on the way home and have a look at Arizona ... which we did ... and when we got to Tucson, we got the first "hey, this is nice" reaction from everyone ... and that was pretty much how Tucson became the target. We moved to Tucson in August of 2013. Our house is literally just down the road from the resort where the ASMC Conference was held in 2007 (total coincidence, had NO idea until after we bought it ... funny how life does stuff like that to you). I do miss things about Missouri, but the fact is that I'm much healthier and much happier here. The desert isn't right for everyone, but if ANYTHING I've written above about my experience sounds familiar to you. PLEASE have your house checked for stachybotrys and/or aspergillus IMMEDIATELY. I also recommend just visiting Tucson sometime. Come down for a few days, see how you feel (and if you hate the cold, as I do, pick sometime when it's really cold where you are and come enjoy the sun and comparative warmth we have to offer).

And by the way, several people who have come to visit us since we've moved here have also decided to move here. This wasn't the primary reason that my wife finally left our company and became a realtor with Keller Williams this year, but in case you come and want to stay, I know someone who would love to help!


And THAT is how I came to Tucson. Next week my blog will return with a completely new essay.

The "Home" Based Business (My Life In Business: Part 7)

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Thank You Jon Stewart

by Duane N. Burghard
©2015

First, I'd like to sincerely thank Jon Stewart for announcing that he's leaving The Daily Show on a Tuesday. Why? Because, while it might appear to some that this announcement was intentionally timed (at least in part) to screw up my blog schedule, it's obvious to me that he must have known how completely lost, confused and conflicted I already was about which essay to post this week, and by making such a historic announcement at this moment, he would force me to literally abandon and throw out everything else (including the truly horrible piece I was trying to write about Valentine's Day) and, right off the cuff, write about this event.

Like many people, my first reaction to the announcement was one of shock, sadness, and frankly concern for the future. Since taking the helm back in 1999, Stewart was the driving force in transforming The Daily Show from an occasionally cute, quirky and comparatively unknown late night show on a barely known cable channel into an internationally renowned and respected, critically "super-acclaimed" and incredibly popular institution of American news, politics and culture. Frankly, it would be very difficult if not impossible to overstate the impact Stewart and his team have had on the show, the Comedy Central network and indeed on the public at large.

I have been watching The Daily Show fairly religiously for well over a decade now. It has always been very good, often hilarious, always entertaining, thoughtful, relevant, television, but I would argue that, over time, it has become far more than that; I believe that The Daily Show has actually been performing a vital service to our Republic.

Over the last 30 years in particular, I have become increasingly convinced that the changes that have been made in our national education policies have been (perhaps even intentionally) systematically breeding out creative and critical thinking skills. America, it seems, has been producing ever increasing numbers of automatons who fail to even desire to adequately question, think critically or act in ways that are necessary to secure the healthy future of a democratic Republic such as ours. In the midst of that ongoing, slow motion tragedy, Jon Stewart has been the front man for a small army that is obviously trying to fight against that trend. Using biting, intelligent satire and a gift for exposing hypocrisy in an amusing way, Stewart (along with his writers and staff) have been teaching young Americans what their schools would not and do not: how to think critically about their government and society and, just as importantly, the importance of doing so. The result? There is no question in my mind that The Daily Show has influenced the opinions and voting habits of millions of Americans in a positive and healthy way. And, of course, they've made us laugh (and sometimes cry) a LOT in that process. I have long said that both Mr. Stewart and Mr. Colbert should be recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom (in fact, if they are not recognized in this way before President Obama leaves office, I will consider it a specific and glaring failure of his Presidency, a shocking and sad inability to appropriately and adequately acknowledge these men and their substantial contribution to America).

And while I'm on the subject of Mr. Colbert (who recently stepped down after an incredibly impressive and socially valuable seven year run of his own), let's not forget that we very likely wouldn't have any idea who he was were it not for The Daily Show, which has shown an impressive ability to regularly reinvent itself and consistently and continually attract incredibly talented people. Early on, I used to worry each time an incredibly bright and funny "correspondent" moved on, but each time the show's supporting cast lost a Steve Carrell, Rob Corddry or Stephen Colbert, there was a John Oliver, Aasif Mandvi or Samantha Bee to take their place.

While the show is certainly best known for its willingness to watchdog our nation's politicians and our hopelessly biased, corporate controlled media, it has hardly been content to confine itself to just those areas. Over time it has fearlessly stepped in to address other issues as well. In fact, there are very few matters of injustice or inequality in our society that haven't been exposed and, when appropriate, skewered by Stewart and his amazing team. In short, The Daily Show has done what our mainstream media has so consistently failed to do in recent decades; it has showed us what we need to see, exposed us to ideas and perspectives that force us to listen and learn and grow from them ... and they have done all of this in a way that makes viewers both laugh AND think. That, is an incredibly rare and important talent and skill, and that is why my first reaction was immediately a sense of loss, followed by sadness and concern about what the absence of such a voice might mean.

There is a song by the rock group Kansas that reminds us that "nothing lasts forever but the Earth and sky," and George Harrison also came to me this morning with the equally true (if depressing) reminder that "all things must pass." One of the most discouraging things about staring down the barrel of my 50th birthday (now just a few months away) has been this growing realization regarding the impermanence of things ... but that realization also serves as a reminder to us (or should) to make sure that we appreciate and enjoy the good things in our lives while they are there. Mr. Stewart has now given the defense of our great nation (and let's be clear, that is absolutely what he has been doing) 16 years of his life, and he has every right to step down in order to spend additional time with his family, explore other avenues of creative expression and/or, well, frankly do whatever the hell else he wants to do. He does not "owe" us another day, another minute. He has done his bit for "king and country" and while we may be sad to see him leave and apprehensive about who will fill the giant hole that will be left when he is gone (which brings us to our new Daily Show segment titled "Who Will Fill Jon Stewart's Gaping Hole On Television?" ... really? That's what we're going with? OK, we'll work on that ...), it seems to me that our first and predominant reaction to the announcement of his departure should be one of gratitude.

So I hope that everyone who reads this essay will join me in saying thank you to Mr. Stewart for all that he has done to inform, entertain and in so many ways improve the quality of the dialog in our society for so many years. I further hope that anyone who sees his departure as a reason to fear for the future because of the absence of his voice, to instead view it as a call to action, an opportunity for us to collectively help fill the void left after his exit. The Daily Show has presented a great example for us to follow. It has encouraged a more active and engaged populace, one that exercises its responsibility to monitor and check its elected officials ... and again, it has done so in a way that has often made us laugh, that brought humor and light to issues of importance and sadness.

Finally, I shouldn't hesitate to add that it's not over yet. In fact, as I type this sentence, somewhere in New York City, Mr. Stewart is literally on stage taping tonight's episode of The Daily Show. We have several months yet to soak in, learn and draw strength from all the ideas and all the laughter and joy yet to come. And can you imagine the send off? Personally, I'm hoping EVERYONE comes back for those last shows. I don't care about the celebrities, I care about the cast. The chance to see Rob Corddry report on some piece of foreign policy goofiness (the "Tae-Po-Dong Missile" segment remains one of the more inappropriate and yet hysterical pieces of TV I've ever seen), or to see Stephen Colbert tell us about "This Week In God" one more time, or to see Wyatt Cenac looking at the camera in exasperation as he deals with some issue of injustice or just absurd stupidity ... the show would have to last hours, but it would be one for all of time.

That day, and that final show are coming. All things have their time and the wonderful time we have had to enjoy The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is ending soon. Enjoy it, be grateful for it, say thank you, and if it meant something to you as it did to me, then don't allow the kind of critical thinking and desire for reason that was so core to what the show was about to end. The mission of the show, to entertain and make our nation and the world a better place, is everyone's mission now ... as in fact it always was.

See you next week.

My Year Without the NFL

by Duane N. Burghard
©2015


As almost everyone on the planet knows, Superbowl 49 was this past weekend. The game marked the official end to the 2014 NFL season. What is substantially less known is that I watched less football this past season than I have at any time since I was 12 years old, and this week's essay is all about why.

For my entire adult life, I had been a rabid football fan. I always remember enjoying the game, but I became a BIG fan in high school, and by the time I graduated from college I was hooked. My wife will tell you that the one warning I gave her about marrying me was, "I don't drink, I don't smoke, I don't do drugs, I don't stay out late ... I watch football."

So what happened? Two things. First, the scandals, controversies and problems of the NFL finally became just too big and too bad to ignore. And second, I found a better sport.

The words scandal and NFL are hardly new companions (there are literally so many that there are entire websites dedicated to merely listing them). The NFL has a long and sad history of having its players involved in all kinds of criminal activities. From drug abuse to dog fighting to rape and murder, the league has consistently demonstrated a staggering either unwillingness or inability to get a grip on and control the behavior of its players. So why did I boycott now? What took me over the edge this past year? Well, it's difficult to identify one particular "last straw" that made me say, "that's it, no more, I'm done" to my lifelong favorite sport, but I can tell you how it started and which ones led me to impose my ban.

Over the last several years, the number of NFL players committing suicide (particularly high profile players like Dave Duerson and Junior Seau) has escalated, and there is evidence that many of these players were suffering from traumatic brain injuries (which is easy to understand given the frequency of the high speed, high energy collisions they have with other players). In late 2013, the PBS series Frontline aired a documentary called "League of Denial," in which it exposed an extensive, detailed and intentional coverup on the part of the league. According to the film, the league had significant knowledge regarding the causal link between play in the NFL and the serious medical issues being faced by these players years later (and, far worse, was intentionally hiding that information). That was a last straw, not because it was any revelation to me or anyone else that football is an incredibly violent game, but because the league knew about this particularly horrific side effect for a LONG time and chose to intentionally hide that information.

And then there was Ray Rice. Sadly, sexual assault and the NFL are also hardly new to each other, but two things about the Rice situation bothered me far more than any other scandal. First, the severity of the initial punishment was to suspend Rice for a couple of weeks. When quarterback Michael Vick was found to be involved in a dog fighting ring, he was suspended indefinitely (that suspension was eventually lifted and a couple of years later, Vick returned). When Ray Rice beat his then fiancé unconscious, he was initially suspended by the NFL for TWO GAMES. The message to me, a father with daughters, was clear; the NFL thinks more of dogs than it does of women. Secondly, it later became clear that the NFL had once again lied and attempted to cover up the truth regarding details of the Rice case (specifically that they knew far more about it than they had initially indicated and had seen detailed video of the incident before they said they did).

Now the truth is that I'm not a big political activist (yes, I did run for Congress, twice in fact, but I don't have any great history of taking part in boycotts etc.), but I am a believer in putting your money where your mouth is, and as an NFL Sunday Ticket holder on DirecTV, there was no question that I was spending money that was going directly to a group of people who I felt were behaving in a reprehensible way, and if I continued to give them my money, then the clear economic message I was sending was that this sort of behavior was acceptable, and that was NOT a message I could tolerate any more. There comes a point where you realize that you're participating in a system that is rewarding behaviors and actions that you find untenable. In years past I'd been able to hold my nose and look away because I enjoyed watching the sport so much, but each time I looked at it now I saw myself as a participant and contributor, and I couldn't do it. So I called DirecTV and I canceled my Sunday Ticket and, even though they couldn't care less and don't track the data on why people cancel, I told them why anyway. And I stopped watching. For the first time since I was 12 years old, I went through the entire pre-season and the first 8 weeks of the regular season without watching a single moment of a single game (even on network TV).

But halfway through the season I told myself that I was being ridiculous, that I was taking it too far. I'd canceled the Ticket, I wasn't giving them money any more, I'd made my statement, what harm could there be in watching part of a game. So I tried. I watched about 5 minutes of a game ... and then I changed the channel. The spell was broken. Everything I saw now seemed to be symptomatic or seemed to be an example of a cultural problem that needed to be addressed. Even the NFL's own acknowledgement of the problem of domestic violence in which it shows players and Hollywood stars near or in tears trying to start the discussion ... but unable to, seemed to me to be the perfect example of what was wrong (you need to SAY "it's not OK!" ... over and over, LOUDLY, and you need to severely punish the people who do it to create a strong enough disincentive to alter behavior).

I have since watched pieces of a few games, and I have kept up a little bit with the game through the news (apparently, as an avid fan of my beloved Chicago Bears, I couldn't have picked a better season to completely tune out ... and I have to say that I was amused and not at all surprised by "Deflate Gate"). I even watched part of the Superbowl (although, let's face it, most of us are watching it for the commercials now anyway), but clearly, my days as a rabid and die hard NFL fan are over.

I mentioned earlier that I had also found a better sport. Two years ago I was in my basement on a Saturday morning riding my exercise bike and, as I sometimes did, I turned on the TV and went surfing around to find something to watch while I peddled to nowhere. As we all know, one of the most frustrating things about cable and satellite TV is that we now have access to hundreds of channels of content, and yet we frequently can't find anything good to watch. Well, as I scrolled through screen after screen of channels, I stumbled on a sports channel I didn't recognize, and found myself watching a live rugby game between a team from South Africa and a team from New Zealand. I was extremely cooled out by the fact that I was watching a live sporting event on the other side of the planet (I love stuff like that, it makes me feel like I'm actually living in the 21st Century), but more than that, I found the game genuinely interesting. As I watched, I learned that there was an entire league called Super Rugby with teams from South Africa, New Zealand and Australia. The game was not unlike football in that it was full of fast action, very physical play and some pretty violent collisions, but with no helmets or padding there's a limit to how hard you can hit someone without doing serious damage to yourself (thus there are concussions etc., which their league takes a LOT more seriously, but there are fewer major injuries). In any case, a number of players would end up bleeding from the head at some point during the game (which, after watching for a few weeks, I suspected was a criteria for being interviewed afterwards). As I watched the game (and subsequent games) though, I began to see some interesting differences as well. The first was the level of respect that the players exhibited towards the officials. There are no overt disagreements, and when the referee feels the players are misbehaving, he calls the captain of the team and warns him, and invariably whatever minor issue is going on, stops immediately. During instant replays, viewers get to hear the conversation between the official (whose microphone is always on) and the replay official. The interviews after the game were also fascinating. It was quickly obvious that it is culturally expected that the winners of the game be gracious and magnanimous. They always have something positive to say about their opponents. Every now and then we see this in American sports too, but here it's sadly unusual, there it's literally expected every time (the losers are also usually very complimentary and gracious in losing).

The end result is that I don't really miss the NFL. I found another sports league, one with a game that's also enjoyable to watch and doesn't come with the moral issues that the NFL has allowed to infect and tarnish its image.

The Super Rugby season starts on DirecTV channels 489 and 490 next weekend (Feb 12) and runs well into the summer. And when it finishes, DirecTV also carries the Currie Cup and ITM Cup Rugby league games (which are the intra-national leagues of South Africa and New Zealand respectively) through October. Check it out.