The Rawhouser's

So this week Monica went to Las Vegas to take her last lab class for her degree from UNLV. She and Quinn will be gone for a total of six weeks. For a week, I have the kids before they go off to Arizona to see my Mom and sister.

So I’ve been working basically a half day so that I can keep up with all of the other parenting responsibilities that Monica usually fulfills. One of the many was helping Conrad to practice his piano. He had a fun song from Star Wars (the kind that I never got when I was taking piano lessons), and he started to play. The notes were right, but he was not counting (he wasn’t holding the notes out as long as the music instructed). With the simple instruction, “Conrad, you have to count” began a battle of wills.

I was amazed at the depth of conflict that this caused in Conrad. To have to sit at the piano and count out each beat, repeating areas that he couldn’t at first get, seemed to be psychological torture. He writhed, yelled, and moaned as if this was a challenge on Fear Factor. I would have believed that it actually hurt him if I had not passed through the same feeling of facing an obstacle that I didn’t know how to overcome and knowing that the obstacle could be avoided, or at least avoided temporarily.

I have to credit Conrad in his dramatic struggle against self-mastery; he came up with quite a few tactics to test my resolve and argue away the simple act of playing a song correctly. If there had been a video camera, I think we could have successfully auditioned for a new reality TV show.

“Why do I need to count? It doesn’t matter!”

“Why are you so mean?”

“I’m not perfect!”

“Mom doesn’t make me do this!”

“Stop criticizing me!”

Conrad even left the house. I have recognized my need for better and more patience, and through it all, I was quite patient. I had work to do, but I didn’t want this teaching opportunity to pass away. He reminded me so much of myself. I too did not like to practice. I too feel that uncomfortable, bubbling under my skin when I confront something that I am not sure if I will be able to accomplish. It was the same feeling that I felt when I hid as a kid when I was supposed to practice piano. It’s the same feeling that I feel as I approach the messy process of piecing together ill-formed ideas in a dissertation. It makes me want to run away as well, or at least to do something else that sounds like it’s responsible, respectable, and a good excuse. It still tests me, and I still fail in many ways.

For these reasons, I didn’t let Conrad flee at the sound of mental and emotional distress calls from within. Instead, when he came back inside, I invited him again, and when he wanted to leave again, I sat at his side and started to play and count out loud. Together, we fought through the difficult urge to avoid the problem areas. Together we started again when Conrad forgot some of what he learned. And together, we made it.

It’s impossible to sum up the influence of mothers in a short blog post, so I’ll just describe two memories that are significant to me in describing the influence of my mother on me, and the influence of my wife on my children.

Monica

This memory is more of an image than an event. It is simple, and re-occurs often. It makes me feel things are right with the world. Conrad and Riley have to be up early to catch the bus by 6:35. Monica usually gets up with them, helps them get ready, takes them to the bus stop, and then comes back to rest with Quinn. I often get up and exercise, and then come back to find her asleep in the bed, with Quinn, and now Amelia by her side. They, all three, often are facing the same direction. Quinn and Amelia look so much alike. They are all peaceful, and it is quiet. I look at them, and try to breathe in their feeling of protected stillness. I realize that this window of a mother’s relationship with her young children is fleeting.

Mom

I’ve always been concerned with things being fair, as are most kids. I didn’t expect to get special treatment, but I would often say to Mom “That’s not fair,” to which she would respond, “Life’s not fair.” The past few months, I have been wondering why things have been as difficult, uncertain, and confusing as they have been for me. There are so many lessons for me to learn from the experience, and I hope that I am learning them. They remind me though of a lesson that I learned from my mother.

I grew up in a family-run motel in Sundance, Wyoming. It was a Best Western franchise named the Best Western Apache of the Black Hills. My parents bought it with the help of my grandma in 1978. But they paid too much, and the coal business declined, and with it the truck driver business that came throughout the year. So little by little, our business failed. We were always short of money to pay the $6000 mortgage. I saw miracles happen, but after 12 years, we could no longer pay the mortgage. We couldn’t find a buyer (the market for motels in Sundance, WY is not very efficient), and so we had to let the motel go back to the owner, who had carried the note on the motel. There was a clause in the contract that if we had not reached 40% equity in the motel, we would have to walk away from the mortgage with no equity in return. We were just a few months from getting to 40% equity, but my parents still walked away with nothing to show for 12 years of working, never buying a new (or used) car, no health insurance, no retirement savings, except debts incurred trying to make the business work.

I remember that my Mom cried a lot before and after we left. I remember her asking “why?”. “Why had the former owner not been more merciful?” “Why had we not found a buyer?” “Why did the motel fail?” Those were tough times. Now as an adult, I put myself in her shoes, and I feel her real desire to know and understand.

Yet, more importantly, she did not give up, but rather moved on. I don’t remember the last time that she mentioned the words, “If only …” or “Things were not fair for me.”  On this Mother’s Day, I take inspiration from this way of living. Sometimes things happen that are not fair or not right. We can react, or we can move onward and upward, in the face of feedback that says we should stop or give up. And pretty soon, our actions start other reactions that start to make it easier for us to continue to move onward and upward. Instead of getting stuck in vicious cycles begun by life’s circumstances, we can create virtuous cycles from our own faith-filled footsteps. I’m thankful for my Mother, and for this Mother’s day that I could remember a lesson from her. This has blessed me, even now 20 years later to deal with the difficulties I now face. Thanks Mom.

I recently received this e-mail entitled, Joe Legal vs. Jose Illegal. It’s filled with racist undertones and is annoyingly ignorant. According to Snopes.com it started being e-mailed in 2000, 10 years ago.  It’s clear that the author  started with the goal of making illegal immigrants look like they are getting a everything for free and paying for nothing, and then tried to gather a few bits of evidence, with bogus math, to support the claim. The following is a response that I gave to the entire list of addresses to which the e-mail was forwarded. I welcome better-informed views and evidence on the topic.

I do not profess to know the answer to the specific problems of immigration. I think that this is a complex issue, and I have come to the conclusion that there are rarely quick fixes to problems this complex. So I won’t attempt right now to propose a well-thought solution. But I will address misinformation.

I would propose that a better way to approach this issue is to be humble and just ask questions like, “Are illegal immigrants paying less taxes?” I think that the people in the best position to answer this question are people who are willing to ask questions, do really thorough research, and report the answers that they find, regardless of whether the answers support their prior held views. Economists do this for a living. They, like all of us, have opinions. However, they also have pride, just as most of us do. And most economists that I know do not want to be viewed by their peers as weak or sloppy in their analysis. Therefore, they at least gather the right data and analyze it correctly. This is superior to these e-mails.
So, I’m no expert on this, and I do not have any friends that do this type of work, but this is what I have found from a simple google search using “percent of illegal immigrants paying taxes”. I find several articles, and am not sure which of them are done by a qualified and impartial economist. One rule of thumb is that I avoid blogs and websites that clearly have an agenda. I think: “Are they somehow making money off of this (by more webhits)? Is their self-esteem and identity wrapped up in supporting a view, so much that they could never be persuaded by evidence that they are wrong?”

On the first page of hits, I find an article from the Urban Institute, a non-partisan economic and social policy research group at: http://www.urban.org/publications/900898.html
I attach a summary to this email.

I go back to the google search, and I find another thinktank called Reason Foundation, subtitled: Free minds, free markets (I would think that they have little incentive to support a view of illegal immigrants based on this affiliation). They provide their view:

http://reason.org/news/show/122411.html

Another article from the Tax Foundation from an economist

http://www.taxfoundation.org/blog/show/1424.html

A website called procon.org that gives opinions with some evidence on both sides of the question of whether illegals pay taxes. It is at: http://immigration.procon.org/view.answers.php?questionID=000789

On the next page, I find another paper on SSRN (a site where academics post their research papers, often before they are published, so that any one can access them for free).

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=881584

I find another study in the state of Virginia at the Wilson Center at:

http://www.wilsoncenter.org/news/docs/immtaxcontribution_1.pdf

From these sources, it seems that while the data is not perfect, illegal immigrants do pay various forms of taxes. Most interesting to me, and something that I had never thought of before, is that illegal immigrants are actually helping to pay into social security, but they are not able to receive social security, so they are helping to address the huge problems that we have with social security.

I’m sure that there are more facts that can tip the balance somewhat from the few cursory findings that I find in the last hour. Nevertheless, I think that we should find viable solutions to stopping illegal immigration. I imagine that there are some methods that are more successful than others, but it’s late. If anyone would like to respond with impartial evidence of a system that actually works, I’d be interested.

So Riley has taken to chess. He loves playing, and I really don’t know he learned all of the moves, but he does really well. A few weekends ago, he had a chess tournament. Since we ended up not being able to get close enough to actually see the match, I was more of a people watcher. I found a pretty mixed batch of about 150 kids.
Almost all of Riley’s team is from Mexico, and several of them have faux-hawks, so he kind of stood out. There was a group of inner-city kids, with a jolly African American coach reassuring them when they came to report their wins and losses after each game. There was the Indian kid who looked like he’s biding time until the next spelling bee. There were several white boys, with hair that is a bit longer (kind of like the mean kid on “Searching for Bobby Fischer”). Riley’s first opponent (who I think eventually won his age group) looked like he was born to play. His hair was kind of long, a little wavy. His skin was pasty white, kind of like he hadn’t been out in the sun much, or if he had, he was always carefully bundled up in some Land’s End parka. There were a few other kids who had the same look. Not nerdy, just eccentric, at age 8. One shaggy, blonde-haired boy played with his hood over his head, while sucking on it’s draw strings.
But most interesting was a man who I noticed and had the thought, “This guy must be a chief in the tribe of chess.” He looked distinguished, with a button-up shirt, buttoned all the way up. And he wore the most interesting, round, thick-rimmed glasses that seemed to be made out of wood. I’ve never seen any quite like it. I quickly gathered that he was a coach, as he would go out between games and sit with a student with just a few pieces on the board and have them do a focused practice. Later, I watched as students after each game would come up to him and say, “I won.” “I won.” “I won.” …. “I won.” “I won.” “I lost.” I won.” I heard almost all, “I won.”
It seemed almost like a ceremony. No high-fives, no fist-bumps, no “way to go tiger”. He would just take out his book and record the result. When they were sad at losing (which was pretty rare), he would just say a few sentences calmly, and then they would walk away.
Later in the day, I got close enough to hear him talk to them, and realized that he was either Polish or Russian. They called him Mr. K. I asked him how I should encourage Riley. As I came away from the day, I was again reminded how much I love to see people brought together in the search for excellence.