Steve’s Newsletter 1(7)
With Liberty and Salmonella for All
Well, July 4th is coming up. I guess it’s time to dust off the Lee Greenwood cassette and celebrate the freest place on earth!
I’m speaking of Finland of course.
Finding a metric of freedom is difficult. I like using the nonpartisan Freedom House which scores political rights and civil liberties on a scale of 100. If we are going to celebrate the freest nation, Finland gets a perfect score of 100/100. Finland’s independence is celebrated on December 6th and I don’t think Lee Greenwood is popular there.
If you are proud to be an American where at least you know you’re free, the United States consistently scores behind almost every other developed democratic republic. Our score of 84/100 wedges us a little behind Greece and a little ahead of Croatia. Yeah, we are free compared to places like Somalia, Afghanistan, and even Mexico, but when it comes to developed nations, we are like the lazy kid in gifted class.
Greece, Samoa, São Tomé and Príncipe, Antigua and Barbuda, and Panama are not considered developed in an attempt to compare apples to apples of developed democratic republics.
The lazy kid in the gifted class wasn’t actually lazy; he just had a lot going on. Maybe he needed ADHD meds but his parents couldn’t afford them. Maybe he missed class because of preventable illnesses. His homelife wasn’t great so he never turned in homework. He smelled occasionally because a utility bill hadn’t been paid. His teachers were concerned, but they had their own chaos going on and couldn’t intervene even if they wanted to. The lazy kid in gifted class had a lot of potential, but the odds were stacked against him despite his documented brilliance.
Which brings me to the salmonella. A few weeks ago, a headline on a tomato recall due to a deadly strain of salmonella caught my eye. I muttered aloud, “another Salmonella outbreak? I swear we just had one of those.” As I read further, I was startled to see that there are approximately 400 deaths annually from salmonella in the United States. That seemed like a lot, so I started looking at other countries.
A headline in Germany noted that there has been a recent increase in salmonella with 181 cases of diagnosed salmonella and 1 death annually.
Read that again.
The US has 400 deaths annually from salmonella and Germany, despite seeing a recent surge in cases has had only one death. Adjusting for Germany’s 83 million people, it means that for every single German death from salmonella, 100 Americans die. Heck, in the entire EU with a population of 450 million people, there are only 80 deaths from salmonella annually. (Again, compare that to the United States with a population of 340 million and 400 deaths annually.)
Now, as I am wont to talk to myself on a regular basis, I said “Steve, the counterargument here is that the United States has more economic freedom which isn’t measured by Freedom House. If we want to have economic freedom, higher salmonella cases are just the cost of doing business. I replied, “good point Steve, where do we rate on that?”
I didn’t want to use the conservative Heritage Foundation because they have an axe to grind in further deregulating the United States. However, all the other studies I found referenced Heritage Foundation numbers. According to them, the United States is ranked 27th overall for Economic Freedom, predominantly because of byzantine regulations and a cockamamie tax code in desperate need of streamlining. (Finland is 13.)
So, if we were truly the most economically free place on earth, I could understand that 400 salmonella deaths is the cost of doing business. (I wouldn’t agree with it, but I would understand it.) We are 27th for economic freedom and still have 7 times the salmonella deaths of the EU. Why is that?
Because like the lazy kid in gifted class, we don’t have the support to take care of basic needs. In the EU, if you have a stomach bug, you miss work and go to the doctor knowing that you won’t be fired. This means not only do you get the care you need, you don’t spread disease to everyone else. Simply having a functional healthcare system and rights for workers mitigates disease. In the US, healthcare is expensive, and 49/50 states allow an employer to fire you for going to the doctor. Unless you are projectile vomiting or a salaried worker, you don’t miss work.
Combined with the absolutely horrible conditions for agricultural workers who can’t wash their hands in between excreting and picking, 400 Americans die from salmonella.
Lazy kid in the gifted class.
So, stand up with Lee Greenwood this Fourth of July, unless you’re on the john from some sketchy looking egg salad you ate. Patriots can both stand and shit for the flag.
Imminently Replaceable
The purpose of this post is to discuss the state of American employment, not airing dirty laundry. As such, I have not identified my previous employer, even as I discuss their typically atrocious HR practices. (You are welcome to stalk my LinkedIn if you want but I hope you have something better to do with your time.)
A few years ago, I observed that the two-weeks’ notice was an antiquated practice that put employees at a disadvantage. The basis for the argument was that, with most jobs being under the condition of at will employment, an employer can fire someone with absolutely zero notice (and they regularly do). The employee giving two weeks’ notice might get fired on the spot when they needed that next two weeks to pay bills. (My only caveat is if you need the employer as a reference you should make sure to leave on the best terms possible.)
When I posted it on my Facebook page, feedback was split along generational lines with older Gen X and Boomers saying it was disrespectful and everyone else agreeing with me, noting horror stories of giving notice and a petty manager telling them to pack up.
It’s been awhile since I quit a job, so I share this little anecdote on the state of employment in the US.
Until a few weeks ago, I was in my sixth year of employment teaching for an online law school. As with most college professors in recent years, I was an adjunct professor. This meant continued employment based on a series of nonrenewable contracts awarded a few weeks ahead of the next semester. After lengthy consideration of my family’s financial situation, my desire to write full time, and numerous other factors, I decided that this summer semester would be my last.
I wrote a conciliatory email noting how much I had loved my experience and that I was giving ample notice to find a replacement so it would be an easy transition.
I received no immediate reply. Four hours later, I received a sarcastic email from the associate dean. “I wouldn’t call it easy to replace someone on short notice, but we did accomplish it. You should see access change as soon as they process it.” A few hours after that, I lost access to the classroom I was three weeks into the semester and had already built solid rapport with most of my 35 students.
I lost access to my work email before I could preserve a record of the original exchange.
This was an attempt to get an explanation on LinkedIn, but I did not receive a reply.
(One sentence was removed for the sake of a coworker’s privacy.)
I gave three months’ notice, and I was gone in a four hours. With the exception of government workers and people with long-term contracts, this is the existence that most employees face in the United States.
I am fine financially, so there was no harm to me. Any bitterness faded about the time I wasn’t having my family time schedule disrupted by live seminars. I do imagine someone living paycheck to paycheck giving two week’s notice on a Friday being told to not come in on Monday. That two weeks pay could be the difference in whether or not they get evicted in most states.
The employment standards of our parents is a bygone era. Act accordingly.
Finding Farewell Update: Publication August 18, 2025
In the Fall of 2022, my wife retired from the United States Navy and we set out on a year-long travel trip to visit US National Parks and other natural areas with our three young children. I published daily accounts in a blog format with the intent that when the trip was over my wife and I would copublish a book.
We finally have a book that will be released on August 18, 2025. It charts the terror, joy, malaise and all the other emotions in that year of exploration. We began with the belief we would find a forever home and ended with the realization that, wherever forever was, it wasn’t in the US.
The Time Bank
Time Bank was in my most recent collection of Short Stories titled Let’s Form a Committee. It’s too long for Newsletter but there is a link at the cutoff to purchase the collection on Amazon.
Grady blinked. Noting that he was blinking was actually his first conscious thought. The light was bright and startling.
“That’s probably why I’m blinking,” he thought.
Then he spoke out loud but under his breath
“What a silly thought. Who spends time thinking about their own blinking?”
A young man in the corner sat up.
“What was that?”
“I noticed I was blinking and thought about blinking and then said that it was a silly thought.”
“Oh.”
“What’s this place?”
“You’re dead.”
Grady humphed at that. He did seem to recall the moment just before he blinked.
His last memory was a large tourist bus had been bearing down on him. Silly things those tourism busses, filled with ninnies just wasting time. He didn’t recall the impact. He’d been cutting diagonally across an intersection, and it had come out of nowhere.
“Did I make it?”
“Make what?”
“Am I in heaven?”
“Not quite.”
“Purgatory?”
“There isn’t a purgatory.”
“Oh. I guess the Catholics got that one wrong.”
“To be quite honest, the Catholics didn’t get much right.”
Grady guffawed. He loved a good Catholic joke.
“Now don’t get self-righteous about it. Christianity went off the rails right after Constantine adopted it as a state religion. Pretty much everything that was a wash.”
“Oh.”
“It’s ironic when you think about it.”
“How so?”
“Jesus went out of his way to point out the difference between the realms of god and government and then Constantine merged the two.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. The Coptics did a pretty good job with it.”
“Interesting.”
“It helped to live in Egypt. There really wasn’t room for a Christian government once the Muslims came along. Kept them from getting too big for their own good.”
“Interesting. I honestly don’t know much about them.”
“All the major world religions got parts of it right, even the Catholics.”
“What did the Catholics get right?”
“Indulgences.”
“You’re kidding!”
“Nope. Indulgences were essentially fulfilling what some of the Eastern religions call Karma. In the balance, if you paid more into charity than you took through misdeeds you were more or less good to go to heaven.”
“So is there reincarnation?”
“No. They got the basic idea of karma right but it’s not as if you come back as a fruit fly for being an asshole.”
“Strange.”
“I don’t make the rules.”
“Who does?”
“Way before my time here. I never met her.”
“So, I’m not in heaven?”
“Nope.”
“Didn’t I lead a good life?”
“Better than most.”
Grady felt some satisfaction at that. He’d always felt there were some inherent flaws in organized religion and was ultimately concerned with his mark on the world and less on paying attention to the finer points of theology.
He’d been raised as a Quaker in upstate Pennsylvania but had largely abandoned that when he joined the army. He’d had to kill in uniform but spent the rest of his life trying to make up for it with various civic engagement. He never missed a Rotary meeting and had been on his way to pitch an idea for charity when he’d been hit by the bus. He figured that anyone who was more than halfway decent should get a fair shot at heaven if there was such a place. He wasn’t quite sure he’d believed in it if he was being honest. Yet here he was… Not quite in heaven but somewhere after dying.
“So, what am I doing here?”
“Killing time.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re killing time.”
“Oh.”
Grady looked down at his clothes. They were clean. He’d been meaning to do some laundry but had gotten too busy and kept just hitting his clothes with Febreze on the way out. Smelled okay but he’d been wearing the same shirt for two days and there was a pretty obvious ink stain on the cuff. It was gone now. His entire outfit looked starched and pressed.
He didn’t really understand what killing time meant. He was confused by all of it. He was frustrated by the lack of transparency of this…. hell. He didn’t even have a name for this fellow in the corner.
“I don’t think I got your name.”
“You rarely do.”
“Do what?”
“Ask for a name.”
“Oh.”
“You’ve always skipped what you like to call ‘perfunctory salutations.’”
“I just like to get on with things.”
“I know.”
“Well, I’m asking now.”
“Asking what?”
“Your name.”
“Actually, you’ve yet to ask. You’ve just passively danced around the subject of asking.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, what’s your name?”
“Rich.”
“Rich?”
“Rich.”
“Doesn’t seem like the name of a saint.”
“Oh, there are no saints. I told you; the Catholics didn’t get much right. The Coptics didn’t get that one right either.”
“Oh.”
“So, you aren’t a saint and this isn’t heaven.”
“Nope and nope.”
“And your name is Rich.”
“Bingo.”
“So, what is this place?”
“The waiting room.”
“And what do I do here?”
“Wait.”
Grady could feel his neck getting warm.
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