Stuff I'm Done With

Pardon my grammar - my daughter, Ab, has taken to correcting it quite frequently so I am offering this mea culpa beforehand for the title I selected for this post.

I am adding this as a category title also.

Sam Walton, founder of the Walmart chain, called it "voting with your feet": it's the act of walking away from something when you find it unresponsive, unsatisfactory, or undesirable.

My Dad had a similar phrase for it. It was one which he would mutter loudly as he and our family walked out of an establishment that offered less than satisfactory service. In those cases Dad would say "Remind me not to come here again!"

He actually never needed reminding but you get the point: Dad was voting with his feet.

R. and I have employed this practice several times; I am going to share some of them with you even though I know that many of my readers will find my reasoning silly (okay, I'm guessing three of the four readers will find my reasoning silly).

This stems from the fact that I am at the point of adding the National Football League to my list of Stuff I'm Done With. I will explain later, but for now here are a few items I have voted against by walking away from:

Cable TV - actually I am kinda' proud of the fact that R. and I made a decision together to turn in our cable box about a dozen years ago. We had a number of reasons - like the fact that our monthly cost had doubled but the quality of the programming had declined. The local cable company kept adding more channels when they increased our rates but the channels were mindless shopping channels.
We also felt that from a spiritual standpoint, it might do us good to do away with the clutter.

We left ourselves open to the option of installing a satellite dish if we just couldn't take it - we never did.

Our kids have grown up "without channels" as AA refers to it. They have missed out on being inundated with questionable moral messages, the tendency to fill empty time with so much empty inactivity, and the Siren's Song of irresponsible marketing practices.

Our kids may have also missed out on some pop culture and reality television, but I really think they can get more than enough pop culture on the internet - in small doses.

R. and I can get most any entertainment or news there also.

Disney - okay this is where I will lose a lot of you . . . when the Baptists boycotted Disney in the mid 90's we did too. And we did it for some good reasons, Disney had built an industry around safe, family entertainment and suddenly they veered away from that. We voted with our feet and determined not to spend our money there.

It helped that we didn't have very much expendable cash at the time and we didn't have any children begging us to take them to Disney world.

In all fairness, I have to tell you that we did eventually purchase some Disney movies (and still do) and we may take the kids to Disney world at some point. But having gone this long - we don't feel that we have missed anything truly important.

I must add that I couldn't care less if you take your kids to Disney. Not going did not make us better people - nor did it make us weird.

Professional Baseball and Football - having touched the proverbial "third rail" with that Disney thing, I will go ahead and plunge into an area that will have some people questioning my very manhood.

I have walked away from the diehard-fan approach to these professional sports. Here is why:

I am not a fan of Labor Unions. I think they might have served an honorable purpose -maybe - long ago. But I believe they outlived their usefulness and -for the most part- have become the epitome of corruption.

I believe that the failure of the U.S. auto industry can be laid solidly at the feet of Labor. And for that matter you could say the same for the economic depression that is the state of Michigan.

Nowhere is the uselessness of organized Labor more evident than in professional sports.

I think it was the mid to late 80's that we had a Baseball players strike and an NFL players' association strike.

I'm sorry, I do not believe these guys were beaten down by their employers. I fell out with both organizations because they had proven that their devotion no longer centered on the love of the game.

Couple that with the fact that no one seemed to want to be a role model anymore; and professional teams were cow-towing to every demand of the political correctness crowd.

Now, I need to tell you that over time I have not been solid in my protest. When the Atlanta Falcons did well, I saw some revival of my interest. But then R. and I began dating and eventually married and frankly I just had better things to do with my Sunday afternoons.

When the Atlanta Braves' Dynasty began to come into fruition in the early 90's I did become a solid and dedicated Braves fan. But now that their glory is fading somewhat - I am a fair weather fan.

Todays' headlines have pushed me over the - I'm done with that - edge.

Today I heard that Rush Limbaugh had been kicked out of his partnership in a bid to purchase the Ram's franchise.

I am a fan of Rush Limbaugh. I have been ever since the early days of Gulf War I when I was wildly searching every radio channel in hopes of learning more about our progress in that war.

All the other affiliates had left the latest news conference as I listened one day while traveling between my sales calls; then suddenly I happened upon this guy who was talking about the war. I soon discovered that he was coming from a strictly conservative political perspective, and he was articulate, confident and funny.

I became a fan because he passionately espoused the things that I believed in.

Whether you like him or not, Rush Limbaugh is a truly American Success story and he has overcome some major obstacles (including being a political target of Presidents and the U.S. Congress).

Now he is being denied this opportunity strictly because of his political beliefs.

I thought we didn't do that in America. Isn't that discrimination?

So, even though the deal never officially got into the hands of the NFL, I have decided that I'm done with the whole lot of them.

And in case you are worried that I won't have anything to do with all the extra time that I have now . . . oddly enough, I do.