Anniversaries

A couple of anniversaries today…one universal in nature and one not. The universal:

It was 20 years ago today that President Reagan literally rattled the world, in every sense of the word, when, standing at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, he implored Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall!” Berliners (and most Germans, East and West) went crazy; the rest of the world, including our own State department…not so much. As a matter of fact, the State Department had tried to remove the “tear down this wall” line and references from the President’s speech, calling them “needlessly provocative,” among other things. Here’s Peter Robinson, the man who wrote the speech, quoted at Power Line:

With three weeks to go before it was delivered, the speech was circulated to the State Department and the National Security Council. Both attempted to suppress it. The draft was naïve. It would raise false hopes. It was clumsy. It was needlessly provocative. State and the NSC submitted their own alternate drafts—my journal records that there were no fewer than seven. In each, the call to tear down the wall was missing.

When in early June the President and his party reached Italy (I remained in Washington), Ken Duberstein, the deputy chief of staff, sat the President down in the garden of the palazzo in which he was staying, then briefed him on the objections to my draft. Reagan asked Duberstein’s advice. Duberstein replied that he thought the line about tearing down the wall sounded good. “But I told him, ‘You’re President, so you get to decide.’ And then,” Duberstein recalls, “he got that wonderful, knowing smile on his face, and he said, ‘Let’s leave it in.’”

The day the President arrived in Berlin, State and NSC submitted yet another alternate draft. Yet in the limousine on the way to the Berlin Wall, the President told Duberstein he was determined to deliver the controversial line. Reagan smiled. “The boys at State are going to kill me,” he said, “but it’s the right thing to do.”

“It’s the right thing to do.” Indeed. And it’s one of the many reasons Ronald Reagan is one of the most beloved presidents of our times…not just here in these United States, but world-wide.

Related, in yesterday’s WSJ Opinion Journal: “Hitting the Wall; Reagan’s Prophetic Berlin Speech, 20 Years Later.”

And that not-so-universal anniversary? The Second Mrs. Pennington is 51 today, which makes today an important day for three or four of us, at the very least. I strongly suspect know there are more.

Happy Birthday, Paula!

So…while I was laying in bed at oh-dark-thirty this morning, trying to decide whether to get up or attempt to go back to sleep, I hear this interesting factoid from one of the talking heads on the WX Channel: only 14% of Americans will take a two-week or longer vacation this year. The other 86% simply add a day or two to their weekends and “make do.” Thinking that the talking head was quoting from some recent article, survey, or some such, I went googling. The best I could come up with was a year-old article in the NYT, which blamed high gas prices and a fear of leaving the workplace for an extended amount of time for Americans’ stay-at-home habits. Excerpt:

SEATTLE, Aug. 19 — In August, when much of the world is hard at work trying to do nothing, Jeff Hopkins and his wife, Denise, usually take a week to chase fish in Olympic National Park — a ferry ride and two tanks of gas from here with a boat in tow. But this year, their summer vacation is dead, a victim of $3-a-gallon gas and job uncertainty.

[…]

“The idea of somebody going away for two weeks is really becoming a thing of the past,” said Mike Pina, a spokesman for AAA, which has nearly 50 million members in North America. “It’s kind of sad, really, that people can’t seem to leave their jobs anymore.”

Shrinking-vacation syndrome has gotten so bad that at least one major American company, the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, has taken to shutting down its entire national operation twice a year to ensure that people stop working — for about 10 days over Christmas, and 5 days or so around the Fourth of July.

And then there was this year-old piece at ABC News, which says essentially the same sort of things: (a) Americans are too insecure to leave the workplace and (b) they don’t want to deal with the “catching up” (e.g., 300+ e-mails in your in-box) required after being away for two weeks or longer.

I can relate, sorta. The two-week vacation was a rarity for me in my working days. I took a few extended vacations, but not many. It wasn’t a matter of money, it was the fact that I was always working on some very important project— corporate life or death stuff —none of which I remember now. That’s how important those projects were in the general scheme of things: they are not remembered by me…or (I strongly suspect) anyone else, for that matter.

Take your vacation: no one ever laid on his death bed wishing he had spent more time at work.

OK…all that said… My “Summer of Profligate Spending” is OVER. I did my usual monthly financial review yesterday, which occurs sometime during the week I download the current month’s credit card statement. It’s not like I didn’t know this was coming, but the realization that I’ve run up back-to-back $2,000.00+ credit card bills sorta smacked me in the face. Like I said: I knew it was coming. Getting outfitted for the new bike (last month) and a two and a half week road trip (this month) ain’t cheap. But it’s time to pull back just a wee bit and return to my normal $500.00 ~ $750.00 per month credit card expenditures for a couple of months. Then we’ll go nuts again in August.

Today’s Pic: The Birthday Girl, taken last month in a bike shop in Fort Collins, CO while we were shopping for bike paraphernalia for SN3. Not bad for 51, eh? Hell, not bad at all, regardless of age. No left-handed compliments here…