Hello, my blog followers! I wanted to share with you a story of how I’ve been blessed in a big way this week:

This past week, I discovered my college tuition costs were a little over $900 higher than I was anticipating spending, and it was due tomorrow (the 17th). In order to pay it out if pocket, it was going to almost completely dry up my finances, leaving me with nothing for expenses throughout the semester. Not only was it going to leave me in a very tight place this semester, but it was going to cost me much more than I was expecting overall.
I decided my best option to get a loan, so I called financial aid this afternoon to take out a $1000 loan and the lady looked up my file and gave me some exciting news! Apparently, I have a state scholarship coming in for a little over $1100 – which means that not only is my tuition paid for this year, but I’ll get a little back as well! It’s simply incredible how the Lord provides for His children!

Normally I share a poem of mine with you at the end of my posts, but this time I feel inclined to share a poem by the King David of old instead.

The Lord Is My Light and My Salvation
The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?
The LORD is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?
When evildoers assail me to eat up my flesh, my adversaries and foes, it is they who stumble and fall.
Though an army encamp against me, my heart shall not fear; though war arise against me, yet I will be confident.
One thing have I asked of the LORD, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to inquire in his temple.
For he will hide me in his shelter in the day of trouble; he will conceal me under the cover of his tent; he will lift me high upon a rock.
And now my head shall be lifted up above my enemies all around me, and I will offer in his tent sacrifices with shouts of joy; I will sing and make melody to the LORD.
Hear, O LORD, when I cry aloud; be gracious to me and answer me!
You have said, “Seek my face.” My heart says to you, “Your face, LORD, do I seek.”
Hide not your face from me. Turn not your servant away in anger, O you who have been my help. Cast me not off; forsake me not, O God of my salvation!
For my father and my mother have forsaken me, but the LORD will take me in. 11 Teach me your way, O LORD, and lead me on a level path because of my enemies.
Give me not up to the will of my adversaries; for false witnesses have risen against me, and they breathe out violence.
I believe that I shall look upon the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living!
Wait for the LORD; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the LORD!

From year to year, my experience on independence day has rarely varied much. Back in 2007 (when the photo above was taken) I got to celebrate the day with a bunch of 10 and 11 year olds out at Camp Reveal, but such was a unique year. Fourth of July usually goes as follows: spend the afternoon setting off random bottle rockets and Black Cats, hot dogs or hamburgers for supper, then hanging out after dark on the back hill watching the neighbors light off fireworks.
For whatever reason, however, something about this year’s routine felt uniquely surreal, and I decided to capture it in verse. What do you think – did this year’s 4th of July feel any different to you?

4th
It sounded of a gunfight,
Bright balloons popping into a thousand
Shiny pieces, rubber showering down.
Twas a night often remembered
In history books, aided by commercialism,
Marking the beginning of one in the other.

Products to keep off bugs, while the parade
Goes on, deep into the rambunctious night,
With gatherers twirling sparkles of liberty.
Marching drum percussion accents proclamation
Of delight, as each wonder engulfs the sky,
Briefly silhouetting the figure who released it.

Those who care not or cannot afford eagles
Lighting the sky, sit in chairs gazing over trees
In the hope of catching a moment’s cherry burst.
Intrigue motivates others to drive southwards
To the river, rewarded by a show without equal,
Matched only by others miles downstream.

Night looses the battle against celebration
As noise lingers, obscured in a powder fog,
Laughter and cheers striking the bell at midnight.
Only a sliver of honey moon can be made out
Through smoke, an occasional grenade resounding,
Jubilation’s sent on the wind – freedom’s tingle in the air.

This particular piece was written yesterday (7/3/11) after a particularly impressive storm. The picture above was taken a little under a month ago on a roadtrip north, but I thought it fit so I featured it here.

Rainwater Facialscrub, Ozone Aftershave
The trees dance to a tone of heavy bass
A rumble and crack, with swishing backups
Like a strong rapids or waterfall
Something that inspires fear and awe
Trapping some, easing the minds of others
But leaving both engulfed and transfixed
Something pounds into the brain with every drop
Splashing and smacking frailty into one’s skull
Knowing that it can only be felt and observed
The occasional crack rattling your bones
Well-placed reminders of its static power
And the front seems to think nothing of this

Weather routine – nature’s never-ending cycle
A concentrated freight of death and renewal
The media and fearful see it only as the former
The gardeners and I like to see it as the latter
Embracing lack of control is medicinal
The One who drives the rain is still up there

He who washes the tress
Can wash my grubby hands

I’m back from new student orientation at Indiana State University, and it’s official: I am now a graphic design student at ISU. I don’t have a lot of experience or skill in graphic design so far, but as I finish projects, you should be able to find them on my deviantArt.
Sitting in my dorm one night during orientation, I was inspired to write a poem about the Terra Haute skyline view from my window.

I Can Hear You Now
An icy white dome sits framed
By the sacred and mundane
Nestled among instruments and air conditioning
Overshadowed by steeples of variety
Numerous times and eras preserved
And dwarfed by the greatest steeple
Celebrating the might of modern man
With the pure sheltered telescope
Gazing up at the structure in awe

Shrouded by a blinking, silent army
Erected in a similar form of worship
All in subjection to the central beacon of power
United in filtering the connections of friends and colleges
Defied by only the bravest and strongest
Buildings of might, wealth and safety
Education and business stand alone
Against modern language disseminated

The Teux of time, Deux of day,
Too busy with the productivity
To spend it in a productive way.

Summon a task ant to do the job,
With technology, Goldberg’s proud
Checking it off his wunderlist.

A shiny screen and invisible chain,
Tell the slave to remember the milk
And keep the flow of change.

One can find todoist robots
In queue lines, checking displays,
Abandoning Nirvana for a task-sheet.

The busy living in a world,
Where existence is fixed on a strike app
Hoping to take out the project-pins.

Turn the sun back?
There’s an app for that.

First in a row of six, or seven
- no matter.
A view with a smooth ladder,
A height for the young daring
To peer off beyond the clearing.

Its strangest device, without question,
Was changing the world
- to refashion
What had been commonplace, ordinary;
Became a new home, to reality contrary.
Amusement, hours upon hours spent
From my childhood ivory tower.

A forest quite tall,
With squeaky rolling stumps -
Boughs rich, contain
A wealth of knowledge and wisdom.
Preserved in time,
A collection of learning and intrigue.

On the woodland floor,
Dewy shoes always squeak -
Descending the hill,
From the raised overlook peak.
Smell of paper birch,
Hanging over the timeless land.

A bit of the old world,
From an innocent time, not long ago -
A place now devoid
Of soul, laughter, or school traffic flow.
You I will miss,
My timeless Oakland of old.

The birthing of cookie cutter
Nests, sprawled on a once-field
Blueberry Hill, or Oakwood Meadows,
Containing neither blueberry or oak.

They awake to the pre-fab sounds,
Crickets that moved away with
The corn, immortalized, canned
Salted and pickled.

Land once belonging to few,
Sold by many. He who planted
Long and dead, like the roots
Of crops; intertwined by new
Roots, buried down deep.

I’ll start off by saying that I don’t usually dissemble/assemble laptops – I’ve only completely taken one apart once, and when I put it back together, it never ran. (Ok, granted, I was ten.) And although I could probably safely dissemble one after eight years of light computer work, my brother happened to be the author of this particular deconstruction. It was his first laptop which he had worn out, then passed to me, and reclaimed after my round of abuse. It had always run hot, but the hardware was still working, so he tore it down to improve the cooling system. His “new” server computer finally started coming back together this week, and here is where the moment of discovery hit me.

My brother needed a small piece of copper to fit between the computer’s graphics card and cooling coil, so after some deliberation he decided to file down a penny. I have known for years that quarters, dimes, and nickels contained filler metals; our government has been going cheap on our currency for years. Yet even so, I had always assumed that pennies were still made of solid copper. “Copper can’t be cost that much, right?” But alas, my misconception stands shattered.

A Penny from 1979: solid Copper

A Penny from 1993: 95% Zinc

I felt cheated – that those shiny pennies that brought good luck in folklore, were made of a cheap metal. They were a lie. I grew up with the saying: “A penny earned is a penny saved.” Yet even the smallest amount of money I owned wasn’t real! Ironically, the US Mint reports that it costs them 1.79 cents in materials and production per penny. Is that wrong or what? I bet it’s still not a cent’s worth of metal.

But that is how many things in life are. Much of the shiny things in this world are pretty cheap in the end – fake. Should we be investing our whole lives into fancy paper and pieces of coated zinc? My investment in this life comes down to things that will never will be destroyed by rot and rust, I’ve invested in relationships. The first and most important relationship I have is with the Lord Jesus Christ, and the second is my family – spiritual and blood relations, and then comes my relationships with all the people I touch in my daily life. With my investments in relationships, I’ll never have to worry about how much money I have or what it’s worth; I have recession-proof investments.

Where are you invested?

Although many factors contribute to the high level of unemployment among unskilled workers, a chief problem is the artificially high price of labor set by the minimum wage. Although it is commonly thought that minimum wage helps unskilled, younger workers earn a decent wage, the minimum wage itself actually discourages the hiring of inexperienced and unskilled workers. Companies will only hire workers that produce enough labor to compensate for the cost of hiring them, artificially enforcing a set value of labor prices, and forcing many low-skilled workers out of a job (Sherk). These same workers lose the opportunity to gain valuable communication skills, workplace training, and credible references. Without jobs to occupy young inner-city workers over the summer, youths can often end up joining gangs and dropping out of school. Pa Joof, the principal of the Prologue Early College High School in Chicago made an observation on this situation in an interview with the New York Times: “…you let these kids out there for four or five weeks, [and you] are going to lose some of them. That’s just the nature of the streets.” With wages set at a higher rate than companies can afford to hire them, young workers in tight inner-city job markets are severely hindered in their ability to gain needed work experience. Without job experience on their resume, workers can have more difficulty finding a job when the graduate high school or college. The divide between employers needing experienced workers and able workers without skill must be bridged in order to get America’s job market back on track.

The simplest and most effecting long-term method of reversing this problem is to completely remove the national minimum wage law. Without a minimum wage, businesses would be able to set individual wages at the exact value of workers, even workers who do not possess the skills to command $7.25 an hour, the current minimum wage. Although these workers may earn less than the current wage rates when they are first hired, as their experience increases they will be able to command higher wages, eventuallyexceeding the current minimum wage. An opposing sentiment to this idea is that without a minimum wage businesses would exploit workers by undercutting the wages of unskilled workers in order to save money. However, in an interview, Dr. Michael Zimmer, a professor of economics at the University of Evansville, explained that job market competition would prevent businesses from cheating workers for any length of time, because they would have matched the expectations of workers or risk losing employees. This same principle already prevents skilled labor from being underpriced on the current market, and would apply in the same way to the lower wage jobs if they were market controlled.

By dropping the national minimum wage completely, states would be allowed to set minimum wage laws lower, or to even remove them completely in order to allow businesses to hire workers at their true value, enabling businesses the ability to hire more workers. Giving businesses the ability to set lower starting wages for workers would be especially beneficial for smaller businesses, which have less of a profit cushion from which to pay underproductive employees (Rockwell). In addition to the economic growth encouraged by a lower wage floor, erasing the national minimum wage would help remove the need for failed expensive federal youth training programs such as the National Supported Work Demonstration, the Job Training and Partnership Act, JOBSTART, and Job Corps. With more jobs available, unskilled workers would be more likely to be able to get on-the-job training instead of in government programs, alleviating the need for taxpayers to support these very costly programs. American taxpayers would benefit from the reduction of these programs without worrying about young workers losing valuable job experience.

Although states would not be required to remove statewide minimum wage laws when the national law is removed, the positive economic effect of doing so would encourage states with similar wage laws to do so. Without a national minimum wage law in place, unskilled and inexperienced workers would have the option to move to states with more favorable minimum wages laws if they were unable to find work close to their current residency. Individuals would benefit from the options given them by the removal of the national law, and states would still retain the freedom to enact a minimum wage if they felt it necessary.

The need to remove the national minimum wage is more apparent than ever before, with a hard-hit economy and struggling labor market. The damage being done to the youth labor market by the minimum wage must be stopped. As a citizen aware of this issue, you are enabled to let others know of the need to remove this damaging law. Alerting your federal and local representatives about this problem is a key first step to seeing it removed. Just as equally important, though, is the need to spread awareness of this issue. Despite its harmful effects on the employment of unskilled workers, the minimum wage is often thought to be a protection for unskilled labor instead of a hindrance. Either as workers within the unskilled labor market or workers who will be reliant on their services during retirement, we owe it to the current generation of young workers to remove this detrimental national law.

Works Cited

“Issues Concerning the National Minimum Wage.”Personal interview. 8 Nov. 2010.

Meece, Mickey. “Job Outlook for Teenagers Worsens.” The New York Times Business Day. The New York Times, 31 May 2010. Web. 11 Nov. 2010. <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/business/01jobs.html>.

Rockwell Jr., Llewellyn H. “Wal-Mart Warms to the State.” Ludwig Von Mises Institute – Tu Ne Cede Malis. Ludwig Von Mises Institute, 28 Oct. 2005. Web. 12 Dec. 2010. <http://mises.org/daily/1950>.

Sherk, James. “How to Minimize the Impact of the Recession on Young Workers: Avoiding a Lost Generation.” The Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation, 1 June 2010. Web. 10 Nov. 2010. <http://www.heritage.org/Research/Testimony/Avoiding-a-Lost-Generation-How-to-Minimize-the-Impact-of-the-Great-Recession-on-Young-Workers#_ftn19>.

United States. Cong. Joint Economic Committee. Understanding the Economy: Unemployment Among Young Workers. By Carolyn B. Maloney. 111th Cong., 2nd sess. Cong. Rept. Joint Economic Committee, 26 May 2010. Web. 09 Nov. 2010. <http://jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?a=Files.Serve&File_id=adaef80b-d1f3-479c-97e7-727f4c0d9ce6>.