We live in a country that espouses certain liberties as nothing less than sacred.  Among these rights is one’s right to speak freely, which is one of the key liberties protected by the 1st Amendment.  The President certainly has this right just as much as anyone else in this country.  Although conservatives are not actually abridging his freedom of speech, their criticism of Obama’s speech to school students runs counter to the spirit of the our 1st Amendment freedom of speech, which is one of our central civic values.

Some conservative critics are worried that President Obama is trying to indoctrinate our children.  Let’s say, for the sake of discussion, that this is the case.  So what?  We shouldn’t sheild our kids’ from Obama’s speech even if it is his intent to politically indoctrinate them.  One of the purposes of education should be to expose children to a wide range of views, including those of the current President and his party.  Some may disagree wholeheartedly with his views, but it shouldn’t be our goal to censor our children from them.  We should, instead, seek to expose our kids to these views and help them understand the substance behind the controversies that are alive on our political stage.  If conservatives are concerned with the content of Obama’s message, they should field a message of their own and pressure educators into presenting their views alongside those of Obama or anyone else they oppose.

Besides, it would’ve been more politically strategic for Republicans to give Obama the benefit of the doubt.  Let the man have his say and then, after he’s made the speech, analyze its content.  Determine after the speech has been given if the intent was to indoctrinate students and, if it was, then field an adequate response to the speech.  Criticizing the speech before he had given it only serves to create controversy where none should yet exist.

Americans are not stupid.  If Obama’s intent was to indoctrinate students, his remarks would not have gone unchecked.  Republicans should stop demanding censorship and, instead, embrace whatever might arise out of this event.

The customer service associate I was dealing with was a nice, old man.  He fiddled with the anti-theft locking mechanism attached to the device for a couple of minutes before leaving to verify he was using the right combination.  When he came back, he told me that another one of the same netbooks had just been returned by a woman who didn’t realize she wasn’t getting the full functionality of a notebook when she made her purchase.  I verified that he was going to sell it to me for the same price and approached the customer service counter with him.

When I arrived at the counter, he grabbed the box containing my netbook from a dolly behind me and placed it on the counter.  He told them to override the list price and charge me $200.00.  They complied.  Minutes later, I walked out the store with the device in hand.

I got in my car and briefly checked the contents of the box.  Inside, there was the netbook and a mouse, but no AC adapter.  I promptly went back inside and asked for them to get me an AC adapter.  This is when they realized they had made  a mistake and not followed their store policies correctly.  They sold me the netbook without “checking it into claims” first.  An old woman at the customer service counter tried to pull a fast one on me; she told me it was sold to me “as is” – to which I immediately objected.  I then told her it was the returned item I purchased, to which she replied, “We never should of sold you that.”

Too late.  ”You already did sell it to me.”

“You need to bring it back.”

Bullshit.  A sale is a sale.  I wasn’t about to march back into the store and surrender what I had legitimately purchased.  I confronted her on the issue, pressing her to give me my AC adapter.

“We don’t have one.”

“Well then you better go get one.”

In the meantime, her co-workers contacted a manager who seemed unaware of the minor verbal dispute that was ensuing just feet away.  He ran off somewhere and retrieved the adapter, which someone had forgotten to put back into the box.

All that for an AC adapter.  But having shaved about $60.00 off of the final price tag, it was worth it.

In times past, when I’ve started other blogs, I’ve tried to be creative in coming up with names that sounded cool and fit my personality.  To date, I believe all of those attempts were a dismal failure.  Perhaps it has to do, in large part, with the fact that I’m highly self-critical when it comes to my writing.  But, the truth of the matter is, I’ve never been satisfied with any name I’ve come up with for a blog.  I think this time is different.

Triage is a process paramedics use during mass-casualty incidents; it is the method by which they determine the priority of a patient’s condition.  I’m drawn to this in large part because of my affiliation with the field of public safety.  To briefly sum up my experince: I’m currently a police dispatcher.  I also did a brief stint as a volunteer firefighter and emergency medical technician.  Since I find myself spending a lot of time at work, I often find myself making mental connections between abstract ideas about life and concepts in public safety.  The name of this blog arose from that tendency.

I’m still in my early 20s, but life has instilled enough wisdom in me for me to know this much: human life, not just emergencies, rely on a form of mental triage.  The importance we assign to various decisions, opportunities, etc, define how we eventually go forward in addressing the issues that arise in our lives.  Just as paramedics tag patients with triage tags, we mentally “tag” the various decisions we’re faced with on a daily basis.  Perhaps this takes a concrete form, such as when we mark an e-mail message as urgent before we send it, or perhaps not.  I think it tends to mostly happen in the milliseconds before we actually make a decison to act.  For example, let’s say that two people called you and you need to call both back.  Your mental triage process is illustrated simply by who you decide to call back first.

This is The Triage Log, which means that it is a log of those things I’ve determined to be important during my own process of mental triage.  A stretch at creativity?  Perhaps, but it works for me.  For now, anyway.