The Moral Implications of Redistribution and Righteousness

In a comment to my blog entry Going Galt? an anonymous interlocuter suggests that because I am opposed to the Obama adminstration's plans for the federal government to redistribute private wealth (personal and corporate) from those who produced and earned it to those who have not, I am "standing idly by while (my) neighbor bleeds." He was quoting loosely from Yayikra 19:16, and he wrote:

"And yet "Do not stand idly by while your neighbor bleeds." Leviticus 19."

This commandment is in the part of the Book of Leviticus known as the Holiness Code in which the commandments all harken back to the statement:

"And Adonai spoke to Moshe, saying: Speak to the whole Congregation of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy* for I, Adonai your G-d, am holy." (VaYikra 19:1-2)

Hebrew digression 1: The word for holy in Hebrew, kadosh, is from the root (kaf-dalet-shin) קדש , which has the meaning of separate. So the meaning of holiness from the Hebrew is to make oneself separate from or other than the ordinary. The verse could be translated as: You shall be separate (other) because I, Adonai your G-d, am separate (other)."

The Holiness Code is therefore a series of commandments intended to instruct the People Israel on how to live a covenental life; a life that is other than or separate from the way that the other nations live. It is the way in which Israel sets itself apart as a covenental people. Here is the entire verse (in blue) in context:

"You shall not steal; you shall not deal deceitfully or falsely with one another. You shall not swear falsely by my name, profaning the name of your G-d, I am Adonai.

"You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not commit robbery. The wages of the day-laborer shall not remain with you until morning.

"You shall not curse the deaf, nor put a stumbling block in front of the blind; You shall be in awe of G-d, I am Adonai.

"You shall do no unrighteousness in judgement; you shall not favor the poor nor show deference to the great; you shall judge your people in righteousness. You shall not accuse your people falsely; you shall not stand by the blood of your neighbor, I am Adonai.

"You shall not hate your brother in your heart; you shall surely rebuke your neighbor and not bear sin because of him." (VaYikra 19:11 - 17).

Verse 16a has also been translated as "you shall not go about as a talebearer among your people" and "you shall not deal with your people basely." The Hebrew verb is related to the misuse of speech.

Verse 16b has also been translated as: "Do not profit by the blood of your neighbor" and "Do not conspire against your neighbor."

Verses 11-16 deal specifically with the holiness inherent in the dealings among neighbors in the court of law. The theme of these verses is that all such dealings should be imbued with justice*, which is also translated as "righteousness." The position of the part of the verse in question (You shall not stand by the blood of your neighbor), just after the commandment against falsely accusing one's neighbor, suggests that this verse means that it is a very bad thing to make false statements against one's neighbor in court because such false statements might lead to the conviction of the innocent neighbor thus causing him suffering; or to the acquittal of the guilty, causing the victim of the crime to bleed. This is a crime against justice.

*Hebrew digression 2: The Hebrew word tzedekah, which has the root tzaddi-dalet-kuf
צדק , can be translated as either "justice" or "righteousness". The sense of the root is the concept of being straight, right or fair.

In the wider context of the verse, it is clear that to favor the poor in a court of law because they are poor is a violation of justice, as is favoring those who are great simply because of their status. To act justly means to treat everyone as equal before the law, taking no regard to their actual inequality in fact.

Other verses in this discourse on the holiness of judgement in a court of law state that it violates the holiness of dealings among neighbors to steal from them or rob them. The location of these verses in the discourse suggest that it is unholy for the court to take the goods of one of the litigants by force (this is the meaning of stealing) and give it to another unjustly. That means it is unrighteous to impose fines or otherwise transfer wealth from one to another, unless it is a tort payment--that is the payment by one neighbor to another as recompense for injury--imposed by the court in order to make the relationships between neighbors right.

Given the context and the meaning of the verse, then, I would actually be "standing idly by while (my) neighbor bleeds" if I do not speak out against the injustice of the Obama administration's attempts to allow judges in US courts to change the mortgage contracts of certain people, just because they are "poor" i.e. "unable to pay their mortgages." Such an action, in which certain taxpayers and their descendents would thus be forced to pay for the mortgages of certain citizens because of their status is certainly unrighteous.

The unholiness of this action goes beyond the dealings among neighbors in court in that it violates not only the rights of the current generation of taxpayers, but also incurs debt upon future generations without their knowledge or consent. This becomes the ultimate unholiness in Jewish values, for it is slavery.

The problem with the assertion of my commenter is not only that he took the verse out of context (to the point of only quoting half of it), but further, he assumed a false dichotomy: either the federal government takes the wealth of certain citizens (namely, taxpayers) by force to pay off the houses of other citizens OR those who cannot pay their mortgages will continue to suffer (bleed).

Missing in this false dichotomy is another solution: that the "bleeding" neighbor can declare bankruptcy and start over; and that when bankrupt, he can go to family, to friends, and to neighbors, asking for help making that new beginning.

Another meaning of the word tzedakah in Jewish life, is the holiness of being neighborly by helping those in need. Tzedakah is a moral choice made by individuals, alone or in free association with others. If a person is not free to choose an action, then the action has no moral meaning. It is incumbent upon Jews by virtue of their the Covenant of Holiness to engage themselves in acts of tzedakah. Nevertheless, each Jew must be responsible for choosing those actions and how they are made.

According to the Rambam (Maimonides) there are eight levels of this kind of giving, and the most honorable is to make it unneccesary for a person to become dependent on others. This is the opposite of the socialist agenda that would make us all dependent upon the government for our health, wealth and happiness. The purpose of the socialist agenda is to put the power to decide in the hands of an oligarchy and to destroy individual liberty. The purpose of tzedakah done at the most honorable level is to build up the power of individuals to decide for themselves and thus for them to become menschen--moral human beings.

The "Perfect Storm" Blogging Break

This week was one of those weeks!

It was life getting in the way of blogging; events have enforced a mini-blogging break.

To wit:

1) The week before the UNM spring break meant extra busy days at the Writing Center. And for my classes.

2) We had a dog trainer out to help me deal with Shy Shayna and Rowdy Lily on Monday.

It also snowed on Monday.

3) Tuesday Shayna had her teeth cleaned.

4)My ancient laptop (5 years old is practically antique in computer years) combined with DSL problems means slow connections and a lot of down time, and I cannot blog much from work. (I will be ordering a new laptop this year--Dell has a Deal. I am anticipating problems when I beg to remain with XP. I am such a Luddite!).

5) I am tutoring a young man at EMHS for Algebra II. I have suddenly gotten very interested in factoring equations and simple radical equations after all these years! I am finding Algebra II a whole lot more interesting now than I did in 1976-77 when I was taking the course.

6) Yesterday I went to a conference to hear Temple Grandin speak. This was an awesome presentation, and worthy of a blog entry unto itself.

7) Yesterday afternoon, the EG and I gathered with 18 like-minded people for the We Surround Them broadcast and the unveiling of the 9/12 Project. This also deserves a blog unto itself.

8) I am sick--again! This winter has been the pits for illness. Between lupus flares, the arthritis being worse than ever, the flu in November, food poisoning in January, and now a chest cold that feels like bronchitis, I am beginning to feel like I am aging rapidly. Spring cannot come soon enough for me.

Fortunately, it snowed again yesterday and last night, and so between that and a cough that sounds extremely contagious, I have found an excuse to STAY HOME today. And the internet connection is cooperating, and the ancient computer is no slower than it's age would predict.

Chag Purim!

It's Purim, and when this post posts, because it was post-dated --or should we say post-houred--we will be off to the Chabad of New Mexico drowning out the name of that evil Haman, as we read the Megillat Esther.








Some of us will drown our sorrows until we cannot tell the difference between a Bailout and a Stimulus . . . oops, I mean the difference between "Bless Mordechai" and "Curse Haman."





And the Purim Shpiels will help us laugh at the economy. This one makes as much sense as most of the economic advice we get today. Just remember that "gornisht" means "nothing"!

HAPPY PURIM!

Going Galt?

Last night, her Knight Errant out of town on business, the Chemistry Geek Princess came home for Shabbat dinner. She did not bring the granddog this time because our new girl, Shayna is extremely timid, and Ruby the Granddog's very extraverted, puppy ways would have sent Shayna Sunshine to her corner for a week

We lit candles, we sang Shalom Aleichem, Malachei ha-Malakim, we blessed the children--including the 23 year old--the Engineering Geek read Eyshet Chayil (A Woman of Valor), we made Kidush over the wine, we made the blessing for bread.


It was all very pleasant, but as we began the main course, the talk turned to literature which turned quickly to the state of the Republic.


The Chem Geek Princess began by saying: "I am re-reading Atlas Shrugged, and this time through I am noticing that the words on the page reflect reality even more starkly than they did last summer." She went on to talk about the Bank President with a Heart in the book, who loaned money to people who needed it even though they could not afford the loans, and who was thereby responsible for bringing down the economy of Wisconsin, making it a blighted area with no industry and no future. Then she said, "You know, that is a literary version of what actually happened when the Community Reinvestment Act forced the financials to lend money for people to buy houses, people who could not afford those houses and those loans. Then the banks failed and . . . well, here we are."


We went on talking seriously about the economy, the stimulus that isn't one, and the fact that it won't work and that it cannot work. The CGP went on to talk about the Laffer Curve, and how she sees it's basic truth because she knows a lot of people in small businesses that will make more than $250,000, and they are already finding many ways to either cut that down to $249,000 (at least on paper) or are looking to shelter their money in other ways, so that they don't have to start producing less or laying off workers.


The talk turned to the galloping socialism that the Obama adminstration wants to introduce to our country, in the middle of the night. The CGP is very angry because, as she puts it, this administration is selling her future and children's future to his "utopian nightmare." They will be paying a tax rate of 60 -80 percent, just to pay off what Obama and Bush have borrowed in the past six months for the bailouts and the stimuli. She pointed out that she, a mortgage holder for a a very small house in an older neighborhood of Albuquerque, is going to have to pay off the mortgages of people who foolishly bought houses they could not afford. She and others like her, will have the crushing debt of the irresponsible to deal with, making it impossible to ever get ahead. "It's tax slavery, Mom!" she said indignantly. "Why should I bother to work hard and be responsible when the sweat of my brow will be taken by force to pay mortgages for those people who were not so responsible and who are likely to lose those houses anyway? Why should I have to pay to keep the financials that made the bad loans in the business of paying huge bonuses to failing CEOs?"


Why should she indeed? Soon, it's not going to be worth it for her to earn more, to create more, to work harder, because the harder she works, the more the fruit of her efforts will be taken from her by force to support nameless others who do not work as hard as she does. She will not reap the rewards of her effort, she will not be able to put by money for her children's future (as we did for her).


This is what Santelli meant when he said, "The government is promoting bad behavior!" And the nameless trader said, "It's a moral hazard." (See the Shout Heard 'Round the World if you haven't already).


We then began to discuss the story of Twentieth Century Motors as told by the tramp who had worked there, a key piece of plot in Atlas Shrugged. The story illustrates the inevitable result of forcing the Marxist principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" on free human beings. What happened in the factory is that when the old man died, his heirs got the workers to vote in the use of this principle for the factory and its workers. They were to be all one big family, they thought. And the workers voted for it, because, in the words of the tramp who'd once been a skilled worker:


"There wasn't a man among us who didn't think that under a setup of this kind he 'd muscle in on the profits of the men abler than himself. There wasn't a man who . . . didn't think that somebody wasn't richer or smarter, and this plan wouldn't give him a share of his better's wealth and brains. But while he was thinking that he'd get unearned benefits from the men above, he forgot about the men below who would get unearned benefits from him . . .The worker who liked the idea that his need entitled him to a limousine like his boss's, forgot that every bum and beggar on earth would come howling that their need entitled them to an icebox like his own . . ." (Ayn Rand. Atlas Shrugged, Centennial Edition, p. 666, italics in the original).


So the workers who "played it straight" and put forth their best efforts soon found out that they would not be able to have butter on their bread until everybody else had bread; that their children could not go to college until everybody else sent their children to high school. And of course, there were those that gamed the system and brought in every "worthless relative from all over the country, every unmarried pregnant sister, for the extra disability allowance." And since ability and need were decided by a vote, there was an endless drain on those who were responsible. Those who worked hard were forced to work harder, in order to provide for the endlessly growing need of those who did not. And since human beings do not like to be slaves, what happened next was predictable:


"We began to hide what ability we had, to slow down and watch like hawks that we never worked any better or faster than the next fellow. . . We knew that for every stinker who'd ruin a batch of motors and cost the company money . . . it's we who'd pay with our nights and our Sundays . . . What was it they told us about the vicious competition of the profit system where men had to compete for who'd do a better job than his fellows? Vicious, was it? Well, they should have seen what it was like when we all had to compete with one another for who'd do the worst job possible . . . Ability was like a mortgage on you that you could never pay off . . ." (Ibid. p. 662-663).


The story of the factory in Atlas Shrugged is not real, but is an illustration of the consequences of the idea placed in closed system. But this kind of behavior is the consequence of the redistribution of wealth writ large or small, wherever it has been tried. When Stalin starved the peasants off their land, the result was famine for all, because the peasants weren't willing to work hard and well to benefit others when they received no benefit from their work themselves. And in the United States, at the height of the Great Society, when the marginal tax rate (defined as the tax on every dollar over a set amount) became greater than 90%, people began making sure that they did not earn a dollar more than that margin. Ronald Reagan did just this, and stopped working as an actor mid-year when he reached the marginal limit. This caused him to change his party affiliation and work for the Goldwater campaign. The Beatles protested the same kind of "tax-the-rich" scheme in their song The Taxman, and then moved their business to Holland.


President Obama's plans to "spread the wealth around" (as he put it to Joe the Plumber) will not result in stimulating the economy. It will result in tax slavery for generations of Americans who work and pay taxes. And don't think that everybody who works will have their wealth confiscated equally. Remember, those will pull in Washington don't have to pay their taxes. (Think of the tax cheats now in Obama's cabinet). No, it will be ordinary, ambitious Americans who will see their dreams stifled and their savings taken from them as they are condemned to work and leave it up to the Obamas of the world "to decide whose stomach will consume the effort, the dreams and the days of your life." (Atlas Shrugged, p. 670).


There comes a point when it is not worth it work to earn beyond one's subsistence; a point when the tax rate makes a rising income and rising productivity a liability. This is where our children may well find themselves due to the spending without reason or end, as the federal government spends trillions that it does not have to prop up industries and businesses that cannot succeed.


And this is why many hard-working young Americans are thinking of Going Galt.

The Chem Geek Princess is one of them.
Oh, she is not thinking of trying to find the mythical Galt's Gulch in a valley in Colorado.
She is trying to figure out how not to earn past the margin, where the fruit of the days of her work will be taken from her to pay for Peggy Joseph's mortgage and gasoline.


And many of the rest of us are "going Galt" too. We are doing it by planting gardens, trading favors among neighbors, becoming frugal. Paying fewer taxes by making less money and buying fewer things. We are doing it by taking our money out of the stock market, not counting on that 401K cum 201K, refusing to invest in bonds and currencies that will soon have no value. This is why every time Paulsen opened his mouth, and every time Geithner opens his, the stock market falls. A whole lot of us know that we are being scammed into tax slavery.


The press elites call us wingnuts, but we are the ones paying their salaries, and those of the pols and bureaucrats, too.


The press elites may sneer, but many of us are preparing ourselves and our children to be able to ride out the storm and we are working to protect our rights. We are organizing ourselves to demand a redress of our grievances from our government by having Tea Parties and the 2009 Continental Congress. We are gathering to remind our servant government that We Surround Them. We are gathering at the Campaign for Liberty to remind our public servants that they are elected at our pleasure for the purpose of protecting our Liberty. This is what happens when you try to foist "from each according to his ability to each according to his need" on a free people.


Are you listening, Mr. President? We're going Galt.

That Only a Mother . . .

In the past year or two, the Zits comics in the Sunday paper have begun to make sense in a frightening sort of way; as if the authors actually have a video of what goes on in our house.

I am sure it has something to do with Prefrontal Cortex . . .
. . .But there is something strange about my 15 year old boy and his friends:
They are like baby bears or bulls in a china shop.
They have a restless, uncoordinated energy.
They run into the chairs as if the dining room was very small instead of large as it is.
They have a permanent shadow above their upper lips, that makes the mother in me want to get them to wash their faces.
Whatever they touch seems to get dirty or broken, or both.
Their conversational skills often devolve to monosyllables spoken in deepening voices.
They want to sleep 'til noon, and they literally grow overnight.
They are at that stage that only a mother could love. And that's a stretch sometimes.

And they have put on what I call the Queen Night at the Opera attitude: "Nothing really matters . . ."

Until something does.

And then my 15 year gets into the car after school and says, "Mom, you'll never guess what we learned in Humanities today." Ah. I've got my Boychick back from wherever the alien teenager stored him.

This spring, the Boychick seems to have gotten it that we are not taking him to Machon to torture him. He comes home to tell us about what it would be like to celebrate Shabbat like the orthodox do. Or that he learned about empathy in his Leadership class because the teacher taped two fingers together on the strumming hand and he had to try to play that way . . .

Now that he's gotten over imitating what he thinks is 'cool', he is actually permitting himself to get excited about what he's learning.
And it's all very experiential.

And the sea change in attitude started with that strumming I mentioned.

This spring, when we arranged his schedule according to his Aspie needs, the Boychick insisted on keeping a Guitar and Music Theory class on his schedule. I thought: "Why not? It's something physical. And his grandmother was a concert violinist, after all. Maybe this will turn into something good for him."

And so it has.
He practices every spare moment.
Hours of video games have been replaced with hours of strumming.
He is learning to read music.
He is working to earn the use of my Guild.

Another passion has been unveiled.
Now, with some more motherly work and worry, perhaps his several passions will build together into something good for his future.


This is the faith that only a mother can summon up, when the Boychick looks like this at 11:00 AM on a Sunday morning.

Yikes! I am glad you can't see the rest of his room in the picture.

Of Comments, Congress and Tea Parties

Although I moderate comments, I generally post most of them unless they are spam or unless the commenter continues to refuse to read plain English. This latter characteristic is the one that caused me to decide to moderate my comments in the first place. I wrote some blog entries last spring (Don't Call It Science, The Annointed and the Benighted, All Those Wasted Years, Feeding the Trolls) that received comments from several people who 1) refused to comprehend what I wrote and 2) continued to make assertions based on what they wanted to think I wrote. It was all quite entertaining for a few go-rounds, but quickly became wearisome to the point of . . . well, moderation.

Sometimes, a commenter has something to say that I believe warrants a more thoughtful discussion, and sometimes one will say something that needs a wider refutation. And sometimes, I just want to be snarky.

The other day, in the middle of my mourning for Zoey (she was such a good dog), I got a comment that fulfills (at least) the last two aforementioned criteria. It was in response to this post about the disgraceful machinations used to pass the so-called stimulus bill. Anonymous wrote:

'If you guys knew anything about politics you would know that the bill was read by congress and many committees, and the presidents administration was present when the bill was made."

First, the snark. Notice how this person did not want to put his name or link on the comment? It's a sort of drive-by insult, as evidenced by the the snotty "if you guys knew anything about politics . . ." Of course we have no way of knowing whether or not Anonymous knows anything about politics, but we do know that he knows nothing about the limitations on human reading speed.

FYI, the upper reading speed limit in humans is approximately 900 words per minute. Speeds higher than that would require super-human eye-tracking speeds. Then there are limitations on comprehension speed that are set by the speed at which electrical signals travel along axons, and are transduced into chemical signals at the synapses. All of these things take time. Although in the normal course of events, these processes are speedy enough that we do not even notice them, microseconds and milliseconds do add up over the course of a long document.

And then there's the attention factor. According to Levin's Law, the ability to pay attention to a text is directly proportional to the number of words in plain English and inversely proportional to the number of terms presented in legalese. This text was therefore likely to be in the red zone for sleep-inducing boredom.

Anonymous has clearly not done his homework about the neuropsychology of reading. Nor has he taken into account the fact that the attention factor was enhanced by the time of day (after midnight) that the Congress was supposed to read the final form of the bill.

The fact is that no person was likely to be able to read the final form of the bill, including wording changes hand-written in the margins, between the time it was accessible and the time Nancy Pelosi's plane for Rome took off that evening. And that is assuming that the person is simply decoding English and Legalese (these are two different languages); real comprehension--which includes establishing an internal dialogue with the text--of a bill this fat would have taken days.

So Anonymous, you should do your homework. It is likely that those "many committees" contributed more words and more pork to an already wordy bill. But I doubt that they read the whole and complete bill. Of course, this begs the question: Can a committee read? Especially one made up of pols? If Chicago pols can't walk and chew gum at the same time, and since at least one member of Congress is a Chicago pol, as are several members of the Executive Branch (including POTUS), one could convincingly argue that such committees do not have the physical coordination necessary to read.

That the presidents administration (sic) was present when the bill was written is also likely an unfounded assertion. Perhaps certain members of the adminstration were present during the writing of certain portions of the bill, but again, a bill this fat is likely an unredacted hodge-podge from different authors. The time factor alone would be good evidence that this is the likely case.

So much for Anonymous' argument.

Going beyond the argument, however, I can't help but wonder about Anonymous' purpose in making this comment. If he knows more about politics than we "guys" do, then why would he defend such a shoddy and ineffective process? Why would he want Congress to pass bills that are so large that they cannot even be read before a vote, let alone actually (gasp!) debated?

From my perspective, the machinations of the party-in-power were made precisely to prevent anyone from knowing what was in the bill and to prevent any reasonable debate.

By way of contrast, let us consider The Declaration of Independence. When placed in a word program with 12 point font, it covers ~3.25 pages; it is comprised of 1,328 words, including the title, but excluding signatures. It took the Continental Congress from June 28th to July 4, 1776 to discuss and debate the document and to make text revisions. (Although Congress declared American independence on July 2, 1776, as the British fleet under Admiral Howe was sailing into New York Harbor, it did not adopt the Declaration of Independence until July 4). The discussion and debate was substantive and dealt with important implications of what was stated in the document. The debate was heated and partisan (the southern colonies actually walked out at one point), and no attempt was made to stifle opposition. This is a real-world example of how Congress ought to proceed in doing the work of our Republic.

However, this Congress did no such thing. This bill was nearly a thousand pages long, and was seven inches thick. No one person or even one committee could have possibly known all that was in the Bill. When the final form came before the house, they were given 90 minutes for debate on it. The opposition, though not stifled, was accused of being partisan (as if this were a bad thing) when some members protested about the way in which the bill was brought to the floor, and the lack of time for substantive debate. This is a real-world example of how not to do the work of our Republic.

I do not know if Anonymous is trying to make my protest into a partisan issue, however, I am not a member of either major party. I made the same kinds of arguments against the Patriot Act as I have against this bill. Although I do not like the provisions in either of these two bills, my protest is directed against the way that Congress works. No bill needs to be that long. And no bill should be passed without substantive debate.

The hurry to get the bill passed was irresponsible, even if the bill itself had been about "stimulating the economy." This phrase begs another question: Can government stimulate an economy? When considered empirically, by testing what happens to the stock market whenever an administration official makes an economic pronouncement, it is likely that the answer is yes. The government can stimulate the economy by keeping the pie-hole shut. What we need is "mouth shut" economics. Hmmm. How does one say that in French?

But this bill was not really about stimulating the economy. It was about spending money the government doesn't have on the agendas of politicians at the taxpayer's expense. And that is why it was passed in the way it was. Why debate the issues and possibly lose, when you can just hide them in an emergency spending bill? That this is taxation without effective representation doesn't appear to bother the pols of either party.

Which is why we need a party of our own. America's Tea Party.

Welcoming Shayna

Shayna Sunshine

Maybe it's too soon. At least, it is according to all of the experts.

New dogs come into your life in the most interesting way.

Zoey, my first dog with my kids, came via a neighbor girl who was visiting a Pet Adoption event to get a cat the day that someone abandoned Zoey there. The girl came home with a dog rather than a cat, but her family already had five dogs, so they gave her 24 hours to find a home. We we walking in Sneed Park in Rio Rancho, talking about getting a dog; the girl was walking Zoey in the park and came up and said, "Do you want this dog?"

Lily came because someone had Pet Harbor send me her Shelter listing. I got the listing every day for two weeks, before I decided that it must be fate, and went down to see her. I took the family (big mistake) and came home with the adoption papers but sans dog. She needed to be spayed, and it was Easter weekend, something that I had completely missed. I was cognizant of the fact that it was March Madness, though. The kids say she's a Lily because of the white lily on the back of her neck. I think the Lilies in all the stores were subliminally in their minds!

Shayna came as a Pet Harbor picture e-mailed to me by a friend who thought she looked like a dog for us. She was listed as a Dalmation mix, but it looks to me like she has more Lab than Dalmation in her.

On Friday afternoon, I went down the ABQ Eastside Shelter to see her. I went through the buildings looking for her, and saw any number of really nice dogs, and I thought that maybe she had been adopted. And that this was probably good. It had only been a few days, after all. But before I left, I stopped at the desk and asked about her number. No one had assigned her a name. It turned out that she had been sequestered, so a staff member met me and took me to see her. She is very quiet and very shy. She is also beautiful. I was not sure about her temperment, so I called the Chem Geek Princess and asked her to stop by and see her that evening after work. The CGP is nothing if not forthright:

"Okay, I will, but Mom, you know what the experts say. It's only been since Tuesday and now you want a dog that looks like Zoey. I think it's too soon."

As I was waiting to drop the Boychick off for a Scout camping weekend, the CGP called again. She couldn't find the dog. I talked her through to the place, and she was able to see her. "Oh, Mom, she's beautiful. And she's different than Zoey. She seems pretty shy, though."

In our pre-Shabbat bath, though, the EG expressed interest in seeing her, and then yesterday morning, the CGP called to arrange to go with us. When we first saw her that morning, she seemed to recognize the CGP and I, but she was really shy about getting close to the gate. Then a Vet Tech came up and said, "Sorry, but you guys can't be in here."

I mentioned that the dog was released to be adopted on 2/16, and she said (actually, the area was loud with barking dogs, so this was a shouted conversation), "This dog is being treated and will not be released for three days. Why don't you go to the front desk?" I apologized for being in a restricted area and we followed her advice.

At the front desk, they said that the dog was finishing up meds for kennel cough and was released for adoption. The helpful clerk called back to the veterinary office to find out for us what was going on. We were invited to visit with the dog at the Vet center, and we were able to take her outside and walk her in that area, closely supervised by a volunteer. The Engineering Geek walked her, and she kept stopping and hugging his leg, nervous at the wide openess of being outside. The EG said, "Honey, I think she is scared of her own shadow." But at the end of the walk, she was on heel, and refused to leave the EG's side. For his part, the EG was already calling her "Sunshine."

Back in the Vet Center, we had a serious conversation about whether we should take this girl home. Dr. K., the Vet on duty explained that kennel cough is like a cold for dogs, and that in the outside world, it is seldom treated. "It will run its course in 7-10 days whether we treat it or not," she said. "But shelter dogs are so stressed, and come to us traumatized, malnourished and sometimes abused, so we treat it. It is contagious to other dogs, and there is a small chance that your dog at home will get it."

The Engineering Geek asked if we could pick her up after the three day hold.

The Vet explained that it was not a three day hold, just that they had decided to continue her meds for three more days, and keep her sequestered. However, she said, "We only have 10 open kennels right now, and very few spaces in isolation, so we cannot hold and treat her if you adopt her today."

The EG was undecided, although he clearly thought we should have this dog. But he also did not want to put Lily at risk. I broke the stalemate by suggesting that we call our vet in Tijeras about it. I explained the situation to the receptionist there, and she talked to the vet. "Dr. C. says that you should not worry," she told me. "Lily is strong and healthy, and the chances are very small that she will get ill because the new dog has already been on meds for seven days. And if she does, it is like a cold in humans. We can easily treat it, but it will run its course with no problems." I, in turn, relayed the information to the EG and CGP, and then we were on our way back up to the front.

"Let's go get the shayna maidleh ( Yiddish: beautiful girl)," said the EG. We had previously talked about names. The CGP was partial to Bellah, and the EG had been calling her Sunshine. I was not particularly partial to either.

"That's her name," I replied. "She's a Shayna, a Shayna Sunshine."

And that's how Shayna joined our pack.

It's probably too early.

But she's here now. The experts will just have to deal with it.

And you, gentle reader, must deal with one more post about dogs!