Calling the championship of an American sports league the “World” Series has always been a bit pompous, but it’s a slightly more accurate moniker today, as baseball is played the world over. It’s the national game in Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Dominican Republic and numerous other nations. It’s played in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Canada and Australia, and more and more international players are making it into America’s Big Leagues.

Oddly enough, as the game has become more international, “America’s Great National Pastime” has also become more jingoistic. But let me back up a sec.

I am proud to be an American. I vote in every election, fly my flag on all National Holidays, I actually show up for jury duty, and my heart races at the sound of a John Phillip Sousa march. Heck, I married a girl born on the Fourth of July! I’m the son and grandson (and nephew, cousin and brother-in-law) of military veterans, and I volunteer for veterans’ causes because it is the right thing to do. I consider myself a Patriot with a capital “P.”

When I attend a baseball game, I always get there early enough to hear the singing of the Star Spangled Banner. I doff my cap, place my hand over my heart and either stand at attention or sing along, whichever is more appropriate. Rising for our National Anthem is a fitting way for Americans to affirm our faith in and allegiance to our nation, and I enjoy being part of it. I owe that respect to my country and my fellow countrymen, especially those who fought and died for the freedoms we enjoy.

In the last decade, singing “God Bless America” has become common practice during the seventh inning stretch at Major League Baseball games. After 911, when the nation was looking for common purpose, this patriotic gesture seemed a way to heal the wounds caused by the criminal attacks on our country. Playing the song continued at every Major League game during the 2002 season. In the years that followed, some stadiums only played it on Sundays.

But somehow, it has crept back into baseball. It’s now played during every seventh inning stretch of the World Series, replacing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” the time-honored reminder that the reason we watch baseball is to have fun. No longer can we get up in the middle of the seventh and stretch around, find a restroom or yell for the beer guy… we must instead stand and deliver a second demonstration of national fealty.

What is it about baseball that demands two shows of loyalty? Are we required to do this at pro football or basketball games, when we board an airplane or get our driver’s license renewed? Do we get up half-way through a business meeting for a rousing Pledge of Allegiance, or stop at church between offertory and communion to sing “You’re a Grand Old Flag?” Does anyone sing “God Bless America” after the first nine holes at the golf course? The answer, of course, is “of course not.” So why do this at baseball games?

Maybe the folks who started our two non-declared Asian land wars thought this was a swell way to make Americans feel, despite doing absolutely nothing for the war effort, that watching a baseball game is somehow a patriotic sacrifice. Perhaps it’s a reminder to stay fearful and on a constant war footing. Or maybe it’s to make us feel that if we stand and sing a second patriotic song, we’ve done more than enough for our country.

Whatever the original intent, when no one can offer an explanation why we’re doing it (other than the catch-all “To Honor America”), the song becomes a forced vestigial display. Baseball doesn’t need this, nor do Americans need patriotism reduced to mindless, effortless compliance or false jingoistic conceit. True patriotism requires participation, not just the momentary postponement of a gratifying trip to the snack bar.

You want to sing “God Bless America” at games on national holidays? That’s fine, and I’ll sing along with you. But give it a rest at the World Series. My guess is God won’t be paying attention to the World Series until the Diamondbacks are back in it anyway.

Not just any miracle, but the kind of miracle Humphrey Bogart’s character Sgt. Gunn talks about in the movie, “Sahara.” One of my favorite movies, it’s set against the stark background of North Africa in World War II. Bogie is an Allied tank commander, retreating (as ordered) across the barren desert, looking for a way out of his current mess. When one of his comrades suggests they need a miracle, Bogie utters a most profound response:

“The only miracles I believe in are the ones you work for.”

Bogie and the cast go on to bust their humps to turn their fortunes around, and despite heavy losses and unforeseen circumstances, they make it back to their own lines and a hero’s welcome.

Right now too many businesses are holding back, waiting for a miracle, as if the seas will part, water will turn to wine and businesses will miraculously start making money again. As much as I’d favor divine intervention here, I figure The Big Guy has more important things to do than bring customers through your doors.

Think about it: Are you offering a solid product or service? Are you connecting with the right audiences? Are you saying the right things to attract customers? Are you demonstrating confidence in your own survival? In short, are you working for a miracle?

Having Andres Associates Public Relations and Media promote your business can put you in position to make miracles happen. We’ll use the best public relations, social media and advertising tools available to make your messages seen and heard.

Contact Andres Associates for a free consultation, and let’s get started working on YOUR miracle!

Don’t get me wrong: I wouldn’t trade the life I’ve led for a chance to start over today. My life has had its ups and downs, as every good life should, and while I might be tempted to enjoy some new peaks, I don’t believe I’d care to try for a whole new set of life’s low blows. So I approached this reunion knowing full well where life has brought me, what it has made of me and what I’ve made of it.

On the whole, I’m fairly pleased with what I’ve amassed: a wonderful wife of 29 years, two fine sons, my own small business, three beater cars, two sizeable mortgages, a few acres in the mountains for camping and a treasure trove of good friends and good memories.

As a seventeen year old, I never fathomed how life would change me or imagined where it would lead. A high school kid assumes he knows everything and uses the next sixty years (if he’s lucky) to disprove that theory. There is nothing like life to give you new perspective, and few things like a class reunion to hammer home that awareness.

I was especially excited to attend this reunion after the uncertainty of the past five years. An insurance company decided my life was a “pre-existing condition,” and a botched colon surgery and three subsequent surgeries to correct the botching pretty much emptied the bank account. The recession dried up much of my business just as I was diagnosed with a heart condition. The present was spinning, the future was sketchy, and the certainty of the past became more attractive.

I had a good solid childhood with Leave it to Beaver parents and Dennis the Menace friends, and my Catholic high school years were full of envelope-pushing rebellion against a common enemy: the Christian Brothers of Ireland. While the brothers (some notable good ones, but the majority, not so much) worked hard to teach us the boundaries of authoritarian obedience, my classmates and I struggled to learn common sense and self-expression. Going to this reunion, for me anyway, was the acknowledgment that independence and common sense had won the day and were to be celebrated.

So, I looked forward to revisiting high school: the touchstone of past solidity, a time in my life when I knew everything, when life had not yet frightened me, and when I had good solid friends there to back me up. With the present still a coin toss, I needed to see and feel the firmness of the bonds we created 40 years ago.

The day of the reunion arrived and after travelling back to Irondequoit, New York, I had the chance to reconnect with many of my old high school—and even some grammar school—friends. I didn’t get to spend a lot of time with any one of them, but heard lots of condensed elevator-speech versions of life stories that both echoed my own experience and showed the different roads we’d each plowed for ourselves. It was wonderful to see and hear how each had embraced the stranglehold of life.

Several members of our class formed a band to play at the reunion, and they regularly got together at a barn in Webster to work out a set. I was fortunate to join them on guitar and vocals, and we had a blast playing for our classmates. Several people came up after the set and said they didn’t know I could sing (I think the jury is still out…). Others asked, “When did you learn to play the guitar?”

My answer was, “Over the last forty years.”

The more I’ve thought about it, I realize that same answer, “over the last forty years,” applied to things my classmates have learned as well:

“When did you learn to fly a plane?” “When did you get so well-adjusted?” “When did you learn to run a business?” “When did you come out of your shell?” “When did you learn to cope with the death of a spouse?” “When did you become so generous?” “When did you get so damn smart?”  “When did you get the strength to overcome cancer?”

Or as one classmate put it, “When did we start looking at 58-year-old women and
talking about how HOT they are?”

Over the last forty years.

My classmates and I have all peaked at different times… some in high school, some in our 30’s or 40’s and some are just starting to peak now. Maybe I’ll peak when (if) I become a grandparent, I dunno. It’s exciting and reassuring that my peers have been successful, overcome the odds, braved things I wouldn’t think I had the guts to face.

It turns out we were not just linked for a brief four year moment in time. Each of our lives may not have been a big dish of pudding, but after forty years, we assembled and were there for each other as, in one way or another, we always have been. And that left me feeling pretty solid.

While Dad was a replacement pilot who didn’t join the unit until Christmas Eve of 1944, the bulk of the 34^th sailed on the Queen Mary in March of that same year. There were so many soldiers and airmen on board that the guys from the 34^th were confined to “E” Deck, five floors below deck, where they spent the entire crossing. They ate, slept, and stood around waiting to eat or sleep without ever leaving E Deck or seeing the ocean.

Doors from all the staterooms on the ship had been removed, all the windows blackened and the ship’s hull painted a dull gray to make the Queen less conspicuous to enemy submarines. She would have been quite a target, as this single ship transported more than 2 million allied troops during the war. On one famous wartime voyage, the Queen Mary set the record for the most people ever to cross the Atlantic on a single ship, with more than 16,600 souls aboard.

It was a nostalgic visit for Liz as well. Though she’d never been aboard the Queen Mary, as the daughter of a US Diplomat she’d traveled extensively on ocean liners as a kid. She crossed the Atlantic and the Pacific aboard luxury liners such as the SS United States, the SS President Wilson, the Leonardo DiVinci, the SS Laos, and probably more that I can’t remember. But being on the Queen Mary meant even more to Liz because her father had been a wartime passenger, too. Norman Nelson’s 8^th Air Force unit shipped out on the Queen Mary in March of ’44, about the same time as the 34^th!

During its wartime service as a troop transport, with so many people on board quarters were quite cramped. The Grand Salon alone held 500 troops, in cot-like bunk beds stacked 5-7 beds high. Roger Aubrey, a member of the 34^th who attended the reunion, said the bunks were stacked so closely on top of one another, if you wanted to roll over, you had to climb out of bed to do it. I get claustrophobic just thinking about it.

Today, the Queen Mary is a floating hotel/theme park where you can sample the illusion of ocean liner living without ever leaving port. But for the surviving members of the 34^th Photo Recon Squadron who attended the reunion, visiting the Queen was a chance to relive a few distant memories, catch up with old buddies, and bask in the adulation of their families and descendants. Spouses, sons and daughters, grandkids and great-grandkids all mingled with the veterans and each other, swapping stories, telling jokes and marveling at the accomplishments of our families’ heroes.

None of the veterans would describe what they did as heroic—I know my Dad never did— but they understand now that the role they played was vital to the “War Effort.” Had he been alive to attend, Dad would have been the only pilot present. The rest of the guys were in different sections… supply, mess, personal equipment (parachutes and oxygen masks), camera repair, photo development, motor pool and the like.

Each man’s job helped keep a squadron of specially equipped P-38 F-5 photographic reconnaissance planes airborne, the very planes that snapped pictures of the beaches of Normandy just hours before the D-Day invasion. These were the planes that mapped the retreat of Hitler’s armies and the advance of our own forces. And they were the planes that took the last photos of Eastern Europe as Soviet troops liberated (captured?) country after country at the end of World War II.

A mapping mission on May 16, 1945 changed Dad’s life forever. W.J. “Billy” Andres, Jr., then a 20-year old 2^nd lieutenant, was flying at altitude over southern Germany and what is now the Czech Republic when problems with his oxygen mask caused him to black out. The plane he was flying that day, “Turbo Anny,” crashed near the town of Bad Aibling, Germany.

Dad was very fortunate that the Germans had surrendered a week earlier. According to the official report, some British Tommies saw the crash and pulled him out of the flames. Dad was in rough shape when the commanding officer of the 34^th visited him a day or two later at a field hospital in Germany, and that was the last time Dad saw anyone from his old outfit. He’d spend the next year in and out of stateside Army hospitals treating his burns and broken bones.

In the early 2000s, a new website came online just as Dad was battling lung and liver cancer. To take his mind off the agony of chemotherapy and radiation, every day Dad would visit www.34thprs.org, the online home of the 34^th Photo Recon Squadron. Reading about the unit’s missions, planes and personnel helped him beat cancer, and made him realize he had done something important in the war and was part of something special.

I experienced a similar sensation when I stepped into the reception room of the Queen Mary and met the members of the 34^th gathered for this year’s reunion. There the aging veterans told their stories, their eyes sparking with energy and memory, their years and posture belying the experiences of their youth.

I’ve come to believe that my Dad really loved his time in the Army Air Corps, and he would have loved being with us on the Queen Mary. Liz and I got to represent both our Dads, and it brought us a closeness to their memories we haven’t felt in a while. The men who stood on her decks and slept in her bunks won’t be with us forever; like our fathers, many are already gone. Hopefully, the Queen Mary herself will long stand as a testament to what our fathers and so many other service members endured to keep us free.

Exceptionalism, as they define it, is the quality of our country, our people and our way of life that proves we are better and more deserving than other people, civilizations and countries. It allows Americans to consider themselves inherently above the rest of humanity, perched as the loftiest of nations with the highest of ideals.

In reality, Exceptionalism is less about the American nation and more about the individual adherents to this philosophy. The word is designed to allow the mind to see itself as exceptional, above the rest, and unquestionably deserving to be treated as such.  The Exceptionalist sees himself as superior to everyone else, be it around the world or around the nation.

Obey the speed limit? “Not me, I’m Exceptional!” Leave that handicap parking space for someone who needs it? “Why should I? I’m Exceptional!” Pay taxes to provide necessities to other Americans? “Not me, I’m Exceptional!” 

For decades, conservatives have preached that liberals are morally deficient, politically naïve and socially decadent. The doctrine of conservative exceptionalism fits perfectly with this narrative. In this light, conservatives can see themselves as individually stronger, better, holier, purer, and ungoverned by the laws and responsibilities that pertain to everyone who is not exceptional. 

It is the exceptionalist point of view that allows one to think spa treatments, country club memberships and private jets should be tax deductible, that trips to the Super Bowl are a legitimate corporate business expense, and that C-level salaries in the hundreds of millions are somehow justifiable. After all, when one is exceptional, one is ENTITLED to more than the non-exceptional rabble.

But the conservative messaging apparatus already has poisoned the word “entitlement.” In America, entitlement has always meant that which we gladly give because it is deserved inherently, like food for the hungry, formula for babies, shelter for the destitute or comfort for the sick and dying. Sadly, that word has been co-opted, and is now misused to mean handouts offered grudgingly to those who neither need nor deserve our assistance—the exact opposite of its true meaning.

Now, after a few decades of deriding entitlements, conservatives cannot claim they are “entitled” to a better life than everyone else. They needed to create a new word, a new paradigm, a new canard for creating a separate reality for themselves and their peers. Enter “American Exceptionalism.”

As a nation, America has done some great things: taking on some of history’s biggest tyrants, patrolling the world’s oceans, protecting the weak, assisting after natural disasters and innovating in the fields of science, agriculture, manufacturing, economics and myriad others. We are one of the world’s most generous and selfless nations. But we cannot ignore that there is another side to this coin.

America also has exploited native populations and their natural resources, engineered political coups, fomented revolutions, undermined diplomatic efforts and bullied other nations into doing our bidding. We cannot selectively take pride in our accomplishments and largess without acknowledging the negative effects of our intervention and self interest. Yet ignoring this side of America’s image is exactly what exceptionalists seek to do.

Great Britain, Spain, France, Germany, Russia, Holland, Japan and many other nations have viewed themselves, at one historical point or another, as the most important, most altruistic nations on earth. England saw itself as the Great Civilizer, even as it destroyed native cultures and expropriated natural resources the world over. Russia spent the better part of a century spreading what it believed was a superior ideology that would save the world. Nazi Germany convinced itself it was destined to be the nation that provided “the Final Solution.” Each of these nations felt it was exceptional, and therefore not bound by the laws, rules and norms that governed ordinary nations.

The ruse of American Exceptionalism is no less devious and deceitful. Our Founding Fathers,  regularly trotted out to make any number of points, knew that the American experiment was noble and unique, but they acknowledged it was governed by human nature. We threw off the shackles of tyranny so we could be “a more perfect union,” not to be deluded into thinking ourselves “the perfect union.” America is not a perfect exception. We are a nation of humans guided by virtues and vices and the laws upon which we agree.

There are indeed things possible in America that are not possible anywhere else in the world, but almost every nation on earth can make some similar claim to its individual greatness. Americans can claim no privilege for being better humans than anyone else on the planet. And conservatives cannot claim entitlement to loftier status than other Americans simply to separate themselves from their responsibilities to the nation and the world.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”  

By itself, this line from the Declaration of Independence debunks the myth of American Exceptionalism.

He grew into a patriotic young man and when it was his turn to serve in World War II, Dad enlisted in the US Army Air Corps, where he qualified for flight training as a pilot. He was by all accounts an excellent pilot with a flair for flying, and he celebrated his 20^th birthday, Memorial Day 1944, doing photo reconnaissance training at Will Rogers Field in Oklahoma. Late that year, as a “shave tail” Flight Officer (a warrant officer one step below a Second Lieutenant), he was assigned as a replacement pilot to the 38^th Photo Recon Squadron and shipped out to France. (www.38thprs.org)

Just two weeks before his 21^st birthday, things were looking pretty good for Dad. He’d been promoted to 2^nd Lieut., he’d completed 37 missions over enemy territory, and Germany had finally surrendered. On May 16, 1945, he climbed into the cockpit of his P-38 for his last mission. While flying a recon mission over southern Germany scouting the advancing Russian army, Dad’s oxygen malfunctioned. He passed out at the controls, and woke up upside down with one engine stalled a few seconds before his plane slammed into the ground. 

Dad spent his 21^st birthday in an Army hospital in France, and his 22^nd birthday at the Army hospital at Valley Forge, PA, where he underwent numerous surgeries to repair the burns he suffered in the crash. He bore his scars, and his pain, without complaint for the rest of his life. 

As a kid he may have resented Memorial Day being on his birthday, but by the time he was a young man, he understood and cherished it. Dad knew that many Americans had made greater sacrifices than he. In later life, he embraced his service and was proud of the role he played, albeit small, in defending his country. He honored my uncles’ service in WWII, my grandfather’s in WWI, my great-great-grandfather’s service in the Civil War, and that of our ancestor Matthew Adams, who served in the Revolutionary War. 

Dad passed away in late June, 2005. I don’t really remember which day, because as the years go by, the day of his death becomes less important to me. It is his birthday I will always remember and celebrate, Memorial Day, as I honor his service and the service of all who have given to the defense of our country and our freedoms. Happy Birthday, Pop! I love you. I’ll be flying the flag in your honor.

It is AP style that dictates how states’ names are abbreviated in print, such as “Ariz.” for Arizona. While the Post Office calls us “AZ,” Major League Baseball abbreviates us “ARZ” and the civilized world refers to us as “LOL,” the AP Style “Ariz.” is how it will always appear in the newspaper.

AP style also demands that we write “2 p.m.” as opposed to “2:00PM,” that it’s “President Obama” or “Barack Obama, president” but never “president Barack Obama” or “Barack Obama, President.” It also dictates that the punctuation mark come before the quotation mark, not after, as in the sentence, “Who came up with all these silly rules and why is it so important to follow them?”

One little item that AP style has hung onto for years is the phrase “Web site.” While the rest of the world wrote it as “website,” AP stubbornly maintained its ground. This was a major pain, as everyone of my clients kept writing it “website,” and every time I’d correct them, I’d be asked “Are you sure? Whose crazy rule is that?” 

Well, just last month AP announced that “website” is now the proper preferred usage, and that “Web site” is no longer to be used.  All those years of nurturing, badgering and instructing my clients, and this is the thanks I get?

I’ll start writing “website” and may not make a big deal of it, in hopes that my clients won’t see the abrupt reversal and call me out for being an AP style pushover. Or, in protest, I just may send AP a news release that uses the sentence, “The Web site was seen by president Barack Obama at 2:00PM”.

 Passive aggressiveness at its most obtuse. Yeah, that’ll show ‘em.

Basically that means that my intestines are poking through all the holes in my stomach muscles, and if I’m not careful, a section of colon could get trapped on the wrong side of the abdominal wall. If left unchecked, the trapped section could stop my intestines from functioning, which would kill me. So I’m getting everything repaired because I’m too young to die. 

While I haven’t had any digestive problems since a 13” section of colon was removed in 2007, my insurance company, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona has refused to cover any subsequent surgeries, stating that it’s all related to “diverticulitis” and therefore a “pre-existing condition.” Even after the diverticulitis-prone section was removed, and I had been given a temporary colostomy, they refused to pay for a colostomy reversal. They would have preferred that I suffer for the rest of my life rather than pay for an operation to allow my bowels to function normally. 

So now, they are refusing to pay for an operation that could keep me from dying. I share this with you not to gain sympathy, but to let you know what insurance companies will do to protect their profit margin. They’ve got me over a barrel: they won’t cover my medical needs, they won’t let me pay a higher premium for a lower deductible, and I can’t go to another insurance company because they will turn me down due to the “pre-existing condition” label BCBS has affixed to me. Somehow, they have no problem cashing my monthly premium checks.

I have great confidence in my new surgeon, Dr. Evani, and I know that in time, my hernias will be healed up and I can resume a more regular lifestyle. What will still be a problem is the lack of care, coverage and respect I get from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona. It’s tough to have faith in a company that would rather see me die than allow me to live.

What is the fascination with opinion polling, and why does anyone trust it as an indicator of anything? I’ve been struggling with opinion polls after reading a recent article by George Lakoff, a California-based expert on language, syntax and the use of “framing.” Lakoff’s recent article (here’s the link: Truthout) brilliantly lays out the case for distrusting every poll you read. He shows how easy it is to skew the results of almost any poll with “framing,” the use of words or phrases to elicit emotional responses that cause a person to react in a positive or negative way.

As a simple example, the word “Mommy” conjures up images of a loving, caring nurturing woman, ready to hug and pamper and protect. But say “Mommy Dearest,” and you’re cowering as Joan Crawford is about to beat you bloody with a wire hanger. That’s framing.

 Lakofff cites how framing poll questions changes responses:

“In NYT/CBS Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell poll on whether “homosexuals” or “gay men and lesbians” should be allowed to serve openly in the military: 79 percent of Democrats said they support permitting gay men and lesbians to serve openly. Fewer Democrats, however, just 43 percent, said they were in favor of allowing homosexuals to serve openly.”  

That’s a 36 percent swing because of the “homosexual” framing. Lakoff cites an even more glaring example, a ballot measure facing California voters this fall. Originally, the ballot verbiage read:

“All legislative actions on revenue and budget must be determined by a majority vote.”

Simple enough, and in testing, 73 percent of voters favored majority rule. But reframe the verbiage to include the phrases “raise taxes,” and “Unknown fiscal impact”:

“Changes the legislative vote requirement necessary to pass the budget, and to raise taxes from two-thirds to a simple majority. Unknown fiscal impact from lowering the legislative vote requirement for spending and tax increases. In some cases, the content of the annual state budget could change and / or state tax revenues could increase. Fiscal impact would depend on the composition and actions of future legislatures.”

Same basic issue, same basic choice, but framing changes the outcome completely. Using the phrases “raise taxes” three times and “fiscal impact” twice in four sentences had a dramatic effect: support dropped from 73% to 38%. Just framing it differently rendered a significantly different response from the same people.

Along with the mercurial nature of polls themselves comes my concern that deciding issues based on polls is unscientific and hardly democratic. Yet the news media dutifully trot out poll results as if they actually indicate something true, accurate or important.  If 60% of Americans believe the US should not share a border with Mexico, would that change the reality that we do?  If the majority of Americans believed that Belize posed a threat to our nation, does Belize pose a threat?

 The obvious answer is no, these polls are meaningless. But everyday, we are beset with another round of poll questions framed to make us think a certain opinion is in the majority or a certain belief is somehow reality.

So now, whenever I see the results of a poll that pretends to speak for the “majority” of Americans, I wonder how that poll question could have been framed differently to achieve a completely opposite result.

 When I read “88% of Americans don’t like their government,” I wonder what the results would be for a poll that asked, “Would you prefer to live in a country without roads, schools, laws, police and pollution controls?”

When I see “80 percent like the insurance they have now,” I picture a poll asking, “Do you want an insurance plan that raises its rates without warning, decides what illnesses can and cannot be covered and can cut off your coverage at any time?”

When a poll asks, “Do you trust congress to do the right thing?” I envision a poll that asks, “Who is more likely to do the right thing in Congress, Republicans or Democrats?”

It’s time Americans fight back by ignoring the polls and deciding our actions on what’s right or wrong, not what is supposedly popular. Let’s begin by taking my little poll:

“Will Americans fall for polling questions that are so skewed as to elicit answers that don’t really reflect popular opinion but instead reinforce the opinion of the pollster?”

1. Never
2. Not at all
3. Undecided

(this poll has a margin of error of +/- 100%)

I was surprised to see our bill for March because it was nearly $100, which seemed a bit high for our modest ranch dwelling. My first natural instinct, as an Arizonan, was to look for someone to blame, and I eventually came up with the real culprit. It’s because my house is full of vampires.

Before an army of teenaged “Twilight” fans descend on my house looking for that dreamy vampire Edward, and before Ann Rice readers show up with silver bullets and wooden stakes, let me assure you I’m not referring to that kind of vampire. No, the vampires I’m talking about actually exist.

I’m talking about electricity vampires, those two-toothed gadgets that plug into your wall sockets and do nothing but drain your electricity. All manner of modern appliances now suck electricity constantly, even when you have them turned off, and that’s something I’ve never been able to wrap my brain around.

It used to be that you could tell that the TV was turned off because there was nothing on the screen and there were no kids watching it. Nowadays, they put a little red light in the corner of your flat screen that tells you that the TV is off. The light turns green when the set is on to eliminate any confusion. What a time and effort saver!

I remember bringing this up to a TV salesman, who assured me that it only cost about 3 cents a day which surely, someone as handsome and successful looking as I could easily afford. Well, I bought that line, and the TV, but now I’m having second thoughts.

That little red light that tells me when the appliance is turned off costs me about 3 cents a day, roughly a buck a month, or about $12.00 per year. Doesn’t sound like much of an expense, until you realize it’s not the only vampire in the house.  

There’s another vampire light on my stereo, and on seven or eight light strips, three GFI wall sockets, three computers, two DVD players, our coffee maker, two cordless telephones, and the electric garage door opener. Also using energy while doing nothing are two phone chargers, our modem and router, and wall adaptor/transformers for our electric dartboard, dust buster and blood pressure cuff. Our microwave has a built in clock, one of three built-in electric clocks in our kitchen appliances. (We also have a battery-powered wall clock, which is great because it works even when the power goes out!)

Add up all these little vampires around the house, and it comes to about $30.00 worth of electricity each month, or about $360.00 a year that someone as handsome and successful looking as I could be spending on beer, comfortable shoes or chocolate bars.

But the fault is all my own. Just like the vampires of legend, electricity vampires can’t come into your home unless you invite them in!