Expiration Date

We live in a world of expiration dates. We know that everything around us, like we ourselves, are going to eventually expire. Every time we pass a cemetery, hospital or see rust on equipment, we know that time takes its toll, that there is deterioration, that a repair person, whether doctor or electrician, will have a job.

Give a small child a sucker, he loves to lick that sucker - we have all experienced it. You get that sucker from the child simply by offering a lolly pop instead. Most of us would rather have something new or different than illness or a fine. When your library book has expired, you will have a fine. When your milk, meat and prescription drugs have expired, you may have sickness. Things with which we should have no trouble - eggs, peanut butter, and spinach - do not necessarily have an expiration date. But common sense would dictate to producers and distributors that safety is more important than expensive recalls.

As I have written in many commentaries, I am a long time antiquarian book collector. In finding old books, in junk stores, public auctions et cetera, I am amazed to find long lost library books, many with the familiar check out card still intact and dates going back many decades. Someone did not pay attention to the expiration date.

We are slaves of the computer. Whether in the automobile or paying utility bills, the computer, though smarter than most human beings, is very impersonal. Since I must depend on telephones in order to run my various businesses, I have phones from several companies, just in case something happens. I have a land line with AT&T (cheapest service). You cannot make long distance calls on this phone, only local calls, and by law, emergency calls. The phone was disconnected because I refused to pay a large charge for long distant calls, a phone on which you CANNOT MAKE long distance calls. Of course, the agencies responsible for the oversight of these monopolistic companies, locally, statewide and nationally, are just paid to sleep. They give not the slightest oversight or response to a letter of complaint. Finally, after many letters, this dead phone, which had been dead for weeks, finally rang.

I realize the woman on the phone, when it finally rang, was a victim of a computer. I had stated in my letter regarding this problem that I would give one thousand dollars to the company if she could prove that anytime over the past sixty years of telephone service that I ever failed to pay a legitimate bill. These folks could care a less, they simply act on an expiration date. If the money is not there, they expire your service, like the electric utility who expired my service in an empty building where no service had been used simply because the meter had been misread, like the water utility who threatened to expire my service in all my rental units because I would not pay a twelve hundred dollar water bill for a building that had burned down twenty years before, before I owned the empty lot. The water meter had never been removed and a new employee read the meter from thirty years previous. All of these utilities wanted me to pay the erroneous bills and then get a refund later, after they were satisfied of the outcome. This is American life with monopolies, services on which you must depend.

If there is need for government at all, government regulations and government controls, there should be oversight with expiration dates. There are some things with which we have no control. Expiration dates which cannot be foreseen. Today we are observing the 9th anniversary of 9-11, an infamous date in America history, when thousands of Americans left home in the morning expecting to return in the evening, but becoming the victims of a dastardly attack. Today, in this city, a 21 year old marine is being buried, his expiration date coming much too soon, as he defended his country on foreign soil. He will be buried with military honors and long lines of military and police patrols will escort his casket to a family cemetery. But his life is over (and we all only have one life to live), and for his family, a large part of their lives has been erased.

The future holds expiration dates for us all. We do not know when or where. Before the foundation of the world, God designed us for a specific number of years, and he is Boss. Religion is not salvation. If you have not made arrangements, prepare for your certain redemption. In the meantime, prepare for an uncertain future. No one could have convinced me that I would spend most of my life as a totally blind person. The test of a man is not what he does when everything is going well, but what he does when things go wrong. Surveying conditions in the world, we are sure things can go very wrong in this country. Prepare for the unexpected. It might be a dirty bomb or it might be worsened economic conditions. By faith, you may learn how to hold on to your very existence, compromising your expiration date by the very finger nails.