Wading In

Make baby steps of kindness in 2011 By Kelvin Wade December 30, 2010 With 2011 on the horizon, many people are preparing New Year's resolutions that they'll never keep. By Martin Luther King Day, you will have blown your diet, let the house get messy again or traded in exercise for TV watching. Hey, I've been there. However, I've already embarked upon something that will define life from now on. And that is taking baby steps of kindness. I was at Starbucks a month ago with a friend. While she was telling me something, I couldn't focus on her words because a serviceman in fatigues walked in and stood in line. Something impelled me to go up and purchase his coffee and pastry, shake his hand and thank him for his service. He was very appreciative and I decided there on the spot I would repeat this small gesture as often as I could. I went home and looked up ways to send service members letters and packages. Little things mean a lot. There are people on my street who ha...

Christmas is worth the hassle By Kelvin Wade December 22, 2010 As the song goes, it's the most wonderful time of the year. But it's also the most stressful. One doesn't have to be the Grinch or Scrooge in order to feel put upon by the Christmas season. Right now, there are people who are wishing it were Dec. 26 so they can exhale. It starts with Black Friday. You see those great deals you know you're never going to come close to getting because there's no way you're camping out or standing in a line for hours freezing just for the chance to buy something at a discount. During the Christmas season, every store you go to is packed. The parking is horrendous, the lines are long and the selection is skimpy because a horde has descended upon the store before you ever showed up. Every restaurant is crowded. The post office is even slower than normal, something that seems to be an impossibility. Then someone unexpectedly gives you a gift and you fret because you feel ...

Support all the troops By Kelvin Wade December 16, 2010 My respect for the military started with my father. Master Chief Petty Officer Orvis Wade served in the U.S. Navy for 30 years. My family grew up on military bases including Norfolk Naval Air Station in Virginia, and Hamilton Air Force Base in Novato. We moved to Fairfield in 1976 when our dad was stationed at Alameda. Fairfield loves the military. We've fought elections over who wants to protect Travis Air Force Base more. We have families who have loved ones in harm's way and others serving in relative peace in faraway places who deserve our support and respect. But what I can't respect is the fact that the 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' policy is still in force. We're still spending millions to hound hundreds of gays out of the military every year. Though Republicans are currently blocking repeal, this isn't a partisan issue. In a new Washington Post-ABC News Poll, 77 percent of Americans support l...

The tea party's last supper By Kelvin Wade December 10, 2010 With President Obama and the Democrats' capitulation to Republicans on taxes, where did the deficit hawks go? Where are the tea partiers? Where are the Solano County Tea Party Patriots? And where are they nationally? The government is preparing to spend billions. The tax framework the White House and Republicans have proposed will offer tax cuts to everyone, including millionaires and billionaires. It extends unemployment 13 months and the Earned Income Tax Credit, as well as makes other tax changes for individuals and business. It provides a generous inheritance tax. There's also a reduction in payroll taxes so Americans will take home more in their paychecks. Total price tag? About $900 billion over two years according to Moneywatch's Jill Schlesinger. That's larger than the bank bailouts and auto company bailouts combined. It's larger than the $787 billion stimulus bill (which was one-third tax cuts...

Friends, strangers and predators By Kelvin Wade December 02, 2010 Who's a stranger? I've told the story of when I was 5 and my family and I were visiting relatives in San Augustine, Texas. Two men drove up in a dirty old truck and asked me if I'd like to go with them to see a sawmill. I had no idea what a sawmill was but I knew I wanted to see one so I climbed into their truck. My brother Orvis saw me and quickly got our mother, who came flying out of the house to get me out of the truck. Who's a stranger in 2010? Most of us have hundreds of Facebook friends; many or most are friends of friends and other people we've never met. That is the point of social networking, to network and make new friends and contacts. What we've done is turned what we used to call acquaintances into friends. Now 'friend' tends to mean anyone whose name you can spell correctly. I thought of this when going to log on to my old MySpace account this week. I hadn't logged on t...