In the days immediately following the attacks of September 11th, there were hundreds of well-earned salutes to public employees. Not just cops and firefighters, but all the way to Postal workers who continued to deliver the mail in the face of a potential Anthrax risk.
Yesterday was Bastille Day in France which was marked by the usual military parade down the Champs Elysees. What was unusual, as reported by one of Mullings' TWO Paris correspondents, Zabelle Huss, was (1) The parade was led by cadets from West Point, and (2) A truck from the New York Fire Department, which has been on display in Paris, led the fire brigade section of the parade.
Meanwhile, back in the Good Old US of A, the blistering images of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have faded, for most of us, into a more comfortable sepia.
The daily - often breathless - cable news reporting about the war in Afghanistan has morphed into footage of West Coast car chases and lengthy analyses of a young girl's disappearance from her home in Utah.
The Washington press corps and the Congress last week were totally absorbed in the microscopic reporting of whether a minor stock transaction, in a relatively small energy company, by a private citizen, more than a decade ago, signaled the End Of The World As We Know It.
In Sunday's Washington Post, Norm Ornstein (resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and one of the best thinkers in Washington) had a piece which led as follows:
"All those in favor of a new Department of Homeland Security? The ayes have it, overwhelmingly.
"All those in favor of changing your office location, your telephone number, your car pooling arrangements, your job duties and, possibly, your job classification?
"I thought so."
Ornstein reminds us that dealing with the human aspects of moving about 170,000 people from their current jobs and locations to new jobs and new locations is a daunting task.
Many Federal employees, under Civil Service rules, have job security which is just slightly less eternal than a Federal Judge or an incumbent Member of Congress.
We are not asking these Federal employees to act like members of the Reserves and National Guard who, with a few days notice, left their jobs, left their families, and left their country to fight for freedom in places we could never pronounce and can no longer find on a map.
We are not asking these Federal employees to act like firefighters and race into burning buildings.
We are not even asking them to deliver a letter.
All they are being asked to do is to be assigned to a new Department. With perhaps, fasten your seatbelts, a new phone number and a new commuting route.
People who toil in the world of private enterprise know that it is not unheard of to be moved to a different division of a company, or a different subsidiary of a corporation, often in a different city and state.
People who toil in the armed services know that they and their families are going to be moved every few years to a new post.
A civilian employee in a supervisory position might be, at the GS-12 level, making about $50,000 per year depending upon where the employee is located. That person, living in Dallas, might make an additional $1,000 per month.
An Army sergeant (with dependents) in approximately the same supervisory level (E-6) makes about $36,000 per year. If that sergeant is in a war zone he or she might draw as much as $400 per month more.
People who toil as civilians in the Federal government should be able to overcome the horror of moving to a different building in the same city. Even if they have to join a different car pool and memorize a new phone number.
On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: The two pictures I promised and the Norm Ornstein piece from the Washington Post.
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