Forrest Gump's mom was right, "Stupid is as stupid does."

  All right, it's time to 'fess up. I've spent the better part of a year bashing Chinese and other inferior import goods as a poor economic choice. I've insulted the intelligence of people who shop based on price alone. While I could give you all the really good reasons I didn't want to spend a lot of money on good quality tires, I won't bore you with them.

  It made perfectly good sense to me at the time. I put four new 16” tires on my minivan for under $500. For the first two months, everything was great. Then I noticed that the left rear looked low. I checked it, and sure enough, it needed air. I filled it and looked for an obvious leak and found no nails, so I decided to keep an eye on it. For three or four weeks, everything looked fine. Then one morning I noticed it looked low again. Again, no nails, no obvious leaks, and I decided that since I had parked on the street in front of my house, that it was a neighborhood kid goofing around with it.

  Then a week later it was down fifteen pounds. I had parked in back that time. I was getting fed up with filling this tire every week, so I took it to the tire store that sold them to me and they “fixed” it. I don't know what they did, as they didn't record anything on the service record, but I drove away thinking, okay, now I have four good tires.

  Three days later it was down twenty pounds. From that point I was filling the tire every three to four days. I called and made another appointment. They “fixed” it again. Now my tires were five months old, and had been installed and fixed twice by the same shop. Same result. Needed air twice in the first week after the second fix. I was headed out of town for a week on business, and didn't want my wife bothered with filling the tire constantly, so I called back and was told they were “swamped” and couldn't get me in to fix it before I left.

  By the time I got back in to have it looked at again, the fourth time they had the wheel off the van, I was filling the tire twenty or more pounds three or four times a week. I had owned the tires for seven and a half months, and driven just under ten thousand miles. Mostly to and from the tire store. This time I was smart. I walked in unannounced, with my eight year old son, and told them I would wait while they fixed my tire, and that I wanted a full report of what they found, not just a smile and my keys back.

  After over an hour and a half of waiting, (reasonable, given the fact I had no appointment, but irritating because it was my fourth trip in less than eight months), the salesman at the counter explained to me that there was a puncture of the interior sidewall of the drivers side tire, likely from hitting a curb, and that it was an unrepairable condition. I'm not sure I want to know how he drives home, but I do know that if I got an unrepairable puncture, on the inside sidewall of the drivers side tire by hitting a curb, I'd remember it. In fact, the rest of my van would show some signs of ill treatment as well.

  Up to this point in the story, my experience can be chalked up to choosing a poor tire store. A tire made anywhere in the world could have these problems. Here is where quality, pride of workmanship, and value come into play. The road hazard warranty I paid extra for was pro rated. In less than eight months of driving, fewer than ten thousand miles, just over half the tread was worn off this tire. I asked if it was from running at low pressures, and the salesman said all four tires were in the same condition.

  What did I do? I paid the man over seventy dollars to put a replacement tire on, which was half the original purchase price of the tire, plus installation. And I made up my mind that I would not deal with that tire store again, because I am convinced that the leak was present when the tire only had 10% wear, but they jerked me around long enough to get 50% of the replacement out of me. I also did the math, and for 30% more I could have bought American made tires with a tread life warranty to 60,000 miles. That's three times further than I can expect my “inexpensive” (read 'cheap') Chinese tires to run.

  So to all who I have offended in running down inferior imports, I apologize. I am just as dumb as you.

Thoughts on Sandy Hook, and Christmas

  When we allow grief to set policy, it propagates more grief. I've seen blogs that point out that the failure in Sandy Hook was not in controlling the availability of weapons, but rather an unwillingness or inability for area residents to recognize what is right and wrong, then act on that recognition. Many people who knew the gunman reported that they were “not surprised” to learn he had committed this horror. He was widely reported as “odd” or “weird”, yet no one took the time to look further.

For fear of being labeled "insensitive" to the plight of mentally ill individuals, we allow them to occasionally take over our entire country through gross acts of violence. America used to have a backbone. We used to stand up to bullies, dictators, and madmen. Now we spend so much time comparing ourselves to them to make sure we're "not as bad as that guy", we have forgotten that bad guys do bad things, and that the reason we have been given the ability to see that is because we also have the responsibility to prevent it.

I am shattered by the image of those broken parents as I put myself in their shoes. I hug my school age sons a little tighter since last Friday, and I find myself urged to pray for the comfort of those left behind. What was done cannot be undone. It may be that what was done cannot be prevented.

At this time I am reminded of another madman. One who was so concerned with a perceived threat that he ordered the deaths of every male child under the age of two in an entire region. And he had the might of the sole superpower nation in the world behind him, to see that it happened.

Our Lord escaped that horror, and never once suggested that the means used to kill those babies be eliminated. He came to show that the deficiency is in the hearts of every one of us. He pointed out that we live in an evil age, surrounded by evil. He showed us that the way to overcome evil is through diligent prayer and love for one another. Love for one another implies that we protect one another. Since we are unable to remove from our world the means which bad people use to harm others, we can do only as Jesus did. We must be willing to put ourselves in harms way to prevent harm to others. Let us not cower even further by abandoning our responsibility to protect our children to the good intentions of others. Every parent of every child that died last week did that when they sent their children to school that day. A school that the gunman knew would be absolutely defenseless.