What I Want For Christmas

We really don’t exchange gifts in our family anymore, simply because shopping is such a chore and we need very little.

That doesn’t mean I still don’t want stuff. So here’s my Christmas list.

• I want to be able to listen to “The William Tell Overture” without thinking of The Lone Ranger.

• I really want to understand why so many people still think Trump is qualified to be president.

• I want to stop getting lost in Facebook, especially clips of Friends that I can recite from memory.

• I want to remember that oysters Rockefeller gives me heartburn when I first open the menu, not at 1 a.m. the following morning.

• I want to ascribe most annoying actions to stupidity rather than malice.

• I want to admit that some parts of Love, Actually are dated and misogynistic, even while we watch it every year.

• I want people to correct my mispronunciations, like imprimatur.

• I want to be able to control my bodily functions as long as I possibly can. (This is not necessarily a new desire; I once drooled in front of the most beautiful girl in my high school.)

• I want to always appreciate the change of seasons, and to never be able to decide which one I like best.

• I want to learn the optimal interval for basting a turkey – that is, how to keep it moist without losing heat from the oven.

• I want to figure out how to develop new friendships at an old age.

• I want to discover old movies that I’ve never seen but make me want to watch them over and over again (cf. The Best Years Of Our Lives).

• I want two of my old girlfriends to know much I regret cheating on them.

• I want to wake up every single morning for the next thirty years, but to be okay with it if I don’t.

The Roll Call Of Souls

In Sully, after he’d miraculously landed his crippled plane in the Hudson, Captain Sullenberger (played by Tom Hanks) was hyperfocused on confirming that all souls had survived. Such an archaic term, souls, but it dates back to sailing ships and encompasses more than passengers; it takes into account the crew, too, about whom Sully also fretted.

(Disclosure: I found myself on a plane on which Sullenberger was deadheading not long after that event, and I never felt so safe on a plane as that day. Man, we had pilots to spare.)

But earlier this week, I really understood Sully’s fear and tension. He wanted to make sure everyone was all right. It was almost like a little kid grounding, making sure his parents were still in the vicinity. Yeah, everything’s okay; my tribe is still here.

That sense of needing to ground hit me this week. The long-term partner of a long-time friend and colleague passed away suddenly, but not unexpectedly. She’d been fighting cancer, and had been responding well to chemotherapy, until she wasn’t. My physician wife said she wasn’t surprised, but I was, and her poor partner was. What a shock not be able to wake your love.

So it didn’t surprise me that, on the day after we heard the sad news, Monica started calling old friends to check in. She didn’t admit it as such, but I knew what was going on. Like Sully, we had an unnatural instinct to make sure everyone was okay. We had to do the roll call of souls to make sure no one else was missing. I did the same thing. I called a friend back east whom I hadn’t spoken to for a while, because I knew her life was particularly tumultuous, just to make sure she was surviving it.

It’s a facet of getting old. When my father was still alive, I apparently called him so infrequently that his first question was always, “Who died?” That wasn’t always the reason for my calls, but more often than not …

It’s slightly unnerving, because being retired, we’re finally at a junction of comfort in our lives. Our careers are in the past, and the dreams of missed finals and missed deadlines grow fainter with time. It’s quite refreshing. But at the same time, there’s this ogre standing on the edge of your vision. All of your friends and relatives, all the souls on your plane, are in the crosshairs of fate.

Which is why, especially as the holidays approach, it’s time to revive that old AT&T slogan and reach out and touch someone. You’ll feel better after you’ve called the roll.

Fifty Years And Done

It’s a strange feeling to attend an event commemorating something that happened fifty years ago when, damn it, you don’t even feel that old. It’s a strange feeling to return to a place so vivid in your memory yet so different now. It’s a strange feeling to see people you know, and yet don’t know, and to see how they’ve changed, or haven’t changed.

I attended my fifty-year high school reunion last month, celebrating the class of 1973 from Palo Alto’s Henry M. Gunn High School. About half of our class of around 300 showed up to one or all of the three events across three days, engendering a variety of comments: “Who are all these old people?” “She didn’t look like that in high school,” and “What was my locker combination?”

I plead guilty on all counts. I hugged one of my elementary school classmates and called her by her sister’s name (in my defense, she had told me her sister was coming). I looked down from my hotel room overlooking the courtyard where we would be initially meeting and saw what looked like a homeless guy roaming around, who turned out to be one of our classmates who’d been facing some health issues. And always the categorization: instead of jocks and nerds, this time we split into groups of retirees and those still working.

So many mixed emotions. The reunion committee had already announced its dissolution. Having been a part of it at one time and seeing how much work it took to throw such a party over multiple decades, I begrudge them nothing. But it was so great to see everybody! One person opined that in five years, most of us would be 73 and we’re the class of ’73 so we HAD to have another reunion. That guy is certainly welcome to start planning it himself.

I understand this reasoning. We really do have a very social class, as evidenced not only by our regular reunions almost every five years, but also by the establishment of what we called “the reunion between the reunions.” The committee generally scheduled a casual picnic after the main event and invited other classes from our high school. In part because it was so casual, it became a big hit, encompassing siblings and teachers. I knew it was a success when one of my classmates came up to me at the picnic and said, “I just talked to two girls I NEVER would have talked to in high school.”

Something else makes us special, something that I only realized recently. Growing up in Palo Alto, just as Silicon Valley as it came to be known bloomed, meant that parents got good jobs and frequently stayed put. I don’t know the percentage of people that started in kindergarten and stayed together all through senior year, but I’ll bet it’s a higher percentage than most cities. My loving spouse has expressed jealousy at the longevity of some of my friendships, given that her father moved the family three times during her school years, always chasing better business opportunities in different Bay Area cities. She has no close friends from her school years.

And yet, I have to say that I’m against another reunion. There was so much joy last month. Those of us who haven’t stopped working do so because they love what they’re doing too much to stop. They’ve reached the pinnacles of their careers. I don’t think we could ever replicate a party like it, and even if we could, I don’t want to see what comes next.

Even now, some of our classmates are facing health issues. For one thing, it would be impossible for a banquet to accommodate the inevitable upcoming litany of low-salt, low-carb, gluten-free requests. For another, I really don’t want to see a traffic jam of canes, walkers, and wheelchairs. There would be arguments over the handicapped parking spots at any venue we chose.

I just want to remember everyone “the way we were.” Which, coincidentally, came out in 1973.

Six Things They Don’t Tell You About Getting Old

The only relative of mine who ever adequately warned me about aging was my Uncle Joe. He talked about how frustrating it was to be able to afford anything on a restaurant menu — only to be unable to order it because his stomach couldn’t digest it.

I realized how right he was when I started keeping a heartburn diary and discovered my downfall was my beloved oysters Rockefeller.

I’ve also realized, as I’ve aged (no, no plans to change the name of this blog to “Old Age Cranky”), how many other things nobody told me about getting old.

Nobody told me …

… how strange it would feel to have friendships that have spanned fifty or sixty years … or how to process the loss of friends and classmates who left too soon.

… that I wouldn’t be able to tell when descending stairs whether the creaks were coming from the floorboards or me. But, at the same time, nobody told me that more often than not, I’d still feel like a twenty-one-year-old trapped in a much older body.

… how many frigging pills I’d have to take every day.

… that I’d need a podiatrist.

… how wide the chasm between theory and reality would be. For instance, I love the theory of going to Disneyland. But when I remember the reality of the line into the parking garage, the line to get on the tram from the parking garage, the ticket line, the security line — all before you even think about a ride line — not so much.

… how close the past feels. On television mysteries, they make a big deal of some obscure event from twenty years ago. I still remember the third time I saw The Poseidon Adventure, and that was fifty years ago.

And yet … I sometimes find this time of life downright exhilarating. The ability to relax, not worry about when certain things get done. The joy that comes from the fact that everything I’m lucky enough to do is my choice, not my obligation.

If I’m being honest, it almost feels like the transition from adolescence to adulthood, where a multitude of choices and options lay ahead of me. Except for oysters Rockefeller.

That Chapter Closes

When I retired in 2015, I changed my LinkedIn occupation to “novelist.” It was one of those visualization things, the foundation of making the dream come true.

It did not.

Over the last seven years, I’ve embarked on several strategies for selling fiction. First I wrote a mystery, set in Silicon Valley. In it, a struggling programmer discovers that his favorite math teacher was murdered many years before, and sets out to reveal the culprit. Why a mystery? Because agents who represent mysteries, more than most agents, are willing to look at unpublished novelists.

Except in my case.

Then I surmised that it was better to lure agents to me, rather than trying to stand out from the deluge of unsolicited queries. So I wrote a spate of short stories and submitted them to literary magazines, in the hopes that an agent would read my sparkling work and offer to represent me. I ran into one little roadblock.

None of the literary magazine editors liked my short stories.

So then I came up with what I thought was a surefire idea for a novel, especially in light of Matt Haig’s success with The Midnight Library and How To Stop Time. Sequel is the story of a man struggling with the emotional effects of a dysfunctional family who dies and finds himself reincarnated into his old life … with his memories intact.

It did not intrigue anyone.

In fact, not so very long ago, you’d actually get responses from agents, even if they were negative. Now the trend seems to be “if we like it, you’ll hear from us.” So it’s kind of like talking into a dead telephone.

I’ve hung up.

There are other factors afoot in the publishing world thwarting my endeavor, of course, as I wrote about a couple of years ago. I talked then about following the path of least resistance to my journalism career, missing the opportunity to hone my fiction skills in the face of the utter apathy I encountered in the Stanford English department. But I can’t go back and live my life again; that gift is reserved for the hero of Sequel.

But I can face reality. To paraphrase the baroness in The Sound Of Music: “Somewhere out there is a man who I think will never be a novelist.” And for the most part, it’s okay.

In fact, I started purging a lot of ephemera I’d been dragging around for fifty years, waiting for the time I’d need to reference it for verisimilitude in various novels. Brochures from my teen-age trip around the United States, old copies of MAD, national park reference books (American Heritage). South Pacific guidebooks, Hawaiian language guides, books on running hotels (The Pennington Jinx). Silicon Valley glossaries (Who Killed Mr. Winthrop?).

I talked about ending my fiction quest many times before, but I could never quite give it up. Until now. This time, it feels like it’s time.

I’m reminded of the words of a man whose name I don’t remember, whom I only met once. He was a tech company executive I was interviewing when I worked for McGraw-Hill. I noted in his biography that he had gotten his MBA from Cornell, a program I had been unceremoniously bounced from after just a single semester. I noted this difference between us — that he graduated, and I didn’t —even before we sat down. He smiled and said, “And look how it’s ruined your life.”

There are far worse things than looking back on a fruitful career as a journalist, firmly ensconced in a tony little Oregon town, in a house full of warmth and cats, accompanied by a woman who’s steadfastly loved me through it all.

So I never sell a lick of fiction. Look how it’s ruined my life.

The Privilege of Perspective

One of the reasons I so enjoy my (fairly) new town is its similarities to Palo Alto, California, the town where I grew up. Suburban, hence urban access without all the urban downside; good schools, perhaps the best in Oregon. Politically blue.

Unlike Palo Alto, though, Lake Oswego has a shameful history. It was a sundown town. That meant that unless blacks were live-in servants, they had to be out of town by sundown. This was not unusual in Oregon. We learned in school that Oregon had no slavery; we didn’t learn that it didn’t have slavery because it outlawed blacks from even living in the state (a provision that was not officially removed from the state constitution until 2000).

There have also been sundry racial incidents at the local high schools, so local educators founded a group called Response to Racism. All this is prologue to a webinar we attended this week entitled “Repurposing Your Privilege.” It was more about identifying privilege than repurposing, so I’m hoping for a sequel.

Once of the reflections the moderator asked the audience to think about was indeed to identify what we considered to our privileges, and the usual answers came forth: wealth, education and the connections that come with it, safe neighborhoods (see above), access to health care. My spouse articulated one that’s been pointed out to us by single friends: the privilege of partnership; that is, the ability to have someone else to rely on during life’s vagaries, such as the loss of a job (and associated health insurance) and the decision to retire.

I identified one that I’d rarely considered before: the privilege of perspective.

The privilege of perspective relates to growing up in a place like Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley just as it was becoming Silicon Valley, in a state where horizons seemed as limitless as the view of the Pacific we had.

My classmates were the offspring of both Stanford faculty and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. It took me no more than a few minutes to compile this highly limited list of their accomplishments, so I’m sure I’m leaving some pertinent references out.

• Lisa’s father was a Stanford biology professor globally famous for warning about the perils of overpopulation, occasionally on The Tonight Show.

• Bob’s father wrote a series of unbelievably successful mathematics textbooks for elementary and junior high school students.

• Sara’s father had a Ph.D. in physical metallurgy with minors in ceramic engineering and thermodynamics, and variously spent time at the Atomic Energy Commission, Stanford Research Institute, Lockheed, and Stanford University.

• Persis’ father was a distinguished physicist who hosted Andrei Sakharov during various visits to the United States.

• Jeff’s father co-founded what became the world’s largest manufacturer of gas lasers, which are used in both surveying instruments and bar-code readers.

Then, after graduating from this wonderland, I went to Stanford myself, where I was surrounded by people who went on to do amazing things themselves, including:

• Becoming the first black female astronaut
• Producing The Terminator
• Clerking for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall
• Working for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times

I didn’t know the first two, but the other three were colleagues of mine at the Stanford Daily. I had a successful career as a writer, but not that successful.

My point is this: growing up where I did and when I did gave me something few people, white, black, or brown, ever get: the perspective that anything is possible, that if you can imagine something, whether it be literary or technological or something else, you can shepherd it into existence. That’s a powerful idea for a child, and even for an adult. It’s one that I suspect and fear is not widely shared in other homes or school districts. It’s one I fear is even less likely to be shared in a world riven by inequality and the growing chasm between the haves and have-nots.

It’s a privilege I wish more people had.

Come Next November

Political fact: Since 1938, the party holding the White House has lost seats in the House in every single midterm election except two (Clinton in 1998 and Bush in 2002).

Political theory (mine): that trend stops next year.

My conjecture is wrapped up in the idea that voters traditionally haven’t felt like there’s a dime’s worth of difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. That’s why voting rates, up until the time the Orange Cheeto started running, have been so low. It’s not just that people felt their vote didn’t count; it was that they didn’t expect anything to change no matter who was elected.

In a way, they’re right. Both Democrats and Republicans accelerated the loss of American jobs with “globalization.” The Democrats rightfully thought that sending business overseas was better than sending foreign aid overseas, and the Republicans were delighted by the thought of business’ costs decreasing. Everybody was happy, until we realized that no one had thought about protecting American jobs, and we ended up with a supply chain stretched like a snapped tendon (sorry for the creepy image, but it’s football season).

This is, I believe, why we’ve ended up with so many Republicans in office. Republicans for years have promised two things: to keep taxes low and protect Americans from the “bad guys.” The definition of “bad guys” changes depending on the times. I find it hilarious that once upon a time, Republicans railed against Communists, until they became some of Donald Trump’s best friends and financial saviors.

Given the twin advantages of low taxes and national security, without a clear differentiation between parties, who wouldn’t default to the Republicans?

Here’s my theory: finally, finally, it’s clear that there IS a dime’s worth of difference between the parties. The Democrats (well, most of them) want to invest in America and Americans; the Republicans don’t. The Democrats want to scale back the tax cuts of people who make kajillions of dollars even while they sleep; the Republicans don’t. The Democrats believe that the Covid-19 vaccine is a blessing; the Republicans believe that it’s a curse. The Democrats believe that women have the right to dictate what happens to their body; the Republican’s don’t.

Add to this the utter lies and the blatant hypocrisy of the Republicans, which has given us a more political Supreme Court than even Newt Gingrich could have hoped for. I think—I think—that most Americans finally see the Republicans for what they are: racist, antediluvian contrarians whose only interest is in perpetuating their own power over women, minorities, and everyone who doesn’t agree with them. Like Big Brother in 1984, they have started erasing words from their dictionaries like compromise.

I suspect that all the voters who didn’t think their vote counted, who didn’t think they could change the course of American history, have finally realized that they’ve been wrong. This realization comes at the very worst time, what with the Republicans making it difficult for those same people to vote, but I’m hoping that the numbers will be overwhelming, and that the midterm curse will be reversed this year. I’m hoping the Democrats take back the Senate, if not decisively, at least so Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema don’t have so much power. I’m hoping the Democrats further cement their hold on the House. I’m hoping the Republicans slink back into a corner and whimper impotently.

Man, I hope I’m right about this.

Underwhelmed By Understaffing

How many times recently have you gotten an apology from a service business because they’re “understaffed”?

Pharmacies. Restaurants. Salons. It’s a first world rant, but the list goes on and on. So many times recently a text has popped up on my phone: “Your appointment has been cancelled.” When you finally get through to a human being, the response is always, “We’re understaffed.”

Pardon me, but I lived through the greatest staffing crisis of the 20^th century. Silicon Valley, the 90s. Technology was booming. Technology publications were booming. Magazines couldn’t find enough qualified people to write and edit. I used to get a $5,000 raise every time I switched jobs. Granted, publications had booming ad sales to prop up those editorial salaries, but after a while, there just weren’t enough people.

Some of those on the editorial side turned to freelancing (as I did, after the boom went bust) and found it was more lucrative. Apparently, that’s what’s happening now. People are finding alternatives to the grind they endured before the pandemic. They can’t be lured back.

So where are the answers? They’re the same answers magazines had to come up with during the web boom. First, you create a working environment that’s equally enticing as money. You remember the adage that people don’t quit jobs, they quit bosses. You create a culture that accommodates, that’s flexible, that — oh my goodness — actually requires some effort to see employees as people rather than as interchangeable scheduling pegs. It’s not complicated — I heard of a company recently that lost someone because that person only wanted to work 15 hours a week. The employer demand 30 hours a week, and so what happened? The person resigned and gave them zero hours a week.

Employers complain that they post jobs and no one applies. Well, sometimes money is the carrot. Companies could raise prices — here’s a radical thought — stop paying CEOs a gazillion times more than your line workers and increase the latter’s salary.

But also work on your damn reputation. Be a company whose current employees are ambassadors for your future employees. See answer number one.

Corporate consolidation has given us fewer choices. We’re feeling trapped. But there’s always a solution. Why has the retail industry gone to seed? Because too often, online is a better shopping experience. Stop being transactional and start being experiential. That starts with happier employees, whether they’re paid better or treated better or both.

Because if companies don’t start improving, they’re going to face the prospect of zero hours a week.

Life in Boiling Water

The news streams in from Afghanistan of the country’s swift and “unexpected” fall to the Taliban. Citizens swarm the airport to try and escape, apparently because they mistakenly thought the Afghan military would have held off the Taliban forces long enough for them to leave in an orderly fashion.

They were like the proverbial frog in boiling water, the one who doesn’t realize the heat is being turned up beneath him and he’s eventually going to die.

What does this remind me of?

Driving on Interstate 5 recently from southern Oregon to northern California, we approached Mount Shasta. We were speeding along in our air-conditioned splendor, listening to CDs. More accurately, we approached the outline of Mount Shasta. It was so thoroughly shrouded in haze from one of the wildfires to the east that we couldn’t even see if it still had snow on it.

At the same time we’re getting the news from Afghanistan, it’s also reported that the levels of both Lake Powell and Lake Mead are the lowest since their respective dams were built, and the so-called “bathtub ring” of white showing the former water level is higher than it’s ever been.

Side note: as we left home, the Portland area was undergoing its second triple-digit heat wave of the year. The last one broke records.

Fires, drought, heat waves: talk about life in boiling water. We’re all sitting here in a saucepan and pretending that the effects of climate change are something we’re going to have to worry about in thirty years, so we still have time. We don’t. There is no Afghan military to save us; there’s nobody manning the front lines. The American Petroleum Institute is advertising on CNN, promoting domestic oil and gas exploration instead of doing so in “unstable” foreign countries; hooray! Yet that’s not even the question. The question is how we’re going to move from fossil fuels entirely.

Conservatives for years have said that it’s too late to move to renewable energy, because it’ll take too long to develop, and they’re still saying that. Well, sorry, guys, but there is no alternative. You think there’s a refugee problem now? Wait until certain parts of the world become wholly uninhabitable because of climate change.

If the water keeps getting hotter, there isn’t going to be enough air-conditioned splendor in the Western world to save us. And just as in Afghanistan this week, no army in the world will be able to save us.

The Experiment Ends

It took the United States 183 years to go from thirteen colonies to fifty states. It took exactly one day for it to go back down to twenty states. The Senate voted to allow the Midwestern and Southern states—including Alaska, excluding Georgia and North Carolina—to create a new nation dubbed Freedom States. The actual negotiations took longer, because the leaders of the United States kept using things like math and logic to dissuade the leaders of the Freedom States from their secession plans, and these efforts failed miserably.

Initially, U.S. leaders, arguing against the end of the American experiment, used math. The twenty states of the United States generated 57% of the country’s tax revenues, and the thirty proposed Freedom States generated only 43%. Proponents for the split scoffed, insisting that not only did they prefer lower taxes, but they could generate revenues from oil reserves in Alaska and North Dakota to make up any shortfalls. Arguments that the world was shifting away from fossil fuels—an inevitability even Middle Eastern oil regimes accepted—failed to sway them. Eventually, the U.S. senators realized that they were talking into a dead phone, and decided to let the others secede.

Once this was decided, one of the biggest sticking points, not surprisingly, was Social Security. The Freedom State senators wanted to launch their country with a lump-sum payment transferred from the United States’ Social Security fund, but since that money didn’t really exist, U.S. senators suggested that the U.S. continue to manage Social Security payments until such time as all currently eligible F.S. recipients had died. Given that F.S. citizens had higher levels of chronic disease and far lower longevity, it was a smart fiscal move that the F.S. leaders didn’t seem to take into consideration.

Initially, the F.S. senators argued about whether to establish a central seat of government at all, or whether they should just run the whole thing over Zoom. But then they decided that it was best to have a place to get away from their families. They picked Kansas City, because of the barbecue, although New Orleans came in a close second, because of jambalaya.

Then they argued about which government agencies they didn’t need, since they wanted to have a government small enough drown in a fish tank, Grover Norquist’s dictum having been shrunk as well. This caused the first cracks to appear in the Freedom States’ structure.

For instance, the Freedom Staters were dead set against having a Federal Communications Commission, even though talk radio was instrumental in spreading “news” to the minions. But in a vote for patriotism, the F.S. Senate determined that call letters for television and radio stations in the Freedom States would begin with F, rather than K or W, using the Canadian model of all stations beginning with C.

Unfortunately, stations quickly appeared with call letters as innocuous as FART and as offensive as FKYU. This sparked friction between factions like the Proud Boys, who had no decorum, and the Christian Right, which had too much decorum, because the former group wanted no laws and the latter group wanted laws that applied to everyone but them.

Business in the Freedom States was remarkably unfettered. Without regulations, factories skimped on both safety and health standards. This worked fine until the daughter and grandchildren of a F.S. senator were poisoned after eating tainted pork from a meat-processing facility. Naturally, being a lawyer, the senator wanted to sue, but because producing substandard meat was no longer illegal, he had no regulation to charge the facility with violating.

At the same time, because of the lack of safety standards, people started finding fingernails, knuckles, and other human body parts in their packaged meat in increasing numbers. Eventually, most supermarket chains stopped buying from F.S. factories.

Because most F.S. municipal governments, backed by counties and states, voted to reduce their tax burden, the number of government activities shrank. The libraries went first, and although some politicians wanted the books burned, most of them were simply donated to Goodwill. Cities considered eliminating garbage pickup, until it became clear that most people were happy to just dump their bins on their neighbors’ property. The idea of actually defunding the police departments to save tax dollars came up, but those efforts failed because that smacked of something the United States would support.

F.S. public schools came under fire because teachers tended to emphasize subjects like science, proper grammar, and mathematics (although there was a groundswell of support for statistics, since it was so easily grouped with lies and damned lies). Citizens soon realized that the Freedom States had cut themselves off from almost every prestigious university in the United States, leaving them only the likes of Tulane, Notre Dame, and Purdue. As administrators gutted school curricula, forcing many citizens to move their children to private institutions so that they could actually understand what was being said on television, colleges in the U.S. began rejecting F.S. public high school graduates.

Between the problems with the schools and the fingernails in the hamburger, any F.S. citizen that could find a job in the United States gleefully did so. After a while, only the My Pillow guy was hiring. So many people tried to leave that there was talk of building a wall, not so much to keep immigrants out but to keep citizens in.

Eventually it became clear that the Freedom States’ charter to survive without public sector institutions or some modicum of intelligence was unsustainable. The F.S. Senate petitioned the U.S. Senate for reinstatement to the United States. The U.S. Senate offered the following deal: the Freedom States could return, but they would be granted no more than two senators overall and for Congressional representation, each citizen would only be counted as three-fifths of a person. In desperation, the F.S. Senate reluctantly agreed, and the U.S. Senate designated the former Freedom States the Inland Territory.

But not before they granted statehood to Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.