Category: Politics

Sometimes

There is a little poem by Sheenagh Pugh called Sometimes. I first encountered it in the book Good Poems collected by Garrison Keillor. I have called it up as a Thanksgiving prayer of gratitude a couple of times in this blog and over our Thanksgiving celebrations with family and friends. I leave it to you to find it with the search tools you undoubtedly have at your disposal. It is difficult to give you the kind of post I would like to if I were working from my desktop at home so I leave it to you to do some digging.

Yesterday was one of those days — for me. The Astros won a game in Seattle after losing three in a row and Justice won out over the bullying threats of an ex-president. Set aside the Astros. There is always next year. But for the brave citizens that prosecuted, judged and read the facts of this case, I shall always be grateful. Their courage and understanding of duty is a model for us all.

The bullying ex-president was held accountable for the first time since appearing on our national political stage and maybe for the first time in his life. After hearing the verdict he faced the cameras for the first time in his business and political career with eyes that betrayed his fear of Justice. He showed the clear countenance of a loser.

Except for that, there was no reason for this to be major news. White collar crime in Manhattan is probably not so unusual as to deserve headline coverage in the New York Times. Sentences are usually light for white men gone astray. They can remain heroes in the world of finance and pass on fortunes to the kiddoes like Jared Kushner.

The ex-president’s misbehaving has probably only begun. A light sentence, say probation, provides a stage for him to challenge the judge lock him up. He would love the theater of it.

But there must be a way to let him stew over questions like guilt and innocence, crime and punishment. Maybe he could be assigned reading in the classics of American governance and jurisprudence and required to turn in short essays on what he has learned from the reading. His essays would undoubtedly repeat his tired chants about witch-hunts and how unfairly he is treated by the same Elites that administer death penalties on the streets to people of color.

Judge Merchan would give him a very public and embarrassing “F” and require him to re-read the assigned prompt until he starts to deal with fact and logic and maybe even admit that his own treatment and that of George Floyd is a false equivalence of the worst kind. Another “F”. Maybe even a zero on the assignment. Require him to strain his eyes and read again, and again. Maybe from his seat in that cold Manhattan court room.

I have very little concern for the ex-president and his feelings about the day. To me it was one of those days when things went right. Celebrate a win for Justice and the people.

But remember his followers. There are so many ways we have failed them.

We have reduced public education in most places to shallow measures of the transmission of “content” at a time when the world begs for thinkers who have explored ideas like justice, truth, fairness, and personal responsibility as starting points for better understanding of a structure of government that promotes these ideals.

We have given them hundreds of cable television channels that offer up drivel for tired and lazy minds twenty-four hours a day. Mixed into that stew of nonsense there are a few that offer journalism from the old school where there is no room for “true facts” versus facts. Just facts. Observable and undeniable facts.

We have given them gun-rights when they needed moral leadership. We have given them video games when the same technology might have been used to teach more deeply the meaning of religious traditions rooted in love, empathy and the revolutionary value of stepping back and listening to each other.

We might have given them the ability to read — to read deeply and critically. We might have given them good nutrition instead of the empty calories of fast food.

For now, they are our charges (or we, theirs?) and we need to co-exist without destroying a system of government that has held dictators at bay for over two centuries while other systems have produced authoritarian leaders that goaded us into wars and sacrifices that were necessary for the survival of the idea of freedom.

So, enjoy the day when a few things went the way they should. But do not forget the needs of all the folks who show up for the ex-president’s rallies.

Listen to them. Help them. They need the moral leadership of thinking people. Who really knows how that can best be provided? But it is a conundrum worthy of our own best thinking and effort.

Sometimes things don’t go, after all, / from bad to worse.

The Sanctity of Life as It Applies to the Common Street Urchin, School Shooter, Gang Member, and Teen Suicide Victim.

The Republican Party has marketed a view of a particular medical procedure as the murder of a precious child. The sanctity of life, they say, should be respected in law by making that procedure illegal and, in some places, by making the mother an accomplice in the commission of a crime. And often it is her life that is most at risk and, therefore, two lives.

If you are an American woman, you have watched as your right to have that procedure has become the principal question put to every judicial nominee since 1973. As a result, it has been made difficult, if not impossible, for women in many states to obtain the procedure.

Republicans have mobilized millions of votes through one of the most brutally invasive yet successful political marketing campaigns in history. They have pulled at the heartstrings of voters by romanticizing and dramatizing a beautiful life of the fetus and the the right of that fetus to expect the chance to have a full life with air to breathe, to be cuddled by adoring parents, to become educated and prepare for great achievements and contributions for the betterment of all mankind.

Democrats have responded with the argument that it is about the right of a woman to make decisions about her own health care; that it is about the broader and more generally applicable right to privacy. Democrats have tried to appeal with reasonable arguments.

But is anyone really thinking about those children? When the debate juxtaposes the rights of a cute and cuddly fetus against the rights of a self-interested and probably promiscuous woman, the argument is already lost.

“Sanctity of life” is an interesting catchphrase and marketing ploy. But, it is to mothers that nature has given the responsibility for the delivery, care and nurturing of new life — not Congress and not the Texas Legislature. Those institutions have been corrupted by the Republican Party and have been allowed to become, let’s call them what they are, agents of an evil interference with the God-given right and responsibility of mothers to make decisions about whether her current situation and conditions are right for a child that she may love most fully by not bringing it into a life of almost certain loneliness, poverty and despair. And perhaps most important of all is the right of mothers and the medical profession to privacy.

Your Texas legislature, so assembled, would be a poor choice for a cardiologist. It makes even less sense in the choice of an OB/GYN doctor since, in many cases, there are two lives at stake.

When we look at the lives of the children born into circumstances that any mother can see as wrong for proper nurturing, the Texas Legislature is nowhere to be found. It is a corrupt and shameless institution for which “sanctity of life” often means many thousands of births into lives of violence and despair.

You may thank your gerrymandering Republican political lifers for packing the courts and legislative branch with dull-witted, power-seeking politicians too short-sighted to see the connection between their meddling in medicine and the unhappy lives of youth who become perpetrators and/or victims of violence, sometimes dying by their own hand.

Many of my friends who vote for Republican candidates do so for other reasons and don’t really support these inhumane laws. Some have sound policy reasons for voting the way they do. But I suspect many have just come to accept a view that is popular among their social and economic peers: that Democrats will take their money and give it to the poor. There may be a bit of truth in that view but, really, only if they have more than a fair share of control over God’s gift of a decent livelihood.

Apologies, Republican friends, but now you have introduced a fundamentally Christian notion into the discussion: sharing.

Republicans in the legislature go on celebrating the sanctity of life by pretending that more guns bring more peace to the streets, by underfunding public education, food and nutrition programs, and and by meddling more and more in the practice of medicine. They do all that they can to stay in office for as long as they can by selling the snake oil of a simple-minded gutter morality to a voting population that begs for leadership, not exploitation.

They may become a bit rattled when another teenager acquires an automatic weapon and shoots up a school. Or if he turns the weapon on himself and takes his own life. Then, and only then, they start talking about our dreadfully underfunded community and school mental health services. Or maybe they will call for arming teachers, or adding one more counselor in each of the schools. Yet they never stop to ponder the decision they yanked from a mother’s heart that might have spared these children such tragic lives.

They may do brilliant root cause analyses for problems on the job yet they hardly ever apply that trusted technique in executing their civic responsibilities.

Don’t Despair: Good People with Grit Find a Way to Win

www.nytimes.com/2021/11/22/opinion/american-democracy.html

This is an article by Michelle Goldberg from the Nov. 22 New York Times. In it she discusses the various techniques the present day Republican Party has put in place to prevent Democrats from ever again influencing public policy in any meaningful way. I hope you will be able to open the article and read it if you have not already done so.

As she ticks off the things they have done over the last forty years, it becomes clear that what they have in mind is a one-party America run for the benefit of a white, male, evangelical Christian minority that won’t hesitate to use its Second Amendment rights to intimidate and suppress.

If you are a Democrat, things seem hopeless. And things look particularly grim if you are a Democrat who is non-white, or maybe someone who identifies as LGBTQ (will five letters do?), or maybe even if you are a woman, things begin to look pretty hopeless.

I grew up in a one party state. Yes, it was right here in Texas. It was the Democrats then. We went through the whole process of picking candidates to run against a Republican nominee in the General Election. The democratic primaries usually offered the voters real choices. But the Republican never won. And many of the Democrats who won could easily match conservative cred with today’s Republicans, including the racist part.

The Republicans never won, that is, until some rich Texans decided they had had enough when the Democratic Party started doing the unthinkable — electing liberals. And some of the conservatives the Democrats had elected to state offices moved into national office and began to act like liberals. Rich Texans decided it was time to build a Republican Party that could take care of business — literally. Continue reading “Don’t Despair: Good People with Grit Find a Way to Win”

Veterans Day and a Thought about Vaccinations and Masks

I read today that only one in ten adult Americans alive today have spent any time in military service. The other ninety percent are quick to “thank you for your service.” Yet a good many of them insist on the right to remain unmasked and unvaccinated during a deadly pandemic.

I wasn’t told about any such rights in 1968 when they lined us up and marched us between two rows of medical technicians who administered multiple inoculations through pressure pumps that pierced the skin without needles. One med tech leaned on us from each side to administer two shots quickly so we could move on the the next two shots. I don’t even remember how many shots we got that day to prepare us for possible service in southeast Asia.

Mine turned out to be unnecessary since I never went to Vietnam. Still, I have been protected against some unknown list of exotic diseases all these years. I haven’t had the plague yet. Thank you, Uncle Sam.

I try to imagine anyone that day claiming a religious exemption. He probably would have been sent over to talk with the chaplain. It would have been a brief consultation. Mine would have gone about like this: “Methodist? Hmmm. No, private, Jesus didn’t have anything to say about vaccinations. In fact, he talked a lot about sacrificing for others. Go get back in line.”

Maybe Veterans Day would be a good time for Americans to take their minds off their rights for a brief while and spend a few minutes thinking about duty and responsibility. No uniform is required to be a responsible citizen.

So, get vaccinated. Do it for a veteran you love. Do it for your protection and theirs. He or she may thank you for your service.

Open Mic Night at the School Board: I Play the Gray Card

Inspired by Michael Morris’s September 8 column in The Facts, I called the school district office and got on the list to offer public comment at the start of the September board meeting. I am not an open mic kind of person, but Mr. Morris reminded me of the importance, in a democracy, of speaking up when you have a reasonable opinion about how things should go in your community’s life.

As the day approached I thought about the possibility that the Justice for J-6 crowd may well be preparing to flood the board room with bikers recruited from Sturgis, South Dakota to chain whip anyone daring to appear at the meeting masked against “the Chinese virus“. At a minimum I thought I ought to choose my words carefully and write them down to keep myself on script.

So I wrote about two and a half minutes of my thoughts in which I appealed to my status as an elder in the community. Maybe they would’t beat up an old man wearing glasses, leaning on a cane, and talking about the olden days.

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Speaking Up and Speaking Out – For Children and Teachers

Michael Morris of The Facts gave excellent and important advice in his column this morning. I took the challenge and got on the public agenda for the September meeting of my local school board trustees’ meeting. I hope other of his readers will do the same.

As someone who came of age in another century, I can remember when public health was treated as a legitimate and very important medical specialty. Polio, smallpox, chicken pox, measles and many more have been controlled through the advancement of science and medical practice. We learned to trust the advice of the professionals. And maybe even more important, we had teachers in public schools who taught us how to recognize the difference between the advice offered by public health professionals and that of snake oil salesmen.

Just remember that the same people who are telling you that masks and vaccines are the work of the devil are the same ones telling you that ivermectin works and will keep you safe from Covid-19. Not all of the people who listened to them are still with us. May they rest in peace in the arms of their understanding, if not greatly disappointed, God.

Instead, believe the people who went to medical school and completed the really hard science courses and medical practice internships and residencies. They know what they are talking about and they don’t do satanic rituals when you aren’t looking.

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