Tag: history

Good Morning from Hell

Hell?

This doesn’t seem like Hell. There’s this long and beautiful marriage, two wonderful children and five grandchildren — all of them perfect. A church and a center for arts and sciences with friendships of many years. The pantry is full. The AC keeps me comfortable day and night. I have more doctors than I once had school teachers in high school. My church is involved in mission projects, a food pantry, assisting in a local elementary school, and help for people in need of financial assistance. And if I need, more likely just want, a new electronic toy, Amazon can have it on my doorstep tomorrow. Some of us are getting along quite well.

But something is amiss in our politics.

The president’s authoritarian character is not news anymore. I refer you to well documented reporting in established national media. The president, of course, denies anything that doesn’t glorify him and he decries “mainstream journalism” as creators and bearers of “fake news.”

But that’s just another tool in the authoritarian’s toolkit. 

I will also spare you the well-worn comparisons with Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. Those can be found anywhere except maybe in Fox media, controlled by the Rupert Murdock family, or the many informational hellholes you can read into on social media. 

However, if you discard these comparisons as illogical name-calling, I refer you to The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a report on events in Germany in the 1930s by a CBS and UPI reporter, William L. Shirer. Adolph Hitler was Shirer’s subject with a tip of the journalist’s hat to Benito Mussolini and our ally in the European war against fascism, Joseph Stalin.

But I suspect Hitler did not consider either CBS or UPI to be a credible news source. 

Shirer’s book is one of those thick ones. You may not choose it for bedtime reading.  But if you do, follow it up with On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snider. That’s a short one and easy to read. Invest a few dollars and put it down beside your evening devotional guide. Read a chapter every night before you say your prayers. You will pray more fervently.

So forget about Trump for awhile if you can. Forget all about what many see as readily apparent indicators of an authoritarian future for the United States of America. Think, instead, about where we live now and where we have lived throughout the lives of most of us — Hell.

Really? How could one possibly call this Hell?

More tomorrow about the hell we live in and how it looks from the south of town.

Voices of a New Silent Majority: Defending Democracy

On Monday, April 7, The Facts ran a guest opinion piece by Janel McCann of West Columbia. (Should you look it up, it was The Facts weekend edition for Saturday/Sunday, April 5-6 that I receive on Monday.) She gave a well-written and comprehensive discussion of some of the bad things and good things the Trump administration has done. The good things, as it turns out, are all corrections to badly planned and executed decisions by the president and his cast of people with little experience in government, and in many cases, with little leadership experience at all. I was so excited to see someone in our crimson-red county speaking out for the value that government brings to our lives. She is a public school educator. Surprise . I responded to her article with a letter to the editor which The Facts ran yesterday in its April 10 edition. It follows:

Janel McCann’s guest column on Saturday provided an important service. Too many of us have sat silently while the administration has set about destroying the government that has been assembled over many years. Yes, government often muddles through on the way to getting things done, but the job of governing is complicated and unprofitable yet gets done when it really matters. After all, the products of government (like social security, defense, public education, health care for elderly, public health services, civil rights for all, pure science research, emergency response, weather prediction, etc.) are essential to the civilized, modern existence we have come to expect. And don’t wait for the private sector to do all these things for us.

Too many have been silent while our eyes and ears were telling us that something we hold dear is being taken from us.

No more. It is time for the new “silent majority” to roar and let America and the world know that the super-negotiator-in-chief has poked a sleeping bear. We are still America. We are still a democracy. We still believe in the rule of law. We still believe in peace, love, understanding, sharing and hope. These are the values that have been and always must be our message to our politicians and to the world.

Thank you, Ms. McCann. Just before Easter, your writing could not have come at a better time. On that day, we celebrate the resurrection of love. It cannot be forever suppressed.