presidentsed

The Shame of Sooners

2011-02-13T12:23:00.000-08:00

Andrew Jackson worked for more than twenty years to force the Indians of the Southeast (the names in the history books are Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Seminole, and Cherokee) off their lands. He fought three wars with the Seminoles, fought the Creeks, and made many fraudulent treaties with them all. He wanted all the Indians east of the Mississippi relocated to the western side. He didn’t manage all that but he did get the Five Civilized Tribes evicted from their lands. They were called the Five Civilized Tribes because, in their efforts to survive and preserve some of their culture, they adopted many of the ways of the white people and used the courts to fight for their rights.

Thomas Jefferson supported the idea of an Indian Territory in order to obviate friction between the Euroamericans and Indians. At that time no one knew exactly what lay beyond the Mississippi River but whatever it was, it would be adequate for Indians. All the Indians. As the continent was explored and better understood, it was determined that the Great American Desert, that vast grassland later known as the Great Plains, was uninhabitable. Since white Americans could use much of the rest of the Trans-Mississippi West, the Indians could have the Great American Desert.

Then it was discovered that it wasn’t a desert at all, it was fertile farmland that didn’t even have to be cleared before it could be plowed. That caused the Indian Territory to shrink from what is now Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas, and part of Iowa, to only Oklahoma.

Over a period of more than thirty years, dozens of tribes from all over the east moved west. Some went resignedly, knowing it was inevitable, and some went only under force of arms. But nearly all of the people of the Five Civilized Tribes went. The Cherokees carried their fight to the Supreme Court and won; Jackson defied the court and said that the justices had made their decision, now they could enforce it. But there was never any real question as to who held the power. The Army supported the president rather than the law and moved the Cherokees on the Trail of Tears.

You might think the Indians had undergone enough at this point. No, not yet. After the Civil War, white Americans took another look at the Indian Territory and discovered that they could use it. It was huge. Although the Plains tribes were being added to the residents, white men felt that the Indians didn’t need all of it. President Benjamin Harrison agreed. He signed the law that opened the Indian Territory to white settlement. On an appointed day, April 22, 1889, anyone who wanted (except Indians, of course), could stake out a claim for 160 acres. Thousands did. Most of them filed legally, obeying the few rules. Many opted to anticipate the appointed day and sneaked in and staked out their claims sooner.

For years afterwards, sooners were held in contempt by the law-abiding land grabbers. That changed when an element of the populace decided that sooner was a synonym for progressive. Progressive people do not tamely wait for fortune to smile on them, they go out and make things happen. Robust, vigorous, progressive people take charge of their own destinies. The University of Oklahoma adopted “Sooner” as the nickname of their athletic teams. According to their website, the name evokes history, tradition and championships.

In my opinion it evokes treachery, theft, and shame.

Governance by Blackmail

2011-02-03T16:02:00.000-08:00

Originally, the Founding Fathers intended that the president would have no legislative agenda and would serve to advise congress, having the power then to either approve their action or veto it. President Washington kept very strictly to that model but afterwards the presidents began to see themselves more and more as initiators of legislation. This developed from piecemeal legislative issues to whole packages of related issues, such as Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” and now “Obamacare.”

In the beginning, the intent was that Congress would be composed of amateurs. Knowing the dangers inherent in relying on professional politicians, the Founding Fathers decreed that Congress would meet only a few weeks each year. This allowed the congressmen to absent themselves briefly from their work so they did not depend on the government stipend for their living. It also gave them the incentive to do the business of the nation efficiently and to keep to necessities. This model also meant that congressmen were living and working in the same world as their constituents. They were affected by the legislation they passed just the same as the rest of the people.

Politics has always been a dirty profession with a few men and women of integrity dotted through history to show what it might be if enough honest citizens could be persuaded to undertake political careers. Many elected officials begin honestly, sincerely wishing to serve their constituencies and even to curb abuses and corruption. Few are able to withstand the various pressures against their integrity.

First is ego. It is ego that prompts one to want to enter politics in the first place. Few motives are not mixed and the desire to better conditions for one’s fellows may quite well exist along with the egotistical desire to be the one who creates the better conditions and who is seen to be the one who creates them.

Second is power. Power is dangerous, not only to the governed but to the governing. We have all heard Lord Acton’s dictum that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This is not an automatic process but it requires constant vigilance in order to stand against it.

Third is peer pressure. Few would argue against the principle that a senator ought not to vote for anything his or her conscience will not condone. For instance, the military wants to close a base in another state. The base is no longer militarily useful but it is important to the surrounding area, furnishing jobs and a military payroll so the soldiers can contribute to the local economy. Clearly, it is to the national interest to close the base. However, if the senator doesn’t vote to keep it open, the senator from the state it’s in will not vote for his legislation.

Fourth are blackmail and extortion. If an elected official has anything in his or her past that would be detrimental if it became known, others (elected or not) may use the threat of exposure to obtain the vote, favor, or preference that they want. If there is nothing detrimental in the official’s past, extortion can be very useful. The threat can be made, toward the end of the campaign for office, that an announcement will be made that the candidate is or stands for something the electorate abhors, for instance, soft on crime or pro-abortion. It is too late for the candidate to refute the accusation and the election will be lost unless the candidate complies with the extortionist’s demands.

Or the threat can be made that, unless one stops criticizing the president, one’s spouse will be exposed as an operative of the CIA. This is such a vile, traitorous act that it is hard to take the threat seriously. But, in order to keep others who are vocal but vulnerable quiet, the threat can be carried out; the CIA operative can be publicly named and exposed to the danger of assassination or capture and torture, and the president’s critics will see that it’s dangerous to take the constitutional guarantee of free speech too seriously.

There are all sorts of ways to use blackmail and extortion in the political arena. Pressure can be brought to bear through the myriad federal bureaus to foreclose on home mortgages, force businesses into bankruptcy, deny various licenses, require so much documentation that projects are halted. The media can be used to start rumors and manufacture sex scandals, false reports of mental instability, false reports of misconduct in military service. Jobs and contracts can be pulled, official reports falsified, data corrupted.

These are all methods that have been used throughout our history by government officials in order to get the results they deem necessary. Sometimes they believe that the result justifies the means. Sometimes they are indifferent to the ethics and care only about the result. Sometimes they don’t even care much about the result, they enjoy the process of enforcing their will through these methods.

If we are not to become a nation ruled primarily by blackmail and extortion, we must not tolerate them when we see them at work. We must let our elected and appointed officials know that our government is of the people, for the people, and by the people and the people will be led by men and women of ethics and principles, not ruled by intellectual thuggery. It’s been said that people get the government they deserve – let us take the actions that will result in the people of the United States deserving an honorable government.

The Burglar Alarms (me)

2011-01-08T19:17:00.000-08:00

When the burglar alarm was installed, I was given detailed instructions in how to use it, including a numerical code to punch in and a password to use if the alarm was triggered in error. I was also given an electronic gadget with four buttons to push so I wouldn’t have to punch in the code and could turn the alarm on and off from either inside or outside. So far, so good. But one of the buttons on the electronic gadget is RED. (This is the place for foreboding organ music.) That’s the one to push in an emergency. Any emergency, it doesn’t have to be a burglary.

One recent afternoon I was here alone, well, except for the dog and the cat. The cat, having tact and a great sense of self-preservation, does not enter into this story. The dog, being a sweet but neurotic Doberman Pinscher, is a member of the cast. I settled into my new recliner to read and fell asleep. Someone knocked at the door. The dog and I both promptly went nuts. He began barking his head off, his customary practice when he sees anyone out the window or hears anyone at the door. I remembered the electronic gadget in my pocket and pressed the red button. Ooops. I opened the door and some fool wanted to tell me how clever he’d been in finding my Rottweiler. I don’t know if the Rottweiler said anything because the Dobie and the alarm were both pretty loud.

I disclaimed ownership of the Rottie and tried to quiet the Dobie and the alarm. Naturally, I couldn’t remember a single instruction. Hellfire and damnation! The alarm began to speak to me in a woman’s voice. Did I need help? I said no and she wanted to know the code word. I gave her the numerical code and got it wrong but it didn’t matter because she wanted the word. The fool with the Rottie was still trying to interest me in the dog and the Dobie was still baying like a hound hot on the scent. I finally remembered the right numbers in the right order but she insisted on hearing the code word. Just in the nick of time I remembered it and the voice was satisfied and turned the alarm off. The fool took the Rottie away at some point and eventually the Dobie stopped baying. I don’t expect to ever be the same again but it was a good cardiac workout.

Simple Arithmetic

2009-07-01T00:19:00.000-07:00

Traditionally, in what is called mainstream American culture, when things go wrong we subtract until we either find the cause of the problem or declare it unsolvable. Scientists try to isolate the causes of obesity, parents isolate children who cause disruption, the courts isolate law-breakers, sociologists isolate behavior patterns that cause cultural stress. But what if we added instead of subtracting? As a wise person has pointed out, if you work to alleviate the pain, you stay focused on the pain. If you work to heal the cause of the pain, you focus on the healing.

We’ve been told for many years that eating more calories than we burn is the cause of obesity and the only way to shed the excess pounds is to subtract the excess calories from the diet. There are hundreds of books to tell us which calories and which foods to eliminate. If the premise were correct, only one book would be necessary. There is other evidence than the inundation of diet books to demonstrate the fallacy of the premise. Every one of us knows at least one very thin person who practically eats his or her weight in sweets on a weekly basis, and never gains an ounce. What would happen if, instead of subtracting foods when our figures flare, we added them? Suppose we added a baked potato, with or without sour cream? Or a big salad composed of fresh, crisp vegetables? Or a slice of whole grain bread rich with sunflower seeds? We might find that, having given our bodies the nutrients it needs, our appetites are satisfied. If we didn’t set ourselves up for failure and disappointment by working from an incorrect premise, and if we approached the project with love for our bodies instead of anger, it might be that by adding health-giving foods, our bodies would return to good health and the excess weight would gradually disappear.

We often hear people say of an unruly child that he or she only wants attention. The usual response of the adult in charge is to send the child to his room until he can behave. The child’s needs are not met and behavior problems may get worse or the child may withdraw, feeling that he is not important to the people around him. Maybe a more appropriate response would be to give the child the attention that we know he needs. Ask the child what he wants, listen to the answer and respond accordingly. This is not rewarding the unacceptable behavior, this is meeting the needs of the child and thus, of the family.

When a child breaks a rule, it is the custom in America to punish the child. The more important the rule is to us, or the more power over others we take, the more severe the punishment will be. It is not uncommon for us to respond to one child striking another by striking one or both of them. Sometimes we get caught up in legalistic transactions, demanding to know who started it and listening to a blow-by-blow account of the dispute. Sometimes we refuse to listen to the children at all, sending both to isolation until they can be nice. The absence of logic in these responses confuses the children and very often they grow up believing that bad behavior is acceptable if it is paid for in some way. What if, instead of subtracting the child from the group, we added logic and justice? What if we explained the reasons for the rules and allowed the children some genuine input and thought constructively about their points of view? Children are inherently logical and just; they know when things are not fair. They are comparatively easy to manipulate because of their lack of experience but adults are not fooling them. Even though they may not be able to articulate the illogic or injustice, they know it is there.

When adults break the law, we punish them. We remove them from the mainstream of life and place them in prisons. We have a Penal Code to guide us in sentencing our criminals; the more heinous the crime, the longer the punishment, the fewer the privileges. There are times when isolation is the appropriate response, when it allows the law-breaker to contemplate her crimes and truly repent. But this is not really the purpose of our prisons, we don’t even call them penitentiaries anymore. Ideally, our penal system is supposed to isolate the criminal in order to protect society while she is undergoing the rehabilitation process. In fact, we are far more concerned with making sure that criminals get what they deserve and pay for their crimes in full. The real purpose of imprisoning people is to exact revenge on them for their crimes.

What if we operated our prisons as penitentiaries and assumed that most, if not all, criminals could be rehabilitated? Would this shift in philosophy have any effect on the criminal element? What if we strove to truly understand the causes of crime and concentrated on adding those things to life that would keep people in the mainstream of society instead of alienating them? This is not an easy task, or a cheap one, but policing and incarcerating the criminal element isn’t easy or cheap, either.

We in America are such an amalgam of so many races, nationalities, religions, and differences that we have developed the "us against them" mentality to a remarkably destructive degree. We divide along any line that allows us to differentiate, at times whipping our fervor up to the degree that we actually kill people simply for being different in some miniscule way. The harder we try to erase the differences, to take away the criteria for divisions, the more new distinctions we invent. For instance, when we tried to bring immigrants into the mainstream by ridiculing their cultural artifacts, we drove a wedge between the generations. This has been refined to the point that it seems natural to group people according to age and assign them appropriate interests. Take music, for example. It is considered bizarre for elderly people to enjoy rock music and for pre-teens to enjoy classical music. The fact is that enjoyment of all musical styles cuts across the age lines and age is not a factor in music appreciation, although experience may be; we tend to like the familiar. What if we added the perception that it’s okay to think outside the box, that it’s okay not to fit the mold for your age, race, sex, religion, or sociological niche?

What if we behaved as if we really believed the preamble to the Constitution? All men are created equal. That does not mean that all people have equal talents or taste or intelligence or luck, it means that all people are of equal importance. There is no reason to value a singer above a plumber or a politician above a homemaker. There is simply no valid basis for one person or group to assume superiority over another. Scientists are now finding and beginning to understand evidence that we are all connected, not only to each other, but to other species and to all life forms. Everything on earth is connected to every other thing in one ecosystem. When any action is taken, it has repercussions far beyond what we can see and often beyond what we can imagine or comprehend.

So how would it be if we enjoyed our diversities? What if we accepted each and every individual as an individual and not as a member of some disparate group? What if we added love and joy to our repertoire of responses to the divergencies of life?

The Secret Service Does Have a Sense of Humor

2009-04-23T16:57:00.000-07:00

It was early morning and I was on my way downstairs to the hotel ballroom, or more accurately, to the lobby outside the ballroom. It was a small hotel but very chic and used a lot by Washington, D.C. big shots and foreign dignitaries. Once I ran into a small band of men who were wearing gorgeous green and red uniforms. Later I learned that they were security officers for the President of Mexico. Al Gore had lived in the hotel when his father was a senator; Frank Sinatra had decked someone in the bar; it was Nancy Reagan’s favorite luncheon venue.

The nonprofit organization dedicated to education that I worked for used the hotel because we could get it cheaply during its slack times and it was only a block from our office. This particular morning I left my room (I stayed there because I lived in Maryland and wanted to be sure to be on time, which I couldn’t count on if I had to struggle with the commute.) early in order to make sure all the materials and arrangements for the conference were ready. The first unusual thing I saw was a man in uniform with a dog on a leash. They were walking slowly around the registration table that was my work space and the dog was diligently sniffing all the boxes and furniture. They moved on into the ballroom and a hotel staffer brought me some coffee. I asked what the dog was all about, thinking there might have been a bomb scare or something of the sort.

The waiter replied that the Secret Service was making a routine check of the premises because a very important person was scheduled to use one of the conference rooms later that morning. I was curious but had a hundred and twenty-nine college deans and professors due in half an hour and needed to be ready to give them their conference materials. When my boss came down, I told her about the dog and that a VIP was expected. She, too, was curious but busy with the deans and professors.

Our conference was in full swing in the ballroom when the next contingent of Secret Service people came in. They were all men, all wore black suits, and all had tiny receivers plugged into an ear with a spiral cord running down the neck. They spread out, examining everything, paying special attention to doors and hallways. One of the agents came out of one of our break-out rooms, told me it connected to the kitchen corridor, and asked my permission to station himself inside. I was surprised that he asked but naturally told him it would be fine. Three agents sat near the outside door and talked in low tones, looking alert and intrepid. Curious as to what they could be discussing so seriously, because there was absolutely nothing happening in that wing of the hotel that could conceivably interest the Secret Service, I made an excuse to get close enough to hear them for a moment. They were talking about major league baseball.

Eventually, I learned that Joe Lieberman, who was campaigning in the presidential primaries, was to hold a meeting in a conference room on the second floor. Next time my boss surfaced, I told her and she excitedly decided to give him a copy of her book and invite him to say hello to our deans and professors. To that end she buttonholed one of the agents, showed him a copy of her book and explained what she wanted to do. To clinch it that she was a respectable citizen, she showed him a photograph of herself with President George W. Bush, taken at the White House on her arrival for a state dinner. The agent examined the book, studied the photograph, and said, with a perfectly straight face, “Yeah, I can see it’s you but who’s the guy?”

Our Greatest Achievement

2009-04-18T10:24:00.000-07:00

When the speculation of Man’s greatest achievement arises, we naturally think of space exploration, medical advances, or some other modern technological wonder. But much of modern technology is essentially without value. It adds nothing to our quest for understanding our own spirituality, which is the principle reason for living on the Earth, and it also threatens the destruction of the planet.

The development of farming is humanity’s greatest achievement. Most hunting and gathering peoples suffer regular times of famine, such as in the winter when stored supplies run short or when game becomes scarce, as it periodically does. With the advent of farming, the food supply is much more predictable and often more plentiful. Farming also allows us to gather in villages so we can be more compassionate toward our old people and those for whom constant travel is a hardship.

The modern U.S. government has encouraged the mechanization of the farm and the use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers because elected officials believe that if they can claim to have made food cheap, people will continue to vote for them. As the efficiency of farming techniques has increased, the need for farm labor has decreased. New work has had to be found for the superfluous farm workers. The factories of the industrial revolution supplied many with jobs and the cancerous growth of the governmental bureaucracy provided more. Now America has become an economy of service workers, which means that most of us are simply transferring paper money from hand to hand, with no real production to show for our labor and hence no real psychological reward for our labor.

Human beings must have both monetary and psychological rewards in order to live satisfying lives. We must have sufficient material reward to live in cleanliness and dignity and we must have sufficient psychological reward to live with self-esteem and compassion. The price we pay if either of those is deficient is exacted in hopelessness and the fear-based emotions, which lead to alcoholism, drug abuse, violence, and the disintegration of the family.

The type of farming as practiced prior to the invention of the internal combustion engine is ideal in many ways, although it’s unnecessary to divide farm chores into men’s work and women’s work. Farm life is family-oriented and makes room for the extended family – for the richness of family life that includes grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, even unrelated persons. Working the soil brings one close to the elements, close to God. It is no accident that church attendance began its decline when people moved from the farms to the cities.

Farming keeps communities small enough for public opinion to have an effect on each individual’s actions. This is a two-edged sword, however, and care must be taken that narrow-mindedness doesn’t blind people to the joys of diversity. Not that narrow-mindedness is limited to small communities. In actuality, it is in the cities that one finds enclaves of the kind of intolerance that kills people for having different hair styles or unfamiliar types of clothing. People in small towns and on farms, being in touch with the Earth, are less fearful and more able to exercise a wide charity and acceptance.

Non-mechanized farming does the minimum damage to the Earth. The plows don’t reach so far into the soil that one windstorm can carry away a foot of topsoil. Organic fertilizers and pest controls obviate the pollution of our water resources.

There is currently a great fear that without mechanized, chemicalized farming, we will starve. There is no reason to cut the amount of food produced. There is a shift in method, not result. We are adding labor, not cutting production.

There is also a great fear that without modern technology our lifestyles will drift back into savagery. What follows is a speech made by a Micmac Indian chief to some French fishing boat captains in Nova Scotia in 1676, quoted by T.C. McLuhan in Touch the Earth, published by Outerbridge & Dienstfrey in 1972:

“…Thou reproachest us very inappropriately, that our country is a little hell on earth in contrast with France, which thou comparest to a terrestrial paradise, inasmuch as it yields thee, so thou sayest every kind of provision in abundance. Thou sayest of us also that we are the most miserable and most unhappy of all men, living without religion, without manners, without honor, without social order, and in a word, without any rules, like the beasts in our woods and forests, lacking bread, wine, and a thousand other comforts, which thou hast in superfluity in Europe. Well, my brothers, if thou doest not yet know the real feelings which our Indians have towards thy Country and towards all thy nation, it is proper that I inform thee at once. I beg thee now to believe that, all miserable as we seem in thy eyes, we consider ourselves nevertheless much happier than thou, in this that we are very content with the little that we have….Thou deceivest thyselves greatly if thou thinkest to persuade us that thy country is better than ours. For if France, as thou sayest, is a little terrestrial paradise, art thou sensible to leave it? And why abandon wives, children, relatives, and friends? Why risk thy life and thy property every year? And why venture thyself with such risk in any season whatsoever, to the storms and tempests of the sea in order to come to a strange and barbarous country which thou considerest the poorest and least fortunate of the world? Besides, since we are wholly convinced to the contrary, we scarcely take the trouble to go to France because we fear with good reason, lest we find little satisfaction there, seeing in our own experience that those who are natives thereof leave it every year in order to enrich themselves on our shores. We believe, further, that you are also incomparably poorer than we, and that you are only simple journeymen, valets, servants, and slaves, all masters and Grand Captains though you may appear, seeing that you glory in our old rags, and in our miserable suits of beaver which can no longer be of use to us, and that you make in these parts, the wherewithall to comfort your misery and the poverty which oppress you….

“We see also that all your people live, as a rule, only upon cod which you catch among us. It is everlastingly nothing but cod – cod in the morning, cod at midday, cod at evening, and always cod, until things come to such a pass that if you wish some good morsels it is at our expense; and you are obliged to have recourse to the Indians, whom you despise so much, and to beg them to go a-hunting that you may be regaled. Now tell me this one little thing, if thou hast any sense, which of these two is the wisest and happiest: he who labors without ceasing and only obtains…with great trouble, enough to live on, or he who rests in comfort and finds all that he needs in the pleasure of hunting and fishing….Learn now, my brothers, once for all, because I must open to thee my heart: there is no Indian who does not consider himself infinitely more happy and more powerful than the French.”

Although the Micmac chief doesn’t mention it, his people practiced agriculture and raised corn, pumpkins, squash, beans, and other vegetables. In light of the speech quoted above, we have to believe that he and his people had no need of modern technology and filled their lives with substance rather than the superfluity of the French royal court that the sea captains found so attractive. The European colonists and their descendants used the doctrine of “the highest and best use of the land” to justify stealing it from the Indian tribes. We are just now beginning to realize that the Indians had already put the land to the highest and best use.

All this is not to say that we can return to life as the tribes lived before the Europeans came, or even to life before the industrial revolution. There are more than three hundred million of us now and we are accustomed to electricity, indoor plumbing, supermarkets and all the rest of it. But surely we can look at the things we value and make new judgment calls when we look at the relative merits of life on the farm, life in the factory, and life selling hamburgers to one another.

Less is More?

2009-03-14T12:35:00.000-07:00

I know that there is a school of thought among interior designers that holds that less is more but I didn't know that it extended to electrical and electronic engineers. A couple of nights ago there was a public service announcement on TV to the effect that many appliances, including TVs and computers, use more electricity when they are turned off than when they are running. I have heard this before but thought it must be a mischievous myth because it is an idea of such profound foolishness. Why would anyone design an appliance to use more power off than on? It doesn't seem to be even possible but I know very little about electricity and/or electronics. Not only have these designers made their products more power hungry off than on, they have provided remote controls that encourage us to waste power. What is the value of a remote if we have to get up and unplug the appliance? Or switch off the power strip? I wonder if this is a new development or if these appliances have always consumed more electricity off than on. I wonder what other surprises will surface to shake our faith in everyday operations. The insanity of modern life just keeps increasing.

The Pink Cotton Blouse

2008-11-14T11:24:00.000-08:00

A pink cotton blouse hangs in a lady’s closet. It is a simple little blouse, sleeveless, with buttons down the front and narrow lace edging on the collar. She paid $19.99 for it. How did the blouse get there? What are the processes by which it materialized in her closet?

· The lady bought the blouse from a sales associate in a department store in the mall.
The store owners pay rent, lighting, advertising, insurance of many kinds, security, and taxes. They pay staff in accounting, sales, purchasing, and maintenance. The staff uses display racks, chairs, desks, and other furniture.
The landlord, electric company, advertising company, insurance broker, insurance company, governments, outside accounting firm, stationer, security firm, and every other person or firm who does business with the store have similar expenses.

· A seamstress constructed the blouse. Another worker cut the fabric into pieces – fronts, back, and facings. Another person cut the lace into lengths. Another person brought the thread, buttons, etc. to the workroom.
These people do their work in a factory building, which is heated, lighted, cleaned, repaired, plumbed, insured, secured, and taxed. The staff uses benches, chairs, desks, tables, hand tools, and machines of various kinds. The seamstress and other workers are supported by other departments: executive, accounting, design, buying, supply, sales, shipping, and maintenance.

· A lacemaker manufactured the polyester lace. Polyester is made from oil. The oil is pumped from the earth, trucked, stored, trucked again, and processed into polyester thread. The lace manufacturer, the oil company and refiner, the trucking companies, and the thread manufacturer all have similar expenses to those of the store and clothing manufacturer.

· The buttons are made of oyster shell, which is a by-product of the oyster-fishing industry. The oyster fisher must use a boat with all its accoutrements and equipment to harvest the oysters. He sells the oysters to a cannery. The cannery shucks the oysters and sells the shells to the button manufacturer, who trucks the shells to a factory, turns them into buttons, and trucks them to the clothing manufacturer. The fisher, the cannery, and the button manufacturer all have expenses similar to the other companies.

· A weaver made the fabric to specifications of the fabric designer, using thread from the ginning, spinning, and dyeing departments. These people also require a factory building and support from various departments, similar to all the other companies.

· The fabric mill acquired the cotton from a brokerage firm which requires buildings for offices and storage. The broker has expenses similar to all the other companies.

· A farmer grew the cotton. The farmer’s requirements included: ground, seed, fertilizer, insecticide, irrigation water, pumps and pipes, machines for planting, cultivating, and harvesting the cotton bolls. There are costs for labor, accounting, taxes, machine repair and maintenance, energy for operating all the machinery. Each of the companies that supply the farmer’s needs has expenses similar to all the other companies.

· Each of the people involved in the production of the pink cotton blouse has personal expenses that must be met: housing, food, clothing, transportation, retirement fund, medical and dental care, insurance of various kinds, utilities, and taxes. If there are children in his or her family, there are all the expenses associated with raising and educating them. If there are elderly relatives in the family, there are all the expenses associated with maintaining their comfort and safety.

How many blouses does it take to cover all these expenses and make it profitable for each of these people, including the share-holders of the various business entities, to continue in business?

My conclusion is that, just as scientists have declared it impossible for the bumblebee to fly, it is impossible for this pink cotton blouse to generate enough money to make it worthwhile to produce.

Andy Jackson: North Carolinian or South Carolinian?

2008-11-05T09:20:00.000-08:00

Historians have never reached consensus on the question of where Andy Jackson was born. Andrew and Betty Jackson immigrated with two young sons from Ireland. They bought two hundred acres of North Carolina in the Waxhaw district that straddled the border of the Carolinas. Andrew died unexpectedly in the ninth month of Betty's pregnancy. She could not operate the farm by herself so she took refuge with her sister, Jane Crawford, who lived in South Carolina. Another sister, Peggy McCamie, lived about a mile from the Crawfords, across the border in North Carolina.

Jane Crawford was an invalid and Betty was able to do housework and cooking to pay room and board for her two boys and herself. However, as her due date drew near, she betook herself to the home of Peggy McCamie. On March 15, 1767, Andy Jackson was born in North Carolina.

Historians have always known that Andy was born at either the Crawford or the McCamie home but the record does not explicitly state which. It doesn't need to. No sane woman would choose the home of an invalid over the home of an able-bodied woman as the birthplace of her baby. Andy Jackson was born in North Carolina.

Presidential Fun Facts

2008-07-06T10:45:00.000-07:00

Some of the facts that I found in researching my book, Presidential Education: Prelude to Power, are listed below. Our presidents are an interesting bunch of guys and this book takes the reader through each one's first 25 years or to his highest degree.

George Washington was once an officer in the British Army.
John Adams and James Monroe each carried a gun to school.
Thomas Jefferson played fiddle in a combo at college.
John Quincy Adams failed his first Harvard entrance exam.
Andrew Jackson is the only president who was ever a prisoner of war.
Franklin Pierce was constantly in trouble at college for ingesting illicit substances -- root beer and gingerbread.
Abraham Lincoln's father objected to his reading and studying, considering it lazy and a waste of time.
Andrew Johnson never spent a single day in school.
Ulysses S. Grant wanted to be a math professor.
Rutherford B. Hayes’ only playmate was his older sister until he went to school.
James Garfield could read proficiently at the age of 3.
Teddy Roosevelt was afraid of his laundress when he attended Harvard.
Woodrow Wilson, the only president with a Ph.D., dropped out of three colleges.
Calvin Coolidge, “Silent Cal,” was taken on as a law clerk because the lawyer liked to laugh and said Cal was a very funny speaker.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was arrested in Germany four times in one day when he was 14.
Harry S. Truman ordered and consumed an ice cream soda then discovered he lacked the nickel to pay Jesse James, Jr. for it.
Dwight D. Eisenhower taught Sunday School to the children of West Point personnel when he was a cadet.
John F. Kennedy had his phone tapped by the FBI because he was considered a security risk when he worked for naval intelligence during World War II.
Ronald Reagan saved seventy-seven lives working summers as a life guard.
William Jefferson Clinton was advised to become a Jesuit priest when he attended Georgetown University.

Presidential Education: Prelude to Power is now available: www.joyouspub.com

Presidential Reputations

2008-06-25T14:43:00.000-07:00

Historians have been undeservedly hard on some of our presidents. All of them have been intelligent men and most of them have at least meant well, however their efforts turned out or were perceived. Some presidents have been reviled as ineffective and some as corrupt. What must be remembered, and is often forgotten by professional historians, is that until relatively recently, newspapers were not required to publish the truth (and even now the truth is often derailed before an item is published). The term “yellow journalism” applies to the tarnish on some presidents’ reputations. At a time when any calumny could be published with impunity, newspapers were often owned by political rivals who pulled out all the stops in trying to influence the public.

Ulysses S. Grant was vilified by the Democratic papers and the scandals of his administration were greatly exaggerated in an effort to send a Democratic candidate to the White House. Chester A. Arthur is widely perceived to have been corrupt, yet as president he led the effort to pass legislation to control the spoils system of government. Franklin Pierce’s reputation of being a weak president is apparently based on his failure to prevent the Civil War, which could not have been prevented by any president. Most of the presidents who are considered weak and/or ineffective were actually extremely effective, they simply did not catch the journalists’ imaginations or they did not lead the country into war. We remember best our wartime presidents. War is exciting and memorable. Peacetime presidents such as Tyler, Fillmore, Hayes, Arthur, Cleveland, McKinley, Harding, and Hoover are perceived as boring and ineffective. Yet they dealt with the problems of their times and kept the country on a more or less even keel. That’s what they were supposed to do.

For instance, Hoover’s reputation suffered greatly at the hands of the Democrats in consequence of the Great Depression that began during his term of office. Franklin Roosevelt pursued many of the same policies Hoover used in an effort to heal the economy but very cleverly used the media to discredit Hoover and garner credit to himself as a humanitarian. In his first presidential campaign, FDR denounced Hoover’s use of federal relief programs as tending to weaken the body politic by encouraging people to rely on government charity. Once in office, he quickly expanded the federal relief efforts and took Hoover to task as being a tool of big business who cared nothing for the sufferings of “the little man.” At the beginning of World War I Hoover had embarked on a lengthy period of altruism that saved millions of people from starvation during and after the war. But he did it quietly, without calling attention to himself in the press, and without asking for honors or rewards.

Saving millions of people from starvation is not fun to read about so Hoover is pushed into the ranks of presidents labeled ineffective while the public and press avidly pursue every detail of Bill Clinton’s sexual peccadilloes. This says more about the press and the American people than about our presidents. Someone has said that people get the government they deserve. It is evidently true.

A Nation of Victims

2007-09-08T14:02:00.000-07:00

William J. Lederer wrote a book called A Nation of Sheep, published in 1961. I never actually read the book but over the years I have often reflected that Americans are getting more ovine every year. The media tell us how to spend our time and money, how to look, how to feel, and what to care about. In short, how to be cool. Those of us who choose not to take their edicts to heart are punished by ridicule and threats. To be uncool is to risk being ostracized or viciously attacked, sometimes physically.

With the massive defection of parents from the home, our children are more and more being raised by TV and each other. Teachers and daycare workers are unable to completely bridge the gap between children's needs and parental duties. Parents have two primary duties -- protection and education -- and the two must be finely balanced if our children are to become responsible, independent adults. Children must be protected against physical, intellectual, and psychological dangers. They must be taught to recognize these dangers and how to circumvent them.

Without such protection and education, the children remain vulnerable to attack and grow up being victimized and remaining victims. It's a very complex process but the solution is apt to be very sudden: either a dictator will arise who is ruthless enough to impose his or her will on the nation or a handful of patriots will whip up enough fervor to fuel a revolution. After many years of intense suffering, a semblance of freedom will again be implemented and the people will repeat the process.

In the sentence above, I first wrote that the process will repeat itself, which is utter nonsense. The process has no will, no intellect, no emotions. The process is created by people who own those attributes. Historically, people aren't very much interested in their own freedom. Americans give lip service to the ideal of freedom but the actions of the electorate prove the opposite. I have often heard people say things like: "We may not be able to articulate our freedoms, but just try to take them away you'll soon see that we know what they are all right."

Nonsense. In just the sixty-odd years of my lifetime, I have seen our freedoms erode while the populace cheered the perpetrators. When I was a child, it was not necessary for a middle-class home to own a filing cabinet or hire an accountant. Now it is commonplace to need both in order to keep track of all the various government reporting requirements. Federal, state, and local governments require increasingly numerous and complex forms for permits, licenses, insurances, and taxes. Well, we have to have taxes. Right?

Yes, of course, we have to have taxes. And as long as we have to have them, we might as well make maximum use of them. So we send our money to Washington and the state capitals and the county seats and in return we demand to be taken care of. That's fine with the politicians. They are very pleased to take our money and give it back to us in driblets for our own good. This is where our freedoms erode. Once we make this exchange -- our money for relief from responsibility -- we have lost a big chunk of freedom. We no longer have the freedom to decide what's best for ourselves and our children; the people who have our money will make many of those decisions. Education, housing, savings accounts, medical treatment, insurance policies, transportation, utilities -- there is no facet of your life that is not regulated. There is no facet of your life in which you have the freedom to make your own choices from the full range of possibilities.

Say you want to save a portion of your money to use later, for your kids' college, your retirement years, to give away, or even to spend foolishly. If you don't follow the rules very carefully, the government will take some of it, maybe most of it, away from you in taxes and penalties. Why should this be? Why must we consult accountants and lawyers in order to protect our money from government predation? Why can't I put it in a savings account and add to it as I see fit and withdraw it as I see fit? Because the federal government has set up various intricate mechanisms to prevent you from doing so. If you are very wealthy you can easily afford to pay specialists to protect your wealth; the less money you have, the greater proportion the government will take away from you because you can't afford to pay people to protect it. And if you try to navigate the financial savings laws yourself, not only may the government confiscate the “improper” savings, you will be assessed penalties for breaking the law. Fifty years ago you had the freedom to save your money all by yourself and to keep it, too.

With all the reporting and oversight made possible by computers and required by government, maybe it would be better to simply stash your savings in a dresser drawer or a home safe or a hole in the back yard. Then, when you're ready to spend it, there it is. Right? Maybe, maybe not. If it's a large sum, you'll have to account for how you got it. You'll have to prove that it is in your possession legally and that the proper taxes have been paid. If you are a financial wizard or a crook, you will know how to do that. If you are an ordinary, honest person, you probably won't know and the government will confiscate your savings and you may even end up in jail because you can't prove you aren't a crook.

We have betrayed the American Revolution. We have betrayed the ideals of personal freedom. We have made America into a nation of victims.

Up from Virtual Slavery: Millard Fillmore

2007-09-08T07:00:00.000-07:00

Millard, the eldest son and second of eight children, was born January 7, 1800, to Nathaniel and Phoebe Fillmore. He was a curious child and showed signs of ambition even as a youngster. He was a handsome boy, blond with blue eyes and a ruddy complexion. He was robust and strongly built.

Nathaniel and Phoebe worked hard at farming in upstate New York. In 1802, Nathaniel took a perpetual lease on 130 acres situated about a mile from the village of New Hope and built a log cabin and began clearing the land. As he got old enough, Millard was given chores to do, the main one being to clear the fields of rocks. He loved to roam the woods and swim in nearby Skaneateles Lake but Nathaniel objected to him wasting his time.

Millard also loved to hunt and fish but Nathaniel, oddly for a frontiersman, considered hunting and fishing a waste of time. Nevertheless, whenever Millard could get some free time, he went fishing or hunting. He had to borrow a rifle, so he didn’t get to hunt much. He had more chances to fish. He had acquired a canoe and loved to paddle out into the lake, which was pure and clear. He could look down and see the lake bottom and the fish even in the deepest parts.

Millard’s life experiences were restricted to his immediate neighborhood. Only rarely did he spend a night away from home. There was no major road in the vicinity so he had no chance of meeting anyone except his neighbors. He attended a log school in New Hope, walking to and from the village, after the crops were harvested in the fall and before the snow got too deep in the winter. The teacher when he was nine and ten was Amos Castle. There were serious gaps in the school’s resources. There were no maps, no atlas, and no dictionary. There was a book of geographical questions and answers that gave him some idea of the rest of the world. He was bright and quick and learned to read, write, spell, and work arithmetic problems. At the age of nine Mr. Castle awarded him a certificate for the feat of spelling 224 words correctly. In 1815, when he was 15, Millard left school to begin making his way in the world.

Nathaniel wanted his sons to learn trades. He didn’t want them to undergo the hardships and uncertainties of farming and he had no money to educate them for the professions. Millard wanted to join the army. Neighbors returning from the War of 1812 told exciting tales of their exploits so Millard wanted to go as a three-month substitute for a draftee. Nathaniel refused permission and persuaded him instead to learn the wool-carding and cloth-dressing trade.

Benjamin Hungerford of Sparta, now West Sparta, was a former neighbor who operated a wool-carding and cloth-dressing business. He needed a helper and Nathaniel worked out a deal for Millard to give it a try for three months. William Scott was foreman of the factory and he and Millard became lifelong friends, Millard said in later years that it was his talks with Scott that first awakened his ambitions. Scott has left a description of the boy when he first reached Sparta. He wore a suit of gray homespun wool and cowhide boots; his hair was light-colored and worn long; he seemed bright and intelligent, good-natured and thoughtful.

Millard was disappointed with his new life. He had imagined that he would be learning new skills but at first he was put to work chopping wood. The food was disappointing, too. He was inordinately fond of bread and milk but found that milk was a luxury in Sparta and he had to make do with dishes that he disliked. After a few weeks of chopping wood, Millard rebelled. He considered it unjust and tyrannical of Hungerford to set him any task other than those to do with carding wool and dressing cloth. After an ugly confrontation during which the boy threatened his employer with an axe, he was put to work in the factory. At the end of the trial period, Millard went home.

Alvan Kellogg and Zaccheus Cheney had a similar wool-carding business in New Hope and Millard was apprenticed there under an agreement that he would stay until he was 20. He was to receive $55 per year, which must have seemed a princely sum to the boy, most of his earnings to be paid directly to his father. In addition to learning how to card wool and dress cloth, Millard kept the firm’s books. The factory work was evidently seasonal or intermittent in some way because Millard continued to be an apprentice there while taking other jobs. Some were undertaken in the hours after the factory shut down for the night but others were undertaken full time in other villages. He considered the three years he spent in the cloth mill as virtual slavery and he became a stanch abolitionist, although as president he would enforce the law without fear or favor, even the Fugitive Slave Law.

In 1816 and 1817, in addition to working at the factory, Millard helped out on the family farm in the spring and went to school in the winter. Some time that year he spent $2 on a membership in the circulating library. His next purchase was a dictionary. He had little time for study so he propped his dictionary up where he could read the definitions and memorize them as he tended the carding machines.

The winter of 1818 found Millard on the other side of the teacher’s desk. He taught the school at Scott, about eight miles from New Hope. There were some rowdies in the school who had actually driven the last teacher way. Millard had to quell a rebellion one day when he undertook to whip one of the boys and they undertook to stop him. He accomplished his purpose but the boys told such exaggerated stories at home that the parents called a meeting for him to explain himself. He told them bluntly that he would be master in his school or they could seek another teacher. He stayed the full term and they paid his $10 fee in wheat.

He worked in a sawmill for a couple of months that spring then decided to do a little traveling. He walked to Buffalo, where he found the people still struggling to rebuild after the British burned the town. He crossed the Tonawanda Indian Reservation on the way but returned home by way of Geneseo. He said the rich bottom-lands of the Genesee River and the village of Canandaigua were so beautiful that they seemed like paradise on earth.

By June 1819, he was back at New Hope, working out his apprenticeship. But travel and his little stint at teaching had showed him that he needed more education. He enrolled in an academy in Kelloggsville on a part-time basis. This school was better equipped than any he had seen before and for the first time, at the age of 19, he saw maps and learned to read them. He was excited to be learning but he was still working at the factory and had to do his studying by firelight at night, even tallow candles being beyond his means.

His teacher, Abigail Powers, two years older than he, was the daughter of a Baptist minister of Saratoga County. She was quite well educated, her mother having encouraged her to study and fill in the gaps left by the village school curriculum. She was an attractive young lady with a quick mind and studious habits. She had been teaching for two years when Millard matriculated.

Millard was a handsome and charming young man. In spite of the hardships and setbacks he had endured, he had a good sense of humor and was of a gregarious nature. He stood five feet, ten inches tall and had the deep chest and wide shoulders of a man who has chopped a great deal of wood. Abigail admired his determination to acquire an education and helped him make up the deficiencies in his learning so he could make faster progress. He stayed at the academy for six months and it will be no surprise to us that these two soon found themselves in love.

It was also in 1819 that the Fillmores decided to give up trying to squeeze a living out of the farm and moved to Montville, nearly 10 miles from New Hope and six from Kelloggsville. Nathaniel must have been impressed with his eldest son’s stubbornness in attending school in the face of hardship and privation. And no doubt Phoebe urged her husband to give the boy what little help he could. So Nathaniel spoke to Walter Wood, a man of wealth who had many business interests in several counties, in addition to his legal practice and judgeship. The judge accepted Millard as a clerk and reader of law for a few months.

Millard had had no inkling of his father’s intention so when Phoebe told him it was settled at dinner one day, he cried tears of joy. He immediately presented himself at the judge’s office. Judge Wood handed him Blackstone’s Commentaries and told him to read it. The judge gave him no instruction or explanations so Millard read doggedly until he discovered that Blackstone was talking about English law. No one had told him that New York law was based on English law. But he saw that he was learning some New York law through acting as clerk so he stayed. When it was time for him to return to the carding factory, the judge advised him to leave his apprenticeship and continue reading law with him. Millard was not bound to the factory by law but he had given his word and his time had not run out. Millard worked out a deal to pay Kellogg $30 out of his future earnings and be free to pursue another career.

He taught school during the winter of 1820 and paid Kellogg out of the $36 he earned. He borrowed some law books and studied diligently until spring when his school let out. He then returned to Judge Wood’s office. He taught school again in the winter of 1821, returning to the judge’s office in the spring. Somewhere Millard learned to survey and the judge often asked him to survey land he owned.

At that time every hamlet, village, and town had a big Independence Day celebration. In 1821 Millard was asked to deliver the address at Montville. This seems to have been his first public speaking experience and he acquitted himself well. That same summer Elias Rogers of Moravia asked Millard to represent him in a lawsuit to be heard by a justice of the peace. He won the case and collected his $3 fee but the judge took him to task for violating professional ethics. He remained adamant in the face of Millard’s plea of poverty and asked him to promise that he would not repeat the offense; if he would not promise, the judge would no longer be able to help him. At that point, Millard suspected that Judge Wood intended to keep him as a clerk as long as possible, using this promise to keep him from advancing. He acknowledged the judge’s past kindness and assistance but said he would leave. The judge accepted his note for the $65 owed him and they parted. A couple of years later, the judge asked Millard to act for him in the collection of a debt. He accomplished the task and they entered into a cordial correspondence.

In August Millard joined his parents on the farm they had recently bought, situated about a mile from Aurora. At that time Aurora boasted several businesses, including a tannery, a gristmill, and a tavern. His uncle, Calvin Fillmore, owned the tavern. There being no lawyer in town with whom he could read, Millard decided to open a law practice. New York required seven years of reading law before practicing and Millard had only read for two but he went ahead with his plans. He handled several cases and won them but it was not lucrative enough to support him. He went back to teaching school, this time in the nearby hamlet of Wales. His monthly salary was $7 in cash and $6 in wheat or rye. He taught there from the first of October to the end of January and on Saturdays he practiced law.

Seeing that he needed more experience and of a different kind, Millard decided to try Buffalo. He arrived with $4 in his pocket. Before long he had obtained a job teaching in a district school and another as clerk in the law office of Asa Rice and Joseph Clary, where he would also read law. Even after he got the clerkship, he needed the teaching position, as the lawyers paid him no salary. Finally, in February 1823, he passed the bar exam and was certified to practice law by the Court of Common Pleas. He put his student and teaching days behind him and returned to Aurora, once again opening a law office, this time on the principle street in town. He continued to hone his public speaking skills and again gave the address on Independence Day. He and his brother Almon joined the Aurora Union Debating Society and Millard helped to write the bylaws.

Aurora was 150 miles from Kelloggsville, where Abigail was still teaching but they maintained their courtship by letter. He could not yet afford to go by stagecoach and he couldn’t take the time to walk. It was not until the winter of 1825 that Millard was able to make her a visit. Their love had withstood the five-year separation; Millard proposed marriage and Abigail accepted him. They did not set a date beyond deciding that the marriage would take place the next year, which it did, in February 1826.

In the meantime, Millard worked at building up his law practice. In order to indulge his love of reading and perhaps make a few dollars on the side, he incorporated a lending library with his law office. In 1825, at the age of 25, Millard was firmly on the road to success.

Back to Bataan

2007-08-12T05:40:00.000-07:00

The fact that U.S. soldiers are eligible for food stamps is a scandal. We tell prospective soldiers to join the army and be all that they can be. That they’ll receive training, even college degrees. We don’t tell them that while they’re in the army, their pay will be so low that they won’t be able to pay for basic necessities. If private enterprise advertised as deceptively as that, the outcry would very quickly compel adequate compensation.

Remember reading about the “Bataan Death March” of World War II? It was a long time ago but there are still some survivors. I understand that the Veterans’ Administration has instructed its doctors to deny benefits to those survivors on grounds that the privations that aged them twenty years prematurely have nothing to do with their current health problems. Any reputable doctor can explain to you how starvation and extraordinary physical and mental stress will cause or contribute to illness. These survivors of enemy action, even torture, deserve everything that we can do for them now. They emphatically have earned everything that the VA can do for them.

Walter Reed Army Hospital has been found guilty of practicing substandard medicine on our troops wounded in the current war. A new state of the art facility is to be built to replace it. Fine, I applaud the new facility. But the physical plant is not the primary cause of the problem. Neglect is the cause. The present administration has sent clear signals to the military leaders that soldiers wounded too badly to be returned to battle are no longer useful and money is to be spent on the prosecution of the war. To keep sufficient “boots on the ground” to meet the goals of the administration.

The very concept of boots on the ground is demeaning to our soldiers. We must not forget that these men and women are American citizens, with hopes, dreams, families, and lives to live. To call them out of their humanity, to reduce them to “boots,” is disrespectful and despicable. Life is precious, no less so because one is a private soldier than because one is a draft-dodging civilian.

Earliest Education

2007-07-08T05:52:00.000-07:00

When my daughter was an infant, I watched in fascination as she learned how to move her body and tried to make sense of the world. For instance, as she lay on her back, waving her arms and legs, kicking and cooing, she would catch a glimpse of her hand as it flew by her face. It moved too quickly for her to get a good look at it so she didn’t know what it was. But she would stop kicking and cooing momentarily to watch and see if it came back.

A little later she spent one afternoon between lunch and nap time in her high chair, dropping toys over the side. She would drop one and watch it fall, pick up another, drop it, and watch it fall. When all the toys were on the floor, I would pick them up and put them back whereupon she would repeat the sequence. There was a thoughtful deliberation in the way she did this and it finally dawned on me that it was in the nature of a scientific experiment. No matter how many toys she dropped, they always fell down to the floor. Not once all afternoon, did any of them fall up to the ceiling.

A little bit later she spent most of an afternoon standing on a dining room chair calling “Mama.” She had long been experimenting with her voice, repeating certain syllables that evidently were fun to say. Then she made a momentous discovery. If she said “ma ma ma ma ma ma ma ma” nothing particular happened; but if she said “ma ma” and stopped there, I would pay attention to her. She tested her hypothesis and sure enough, every time she said “ma ma,” her female parent would come to see what she wanted.

I remember my younger son’s first joke. We had recently given him a piggy bank and he had a lot of fun putting coins in it. Then one day I announced that we were going to go visit my Aunt Peggy. His little brows came together for a moment of intense thought then he burst out laughing, “Peggy bank, Peggy bank! We see Peggy bank!” It wasn’t much of a joke but he has gone on to much funnier ones since then.

It is such a delight to watch our children learn these simple, yet indispensable lessons. If we exercise a little patience, we can enjoy vicariously once again the wonder of the world, the surprising beauty of the earth and sky, plants and animals. We can savor the first appreciation of humor and the gurgling joy of living once again through our children. The astonishing phenomenon of hiccups, the discovery of our own shadow, the highly interesting fact that when it rains in the front yard it also rains in the back yard.

I remember the first time I made the connection between a word and the thing it represented. I was in front of the new refrigerator in my grandmother’s kitchen and I was holding a little blue earthenware bowl in my hands. Suddenly, the word “bowl” popped into my mind. Bowl. Yes, this thing in my hands is a bowl. I repeated the word in my mind over and over. It was very exciting. Bowl.

From then on I thought about words. I thought mushrooms were mushroons because the “room” sound was already assigned to indoor living spaces. My winter coat had matching leggings, which we pronounced “leggin’s.” We had some friends named Lagan and I found it very confusing that wearing apparel and people had the same name. I knew what a floor was and it baffled me on being introduced to a woman named Flora that anyone would call a person a floor. I have had endless fun over the years in making the acquaintance of words by sight and sound and meaning.

Discoveries and learning experiences such as these are the educational foundation on which everything else is built. Children need time to themselves to experiment and to reflect. They need time with their parents for interaction, to test their conclusions, to articulate their ideas. They need time with their parents to discuss, to observe, to play, for it is in these times that children form their basic philosophy of life and their basic understanding of the world. If parents are not available for such times, their children will learn some of what they need to know from others, from relatives, friends, teachers, coaches, television, and movies. But they may not learn other vital lessons, such as the value of every person, how to form intimate bonds, how to be a good parent.

This is why mental health practioners delve into the patient’s childhood. So much of a person’s understanding of the world is formed in infancy and toddlerhood that he or she might not consciously know why he believes what he does. When we first realize that others’ understanding of the world differs from our own, it comes as a surprise. We took it for granted that reality was the same for everyone. In truth, reality is different for everyone because those early lessons are different for each of us.

A baby whose parent comes to him when he cries in the middle of the night will find the world a very different place from one who is left alone to cry it out. A toddler who goes to day care five days a week will experience a different world from one whose parent stays home with him. The world is very different for a toddler whose parent is home but too busy to pay attention to him than it is for a toddler whose parent is home and devotes some time to her at intervals during the day. A toddler who is parked in front of the TV for hours everyday in order to keep him amused and out of the parent’s way will perceive the world in much different ways than a toddler who is given toys to exercise mind and body and who is read to regularly.

Passivity is the enemy. Watching TV, going to the movies, playing video games, and listening to CDs are all passive activities. Depending on the subject matter, they can all be informative and they can certainly be entertaining. But we want our children to be active, not passive. We want them to be able to take action when necessary, to use their ingenuity to solve problems, to invent, to imagine, to give. In order to instill those abilities, we must nurture their active natures, beginning in earliest infancy. Let them know they have power by going to them when they cry for if you don’t your infant will believe that he is powerless and this will be a great hindrance unless and until he discovers for himself that he does have the power to effect change in his life.

Give your children building blocks, Lincoln logs, erector sets. If your daughter wants a house for her doll, encourage her to make one. Give her scraps of cloth, cardboard boxes, colored paper, scissors, and glue and prepare to be amazed at the house she constructs. How much more satisfying than to have a big plastic one that just sits there. Buy the children books, take them to the library, read to them. Show them how much of the world exists outside of their own little corner of it. Show them how other people live, let them discover the infinite variety of life.

Brokeback Books

2007-07-04T04:42:00.000-07:00

It is very disappointing to check a book out of the library only to find that its spine is broken. It’s virtually impossible to read such a book; half of it flops dismally, leaving the other half out of balance. It’s hard to hold and no fun at all. The distressing thing about books with broken spines is knowing who the perpetrators are. Surprisingly, the culprits are not usually teenage vandals or even thoughtless adult readers, they are librarians.

Of all the people who ought to respect books, I would expect librarians to be at the top of the list. Quite probably, many of them are. But many of them are not. Librarians are the ones who devised the return chutes for convenience. Instead of taking the books inside and sliding them across a counter to a librarian to handle gently, we can push them through a slot and hear them tumble to the bottom of a big wooden box. Predictably, this is rather hard on the spines of the books.

However, even taking books into the library and handing them to a librarian to check in does not always have a better result. For instance, in the public library that I most often use, the big wooden box that receives books through a slot stands beside the counter where books are received by librarians. I usually ask for a receipt when I return books because if I don’t the library too often sends me a notice that one of the books I returned is overdue. That entails a long hassle while the staff waits for months to see if the book surfaces inside the library. If it doesn’t I am required to pay for the book. Hence the receipt.

Handing books to the librarian is unpleasant because he or she drops or tosses the books into the big wooden box. I can almost feel the spines snap. We try to teach our children to handle books carefully, to respect the fragility of these bundles of knowledge, fun, and wonder. Teachers instruct their students in the proper handling of new books: open the front cover, then the back cover, then open the book in the middle. This will help to protect the spine from cracking or breaking. Then the student goes to the library and finds that librarians routinely disrespect their charges, throwing them around carelessly. That sends a very bad message to the youngsters. How can we expect children to respect books when librarians don’t?

In researching the presidents for the book I’m writing - Presidential Education: Prelude to Power - I often order books from other libraries through my local one. For the early presidents, this means that many of the books are old and in varying stages of decrepitude. They sometimes arrive with notices that state they are about to be withdrawn from circulation due to their fragile condition and asking me to be especially careful in handling them. I remember one in particular was damaged so that the cover was only held on by a few threads. It carried a special plea for gentle handling. I gave it tender care, opening it only on a table to avoid straining those few threads. When I returned it to my local library, I pointed out to the librarian that the book was very fragile and asked her to note the plea for gentle handling. She checked it in, looked me right in the eye, and dropped it from a height of about three feet into the big wooden box.

The Race Card

2007-05-27T08:43:00.000-07:00

Recently, I watched a young black man deliver a speech at a contest. He was dynamic and forceful and charismatic. He got a standing ovation and won the contest. But there were aspects of his speech that I found problematical.

The subject of his speech was the disparity in rewards for whites and blacks for similar efforts. The young man is right; that’s a problem that needs to be continuously addressed until the disparity is gone. It is completely unacceptable that any social transaction be based solely on race. We need to fight for racial equality. But we need to fight for the equality of all races, not just black with white.

In order to fight effectively, we need to be informed. When we speak, we need to speak with the authority of truth behind us. Otherwise, no matter how valid our points are, we will lose our audience. That’s what happened with this young man’s speech and me. The people who applauded him and awarded him first place in the contest were black. It was a black function. He was preaching to the choir.

No one gets to be a change agent by preaching to the choir. Change agents preach to the unconverted as well as to the converted. How in the world can opinions change if no one with a different opinion ever hears the message? And if those with differing opinions hear the message but it’s interlarded with nonsense, how can they be expected to change their opinions?

This young man spoke of white teachers favoring white students at the expense of black students. He spoke of being discouraged from speaking up in classes taught by white teachers. He spoke of different and harsher disciplinary actions toward black students by white teachers and administrators. These are enormous problems and must be addressed. Our children and young people deserve much better than this.

But then he spoke of Cocoa Puffs. Must, he asked, he go cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs because the cereal is brown, like his skin? May he not be in his right mind when he eats Cocoa Puffs? And wild rice. Is rice wild merely because it is brown?

As a metaphor for negative racial attitudes, Cocoa Puffs is singularly inappropriate. For one thing, Cocoa Puffs has been around since the fifties and, whatever references druggies and rappers make to it, it is merely a cereal advertised with an animated bird who bounces around proclaiming that he’s cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

Wild rice is even more inappropriate as a metaphor for negative attitudes toward black people. It is not called wild rice because it is brown, it is called wild rice because it grows wild, not in cultivated fields. All cultivated rice, the white rice we see in restaurants and grocery stores, is brown rice before the rice is polished to remove the most nutritious part of the grain. This makes some sense as a racial metaphor: the nutritious brown is removed to make the rice white and therefore presumably acceptable to white consumers. It’s actually pretty stupid to remove the brown and make the rice less nutritious just as it’s pretty stupid to try to prevent black people from full participation in the body politic, depriving that body of the talents and viewpoints of a large number of our citizens.

No, if wild rice has a racial connotation, it is Indian/white. White people have discovered the profitability of wild rice and have begun to use harvesting methods that preclude optimum reseeding, which will eventually take the profitability out of wild rice. White people have also tried to expand the natural beds by damming, which changes the water level, which destroys the rice beds, as they only grow in certain depths of water in certain places. Many of the wild rice beds are located on Indian reservations, where white people have no business harvesting the rice in the first place.

If this young man wants to be a change agent, he must get his facts right and speak so he makes sense to people other than his own choir. He must realize that not every card is a race card and not every race card is black.

And Justice for All?

2007-05-04T13:53:00.000-07:00

Leonard Peltier is a Lakota man who is currently serving two life sentences in a federal prison. He is innocent of the charge of killing two FBI agents at Wounded Knee in 1975. The courts and even the FBI have admitted that they know he is innocent. He remains in prison because the court that reviewed his conviction said that, although he was innocent of the murders, he was guilty, by reason of his presence at Wounded Knee, of aiding and abetting the person or persons who killed the agents. Mr. Peltier has now served 32 years. Amnesty International and many other national and international organizations and activists have been trying for years to pressure the American justice system into releasing Leonard Peltier. Learn the facts and add your voice to the thousands of others. It’s too late to get justice for Leonard but let’s at least get him out of prison. Please visit www.leonardpeltier.org and http://www.freepeltier.org/
Mitaku Oyasin, we are all connected.

You may send donations to: Leonard Peltier Defense Committee 3800 N. Mesa StreetSuite A2 El Paso, Texas 79902915-533-6655info@leonardpeltier.net

Unlearning the Language of Conquest

2007-04-05T18:32:00.000-07:00

I recently read Unlearning the Language of Conquest: Scholars Expose Anti-Indianism in America by Four Arrows (Don Trent Jacobs). This is an important book and I wish every politician, policy-maker, and teacher in America would read it. It's available from Amazon.com and has enough ideas to furnish food for thought for years. Four Arrows has gathered together a number of essays concerning colonialism and its effect on America, especially the Indigenous People.

America the Beautiful has been constructed on some very ugly tenets and, as a nation, we will never reach our full potential until we change the way we treat the Indigenous Nations. The American People, as distinct from the American government, are basically good. Individually, we do not wish to be war mongers or to steal resources from other nations. Yet, by our individual silence we abet our government in everything from cultural genocide to planetary mayhem. The people we have elected to represent us and lead us have mistaken our will to be world leaders and to be prosperous to mean that maximizing profits is the only thing we care about and that if we must oppress everyone, including our own citizens, and destroy the earth in the process, so be it.

It is imperative that the citizenry pressure the government to take the right action. We must foster cooperation among nations, rather than exploitation; we must offer a helping hand to those in need, rather than a crushing boot. We must take immediate and special action in regard to the Indian Nations. We have treaties with many of them and it is a sad and despicable fact that we have broken every one of them. How can we expect to prosper and to hold up our heads as a leader among nations until we rectify the damage we continue to do to the Indigenous citizens among us? History cannot be rewritten but we can and must cease to publish lies about European and Euro-American actions toward the Indigenous Peoples. We must repay the billions of dollars stolen from the tribes, whether by the government or condoned by the government. We must cease speaking the language of conquest and let our Indigenous citizens help us to heal the breach.

Things

2007-02-26T05:08:00.000-08:00

Most of us love things. We collect things. We store things. We hoard things. Often, the less useful things are, the more valuable we consider them. There is really no logical, sensible reason that a baseball card should be sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Or that a single painting should sell for millions. Clearly, the pasteboard, ink, canvas, and paint are only incidental to the value. Even the excellence of the athlete and the genius of the painter do not account for the value. Scarcity is the driving force behind the value. Noting the scarcity or uniqueness of the item, people find it desirable. The more people who desire it, the higher the dollar value goes. The higher the value, the more people want to own it. And the spiral goes up and up, as more people with more dollars chase an item of complete uselessness.

This is very odd.

On a more modest scale, people rent more mini storage units with every year that passes. Some few units are used to store excess business inventory on a temporary basis. Most units are used to store items that were always useless or have become useless to their owners. Clothing that no longer fits or has gone out of style, books no longer of interest, dishes and ornaments for which we no longer have space, toys our children have lost interest in playing with. There is little reason to expect that the owners will ever actually use the items they have placed in mini storage. So why store them instead of disposing of them?

We love our things.

Why are so many of us fixated on things? It’s an avoidance ploy. Human life is not an end in itself. People are merely one dimension of spiritual beings. We know that. Almost all of us know that but we get confused. Religion, being a human invention, often adds to the confusion. We wish to be good, we wish to please God. But too often we distrust our own innate knowledge. Too often religion tells us that we can’t be spiritual until we die, we can only be religious as people. To take our minds off this dilemma, we turn our attention to things.

We can understand things. Things are palpable, we can see and touch things. There is no ambiguity about things but there are an infinite number of differences. Baseball cards, for instance. Each player’s card has a different picture, a different set of stats. Some players have more than one card. Some companies produce higher quality cards than others. Some cards remain in pristine condition over the years, others become battered and torn. All of these differences impact the desirability and value of the cards.

Consideration of these differences gives collectors an infinity of discussion points – endless hours during which spirituality does not have to be contemplated. This is true for any collection of things, whether it’s a collection of cheap salt and pepper shakers or a collection of coins worth millions. Even if it’s a collection of research papers on where each and every one of the Egyptian Old Dynasty pharaohs is at the present time.

Things take our minds off such uncomfortable subjects as the infinite, heaven, hell, God, gods, incarnation, reincarnation, the chakras, and the difference in soul and spirit.

American Concentration Camps

2007-02-07T10:07:00.000-08:00

When other people build concentration camps, we Americans get very upset with them. Those of us who grew up in the time immediately following World War II have especially negative feelings about concentration camps because of the way Hitler used them. They have been used in many countries for many purposes but the effects have seldom been benign. So it comes as a shock to most Americans to find that their own country has long used concentration camps as a way to control various segments of the body politic.

The first concentration camps in America were used in breaking the power of the Indian tribes. After the wars and massacres had killed enough members of a tribe, the survivors were often sent to concentration camps which were sometimes far removed from the tribe’s homeland and/or reservation. For instance, after the second Modoc War, the survivors were shamefully incarcerated at Fort Klamath until the chiefs were executed, whereupon they were permanently removed to Oklahoma and their lands distributed among the settlers.

A more recent example is the shameful “relocation camps” of World War II. People of Japanese descent were forced to leave their homes and businesses to live in concentration camps, complete with barbed wire and guard towers. Not only were Japanese nationals incarcerated, but U.S. citizens who happened to have Japanese parentage, as well.

Now Uncle Sam is once more in the concentration camp business. The Washington, D.C. papers recently ran photos – on the front page, above the fold – of a concentration camp in Texas that is used to incarcerate suspected illegal immigrants. The caption stated that it takes months and sometimes years to return people in the camps to their home countries. Why? Why does it take years? The people in these camps are not doing anything productive, they are not moving forward with their lives. They are locked into the camp and out of their lives.

Americans are much too fond of locking people up. Our prisons are overcrowded, dreadful places of iniquity. Our nursing homes are notorious for their inhumane treatment of the old people locked away in them. I could make a good argument for ghettos being concentration camps, with locks and fences replaced by psychological fetters.

It’s time to change the wording at the Statue of Liberty. We can no longer welcome the tired, the hungry, the poor of the world. We have no resources to help them acclimate to our liberty. In fact, we barely have enough liberty for native Americans, much less immigrants. What we have for immigrants, unless they are very careful to get their paperwork exactly right, are concentration camps. It’s a damn shame.

Giving and Re-gifting

2006-12-18T04:14:00.000-08:00

Re-gifting is a word usually said with a sneer or a smirk, as if the one who did it had committed a faux pas. I’d like to know why. Why should I not give something that I already own if it is an appropriate item? In what way is the gift enhanced if I have a receipt that shows I paid cash for it, or, more likely, charged it to a credit card?

I guess the idea is that pre-owned equals used and used items are considered to be tacky gifts. Of course, there are many grades of used. A coffee maker that shows the wear and tear of daily use is probably not a good gift. But a coffee maker used once and retired from active service would be a useful gift for anyone who drinks coffee. A coffee maker received as a gift and never taken out of the box ought to be a fine gift, given without any embarrassment and received with no thought of whether it looks like the same one the giver unwrapped on her last birthday.

If I buy a holograph letter signed by Abraham Lincoln and give it as a gift, it is considered a wonderful present. But if I find a letter in an old trunk in my attic, unless it can be authenticated and its monetary value established, it doesn’t matter who signed it or how interesting it is, it’s merely old paper and is unacceptable as a gift.

An antique is an acceptable gift, as long as it is bought at an antique store especially for the giftee or is an heirloom of the giftee’s family. If I decide that the pressed glass square honeycomb dish I bought nine years ago at the local Antique Alley would be nice to give my niece as a housewarming present, that’s tacky and I’d better hope she never finds out that I took it out of my breakfront to wrap for her. But if I buy a pressed glass vase at Target and it’s nicely packaged in a box to show that it’s brand new, my niece may think I’m a cheapskate but the gift will be perfectly acceptable.

The inconvenience of procuring the gift also plays into its acceptability. If I stop alongside the road and buy a dozen roses from a vendor’s ice chest on my way to visit a friend in the hospital, it’s okay but kind of tacky. However, if I phone a florist and have flowers delivered, that’s a great gift, whether I visit or not. Even better is if I go to the florist shop, have a bouquet especially arranged, and take it to the hospital to my friend. Just look at all the time and effort I put into it, not to mention the monetary cost. I’m a really good friend.

In my opinion, it is absolutely silly to waste time and effort on the issue of re-gifting. Even if I inadvertently give you something you once gave me, what’s the big deal? Most of us receive so many gifts that we can’t possibly remember who gave them all or on what occasion. If it was nice enough for you to give me, then it’s nice enough for me to give you. If you don’t want it or have no use for it, give it to someone else, sell it at a yard sale, or donate it to a charity.

The tackiness of re-gifting is an idea being promoted by retailers and who can blame them? But we needn’t play into it.

Presidential Ignorance

2006-12-01T04:03:00.000-08:00

As I near the completion of my basic research for Presidential Educations: Prelude to Power, it occurs to me that ignorance is just as important as education in the affairs of our nation. As a people, Americans appear to believe that everyone who runs for president possesses sufficient knowledge and understanding of the way the world operates to take care of national business. What voters are asked to compare are mostly attributes relevant to getting elected, such as media savvy, credibility, and party affiliation. Those journalists who show an interest in the candidates’ educations, understanding of issues, and accomplishments are easily out-shouted by the journalists who are interested in real or potential sex scandals, expletives used in private conversations, sycophancy, or trade-offs for future favors.

Education, of course, is much more than time spent in classrooms and lecture halls. In fact, it appears that the most important education is acquired outside these places. Not that schooling isn’t important, just that it isn’t all-important. We tend to assume that a person who has graduated from a university held in high esteem is well-educated. That may or may not be the case. Woodrow Wilson held a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins but he received the degree more than a year after he left the university without completing his graduate course. His mentor agreed to accept his book, Congressional Government, as his doctoral thesis, although it had not been written for that purpose. Wilson spent two days taking tests and was granted his degree. He wrote the book without bothering to visit Washington, D.C. and without seeing congress in action. He knew the theory of congressional government but his presidency leaves it open to doubt if he understood the actual workings of congress.

On the other hand, Lyndon Johnson was a consummate politician. He cut his teeth watching the Texas legislature in action, accompanying his father to sessions as a small boy and a teenager. He was in his mid-twenties when he went to Washington as secretary to a congressman. Johnson knew how congressional government operates – quite possibly no one has ever known it better. But his presidency illustrates woeful areas of ignorance – his Great Society nearly bankrupted the nation and his foreign policy got us embroiled in an unwinnable war.

Andrew Jackson, in contrast, was knowledgeable about war. He was sixteen when he began fighting in the Revolutionary War in the Waxhaw Mountains. He learned how to strike the redcoats and disappear as a soldier, becoming a backwoods farm boy. Later, he was in the swamps in Florida in the Seminole War and he knew about fighting a foe who could blend into the background, leaving no target to attack. He would never have made the mistake of fighting a high-tech war in a jungle or a desert where guerilla tactics trump technology. But Jackson knew very little about finance and banking and wasn’t interested in learning. His distrust of bankers and financiers caused him to lead the country into a depression.

Ulysses S. Grant was a man of honor, yet his presidency is considered one of the most corrupt in our history. Partly, this is the result of the yellow journalism of the day. Newspapers disclaimed any responsibility to print truth and did not flinch at publishing flagrant lies. It was Grant’s ignorance of finance, politics and the congressional process that allowed him to be victimized. Had he been more knowledgeable about scoundrels and the way they operate, he could have protected himself and his reputation.

The American presidency requires a person with a wide range of interests and knowledge. One-dimensional persons may cause a great deal of harm, not by intent, but by ignorance. There is no checklist for voters to use in assessing the qualifications of candidates so, by default, the ability to be elected becomes the primary qualification of an American president.

An Unlikely President

2006-11-23T17:12:00.000-08:00

Herbert Clark Hoover is one of our unlikeliest presidents. There is nothing in his childhood or his young manhood to indicate the slightest interest in holding high political national office. He was born to a Quaker couple in the small Iowa town of West Branch in 1874. Jesse and Hulda Hoover were hard-working and thrifty and their prosperity increased satisfactorily. From owning and operating a blacksmith shop, Jesse was able to open a farm implement store. The family (Bert, his older brother and younger sister) moved to a spacious two-story brick home and seemed to be set for a happy life. Then, when Bert was 6, Jesse died.

Hulda took in a boarder and did sewing to earn money. By raising a large vegetable garden she was able to keep her family together. Four years later Hulda died. Bert was ten. The children were split up and Bert was sent to live with his mother’s brother, Dr. John Minthorn, in Newberg, Oregon. Newberg was a new town, founded by Quakers, and Bert spent the rest of his childhood with the Minthorns in Oregon. He loved to camp out in the Cascade Mountains and to fish the trout streams.

He was in the pioneer class of Stanford University and always looked back on his college days with affection. He majored in geology with the intention of becoming a mining engineer and was fortunate to have one of the foremost mining engineers of the day as his teacher and mentor. He worked his way through college, doing whatever jobs came to hand or that he could devise in order to complete his course.

He met Lou Henry during his senior year at Stanford. Lou’s father was a wealthy banker who, lacking a son, had brought her up to go fishing and camping with him. She relished the outdoors and had decided to take up mining engineering, a decidedly unusual choice for a woman at the time. She was still studying at Stanford when Bert went to London to interview for a job with the English firm, Bewick, Moreing.

They wanted him to go to Australia and Bert could see that it was a marvelous opportunity so he went. He did exemplary work for the firm and found he had an amazing talent for organization. He was making a great deal of money and had arranged to have some of his salary made over to pay for college for his siblings and to help some friends with expenses and to have a big chunk put into savings. When Bewick, Moreing decided to send him to China, he wired a marriage proposal to Lou and she wired her acceptance back.

His journey to Monterey, where the Henrys lived, was by way of London so he could confer with the firm’s executives. Arriving in Monterey, he was the Henrys’ houseguest until the wedding. After the reception, Bert and Lou took the train to San Francisco and the next day they embarked on a ship to China. Again, Bert’s work was exemplary and his salary and commissions rose to what were fabulous sums for the time. He was 27 when he was made a partner in Bewick, Moreing.

Bert’s first involvement in national politics came in 1914 when, with no official standing at all, he helped Americans stranded in Europe to return home when World War I broke out. His successful efforts were brought to the attention of President Wilson, who appointed him to various famine relief efforts. In 1919, Bert headed the American Relief Administration and saved millions from starvation in 21 countries. Presidents Harding and Coolidge appointed Bert as Secretary of Commerce and in 1928 he was elected President.

It’s an unlikely trajectory for a mining engineer who showed no signs of wanting to be a politician for the first forty years of his life.

The Kindness of a Stranger

2006-11-06T05:50:00.000-08:00

Over the past thirteen years, I have come to hate my commute from Columbia, Maryland to Dupont Circle, Washington, D.C. I drive Highway 95 South to Greenbelt and take the Metro from there. It takes nearly two hours each way, when everything runs right, which is seldom. Sometimes my fellow beings get on my nerves until I’d like to scream in their faces. Only, I know that I would get arrested and probably spend the night in jail. I don’t know why some of the people who scream in my ear don’t get arrested.

But sometimes people are unexpectedly kind and it’s rather shocking to encounter kindness on my commute. An incident this morning reminded me of how kind people sometimes are. I was reading a book on the train and nearly missed my change-of-trains from the Green Line to the Red Line at Fort Totten. I just made it out the door before it slammed shut. I was so elated at making it – then I saw that three or four people were looking at me through the window and pointing at the seat I had just left. Dismay flooded through me as I realized that my right hand held only the book. My tote bag was in my left hand and my purse should have been in my right. I’d left it on the train and the train was gone.

If you have ever lost your purse or your wallet, you know how I felt at that moment. What to do? It only took a moment to skim over my accusations of self-stupidity – the book wasn’t even that good – and assess the probability that one of those people who pointed out that I’d left my purse would turn it in at the next stop, Georgia Avenue -- Petworth. Sure enough, the attendant there had the purse. After we settled the question of identity, all of which evidence was in the purse, of course, he handed it over and I embraced it gladly, uttering copious thanks. I took the next train back to Fort Totten, changed trains successfully, and didn’t miss my stop at Dupont Circle.

Someone (for some reason, I am quite sure the kindness was the work of a young Black woman who was sitting by the window) took the time and trouble to scoop up my purse and take it up to the kiosk to the attendant. It wasn’t an arduous task but it was one more hassle in a stranger’s day that she didn’t have to undertake. After all, it was nothing to her if I lost my purse. She might quite justifiably have felt that if I couldn’t be bothered to hang onto my belongings, she was not obliged to pick up after me. I am grateful that she decided to give me a break this morning. I wish I knew her name and address so I could send her a thank you note, at least. As it is, all I can do is repeat her kindness when the opportunities arise.

The Scarlet Letter Rerun

2006-10-05T10:43:00.000-07:00

I’ve been listening to a pop psychologist during one leg of my commute lately – just half an hour or so on the way home. She can be very annoying the way she cuts people off and quite possibly misses the real point of their calls. But, then, people tend to ramble on, giving way too much background and/or whiny self-justification. I often agree with the advice this woman dispenses, especially when women complain about their husbands. I am all for acknowledging that women have rights equal to the rights of men. However, I do not countenance women usurping the rights of men or subjecting them to emotional abuse. What I see on the TV sitcoms is truly abhorrent in the way the women denigrate the men and browbeat them into believing that to be male is to be wrong. This is not reasonable behavior and it is reprehensible to show it on every sitcom every week, knowing, as we do, that children will accept what they see on TV as the norm for behavior. There is no value to our society in the emotional crippling of men any more than there is in the emotional crippling of women. So far I’m with the doc.

Where I part company with her is when she advises people to throw the children away. She gives lip service to the ideal that children are precious and deserve our best efforts in rearing them but all too often she gives advice that is counter to this ideal. For instance, yesterday she took a call from a woman whose unmarried daughter had just given birth and wanted to come back to live with her, bringing the baby and her boyfriend, who happened to be a parolee. The doc’s instantaneous advice was, “No way.” The daughter had made her bed and must lie in it. If she couldn’t take care of the baby, she was to give the baby up for adoption. She was to take responsibility for her own life and her mother was not to rescue her anymore.

There are several assumptions that underlie this advice that deserve a closer look. First, the fact that the boyfriend is a parolee does not necessarily mean that he cannot be or become a good citizen. Must we all shun parolees so that they can never associate with any but other parolees – which by the way, it’s against the law for parolees to associate with each other – and never have a chance to re-enter mainstream society? Are the rest of us, the ones who are not on parole, really that much better? I think a little reflection will show us that a bit of compassion might be in order. If it appears that this parolee is not yet ready to shoulder his responsibilities, then by all means, cast him into the outer darkness. But leave an opening so he can have a relationship with his child if that should be feasible.

Secondly, the doc in question is the mother of a son but evidently not the mother of a daughter. In my admittedly limited experience, having had only one daughter and one mother, the mother-daughter tie is very strong. Even in situations of great emotional tension, the bond is tight. It is not the work of a moment to sever this tie and tell a daughter to take her baby and go to the devil if she must but don’t come home. That would certainly teach the daughter something about responsibility but are there no other lessons to be learned in this situation? Perhaps the mother could learn something about giving and receiving. Perhaps the daughter could learn something about gratitude and a love that surpasses human understanding. Perhaps the baby could learn something about mothers standing together to protect each other and their own.

If this mother takes the advice and disallows her daughter and grandchild to take refuge with her, I predict dire consequences for all three. The mother will suffer guilt of an intensity that will at times make her wish she were dead. The daughter will sink into poverty and suffer the torment of not being able to feed and shelter her child adequately. There is a host of possible outcomes, most of which are painful. Few of the happy possible outcomes are likely. It is extremely doubtful that she will give her baby to adoptive parents, which means that the baby will probably live in poverty and deprivation and will quite possibly never be able to pull herself out of it.

Thirdly, if the daughter should allow her child to be adopted, what makes this psychologist think the child will automatically live a life of middle-class affluence with two loving parents? Adoptive parents are not necessarily better at parenting than birth parents. They are screened for income levels and criminal records but there is much more to good parenting than those considerations. Most adoptive parents are loving and most adopted children live good lives with them. But it isn’t automatic. Death, divorce, bankruptcy, job loss, mental illness, disease, and accident can happen to any family. And every parent has psychological quirks to some degree that children must learn to live with. It is a rare and fortunate child who leaves childhood without some emotional scarring inflicted by faulty parenting.

The most important consideration is spiritual. I do not believe that life on Earth is meant for us to live the most selfish and hedonistic lives that we can manage to create for ourselves. I believe that we are entitled to comfort and even happiness and that we should work toward those goals. But we are not individual units, who should be working for our own good irrespective of our fellows. We are interconnected and we must work for our communal good. When our children stumble, even if they are grown up, we help them regain their balance. When our parents stumble, we reach out a steadying hand. When our neighbors stumble, we work together to smooth the way.

It is imperative for our own spiritual good that we practice humility and realize that as our faults have been forgiven by our parents, children, and spouses, we must forgive their faults. If theirs are different from ours, even if we think they are so much worse than ours, we must remain compassionate and seek to help, not withdraw into self-righteousness and refuse to help lest we seem to condone sin. It may be hard, it may seem futile, it may cost us terribly in money, time, and frustration. The golden rule must be honored. Above all, we mustn’t turn our children and grandchildren away from our homes and our love. What good is a home if it doesn’t shelter our loved ones? What’s the point of love if we refuse it to our own?

The I.Q. of an Ant

2006-09-27T06:18:00.000-07:00

Modern American humankind considers itself at the top of the evolutionary intelligence tree, so to speak, and scientists attribute that to the size of our brains. The average modern human brain is a few cubic centimeters larger than Neanderthal, Australopithecus, or any other known human predecessor, so scientists have based their perceived superiority on brain size. Aside from the fact that there is no correlation between modern human brain size and intelligence (a tiny human is not necessarily less intelligent than a huge one; a five-year-old is not necessarily less intelligent than a twenty-year-old), it only takes a couple of minutes to survey the world to demolish that theory. For instance, I’ll bet elephants have a larger brain than humans. Of course, they may be more intelligent, too, but we are only at the edge of beginning to think seriously about commonalities among humans and other life forms.

My attention was first brought to the subject of animal intelligence when I lived on my farm in Oregon and I was amused and bemused by the actions of horses, chickens, ducks, pigs, cats, and Sassy, the border collie. But I didn’t really think about the subject until two simultaneous events. My daughter became an animal rights activist and I observed a colony of ants in Burbank, California. My daughter told me way more than I ever wanted to know about animals’ reactions to negative human actions toward them and for two years I walked past the ants on my way to catch the bus home from work. At that time there was a strip of grass with trees and vendor kiosks instead of a street for a couple of blocks and the ants lived across the sidewalk from a bakery. The sidewalk was brick cobbles with roundish tops so that the mortar was like a sunken road to the ants.

The ants went in a steady stream to the bakery shop and back again. They walked in the sunken road. Once in a while I would see an individual or two on top of the cobbles but the overwhelming majority stayed on their road. How did they know it was dangerous to walk on the cobbles? How did they know they would be safe on their road? They must have some concept of danger and safety. That means that they must have some concept of death and life.

I was sure that the bakery and the cobbles hadn’t been there long enough for the ants to develop an instinctive fear of walking on the cobbles. Then there must be some sort of intelligence functioning. I’m a little hazy on insect anatomy but if ants have brains, surely they can’t be much more than a few neurons. Yet here’s a whole colony of them with intelligence enough to recognize the danger of traffic and to circumvent it. This is much more than a great many humans have shown themselves capable of.

A TV documentary that showed some ants in Africa who use mud to roof their trail up a tree trunk confirmed my assessment of ant intelligence. The roof protects them from the predation of birds and other insects. Then I learned a little about how ants construct their colonies; go to war; and how they control herds of aphids, actually milking them for ant food. Scientists attribute these behaviors to something called “instinct,” which is “hard-wired” in the brain. Whatever that means. The fact is, animals are intelligent and they respond to problems in creative, imaginative ways that illustrate some of the concepts and understandings of phenomena that undergird their actions.

Now, if ants can do all that with a few neurons, brain size cannot be the reason for humankind’s perceived intellectual superiority. We’d have to have a brain the size of a baby blimp in order to match the ants’ intelligence.

Technologically Unclean

2006-09-22T04:55:00.000-07:00

Technology. We hear the word everywhere. Mostly with the adjective, “new,” attached. We have new technologies for just about everything. There are technologically “smart” bombs and kitchen appliances and I understand that smart highways are in development to save us from our poor driving skills. I recently saw a TV ad for a computerized toothbrush. I’m not sure exactly how the computer is supposed to help you brush your teeth but I suppose there is some kind of theory behind it. Quite possibly, the theory is based on the technical know-how involved in separating you from your money.

My point about technology is that it is ubiquitous. I don’t even need to know how to spell “ubiquitous.” If I get reasonably close, the technology installed on my computer will give me the correct spelling. Grammar is another issue, but the computer is very good with spelling. Given all these smarts, why is medical care in this country all too often about on a par with the practices of a hundred and sixty years ago? Until the middle of the nineteenth century, western medicine knew little or nothing of asepsis. Then it was discovered and demonstrated that sterilizing instruments and washing the hands of doctors dramatically reduced the number of deaths from infection. Whereupon, the doctors promptly declined to practice techniques of asepsis on the ground that it was damned nonsense, as everyone knew that infection was caused by miasma. Medical students refused to wash their hands because it impinged on their academic freedom.

The evidence for asepsis continued to accumulate and the profession was finally forced to acknowledge that their spurning of basic sanitation was killing their patients. That led to the creation of the elaborate rituals of sterilization and cleansing that are now practiced by our medical personnel. Or are they?

Annually, two million cases of infection are caused by the administration of health care in U.S. hospitals. 90,000 of those cases result in death. Those figures are from the website of the government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, URL: http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/hip/prevention_week.html.
An article on the website of CBS News, Healthwatch, URL: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/07/20/health/main515755.shtml,
gives an even grimmer picture of cases of death by infections caused in hospital health care. The reasons for these dreadful numbers stem from a lack of cleanliness in hospitals and among health care workers, including many doctors and nurses. We have been taught from early childhood to wash our hands, yet there are still large numbers of doctors and nurses who do not practice this simple, life-saving routine as they move among their patients, thus carrying infection from one hapless individual to another. We know that asepsis is imperative in even the most minor surgery, yet doctors often use instruments or operating rooms where the asepsis is compromised. Medical devices are often insufficiently cleaned and sterilized, for instance, underwater birthing units and dialysis machines. Too, tap water is sometimes used instead of sterile water, adding another risk factor to treatment.

Housekeeping staff in hospitals and other health care facilities are insufficiently trained and cleaning tools are no better than they were two hundred years ago. Mop buckets are still in use and cleaning staff still dip the mop into filthy water and slather it over the floors. Hospitals are required by law to undergo accreditation and 75% of them have been cited for being insufficiently clean. The technology and techniques for actually cleaning, rather than merely moving the dirt, bacteria, and viruses around, are in the early development stages. We need “smart” cleaning devices but almost anything would be an improvement over that bucket of filthy mop water.

It is not that health care professionals don’t know how to achieve asepsis. They are all trained in the techniques of sterilization and they are all taught the possible consequences of contamination. It is not that they don’t know that large numbers of people are being infected and that many of their patients die of those infections while in their care in hospitals and other health care facilities. So, if it isn’t ignorance that produces these infections and deaths, it must be indifference. There is no question that most, if not all, of these infections and deaths are preventable. There is no question that doctors and nurses could wash their hands and could change the way their facilities are cleaned and sterilized, if they cared to make the effort. Since they don’t make the effort, one is led to the logical conclusion that they don’t care.

Under the law, indifference to suffering and death is depraved. Depraved indifference to the value of human life is murder and people can be indicted for it.

The Freedom to Pursue Happiness

2006-09-09T18:25:00.000-07:00

The Declaration of Independence states that all American citizens possess the right to the pursuit of happiness. That’s all it says. It doesn’t guarantee happiness to each of us. It doesn’t define happiness. It doesn’t provide a map to happiness. The implication is that each citizen will pursue his or her own happiness, defined to fit him or her individually, in his or her own way. The federal government – elected officials, appointees, and professional bureaucrats – in their ever-increasing thirst for power, have taken it upon themselves to provide happiness to our entire population.

As far as I know, no legally sanctioned definition of happiness has been formulated. There does exist, however, an ipso facto definition. It is ephemeral, is not written down, and is unacknowledged. We know it exists because of the steps taken to impose it upon each of us. The government takes our money and uses it, and a monstrous federal debt, to impose happiness upon us. If this unofficial definition of happiness was written down, it would look something like this (I cannot, fortunately, speak or write fluent bureaucratese).

Happiness consists of:
Ø Life, except when the government thinks a criminal has lived long enough or when a fetus is inconvenient or an industry needs cannon fodder to protect its interests overseas.
Ø Liberty, except when it gets in the way of federal government goals.
Ø Equality, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the entitlements congress mandates.
Ø Suffrage, as long as the Electoral College has the final say and not the voters.
Ø Food, but let’s not get radical and let farmers decide what to grow and then allow them to sell their produce in an open market.
Ø Medical care is so important that many decisions concerning individuals’ medical care must be taken, not by medical personnel or the individual, but by insurance and/or government bureaucrats.
Ø Education for all. In fact, a college degree is so important that standards must be lowered so that everyone who wants one can have one. In addition, recognizing that young people must sow their wild oats, let’s not penalize them by requiring them to learn much of anything in order to get their degrees.
Ø Transportation. Efficient transportation is not necessary to happiness. What is necessary is lots of pavement. If it takes longer to get from Point A to Point B by modern transportation than it took by horse and buggy, there are good and cogent reasons. The point is that we have a modern system of interstate highways with the finest engineering in the world in both road-building and auto manufacturing. If you spend your time sitting in your car on a freeway that looks like a parking lot, maybe you should consider using public transportation.
Ø Office work is central to happiness. Each of us yearns, from the time we are tiny tots, to spend the greater portion of our waking hours in a cubicle in a building as far removed from Nature as it’s possible to get. No one with any sense would want to get their hands dirty or experience any elements – sunshine, rain, fresh air – ewwwww.
Ø Money, lots of money is of paramount importance in achieving happiness. Only money in great quantities can confer real happiness. That’s why the tax laws are written to favor the rich. They are already happy and nothing must disturb their happiness.
Ø Freedom of speech makes for happiness, except when it’s libelous or slanderous, or threatens the peace of the realm, or might give the impression that you disagree with the government position on some point, which might incite our enemies to attack us. In order to avert such abuses, the government must exercise ceaseless vigilance by tapping your phone and bugging your home or office. But if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. Right?
Ø Freedom of religion is a great happiness contributor. In this great nation of ours we are free to practice any faith we like. Of course, if you practice one of the religions that make the government nervous, you might come under some kind of scrutiny by one of those alphabetical agencies but it won’t be because of the religion you practice, it will be because of the threat you pose to national security.
Ø Access to the arts is so important that tax money must be used to support them. In fact, the arts are so important that even when they constitute crimes of hate they are sacrosanct. You want to use human excrement as finger paint on a rendering of a religious icon? No problem. Not only will the government pay you to do so, it will protect you from the consequences of your hate crime. That’s freedom of speech. You want to put a cross up on a hill where it will be visible to an entire town? Sorry, that would violate the religious freedom of non-Christians.

Uncle Sam, I love you, but please let me define my own happiness and pursue it in my own way. I don’t want to hurt your feelings and I know you have only my happiness at heart but the truth is, you are becoming rather intrusive.

JFK Nearly Takes the Count

2006-08-23T13:56:00.000-07:00

Three months before his third birthday Jack Kennedy came down with scarlet fever. There wasn't much the medical profession could do for him; it was 1920 and there were no antibiotics to help him fight it. His mother had just given birth to his second little sister, Kathleen, and had Joe, Jr. and Rosemary to look after, as well. Scarlet fever is highly contagious and in those days it was often fatal. His parents were frantic to get Jack away from the other children and to get him such medical treatment as was available. The only nearby hospital that would take scarlet fever patients was already overcrowded and anyway, the Kennedys didn't live where they would be eligible to send Jack there. His maternal grandfather, Honey Fitz, came to the rescue and used his influence to get the boy admitted.

The hospital staff placed Jack in isolation and when the doctors and nurses cared for him, they wore masks. His mother couldn't visit him for fear of carrying the disease back to the other children and the baby. His nanny couldn't visit him for the same reason. His father left work a little early every day and stopped to see him and sit beside his bed for a while. Jack was very sick. He was so sick that he nearly died. After a month he began to get just a little better. He gradually got stronger and healthier and after another month his parents decided he was well enough to leave the hospital. So they hired a trained nurse, another stranger, and sent Jack with her to Maine, where the fresh, brisk, pure air would bring the roses back to his little cheeks. After two weeks in Maine he was deemed well enough to go home.

I've not seen much made of this event in the biographies of John Fitzgerald Kennedy but surely it merits close attention. Such a small boy to be sent to spend two months in a strange place where the strange people -- who didn't even have faces, just eyes that peered at him over white cloths -- did strange things to him. Besides his extremely young age, there was the fever that kept him from seeing anything clearly or being able to assess his situation realistically. The only familiar thing in this weird new world was his father who came to sit with him every evening. Many barbs have been flung at Joe Kennedy, some of which were deserved, but he was the only constant in Jack's life and he was there when literally no one else was. Biographers sometimes profess themselves at a loss to explain Jack's loyalty to his father. I see nothing puzzling about it.

Abigail Adams, Femme Formidable

2006-08-18T04:49:00.000-07:00

Abigail Adams went to France when John was there as a minister of the new United States of America. She was a middle-aged, provincial housewife and mother of three sons and a daughter. During John's many and prolonged absences, she managed the farm, raised the children, and worried about her husband and her marriage. Although she knew herself to be a very intelligent and capable woman, she also knew she was provincial. She was afraid that John would fall prey to a cosmopolitan beauty and/or find her too mundane to be interesting.

At the time of the revolution, farming in Massachusetts was very hard work. John reveled in it and gave it up as his primary livelihood only at his father's insistence. He went reluctantly to Harvard and, to his surprise, found that he liked intellectual work almost as much as farming. Abigail enjoyed intellectual pursuits, too, but she was kept at home by the customs of the time and the demands of child rearing.

Thus, John and their son, John Quincy, were in France attending the theatre, the opera, concerts, and all the socializing of the diplomatic corps. They traveled to England and to Holland. Johnny even went to Russia with the first U.S. Ambassador to the Court of Catherine the Great. John was making history, doing important work for the new nation, arranging loans for fabulous sums, crafting treaties of enormous portent. John and Johnny lived in a mansion with servants to wait on them. They wore fine clothes, ate dainty meals, and drank fine wines. They had become cosmopolitan.

Abigail and their daughter, Nabby, lived in a farmhouse and did all the housework themselves. In addition, Abigail directed the hired man in plowing and planting and harvesting. She raised her two younger sons and supervised their schooling. She cooked and preserved food for the winter. She bartered the surplus and often bargained with dressmaker's pins to obtain necessities because actual money was in short supply. She farmed with oxen and had to make sure there was sufficient fodder to see them through the winter. She had to make sure that the oxen and other farm animals were well kept and healthy. Abigail had to know every detail of the farm work, no matter how dirty or disagreeable, and she had to be prepared to do most of the chores herself, if necessary. As for entertainment and socializing, she visited back and forth with her sisters and went to church.

Now imagine this woman dropped suddenly into the maelstrom of French society. Lafayette and his wife made the Adams family welcome and introduced them to many of the nobility. He even obtained for them an invitation to the christening of the Dauphin, the son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Into the Catholic Cathedral of Notre Dame, with its rich furnishings and royal splendor of voluptuous fabrics and exquisite fashions, comes Puritan Abigail Adams, fresh from a little colonial backwater.

She was equal to the challenge. She adjusted quickly to her new environment and soon had the hang of court manners and customs, at least enough to be comfortable among the diplomats and their families. Truly, our Founding Mothers are to be admired and revered along with their more famous spouses. They are gutsy ladies.

Civilization, or Not

2006-08-15T05:02:00.000-07:00

Civilization, or Not. Most citizens of the United States consider that with us/US, civilization has reached its highest peak. Many consider that it has progressed as far as possible and that any further developments must necessarily be regressive. Civilization, to modern Americans, means consumer goods more than anything else. I am not speaking of academia, but of the citizenry in general. We are accustomed to denigrate every culture that does not have or does not value designer clothing, automobiles, atomic weapons, television, video games, personal computers, and those cheaply built, expensive to buy homes known as "McMansions."

When Americans think of other cultures, either contemporary or historical or prehistorical, their principal concern is for the lack of material goods. Underlying that is a smug arrogance in the knowledge that "we" have come so far and "they" have not. We call them third world or second rate powers or cave men, secure in the knowledge that we are so much better off than they are or were. Yet the passionate resistance of Autralian Aborigines, American Indians, and Iraqi Arabs to accepting our way of life for themselves ought to give us pause. Is our way better than theirs?

Take cave men, for instance. Research now shows us that the people who lived as hunter gatherers lived longer, healthier lives than those who first settled down to farm. The farmers lived longer, healthier lives than those who first lived in cities. There is a reason that our early presidents and their colleagues preferred to live on their farms most of the year and only live in New York or Washington, D.C. for brief periods. Their farms were more pleasant, more healthful places to live. Those trapped in the cities have defended themselves by portraying farmers and other rural residents as bumpkins, ignorant country people with buck teeth and limited intelligence. This is merely a self-protective ploy designed to hide the fact of their own less desirable accommodations.

There is another consideration in the contemplation of our denigration of the savages of the neolithic period. We are so puffed up with our own cleverness that "we" claim the credit for inventing nearly everything. Stainless steel cooking utensils, computers, literature, accounting practices, architecture, crop irrigation, animal husbandry, the Mona Lisa. Yet, consider how little any one of us knows about any of these things, all of which are rooted in prehistory, invented by those despised cave men and women. Each of these builds on what went before and all can be traced many millenia back, some as far back as paleolithic times. All have obvious roots in prehistory, except the computer. But Stonehenge is a computer. It is constructed so that certain stones align with specific astronomical events -- the solstices, among others -- so that these events become predictable by using the smaller "bluestones" to keep count. Anyone who has seen the paintings at Lascaux can readily see that it is the precursor of all great art since.

How many of us, vaunted children of civilization, can even comprehend how our technology functions, much less reproduce it? We have to have specially trained technicians and engineers in order to keep our infrastructure going. Most of us cannot even deal with our own plumbing fixtures, much less build a bridge, a skyscraper, or a tipi. We feel extremely superior to those cave men and women but in reality we are no more knowledgeable than they as to how our civilization works. Most of us don't even know where to find food, aside from grocery stores and restaurants. Cave men would find us pathetically ignorant, incapable of sustaining life without major contributions from people we disdain.

What we call civilization and are so proud of is merely consumerism constructed on the backs of the few who know how to make things work and the even fewer who know how to exploit us all.

The Nature of Worship

2006-08-06T06:15:00.000-07:00

The word "worship" puzzled me for years. My birth family was not particularly religious and I only remember going to church once with my mother. But I used to go to church with my friends. One Sunday I would be with the Mormons, another with the Presbyterians, then with the Baptists. I never went to the Catholic Church, I guess I didn't have any Catholic friends. I had the desire to worship but I had no idea how to do it. As I got older, I thought about it and remained puzzled. I couldn't see that prayer -- asking for peace, hearts open to love, an end to a famine half a world away -- constituted worship. The hymns were possibly worshipful, some of them at any rate, but I couldn't see why God would need people to tell him "How Great Thou Art." The sermons I heard were certainly not worshipful. Mostly they were all about people and how we could make ourselves acceptable to God. They mostly seemed irrelevant to me. Churches were called houses of worship but I couldn't see the connection. Gradually, I lost interest in church services.

Well into adulthood I discovered Edgar Cayce's work. This was spiritual, this was about God. I was excited. I joined the A.R.E. and read and studied diligently. Finally, one day I ran across a reading that said worship consists of being kind to one another. The Golden Rule. I was astounded! That's worship? I thought about it. Yes, that's worship. People are God's creatures. He gave us free will so that we might be companions to him. Without free will, we wouldn't be much better than robots. With free will, with the power to make our own choices, we would be worthy of His companionship. He gives us guidance, if we choose to accept it, but He doesn't force us.

God is a god of love, therefore, He takes no pleasure in the pain we inflict on one another. He does not enjoy suffering and death. Thus the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It sounds so simple but it is very complex. It is much more than refraining from doing harm, it implies the doing of good. If you were starving, you would want someone to feed you. If you were homeless, you would want someone to take you in. If you were in a six-car pileup on the freeway, you would want someone to pull you to safety and tend your injuries. If you were confused and distraught, you would want someone to soothe you and help you understand.

Worship isn't always hard. In fact, it's usually very easy. Worship is taking your dog for a walk; changing your infant's diaper; showing your child the stars and pointing out the constellations; giving your seat on the subway to an elderly person; holding the door for another to enter; putting a dollar in a beggar's hand; cooking a meal for your family. Sometimes worship is refraining from doing something: not passing along a juicy bit of gossip; not losing your temper when your child disobeys you for the sixteenth time today; not laughing at someone else's embarrassment; not running over that silly squirrel who stopped in the middle of the street right in front of your car.

Anything and everything that we do for other people and animals (we are all God's creatures) is the worship of God. Church has much to offer, even many opportunities for worshipping God, but most of those opportunities arise outside of church, simply because such a small portion of our time is spent in church. Opportunities for worship are all around us, at home, at work, on the commute, among family, among friends, among strangers. Thank you, Lord.

The Uninhabited American Wilderness

2006-07-25T19:39:00.000-07:00

This is the anniversary year of Lewis & Clark's trek to the Pacific. They jumped off in Missouri (but the river has changed course so the jumping off place is now in Illinois) and set out into the wilderness. They wintered in one of the Mandan towns on the Missouri River. Wait a minute! They were in the wilderness, where did this town come from? Oh, that's right, it's an Indian town so it doesn't count.

It's very convenient for historians to talk about "the wilderness" as if the Americas were totally uninhabited by people when Europeans discovered them. Historians talk about land grants given by the various European kings as if those kings had a right to make the grants. The truth is, no one in Europe, not even the Pope, had any right to give away so much as a foot of American ground. The tribes had a different way of thinking about land and the right of occupancy. Most of them, maybe all of them, did not use the concept of land ownership. They warred over various rights to use the land, such as for towns and villages and even cities, and for hunting, farming, and sacred places, but they didn't claim to own the land.

A book I was reading recently remarked that when the Lincolns settled in Indiana, the "Indians were still prowling around the edges of the settlements." That certainly trivializes the Indians and their claims to the land. Displaced people often try to return to their land, especially when they have been driven away unjustly. The truth is that the Indians outfought the Europeans and the Americans in nearly every engagement as tribe by tribe they were pushed out of their homes. They out-parleyed Europeans and Americans, too, having a rich tradition of oratory to live up to. But they couldn't outnumber them. Indians believed that it was irresponsible for a man to father more children than he could provide for. Europeans and Americans, with their broods of ten to twenty children, had no such compunction.

Indians, broadly speaking, are a kind-hearted, hospitable people. The record, as preserved in the early colonists' and settlers' letters, reports, books, and diaries, is full of stories of the Indians' compassion and generosity. These same sources relate how as soon as the Indians' help had brought the colonists and settlers through their first few seasons and they were strong enough, they turned on their preservers and took everything they had. Their homes, their fields, their children, and often their lives. In the early days the children (and their parents) were sold into slavery, in the latter days the children were sent to boarding schools to teach them to hate their race and culture.

Abe Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, was wise and compassionate and caring about his fellow man. Yet, being brought up on stories of the settlers' battles with the Indians, he was unable to apply logic to Euro-American/Indian relations. His grandfather was killed by Indians. One day he was out in his field with his three sons, one of whom was Abe's father, when Indians came and killed him. For whatever reason, they did not harm the boys. Abe wrote that the Indians had committed a wanton act of murder on a man who was only trying to make a living for his family. He had no feeling at all or thoughts to spare for the Indian fathers who were only trying to make livings for their families before the Lincolns stole their land and made them homeless.

It is difficult to write history that encompasses all viewpoints. It is relatively easy to write from a Euro-American point of view and ignore great swathes of Indian interactions. For instance, even in writing about the French and Indian War, historians usually portray it as essentially a French and English war with each European power supported by Indian allies. Only rarely does the Indian point of view intrude and then usually it's given a completely negative spin. But this war was vital to a number of tribes and the outcome meant literally life or death to a great many Indians, noncombatants as well as warriors.

It is time to write history in a way that encompasses all U.S. citizens. It's hard but it's not that hard. Europeans write history to include all their tribes, well nearly all. The English trivialize and largely ignore the Welsh and other survivors of the Roman conquest but they include the German principalities and France and Belgium and Bohemia and many others in their histories. There's no reason American history cannot be written to encompass not only the various European colonists but the Wampanoag, Sioux, Hupa, Modoc, Inuit, and all the other tribes. Historians should also write about the various African tribal members who were sent to America. Quite a lot is known about these people in Africa and in America but the information is in specialized histories. It needs to be incorporated into the "American History" mainstream. So, too, the Aztec and Mayan and other Central American people who have played various roles in North American history. The Chinese immigrants who played such a large and unheralded part in the west should not be relegated to obscure little monographs but should be included in the mainstream histories. All of these people are still in America; all are citizens; all are contributing to our common culture and economy. We need to write our story inclusively.

Ike Strikes Out

2006-07-20T09:46:00.000-07:00

Eisenhower's interstate highway system is fifty years old now, in 2006. AAA magazine had an article all about how our prosperity dates from the completion of the system and how wonderful it is that we can all move so quickly from place to place. I guess no one at AAA has a commute similar to mine. I travel from Columbia, Maryland to Washington, D.C. every weekday. It's exactly 30 miles from door to door, home to work, and it takes an average of 1 hour and 40 minutes. There are various ways to make this commute and driving the whole distance is usually faster than my average but there's no place to put the car in D.C. for less than about $12 to $15 a day. The nearest parking facility to my office would involve a ride on the Metro. It prices me out of the driving option. So I drive the first 20 miles, park at the Greenbelt Metro Station, and take the train the rest of the way.

The truth is, the interstate has not added that much to the quality of life in these United States. Ike first got the idea in 1916 when he was in a motorized army convoy that crossed the continent. Roads were bad for cars and trucks, which weren't all that common yet, and there was no direct route from east to west, just a jumble of local routes that sometimes linked together. The idea of an interstate system was reinforced for Ike during World War II. Lacking broad, hard-surfaced, connecting roads in Europe, the army had problems getting men and materiel to the places they were needed as quickly as they needed to get them there. Cogitating on all that, Ike could see what would happen if this country were ever invaded. Clearly, we needed a system of superhighways that could move the military in straight lines from where it was to where it was needed. In the time-honored way of old soldiers, Ike prepared to fight the last war. In the fifties he instituted construction of a system that would have been very useful in an earlier decade on another continent. America's next major war would be fought in Southeast Asia, mostly with airplanes and helicopters on our side and with bicycles on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

This interstate system has cost us dearly. Not only in the billions of dollars it cost to construct but in the billions it continues to cost to maintain it. Moving our goods by truck on the interstate is far more expensive than moving them by rail. Trucking companies keep trying to legalize the addition of a third trailer to the usual semi rig of tractor and two trailers. What they want is a train because trains are more efficient. But trains are not compatible with automobiles and motorcycles on the same roadbed.

Actually, the railroad was beset by the unions and the government simultaneously and that's what gave impetus to the switch from trains to trucks for moving goods. The railroads went from coal to deisel, putting firemen out of work. The union insisted that deisel engines carry and pay firemen anyway. This was called "featherbedding." In the wrangling and as one thing led to another, the trucking industry blossomed and the railroads withered. The glamour that little boys once saw in trainmen was now given to truckers. We pay more for our goods now because it costs more to cart them around by truck, both in direct costs and in tax dollars to keep repairing the damage those heavy loads wreak on the roadways.

The most costly damage the interstate system has wrought is psychological. Americans have been brainwashed to believe that owning and using a car is normal and usual. That is somehow confers freedom -- "the freedom of the open road." It's been quite a long time since I've seen an open road. As for any kind of freedom in bumper-to-bumper traffic moving at 75 mph -- well, to me it feels more like some kind of macabre trap that it takes a great deal of skill to escape. We used to have a system of buses and streetcars that let people travel reasonably comfortably at low cost and reasonably convenient times. Those have been largely discontinued in favor of each of us driving his or her own vehicle. Think what you could do with the money you would save by not owning a car. Personally, I would save about $700 a year in insurance and nearly $3,000 in gas, oil, and routine maintenance. Then there's the cost of the car itself.

But we've been snookered into living lives in which individual cars are pretty much necessary. Everything we need is out of our walking distance radius. We spend our Saturdays driving to various stores after spending our weekdays commuting and driving our children to various activities. What a lovely thing it would be if we could use all that time for something else or, better yet, nothing.

All this isn't going to change anytime soon. And we're not going to give up on forcing those stubborn people in the Middle East to sell us their oil cheaply, either, no matter how much it costs in lives and integrity and money.

Bullshit, Not Knowledge, Is Power

2006-07-12T04:44:00.000-07:00

Knowledge is power. Really? No, not in mainstream American culture. Knowledge has been replaced by bullshit: bullshit is power.

People care less and less about knowledge and more and more about bullshit. It is no longer necessary to know anything in order to get a good job and/or make lots of money. Listening to the professors on the various "nonfiction" TV channels, such as Discovery and National Geographic, I sometimes wonder if they found their degrees in cereal boxes. Not that I think all professors are crackpots, I have great respect for learning and teaching. But I wonder what the ones who are not learned are teaching.

A while back there was a program recounting the adventures of some professor who persuaded someone or some entity to pay him or her to resolve the question of who was buried in Jesse James' grave. There has never been any serious question as to who is buried there. Photographs were taken of the outlaw lying in the casket and the casket was buried and a headstone marked Jesse James was placed on the grave. When the casket was dug up and opened, the remains in question were compared with the photographs. Sure enough, the bones were the same size as Jesse's, the remnants of clothing were consistent with Jesse's, and a tie tack was the same as the one in the photograph. The conclusion: the remains in the casket in Jesse James' grave were those of Jesse James. Big surprise. But the main point is, there was never the slightest reason to expend funds on this exhumation. The question was not even a real question; the professor just wanted to dig up an infamous outlaw. Complete bullshit.

Some weeks ago I read an article written by a newly graduated college man. In it he talked about the freedom that ignorance confers. His point was that if you know nothing about a subject, you are free to write anything you want to about it. He said he often used that technique in writing college papers and as long as he remembered to use some of the relevant professor's pet words and phrases he received high marks. Pure bullshit.

The purest bullshit, of course, comes from Congress. It always has and I suppose it always will. Knowing the current president's War for Iraqi Freedom to be bullshit, senators and congresspersons nevertheless continue to vote for it. Some of them spout off in public about the wrongness of the war and its prosecution but they continue to vote the president's way. Knowing that Homeland Security is wasting billions of dollars and seriously curtailing American freedoms without adding to our security, they continue to vote for it. Knowing that it's completely sentimental and stupid to rebuild New Orleans on its present site, and knowing that billions of dollars are being wasted in the process, our elected senators and congresspersons continue to vote funds for the purpose.

Bullshit is not a new phenomenon. As far back as words have been recorded, a significant number of those words have been bullshit. But there are so many of us now and we have such easy access to the written word, the spoken word, and the pictures that are worth a thousand words each, that it's easy for the bullshit to overwhelm the real.

Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son

2006-07-09T18:46:00.000-07:00

I'm writing a book about the presidents of the United States, specifically, how they were educated. Or not. There are a lot of interesting facts about these guys, most of which will not be in my book. For one thing, I'm only covering them up to the age of 25 or until they acquire a Ph.D., whichever comes first. For another thing, I decided arbitrarily not to delve into their sex lives because there is just too much it's impossible to know about them. Besides which, I'm naturally a modest kind of person and I think people are entitled to a modicum of privacy, even presidents.

I particularly dislike so-called biographies that purport to explain a person's psychological structure and to trace in his or her upbringing the incidents that later cause this or that behavior. There's a recent biography of John Quincy Adams that absolutely pulverizes his mother. No parent is perfect but I doubt if any basically decent mother, which Abigail Adams certainly was, could or would inflict such damage on a child as that writer claims.

With two presidents, the Adams family was very interesting to research. First John as a son and his upbringing and education, then John as father to John Quincy and how he raised and educated his son. Both Adams presidents are very interesting and I found John particularly engaging.

You can tell when a professor is the author of a biography because they always argue with one another. Instead of stating the facts, they tell what some other professor said and explain why that's wrong. Maybe this is necessary in scholarly papers but it strikes me as just plain silly for the most part.

When one delves into another person's life, rooting around, trying to understand the forces that shaped him and how he molded himself, one gets to feel that one knows that person quite well. Often I become fond of the young man who will be president some day and now and then I take quite a dislike to one of them. Then it becomes my job to watch myself that I don't skew the facts to reinforce my own feelings. For instance, I really like George Washington. I find him a very admirable kind of young man. He's flawed but he's working on it and in the end he is a very mature, sensible, honorable man.

Then there's Thomas Jefferson. I started out admiring Tom and ended up detesting him. I was rather dismayed and had to hunt for the reason my feeling for him changed. It's because he never developed his character. He remained emotionally infantile to the end of his days. Intellectually brilliant and basically kind-hearted, he nevertheless neglected to look honestly at his own behavior and correct his faults. His ego was so overdeveloped that he became adept at twisting what he wanted to believe into something he could believe. He was intellectually dishonest. Tom, Tom, the Piper's son, stole a pig and away he run...

Life in the Slow Lane

2006-07-08T17:50:00.000-07:00

It was a wonderful day today. Not too hot this morning and I was out and about early enough to enjoy an hour in the park before it got too populous and too noisy. My grandmother used to like to sit out in her garden in the early morning and I thought she was a few bubbles off plumb because of it but I'm getting to an age when I see where the enjoyment is. It's calm and quiet -- the neighbors aren't up yelling at their kids yet and the kids aren't out screaming while they play. The birds are flitting and chirping and the squirrels are scampering.

Life in the city -- actually in a bedroom community -- is about as I pictured it when I lived on the farm and felt sorry for people who had to live in the city. I work in Washington, D.C. and live in Columbia, Maryland and I never, ever, in my whole previous 49 years expected it. I expected to live out my life on my farm and the prospect was exceedingly pleasant. I loved being a housewife and raising the kids and watching the crops grow and the seasons change. There wasn't much excitement but there was lots of satisfaction and contentment. I spent a great many winter days curled up in front of the fireplace with a good book. There was enough work but seldom so much that I felt much pressure.

Actually, living in the city isn't exciting, either. It's annoying, irritating, stressful, and aggravating. I spend nearly two hours commuting in the morning and an equal amount of time coming home in the evening. "The Commute" is probably the worst feature of my current life. So any day that begins with quiet time in the park is a real treat. This morning I saw a cardinal, which is always a thrill. I didn't really believe in cardinals until one day I saw one flying. I thought pictures of cardinals had been enhanced because I didn't know birds could be that red. I saw some squirrels spiraling up and down the tree trunks, their bushy gray tails looking sassy. There were ducks and swans swimming languidly on the pond. Ducks are entertaining to watch and swans are mesmerizing in their beauty and grace. I saw a cottontail rabbit, too. Just a tiny little one, nibbling in the grass, his little ears sticking up and his little nose twitching busily. So cute. For an hour life was serene and almost natural.

Can She Bake a Cherry Pie, Billy Boy?

2006-07-05T15:29:00.000-07:00

I've been on vacation for six days and I'm ready to go back to work. It's hot! I have an air conditioner but I don't use it because it impacts my husband adversely. It also impacts my checkbook adversely. Thank goodness it cooled off some today because I do not deal well with heat. Odd how some people thrive at temperatures in the nineties and even low hundreds while I simply wilt when it gets to the mid-eighties. This was supposed to be a working vacation. Working at my writing and publishing business while vacationing from my day job. It's been very hard to get much work done because I've been so dad-blamed hot. Still I did get the stories on hand posted on my website. I run a contest for short stories and essays. If you're a reader or a writer, check it out: http://www.joyouspub.com. People have been sending some very good pieces in.

I also baked a cherry pie. I bake so seldom these days that it took half a day. I made the crust with butter and it was so hot that I had a real problem keeping the dough together to line the pie pan and put the top on. It looks like nothing on earth but it tastes fine. Sad to say, that's about the extent of my cooking for the last five days.

Frankly, my dear...

2006-07-02T18:12:00.000-07:00

Blogging seems to me rather an odd phenomenon. Why should people who are not in the public eye want to read about other people who are also not in the public eye? Maybe it's some kind of voyeuristic impulse. In any case, I'm hoping to connect with people who are interested in what I have to say and/or the way I say it. I seldom watch or read the news because it makes me angry more often than not. I seldom watch any movie released later than about 1980 or listen to any music (except country) released later than about 1975. Quite a lot of country music has the energy and beat of early rock 'n' roll but I can't listen to music that has no melody and lyrics are screamed instead of sang. In many ways I live my life in a retro sort of way and I would be happy if I could turn back the clock to the middle of the 1950s. Not that the fifties were any happier but I was a kid then and I was happier. I will say, though, that the fifties were handsomer and prettier. Movie stars were good to look at, movie sets were usually attractively decorated, and women's clothes were pretty. It was possible to listen to a love song and feel that love was possible, if not actually present. Comedy could be funny without being ugly. Comics could actually make people laugh without using a single expletive. Ordinary people felt comfortable making their own fashion choices without having to wear a stranger's name on the outside of their garments to validate themselves. I think, really, that is the most pervasive indicator of our cultural bankruptcy in the U.S. today -- that so many people feel the need to wear "designer" labels on the outside of their clothing. It's really pathetic.

Let George Do It

2006-07-01T15:48:00.000-07:00

I'm new to blogging but I have quite a lot to say. For openers, I'm reading a book about George Washington. There is so much tripe written about him that it's easy to lose sight of the amazingly remarkable man that he was. He, more than anyone else and more than the constitution, shaped the office of president. Some patriots wanted to make the office a kingship but George wanted it to be a presidency. As this biographer noted, all of the rest of the presidents have been respected because of the office but the office is respected because of Washington. Even Jefferson had to admit that Washington was incorruptible. Washington is the only president who did not campaign for the office and honestly didn't want it. He was afraid that it would tarnish his image as Commander-in-Chief of the Revolulionary War. But he accepted because he could see he was needed. It's said that Martha lost her temper with George only once and it was when he told her that he was going to be president for a second term. They both wanted to go home to Mount Vernon but for George duty would always come before his personal preferences.

If you are interested in what else I have to say, check out my website: www.joyouspub.com