I have been listening to all the furor over the compromise tax proposal reached by the President and the Republican leadership, and I think a lot of people are misinformed.
What did the Republicans want? They wanted to extend all the Bush tax cuts and make them permanent. They wanted to let all the Obama tax cuts lapse. They wanted to repeal the estate tax permanently, and they were reluctant to extend unemployment benefits beyond a few months and without finding spending cuts specifically intended to pay for them.
What did the Democrats want? They wanted to extend only the tax cuts for the middle class and only until the economy has recovered enough that a tax increase would put it into a tailspin. They wanted to continue the Obama tax cuts for at least another year in hopes the economy will recover enough that letting them lapse wouldn't send it into a tailspin. They wanted to extend unemployment benefits, including creating a "tier" to help the "99-ers" who have been unemployed for so long.
What did each side get?
Both sides got the extension of the Bush tax cuts for the bottom 98% of the populace.
The Republicans got the extension of the tax cuts for the top 2% of the populace. They got the lapse of the "Pay to Work" bonus for low-income people who have jobs. They got a reduction in the estate tax from 55% to 35% and an increase in the exemption to $5 million.
The Democrats got the extension of all the Obama tax cuts except "Pay to Work." They got the 2% reduction in the FICA deduction from people's paychecks, which will only partially make up for the loss of the "Pay to Work" tax credit for folks making under $20,000. They got the extension of the unemployment benefits for 13 months, so we don't have to fight over that for at least a year.
Frankly, that looks like a pretty good tradeoff to me. The Republicans got a $130 billion benefit for the super wealthy, while the Democrats got $770 million for the middle class and unemployed -- and part of that will be paide for by the extra revenue that will be coming in from the estate tax.
The only major drawback I see is that all this is going to be deficit spending. Part of me cringes at that thought. Part of me says, so what? The tax breaks for the middle class will keep this recovery chugging along, and the extra 2% in everyone's paycheck will stimulate the economy, as will the unemployment benefits. Getting the economy back on a steady footing is more important than worrying about the debt we're running up.
The people who scream loudest about the deficit and the debt are always talking about the percentage of GDP it represents. They think it would be terrible for the debt to be greater than our GDP, but my family has more debt than our household's income. What is im portant is that we're spending that extra debt on something that benefits us in the short term as well as the long term. Most of it, in other words, is the mortgage on our house.
I look at it this way. The government has income, in the form of taxes and fees it collects. What is happening right now, is that we've had some crises that have forced us to borrow more than we'd like. (We've also been living beyond our means in other ways, too. for the past decade.) Like a family that has faced a major illness or the loss of a home to fire, we can come back from that crisis once it's over. But it's not over yet.
The federal government doesn't have a "house" to mortgage, but it does have resources that could be sold to pay off the debt. While I don't want to see Yellowstone or the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve on the block, I feel confident that their value and the value of other land the federal government owns would cover what we owe. More important, I believe that in the long run the government will be able to pay down the debt we're running up.
But I don't believe that now is the time to tighten our belts. I hope the furious legislators will improve the deal rather than reject it entirely. We need the stimulus it represents.
And I think President Obama deserves some credit for getting the Republicans to bend as far as they did.
Saturday, December 11, 2010
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Fighting Viruses
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I received an e-mail today from a political friend asking for help in answering a viral e-mail she had received. It was all about health care, and it started out so ridiculously that I have to pass it on.
It seems the writer believes that Natasha Richardson died because she was not med-evaced out of the ski area where she received the head injury that killed her. In actuality, Ms. Richardson was taken to a clinic immediately after the injury and refused to be taken to a nearby hospital for further tests to make sure her injury was not life-threatening.
When further symptoms made it clear that she should have taken the doctors’ advice, an ambulance was called, and the emergency medical technicians worked on her while she was driven to the hospital, a trip that took less than 15 minutes. Unfortunately, the swelling of her brain had caused damage that was irreversible.
Now, the e-mailer was using this tragedy as a jumping-off point to rail against health care reform, specifically Obama’s health care reform. If Ms. Richardson had been injured in America, the writer opines, she would still be alive because the U.S. has a superior health care system – including med-evac helicopters. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.
Later, the writer says that Obama wants to change the American health care system to be just like Canada’s and England’s. Unfortunately, she seems unaware that Canada and England have very different health care systems. Canada’s is a single-payer system, where providers are private but apply to the government for payment of fees for services. England’s is a national health system where doctors are employees of the government.
As I describe the e-mail, you may think that it requires no response, because it is so weak. Unfortunately, that is not true. These viral e-mails circulate back and forth across the Internet, sometimes morphing into truly hateful messages that accuse Democrats of total irresponsibility, if not corruption.
It takes time to write a response – or even to find the one you wrote before and modify it to fit the version of the e-mail you’re receiving this time, but it is very important that all Democrats learn the truth and “fight such bad speech with good speech.” If we remain silent, the people who receive these e-mails assumes they are true.
The e-mails are generally written by cutting and pasting from rightwing bloggers and websites, often mixing apples and oranges. Of course, no sources are provided for the assertions. You have to do the research yourself to find out where the stories come from so that you can fashion a rejoinder. But sometimes you’ll receive one that is so cleverly put together, mixing half-truths with whole lies to twist the mind of the reader, that it probably was not written by a private individual. Those are the ones that are truly viral.
Someone once said that you could have your own interpretation of the facts, but you couldn’t have your own facts. That is no longer the case. The extremes on each side not only pick and choose what information they will trumpet, but they make up information, if it fits their purposes, regardless of the truth.
What does it say about our society that there are people out there who willfully refuse to accept the truth of a situation? And what more does it say about us that there are people who make a living – often a very good living – misleading others in this way?
Nothing good.
.
I received an e-mail today from a political friend asking for help in answering a viral e-mail she had received. It was all about health care, and it started out so ridiculously that I have to pass it on.
It seems the writer believes that Natasha Richardson died because she was not med-evaced out of the ski area where she received the head injury that killed her. In actuality, Ms. Richardson was taken to a clinic immediately after the injury and refused to be taken to a nearby hospital for further tests to make sure her injury was not life-threatening.
When further symptoms made it clear that she should have taken the doctors’ advice, an ambulance was called, and the emergency medical technicians worked on her while she was driven to the hospital, a trip that took less than 15 minutes. Unfortunately, the swelling of her brain had caused damage that was irreversible.
Now, the e-mailer was using this tragedy as a jumping-off point to rail against health care reform, specifically Obama’s health care reform. If Ms. Richardson had been injured in America, the writer opines, she would still be alive because the U.S. has a superior health care system – including med-evac helicopters. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.
Later, the writer says that Obama wants to change the American health care system to be just like Canada’s and England’s. Unfortunately, she seems unaware that Canada and England have very different health care systems. Canada’s is a single-payer system, where providers are private but apply to the government for payment of fees for services. England’s is a national health system where doctors are employees of the government.
As I describe the e-mail, you may think that it requires no response, because it is so weak. Unfortunately, that is not true. These viral e-mails circulate back and forth across the Internet, sometimes morphing into truly hateful messages that accuse Democrats of total irresponsibility, if not corruption.
It takes time to write a response – or even to find the one you wrote before and modify it to fit the version of the e-mail you’re receiving this time, but it is very important that all Democrats learn the truth and “fight such bad speech with good speech.” If we remain silent, the people who receive these e-mails assumes they are true.
The e-mails are generally written by cutting and pasting from rightwing bloggers and websites, often mixing apples and oranges. Of course, no sources are provided for the assertions. You have to do the research yourself to find out where the stories come from so that you can fashion a rejoinder. But sometimes you’ll receive one that is so cleverly put together, mixing half-truths with whole lies to twist the mind of the reader, that it probably was not written by a private individual. Those are the ones that are truly viral.
Someone once said that you could have your own interpretation of the facts, but you couldn’t have your own facts. That is no longer the case. The extremes on each side not only pick and choose what information they will trumpet, but they make up information, if it fits their purposes, regardless of the truth.
What does it say about our society that there are people out there who willfully refuse to accept the truth of a situation? And what more does it say about us that there are people who make a living – often a very good living – misleading others in this way?
Nothing good.
.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Going Home
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They say you can’t go home again, but I’m about to prove them wrong for the umpteenth time: I’m heading for Nevada, Missouri, to visit my mother for a few days.
I do this about a dozen times a year now. Mother is eighty, and I worry about her. Not as much as I used to, however, because she now has a boyfriend, Bill, who takes her out to lunch every day and helps her run the few errands that occupy her time. And my brother lives with her. Even though he works long hours, I know that if anything were to happen, he would be there, eventually.
So, I really go back because I enjoy her company and because the visits are so pleasant. I don’t have to feel responsible for anything while I’m there, although I try to do the dishes a few times and help her some with the notebooks she is assembling about the lives of my father and the two brothers who never had families to collect their mementoes.
But I don’t go back to visit my hometown. I have almost no interest in Nevada. I didn’t have much when I lived there. I was always intent on getting old enough so that I could go to college and get out of there. That’s such a common thread running through so many teenagers’ lives.
Now I wish I had been less dismissive of the community activities that mark the passage of the years in a town like Nevada. I never participated in the Little Miss Bushwhacker Days contest; I never entered anything into the County Fair contests; I never even read the newspaper.
Part of that was because I had so few friends to draw me into such activities. I was always the odd duck, the girl everyone thought was stuck-up, when I was really only a peculiar sort of shy. As one of five children, I didn’t miss having friends much and so I never learned how to make them. I had my brothers and sisters to pal around with – at least until my older brother and sister went off to college. Then I was left with two brothers years behind me, who didn’t really want to have much to do with a sister.
So I have no friends there to catch up with. The most I do is ride around the square and try to remember which stores have closed and opened since the last time I was there. My husband actually does a better job of that. He is more observant than I am, and he remembers what he notices. So he tells me what has changed, and I say, “Really?” and nod like I’m interested.
But I do notice what has changed in Mother’s world, and I am interested in her news, even though so many of our conversations repeat themselves. How my sister, Sharon, doesn’t listen to her and acts like she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. How Sharon’s sons are struggling with their finances and what Mother has done to help them out. What funny things the great-nieces and great-nephews have said recently and how they are doing in school or pre-school.
It’s comforting to know that some things never change, that home is still home and will be until Mother’s gone. At which point I won’t be able to go there any more.
-------------
While I'm in Nevada, I won't have access to e-mail, so no blog from me until Saturday.
.
They say you can’t go home again, but I’m about to prove them wrong for the umpteenth time: I’m heading for Nevada, Missouri, to visit my mother for a few days.
I do this about a dozen times a year now. Mother is eighty, and I worry about her. Not as much as I used to, however, because she now has a boyfriend, Bill, who takes her out to lunch every day and helps her run the few errands that occupy her time. And my brother lives with her. Even though he works long hours, I know that if anything were to happen, he would be there, eventually.
So, I really go back because I enjoy her company and because the visits are so pleasant. I don’t have to feel responsible for anything while I’m there, although I try to do the dishes a few times and help her some with the notebooks she is assembling about the lives of my father and the two brothers who never had families to collect their mementoes.
But I don’t go back to visit my hometown. I have almost no interest in Nevada. I didn’t have much when I lived there. I was always intent on getting old enough so that I could go to college and get out of there. That’s such a common thread running through so many teenagers’ lives.
Now I wish I had been less dismissive of the community activities that mark the passage of the years in a town like Nevada. I never participated in the Little Miss Bushwhacker Days contest; I never entered anything into the County Fair contests; I never even read the newspaper.
Part of that was because I had so few friends to draw me into such activities. I was always the odd duck, the girl everyone thought was stuck-up, when I was really only a peculiar sort of shy. As one of five children, I didn’t miss having friends much and so I never learned how to make them. I had my brothers and sisters to pal around with – at least until my older brother and sister went off to college. Then I was left with two brothers years behind me, who didn’t really want to have much to do with a sister.
So I have no friends there to catch up with. The most I do is ride around the square and try to remember which stores have closed and opened since the last time I was there. My husband actually does a better job of that. He is more observant than I am, and he remembers what he notices. So he tells me what has changed, and I say, “Really?” and nod like I’m interested.
But I do notice what has changed in Mother’s world, and I am interested in her news, even though so many of our conversations repeat themselves. How my sister, Sharon, doesn’t listen to her and acts like she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. How Sharon’s sons are struggling with their finances and what Mother has done to help them out. What funny things the great-nieces and great-nephews have said recently and how they are doing in school or pre-school.
It’s comforting to know that some things never change, that home is still home and will be until Mother’s gone. At which point I won’t be able to go there any more.
-------------
While I'm in Nevada, I won't have access to e-mail, so no blog from me until Saturday.
.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Real Health Care Reform
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We’ve heard a great deal lately about health care reform, but that isn’t what they’re really talking about. They’re talking about health care insurance reform. In other words, how do we get everyone covered by some form of health insurance so that they will have access to the health care system we already have?
Well, I’m not particularly in favor of that. I’d rather see us reform the health care system so that we can afford to give proper health care to everyone for far less money. Whether the health care insurance industry is involved, indeed, whether it even survives that reform, I don’t care. I want a system where a sick child can be taken to see a health care professional to make sure that the cold the child is suffering from isn’t pneumonia and doesn’t turn into pneumonia. And the same for the adult with bronchitis.
Lowering the cost of health insurance won’t get us to that point, because all health insurance involves co-pays and deductibles, which very poor people can’t afford. It does us no good to limit individual payments for a doctor’s visit to $25 each if the sick person can’t even afford a co-pay of $5.
Personally, I think the only reasonable route is to institute a system of free health clinics, run not by doctors but by nurse practitioners, in neighborhoods that need service, and supported directly by tax dollars. This is the backbone of the system in England, and it works pretty well for them.
The clinics act as a triage filter, treating the sniffles, even setting broken bones, but sending the pneumonias to a “real” doctor and the shattered ulnas to the emergency rooms. That frees the doctors from being overwhelmed by patients whom they don’t need to see and allows local hospitals to maintain emergency rooms for the good of people who face real medical emergencies.
I’ve grossly oversimplified this, of course, and I know that this basic idea would be far more difficult to implement than just renting storefronts and hiring nurse-practitioners, but I can’t think of any other system that really reforms the medical system we have today, which rations care to those who can afford to pay for it while encouraging doctors to prescribe unnecessary laboratory tests and computer imagings because the doctor gets a kickback – or even owns the lab or the machinery outright.
But the people in Washington are not talking about any such reform to the medical system. They’re just talking about reforming the way we pay for a system that is broken. In my opinion, that will be a waste of taxpayer dollars.
.
We’ve heard a great deal lately about health care reform, but that isn’t what they’re really talking about. They’re talking about health care insurance reform. In other words, how do we get everyone covered by some form of health insurance so that they will have access to the health care system we already have?
Well, I’m not particularly in favor of that. I’d rather see us reform the health care system so that we can afford to give proper health care to everyone for far less money. Whether the health care insurance industry is involved, indeed, whether it even survives that reform, I don’t care. I want a system where a sick child can be taken to see a health care professional to make sure that the cold the child is suffering from isn’t pneumonia and doesn’t turn into pneumonia. And the same for the adult with bronchitis.
Lowering the cost of health insurance won’t get us to that point, because all health insurance involves co-pays and deductibles, which very poor people can’t afford. It does us no good to limit individual payments for a doctor’s visit to $25 each if the sick person can’t even afford a co-pay of $5.
Personally, I think the only reasonable route is to institute a system of free health clinics, run not by doctors but by nurse practitioners, in neighborhoods that need service, and supported directly by tax dollars. This is the backbone of the system in England, and it works pretty well for them.
The clinics act as a triage filter, treating the sniffles, even setting broken bones, but sending the pneumonias to a “real” doctor and the shattered ulnas to the emergency rooms. That frees the doctors from being overwhelmed by patients whom they don’t need to see and allows local hospitals to maintain emergency rooms for the good of people who face real medical emergencies.
I’ve grossly oversimplified this, of course, and I know that this basic idea would be far more difficult to implement than just renting storefronts and hiring nurse-practitioners, but I can’t think of any other system that really reforms the medical system we have today, which rations care to those who can afford to pay for it while encouraging doctors to prescribe unnecessary laboratory tests and computer imagings because the doctor gets a kickback – or even owns the lab or the machinery outright.
But the people in Washington are not talking about any such reform to the medical system. They’re just talking about reforming the way we pay for a system that is broken. In my opinion, that will be a waste of taxpayer dollars.
.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Transfer of Power
.
Watch what happens in Iran over the course of the next few days – and compare it to what happened in Florida in November and December 2000.
In the United States, a disputed election meant lawsuits and people poring over ballots with other people leaning over their shoulders. In Iran, a disputed election has alredy meant clashes between young people and the police. Here, we called about 30 people in a corridor a “riot.” There, the police have raised translucent shields and are chasing looters up and down the streets.
The peaceful transfer of power from one leader to another is one of the primary hallmarks of civilization. The methods developed in Britain and the United States have been copied all over the world. Britain arrived at its method after centuries of uprisings any time a ruler died or aroused the ire of the populace. We arrived at our method after only eight years of the failed Articles of Confederation and less than twenty years of the Continental Congress.
Only once did the election of a President cause armed conflict (and that might have been avoided had the South not forced the issue). This is a blessing we take for granted.
One half of this country will continue to believe that Albert Gore was cheated in 2000; the other half will continue to believe that election fraud was narrowly averted. In the next few days, we will see what Florida could have been if either half had adhered less to the rule of law and surrendered more to the passions of the moment.
.
Watch what happens in Iran over the course of the next few days – and compare it to what happened in Florida in November and December 2000.
In the United States, a disputed election meant lawsuits and people poring over ballots with other people leaning over their shoulders. In Iran, a disputed election has alredy meant clashes between young people and the police. Here, we called about 30 people in a corridor a “riot.” There, the police have raised translucent shields and are chasing looters up and down the streets.
The peaceful transfer of power from one leader to another is one of the primary hallmarks of civilization. The methods developed in Britain and the United States have been copied all over the world. Britain arrived at its method after centuries of uprisings any time a ruler died or aroused the ire of the populace. We arrived at our method after only eight years of the failed Articles of Confederation and less than twenty years of the Continental Congress.
Only once did the election of a President cause armed conflict (and that might have been avoided had the South not forced the issue). This is a blessing we take for granted.
One half of this country will continue to believe that Albert Gore was cheated in 2000; the other half will continue to believe that election fraud was narrowly averted. In the next few days, we will see what Florida could have been if either half had adhered less to the rule of law and surrendered more to the passions of the moment.
.
Friday, June 12, 2009
A New Couch?
.
We need a new couch.
We've needed a new couch for a long time. Years, even. In the past, we never had the money when we had the time to look, and vice versa. Now we have the money and we could easily find the time, but . . .
My husband works for a company that sells services to newspapers. The newspaper industry is dying. None of his company's customers appears to be in danger, but . . .
So we're holding off on buying that couch or making any other major investment until such time as the dust settles and we know where we are and what we'll need, to keep us where we want to be.
Unfortunately, a lot of people are doing what we're doing, and it isn't doing the economy any good.
That is the biggest irony of our economic situation: to get the economy out of its rut, we need to consume; to get our personal finances under control, we need to save.
Our household has decided to follow Isaac Newton's advice: moderation in all things.
We're going out to eat less, not making unnecessary trips in the car, using our ceiling fans more and leaving the thermostat at its energy-efficient, computer-controlled level more often. But at the same time, we're not switching to the store brand on items where brand means something to us, not haunting the thrift stores looking for bargains, not walking to the grocery store that is less that five blocks away (but on the other side of Tyler Road).
Whenever I have to make a financial decision, no matter how small, I find myself thinking of this balancing act. Should I save a few pennies or should I help the economy? It's kind of corny, but I believe, no, I know that the future of the country rests on all those little, everyday choices.
So what do you think? Should we buy that couch, after all?
.
We need a new couch.
We've needed a new couch for a long time. Years, even. In the past, we never had the money when we had the time to look, and vice versa. Now we have the money and we could easily find the time, but . . .
My husband works for a company that sells services to newspapers. The newspaper industry is dying. None of his company's customers appears to be in danger, but . . .
So we're holding off on buying that couch or making any other major investment until such time as the dust settles and we know where we are and what we'll need, to keep us where we want to be.
Unfortunately, a lot of people are doing what we're doing, and it isn't doing the economy any good.
That is the biggest irony of our economic situation: to get the economy out of its rut, we need to consume; to get our personal finances under control, we need to save.
Our household has decided to follow Isaac Newton's advice: moderation in all things.
We're going out to eat less, not making unnecessary trips in the car, using our ceiling fans more and leaving the thermostat at its energy-efficient, computer-controlled level more often. But at the same time, we're not switching to the store brand on items where brand means something to us, not haunting the thrift stores looking for bargains, not walking to the grocery store that is less that five blocks away (but on the other side of Tyler Road).
Whenever I have to make a financial decision, no matter how small, I find myself thinking of this balancing act. Should I save a few pennies or should I help the economy? It's kind of corny, but I believe, no, I know that the future of the country rests on all those little, everyday choices.
So what do you think? Should we buy that couch, after all?
.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Confronting the Hate
.
I have a nephew who was a Holocaust denier. May still be.
My sister's boy Eric was indoctrinated in that hatefulness by one of his high school teachers. My father tried to counteract it by taking him out to hear the stories of a friend who helped liberate one of the death camps. I don't think Eric was convinced. If he had been, I don't think my father would have told me the story.
I've never asked Eric about it. If he still holds those opinions, I don't want to know. I don't know him well, and I'm not sure I like him. But he's family, and I really don't want to have any reason to like him less. Besides, there's no point in being confrontational with someone I see at most twice a year -- is there?
My ambivalence probably mirrors the reaction of most of us to racial hatred. We don't want to know that our neighbor, our co-worker, our friend is a racist. So we shy away from discussing the issue until the other person has given us some sign of where they stand. Then we either relax or tighten up completely, depending. The result is that the quiet haters, the ones who give aid and comfort to the violent ones, are rarely confronted with the truth.
James von Brunn is one of the violent ones. He appears to be an equal-opportunity hater -- against Jews, Catholics, blacks, Hispanics, and government employees. He isn't happy with the world as it is, and he is willing to take matters into his own hands to change it, no matter the cost -- to him or to others.
Haven't we seen enough of that lately? I wonder if he realizes that he is a comrade-in-arms of the suicide bombers who kill our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. But fanatics rarely have true self-awareness.
Maybe I'll bring that up at Thanksgiving dinner this year.
.
I have a nephew who was a Holocaust denier. May still be.
My sister's boy Eric was indoctrinated in that hatefulness by one of his high school teachers. My father tried to counteract it by taking him out to hear the stories of a friend who helped liberate one of the death camps. I don't think Eric was convinced. If he had been, I don't think my father would have told me the story.
I've never asked Eric about it. If he still holds those opinions, I don't want to know. I don't know him well, and I'm not sure I like him. But he's family, and I really don't want to have any reason to like him less. Besides, there's no point in being confrontational with someone I see at most twice a year -- is there?
My ambivalence probably mirrors the reaction of most of us to racial hatred. We don't want to know that our neighbor, our co-worker, our friend is a racist. So we shy away from discussing the issue until the other person has given us some sign of where they stand. Then we either relax or tighten up completely, depending. The result is that the quiet haters, the ones who give aid and comfort to the violent ones, are rarely confronted with the truth.
James von Brunn is one of the violent ones. He appears to be an equal-opportunity hater -- against Jews, Catholics, blacks, Hispanics, and government employees. He isn't happy with the world as it is, and he is willing to take matters into his own hands to change it, no matter the cost -- to him or to others.
Haven't we seen enough of that lately? I wonder if he realizes that he is a comrade-in-arms of the suicide bombers who kill our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. But fanatics rarely have true self-awareness.
Maybe I'll bring that up at Thanksgiving dinner this year.
.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Political Dilemma
.
Last week, I began walking door-to-door in my precinct, and I finally met someone I have been hearing about all my political life: A Democrat registered as a Republican so that she can vote in Republican primaries.
I was told about such people when I first became active in Democratic politics in 1988 in Somerset County, New Jersey. Somerset County at that time was the third richest county in the country. It was home to estates owned by Jacqueline Onassis, the king of Morocco, and Malcolm Forbes, among others.
There had been no Democratic member of the County Board of Chosen Freeholders since the days of Lyndon Johnson. Most of the state legislators from the districts including part of the county were Republicans, and the two Democrats were anti-choice and fairly conservative. Both of them were replaced by Republicans during the time I was active.
In other words, the Republican candidate on the ballot in November was sure to be the winner of the race. The only voters who had a say in who would be their representative at the county or state level were the people who voted in the Republican primary. Many Democrats, we were told, registered as Republicans in order to vote in those primaries.
But I never met one, probably because I didn't do a lot of door-to-door canvassing. It was something everyone there pooh-poohed as old hat, no longer effective. The secret to winning elections at that level, they thought, was to send out more and better mailings, which meant more and better fundraising.
Obviously, many Democratic candidates here in Sedgwick County have proven them wrong. For example, in 2006, Terry McLachlan was out-spent by his opponent, but he walked his district, identified his voters, and mobilized them to turn out and vote. He won by 51 votes. Terry was ill during the 2008 election and couldn't walk as much. He lost by 52 votes. It is said that Raj Goyle walked his district three times in 2006 and he beat Bonnie Huy by a large margin.
But what to do about this woman who was registered as a Republican but voted Democratic? I will mark the information in my part of the database provided by the state party so that the eventual candidate in my district will know to treat her as a Democrat, but that begs a larger question. If there is a Republican primary in my state house or senate district, do I want her to vote for the candidate I think will be the better legislator or do I want her to vote for the candidate who will be easier for the Democratic candidate to beat in the general election?
In some cases, the answer to those questions will be the same person. The person who holds the opinions close to mine will be the person that Republican voters will be less invested in and therefore will be less likely to turn out for, meaning that high Democratic turnout will be able to beat low Republican turnout.
But in other cases, the opposite will be true. The person easier to beat will be the more conservative candidate, because he or she is too far "out there" and will turn off all but the most ardent Republicans. A good example would be a candidate from the John Birch Society. The other candidate, however, although still staunchly conservative, might make decisions from a perspective closer to the middle, but not close enough to be decisions I want to see coming from my legislator.
Do I want her to vote for the John Bircher, giving the Democratic candidate a better chance of winning? Or do I want her to vote for the more rational conservative, keeping the John Bircher out of the running but making it more difficult for the Democratic candidate to win?
In other words, do I want her to vote like a moderate Republican or like a Democratic spoiler? I don't know, which is one reason I'm not a registered Republican.
What would you do?
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Last week, I began walking door-to-door in my precinct, and I finally met someone I have been hearing about all my political life: A Democrat registered as a Republican so that she can vote in Republican primaries.
I was told about such people when I first became active in Democratic politics in 1988 in Somerset County, New Jersey. Somerset County at that time was the third richest county in the country. It was home to estates owned by Jacqueline Onassis, the king of Morocco, and Malcolm Forbes, among others.
There had been no Democratic member of the County Board of Chosen Freeholders since the days of Lyndon Johnson. Most of the state legislators from the districts including part of the county were Republicans, and the two Democrats were anti-choice and fairly conservative. Both of them were replaced by Republicans during the time I was active.
In other words, the Republican candidate on the ballot in November was sure to be the winner of the race. The only voters who had a say in who would be their representative at the county or state level were the people who voted in the Republican primary. Many Democrats, we were told, registered as Republicans in order to vote in those primaries.
But I never met one, probably because I didn't do a lot of door-to-door canvassing. It was something everyone there pooh-poohed as old hat, no longer effective. The secret to winning elections at that level, they thought, was to send out more and better mailings, which meant more and better fundraising.
Obviously, many Democratic candidates here in Sedgwick County have proven them wrong. For example, in 2006, Terry McLachlan was out-spent by his opponent, but he walked his district, identified his voters, and mobilized them to turn out and vote. He won by 51 votes. Terry was ill during the 2008 election and couldn't walk as much. He lost by 52 votes. It is said that Raj Goyle walked his district three times in 2006 and he beat Bonnie Huy by a large margin.
But what to do about this woman who was registered as a Republican but voted Democratic? I will mark the information in my part of the database provided by the state party so that the eventual candidate in my district will know to treat her as a Democrat, but that begs a larger question. If there is a Republican primary in my state house or senate district, do I want her to vote for the candidate I think will be the better legislator or do I want her to vote for the candidate who will be easier for the Democratic candidate to beat in the general election?
In some cases, the answer to those questions will be the same person. The person who holds the opinions close to mine will be the person that Republican voters will be less invested in and therefore will be less likely to turn out for, meaning that high Democratic turnout will be able to beat low Republican turnout.
But in other cases, the opposite will be true. The person easier to beat will be the more conservative candidate, because he or she is too far "out there" and will turn off all but the most ardent Republicans. A good example would be a candidate from the John Birch Society. The other candidate, however, although still staunchly conservative, might make decisions from a perspective closer to the middle, but not close enough to be decisions I want to see coming from my legislator.
Do I want her to vote for the John Bircher, giving the Democratic candidate a better chance of winning? Or do I want her to vote for the more rational conservative, keeping the John Bircher out of the running but making it more difficult for the Democratic candidate to win?
In other words, do I want her to vote like a moderate Republican or like a Democratic spoiler? I don't know, which is one reason I'm not a registered Republican.
What would you do?
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Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Letters and Comments
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There were a couple of nasty letters and at least one nasty comment about religion and the abortion issue in yesterday’s paper that I can’t resist responding to.
The first letter asked “Who really killed George Tiller?” and proceeded to lay the blame everywhere but where it belonged. The pro-choice movement did not kill Dr. Tiller. The anti-choice movement did. I am not saying that Operation Rescue gave the killer actual aid in terms of buying him a gun or helping to buy the gas that got him to Wichita.
But I am saying that the constant drumbeat from so many in that faction that abortion is murder and that anyone performing abortions is a murderer and that murderers should be executed and that if the government won’t execute them, then private citizens should, provided the environment that egged on the likes of Scott Roeder to do more than picket outside clinics. Don’t get me wrong, however: the killer is the one who killed Dr. Tiller and he deserves to be punished to the full extent of the law.
The second letter was in support of the National Day of Prayer and against the lawsuit that has been filed protesting that the government sponsoring such an event is a step too far over the wall separating church and state. The writer says “Atheists do not have to pray if they don’t want to and their rights should not take priority over the rights of those who do pray and follow God’s way.”
This is inside out. If the rights of atheists should not take priority, then why should the rights of the religious take priority? There is no right to hold a national day when the government urges everyone to pray. The government’s endorsement of such a day does not mean that the day cannot take place. But the government’s endorsement of such a day does mean that atheists or other non-Christians are subjected to the prayers of the Christian religion. And don’t tell me that it's not just a day of Christian prayer, that Jews and Muslims are urged to pray in their way. When was the last time you saw a non-Christian leading any of these groups in prayer?
This is like the canard that prayer is no longer allowed in schools. The proponents of school prayer are not satisfied with the right of each student to say a quiet prayer before lunch or an algebra test. They want prayer broadcast over the school’s public address system so that every child is forced to say a particular prayer at a particular time. That is not freedom of religion. That is indoctrination.
Finally, there is the caller who says, “I am tired of all the Christians being bashed because of the killing of Tiller. It had nothing to do with the Christians. It was all from the devil.”
Have you heard any commentator bashing all Christians for the murder of Dr. Tiller? I have not. Even the ones who talk about the responsibility of the extremists who advocate murder as political free speech are careful to say that these are not the views of all Christians or all anti-choice people. In fact, I think the discourse over this issue has been remarkably free of vitriol.
I am not someone who sings in the choir every Sunday, but I do believe that everyone has the right to believe as they see fit. I do not hold ardent Christians in contempt. Why do they seem determined to hold me so? People who truly live by the example of Christ are to be admired and encouraged. But people who advocate murder in the name of God are to be watched carefully and punished when their actions step over that line.
And that’s all I’m going to say about that – at least for today.
.
There were a couple of nasty letters and at least one nasty comment about religion and the abortion issue in yesterday’s paper that I can’t resist responding to.
The first letter asked “Who really killed George Tiller?” and proceeded to lay the blame everywhere but where it belonged. The pro-choice movement did not kill Dr. Tiller. The anti-choice movement did. I am not saying that Operation Rescue gave the killer actual aid in terms of buying him a gun or helping to buy the gas that got him to Wichita.
But I am saying that the constant drumbeat from so many in that faction that abortion is murder and that anyone performing abortions is a murderer and that murderers should be executed and that if the government won’t execute them, then private citizens should, provided the environment that egged on the likes of Scott Roeder to do more than picket outside clinics. Don’t get me wrong, however: the killer is the one who killed Dr. Tiller and he deserves to be punished to the full extent of the law.
The second letter was in support of the National Day of Prayer and against the lawsuit that has been filed protesting that the government sponsoring such an event is a step too far over the wall separating church and state. The writer says “Atheists do not have to pray if they don’t want to and their rights should not take priority over the rights of those who do pray and follow God’s way.”
This is inside out. If the rights of atheists should not take priority, then why should the rights of the religious take priority? There is no right to hold a national day when the government urges everyone to pray. The government’s endorsement of such a day does not mean that the day cannot take place. But the government’s endorsement of such a day does mean that atheists or other non-Christians are subjected to the prayers of the Christian religion. And don’t tell me that it's not just a day of Christian prayer, that Jews and Muslims are urged to pray in their way. When was the last time you saw a non-Christian leading any of these groups in prayer?
This is like the canard that prayer is no longer allowed in schools. The proponents of school prayer are not satisfied with the right of each student to say a quiet prayer before lunch or an algebra test. They want prayer broadcast over the school’s public address system so that every child is forced to say a particular prayer at a particular time. That is not freedom of religion. That is indoctrination.
Finally, there is the caller who says, “I am tired of all the Christians being bashed because of the killing of Tiller. It had nothing to do with the Christians. It was all from the devil.”
Have you heard any commentator bashing all Christians for the murder of Dr. Tiller? I have not. Even the ones who talk about the responsibility of the extremists who advocate murder as political free speech are careful to say that these are not the views of all Christians or all anti-choice people. In fact, I think the discourse over this issue has been remarkably free of vitriol.
I am not someone who sings in the choir every Sunday, but I do believe that everyone has the right to believe as they see fit. I do not hold ardent Christians in contempt. Why do they seem determined to hold me so? People who truly live by the example of Christ are to be admired and encouraged. But people who advocate murder in the name of God are to be watched carefully and punished when their actions step over that line.
And that’s all I’m going to say about that – at least for today.
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Thursday, June 4, 2009
The Ultimate Choice
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“I do not want – and I am sure the vast majority of Americans will agree with me – my family's lives put in jeopardy because some half-wit in government thinks that is what our Constitution requires. Such a person should be instantly fired.”
-- rick0101
That is a quote from a comment on a news story about Guantanamo and torture. It fairly leaped off the page. It is perhaps the clearest statement I’ve read of the quandary that is the American political scene today.
Do we protect our loved ones first and foremost, or do we protect the ideals that make our country great?
Our country was founded on some pretty simple ideas. We sum them up in some pretty simple phrases: All men are created equal. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Habeas Corpus. Freedom of speech, assembly, religion, the press. There are people who claim that the abrogation of any of these tenets will mean the end of civilization as we know it.
That’s until there is any credible threat to them or their families.
Perhaps that old saw that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged and a liberal is a conservative who has been arrested is really true. Tip O’Neill, after all, said that all politics are local. What’s more local than your child’s welfare?
When does the good of everyone trump the good of any one person? I suspect that we all have a different answer. And I also suspect that we won’t really know the answer until we are in a position where we’ll really need it.
.
“I do not want – and I am sure the vast majority of Americans will agree with me – my family's lives put in jeopardy because some half-wit in government thinks that is what our Constitution requires. Such a person should be instantly fired.”
-- rick0101
That is a quote from a comment on a news story about Guantanamo and torture. It fairly leaped off the page. It is perhaps the clearest statement I’ve read of the quandary that is the American political scene today.
Do we protect our loved ones first and foremost, or do we protect the ideals that make our country great?
Our country was founded on some pretty simple ideas. We sum them up in some pretty simple phrases: All men are created equal. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Habeas Corpus. Freedom of speech, assembly, religion, the press. There are people who claim that the abrogation of any of these tenets will mean the end of civilization as we know it.
That’s until there is any credible threat to them or their families.
Perhaps that old saw that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged and a liberal is a conservative who has been arrested is really true. Tip O’Neill, after all, said that all politics are local. What’s more local than your child’s welfare?
When does the good of everyone trump the good of any one person? I suspect that we all have a different answer. And I also suspect that we won’t really know the answer until we are in a position where we’ll really need it.
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Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Spaghetti Thoughts
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I spent the day tidying up my office. I organized the piles into folders, coiled some of the cords running between the various peripherals on my desktop, and recycled anything I could. I wish I could do as much for the swirling thoughts in my head. But my mental spaghetti cannot be untangled so easily.
I worry that I will give in to the despair that follows a senseless act of extremism, the sense that no matter how hard my cohorts and I struggle against adversity, there’s always a nut out there poised to do more than shoot down our arguments. The longer I am involved in politics, the more it seems that issues are never put to rest. We wrangle endlessly over the same ideas with merely incremental results.
The current campaign against the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor is a case in point. As the Senators dance the minuet of the confirmation process, the usual suspects are taking the usual positions and making the usual comments. All that has changed is the methods used as the Republicans back away from their “up or down vote” position and find nice words to say about the filibusters they decried during the confirmations of Justices Roberts and Alito.
The hypocrisy has been breathtaking. That Rush Limbaugh would have the nerve to call anyone else a racist leaves me gasping. My husband likes to say that Republicans engage in political projection, accusing Democrats of bad intentions because that is how the Republicans would act if they were in the Democrats’ position.
I think they just engage in selective memory. Dick Cheney’s recent assertion that George Tenet is to blame for the mistaken impression that Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda were allies is a good example of this. George Tenet did not cherry-pick intelligence to back up a belief he couldn’t bear to give up. Nor did he go on news show after news show to state categorically that there was such a connection.
Someone once asked me why I am a Democrat. I thought for a moment, and then replied, “Because Democrats care.” I wasn’t just thinking about Social Security, affirmative action, and welfare. I was thinking that the Democrats I have known have been concerned that what they say is both true and accurate. We not only know that life is full of nuances; we are determined to help others understand those nuances.
It is very difficult for the Democrats I know to limit themselves to sound bites and daily messages. They want what they say to make sense. They are not cynical about skirting the real story in order to tell the story they think will get them quoted in the newspapers and on TV. (This is one reason we sometimes have so much trouble winning elections.)
We don’t want to put out twisted statements that, like spaghetti, arrive tangled on the table.
.
I spent the day tidying up my office. I organized the piles into folders, coiled some of the cords running between the various peripherals on my desktop, and recycled anything I could. I wish I could do as much for the swirling thoughts in my head. But my mental spaghetti cannot be untangled so easily.
I worry that I will give in to the despair that follows a senseless act of extremism, the sense that no matter how hard my cohorts and I struggle against adversity, there’s always a nut out there poised to do more than shoot down our arguments. The longer I am involved in politics, the more it seems that issues are never put to rest. We wrangle endlessly over the same ideas with merely incremental results.
The current campaign against the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor is a case in point. As the Senators dance the minuet of the confirmation process, the usual suspects are taking the usual positions and making the usual comments. All that has changed is the methods used as the Republicans back away from their “up or down vote” position and find nice words to say about the filibusters they decried during the confirmations of Justices Roberts and Alito.
The hypocrisy has been breathtaking. That Rush Limbaugh would have the nerve to call anyone else a racist leaves me gasping. My husband likes to say that Republicans engage in political projection, accusing Democrats of bad intentions because that is how the Republicans would act if they were in the Democrats’ position.
I think they just engage in selective memory. Dick Cheney’s recent assertion that George Tenet is to blame for the mistaken impression that Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda were allies is a good example of this. George Tenet did not cherry-pick intelligence to back up a belief he couldn’t bear to give up. Nor did he go on news show after news show to state categorically that there was such a connection.
Someone once asked me why I am a Democrat. I thought for a moment, and then replied, “Because Democrats care.” I wasn’t just thinking about Social Security, affirmative action, and welfare. I was thinking that the Democrats I have known have been concerned that what they say is both true and accurate. We not only know that life is full of nuances; we are determined to help others understand those nuances.
It is very difficult for the Democrats I know to limit themselves to sound bites and daily messages. They want what they say to make sense. They are not cynical about skirting the real story in order to tell the story they think will get them quoted in the newspapers and on TV. (This is one reason we sometimes have so much trouble winning elections.)
We don’t want to put out twisted statements that, like spaghetti, arrive tangled on the table.
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Sunday, May 31, 2009
Dr. Tiller
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I didn’t really know Dr. George Tiller, but I liked him.
I spoke to him at some length once when he called to thank me for some work I was doing on the Pro Kan Do database. I was in his presence perhaps another dozen times, several of them just to hear him speak, but I could tell that he was a decent man, who thought about what he was doing and why he was doing it and did his best to do what was right.
I didn’t always agree with him on that. Third-trimester abortions bother me. I wouldn’t have one myself and would discourage anyone else from having one. But I figure that I’m not alone in those sentiments and that most of the women who have a third-trimester abortion do so for reasons more compelling than forgetting to make an appointment to end the pregnancy before the end of the second trimester.
Whatever their reasons, however, it’s their business, not mine.
That is part of where I differ with people motivated by the ideas held by the man who is now in the custody of the Wichita police. But it is only part.
The real question, of course, is how we define human life.
The other side believes that a sperm and an egg become a human being at the moment of fertilization. I don’t.
I do believe that a fetus that can survive outside the womb without heroic measures is certainly a human being. Some in the pro-choice movement would deny humanity even then, holding that the woman has the right to end her pregnancy right up to the moment she goes into labor.
Somewhere between those two moments, the fetus stops being a fetus and becomes a baby. I don’t know where that dividing line falls, and I’m willing to let each woman make that determination for herself. It’s her business, not mine – or yours.
The people who like to call themselves “pro-life” think it is their business. They think not only that the woman should not be allowed to make that decision, but that no one should. They think every pregnancy must take its course. Every life is sacred, they say.
This morning, someone who agreed with them walked up to Dr. Tiller and shot him dead as he stood in the foyer of his church.
There is no doubt that Dr. Tiller was a living human being.
I guess his life wasn’t sacred.
-------------------------
Let’s not rush to judgment.
Police have taken a suspect into custody. The media report that the evidence is compelling. But mistakes have been made in the past, and suspects are still “innocent until proven guilty” in this country.
Try to avoid talking as though this man has already been convicted.
.
I didn’t really know Dr. George Tiller, but I liked him.
I spoke to him at some length once when he called to thank me for some work I was doing on the Pro Kan Do database. I was in his presence perhaps another dozen times, several of them just to hear him speak, but I could tell that he was a decent man, who thought about what he was doing and why he was doing it and did his best to do what was right.
I didn’t always agree with him on that. Third-trimester abortions bother me. I wouldn’t have one myself and would discourage anyone else from having one. But I figure that I’m not alone in those sentiments and that most of the women who have a third-trimester abortion do so for reasons more compelling than forgetting to make an appointment to end the pregnancy before the end of the second trimester.
Whatever their reasons, however, it’s their business, not mine.
That is part of where I differ with people motivated by the ideas held by the man who is now in the custody of the Wichita police. But it is only part.
The real question, of course, is how we define human life.
The other side believes that a sperm and an egg become a human being at the moment of fertilization. I don’t.
I do believe that a fetus that can survive outside the womb without heroic measures is certainly a human being. Some in the pro-choice movement would deny humanity even then, holding that the woman has the right to end her pregnancy right up to the moment she goes into labor.
Somewhere between those two moments, the fetus stops being a fetus and becomes a baby. I don’t know where that dividing line falls, and I’m willing to let each woman make that determination for herself. It’s her business, not mine – or yours.
The people who like to call themselves “pro-life” think it is their business. They think not only that the woman should not be allowed to make that decision, but that no one should. They think every pregnancy must take its course. Every life is sacred, they say.
This morning, someone who agreed with them walked up to Dr. Tiller and shot him dead as he stood in the foyer of his church.
There is no doubt that Dr. Tiller was a living human being.
I guess his life wasn’t sacred.
-------------------------
Let’s not rush to judgment.
Police have taken a suspect into custody. The media report that the evidence is compelling. But mistakes have been made in the past, and suspects are still “innocent until proven guilty” in this country.
Try to avoid talking as though this man has already been convicted.
.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Two Enlightening Books
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I just finished reading one very interesting book and I’m about 2/3 of the way through another about the experiences of black people just before and during the Civil War.
The first book is “Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery,” by Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman. It is a refutation of the widespread belief that all slaves were malnourished, ill housed and ill clothed, and the victims of sometimes daily, brutal physical punishment.
Instead, it paints a portrait of a class of people over whom care was taken to make sure they had not only the tools they needed, including healthy bodies, to perform their duties but in some cases skills so valued that the slave became a source of income for his or her master when leased out to other plantations. The authors even prove that sometimes the slaves were allowed to keep a sizable percentage of the payment received for their services.
The second book is called “The Negro’s Civil War: How American Blacks Felt and Acted During the War for the Union,” by James M. McPherson. It is a collection of contemporary writings showing how the Civil War affected both slave and freedmen and what they were able to do to advance their case.
I’m not a scholar of the Civil War, and it is difficult for me to judge the accuracy of the portraits drawn in these books, but I find myself drawn to both arguments. It always seemed counterintuitive to me that slave owners would have abused chattel that cost them so much money and could earn them so much more. Oh, I didn’t doubt that whippings happened. There is too much evidence that they did. But whippings that disabled a slave for work just weren’t reasonable.
(Not that the authors or I want to suggest that slavery without whippings and starvation is somehow acceptable. Slavery is immoral. It never should have been allowed to come to our shores, and the United States should have followed England’s lead when they abolished it peacefully.)
I’ve never cared for the picture of black people sitting passively by, just wishing and hoping that freedom would come some day, not doing anything to better their condition, except maybe lying to get out of work. That did not comport with what I know of the human spirit. To accept that picture was to accept the canard that slaves somehow were not human.
Instead, it is in the long quotations from Civil War newspapers, private letters, and military reports that I find the indomitable black spirit that I believed was there. I believed that even when others most insisted that freedom had been handed to the slaves, that they had done little or nothing to wrest it from the hands of Confederate plantation owners.
One startling sentence with two statistics says it all: “By October 20, 1864, there were 140 Negro regiments in the Federal service with a total strength of 101,950 men.” Until I read that line, my knowledge of black service in the Civil War had begun and ended with the story told in the movie “Glory” of the Massachusetts regiment that fought so gallantly and was sacrificed so cruelly in the assault on Fort Wagner. That is only one in a litany of acts of courage and resolve by slaves who ran away to become black soldiers – and the freedmen who volunteered in droves.
The black community of today can look back on the slaves and freedmen of the Civil War era with justifiable pride. The racism rampant in that day and for a century and more since then may have dismissed blacks as somehow inferior, but we do not have to extend that error one more day into our time.
.
I just finished reading one very interesting book and I’m about 2/3 of the way through another about the experiences of black people just before and during the Civil War.
The first book is “Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery,” by Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman. It is a refutation of the widespread belief that all slaves were malnourished, ill housed and ill clothed, and the victims of sometimes daily, brutal physical punishment.
Instead, it paints a portrait of a class of people over whom care was taken to make sure they had not only the tools they needed, including healthy bodies, to perform their duties but in some cases skills so valued that the slave became a source of income for his or her master when leased out to other plantations. The authors even prove that sometimes the slaves were allowed to keep a sizable percentage of the payment received for their services.
The second book is called “The Negro’s Civil War: How American Blacks Felt and Acted During the War for the Union,” by James M. McPherson. It is a collection of contemporary writings showing how the Civil War affected both slave and freedmen and what they were able to do to advance their case.
I’m not a scholar of the Civil War, and it is difficult for me to judge the accuracy of the portraits drawn in these books, but I find myself drawn to both arguments. It always seemed counterintuitive to me that slave owners would have abused chattel that cost them so much money and could earn them so much more. Oh, I didn’t doubt that whippings happened. There is too much evidence that they did. But whippings that disabled a slave for work just weren’t reasonable.
(Not that the authors or I want to suggest that slavery without whippings and starvation is somehow acceptable. Slavery is immoral. It never should have been allowed to come to our shores, and the United States should have followed England’s lead when they abolished it peacefully.)
I’ve never cared for the picture of black people sitting passively by, just wishing and hoping that freedom would come some day, not doing anything to better their condition, except maybe lying to get out of work. That did not comport with what I know of the human spirit. To accept that picture was to accept the canard that slaves somehow were not human.
Instead, it is in the long quotations from Civil War newspapers, private letters, and military reports that I find the indomitable black spirit that I believed was there. I believed that even when others most insisted that freedom had been handed to the slaves, that they had done little or nothing to wrest it from the hands of Confederate plantation owners.
One startling sentence with two statistics says it all: “By October 20, 1864, there were 140 Negro regiments in the Federal service with a total strength of 101,950 men.” Until I read that line, my knowledge of black service in the Civil War had begun and ended with the story told in the movie “Glory” of the Massachusetts regiment that fought so gallantly and was sacrificed so cruelly in the assault on Fort Wagner. That is only one in a litany of acts of courage and resolve by slaves who ran away to become black soldiers – and the freedmen who volunteered in droves.
The black community of today can look back on the slaves and freedmen of the Civil War era with justifiable pride. The racism rampant in that day and for a century and more since then may have dismissed blacks as somehow inferior, but we do not have to extend that error one more day into our time.
.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Solving Problems
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How do you solve a problem like . . . North Korea.
With apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein, that tune from “Sound of Music” has been cycling through my head all day. Of course, the original is a problem like Maria, who has the nuns flummoxed because she keeps failing to follow the rules, not so much in a spirit of rebellion as in a sort of absent-minded impulsiveness.
Sounds kind of like Pyongyang, doesn’t it, although the spirit of rebellion is definitely present in our relations with Kim Jong Il. But at one time it appeared to me that so much of what Kim was doing was the result of immaturity. I thought he might grow into the leadership of his country and learn to get along with us. He was a spoiled child whose indulgent parent had died, but he wasn’t really a bad boy.
He showed us that when he negotiated with the Clinton administration to exchange his nuclear program for food for his starving people. Unfortunately, the Bush administration reneged on part of the deal and Kim began to pout and stamp his feet. But like a spoiled child, he still could have been talked back into a better frame of mind.
Then he had that stroke. If he’s still alive, he’s more than likely the captive of one group or another, and they’re calling the shots. Now we have to deal with some very bad players.
We have seen the result: atomic explosions and missile launches – plus the repudiation of a treaty that has maintained a sort of peace for more than 50 years. Can we afford to wait to see what comes next? Already there is a faction here that wants us to nuke North Korea before it can nuke South Korea or, worse, us. A less extreme group wants to invade, trusting that the resulting turmoil in the North Korean government won’t lead to a mushroom cloud – at least not one on our soil.
Obama, as always, will act with restraint. He may talk tough, but talk he will before he does anything. I think that’s a good thing. In fact, that mind-set is one of the things I find most appealing about him. He thinks things through carefully before he acts. He is never irrational – or impulsive.
Let’s hope we can say the same about whoever is in charge in North Korea these days.
.
How do you solve a problem like . . . North Korea.
With apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein, that tune from “Sound of Music” has been cycling through my head all day. Of course, the original is a problem like Maria, who has the nuns flummoxed because she keeps failing to follow the rules, not so much in a spirit of rebellion as in a sort of absent-minded impulsiveness.
Sounds kind of like Pyongyang, doesn’t it, although the spirit of rebellion is definitely present in our relations with Kim Jong Il. But at one time it appeared to me that so much of what Kim was doing was the result of immaturity. I thought he might grow into the leadership of his country and learn to get along with us. He was a spoiled child whose indulgent parent had died, but he wasn’t really a bad boy.
He showed us that when he negotiated with the Clinton administration to exchange his nuclear program for food for his starving people. Unfortunately, the Bush administration reneged on part of the deal and Kim began to pout and stamp his feet. But like a spoiled child, he still could have been talked back into a better frame of mind.
Then he had that stroke. If he’s still alive, he’s more than likely the captive of one group or another, and they’re calling the shots. Now we have to deal with some very bad players.
We have seen the result: atomic explosions and missile launches – plus the repudiation of a treaty that has maintained a sort of peace for more than 50 years. Can we afford to wait to see what comes next? Already there is a faction here that wants us to nuke North Korea before it can nuke South Korea or, worse, us. A less extreme group wants to invade, trusting that the resulting turmoil in the North Korean government won’t lead to a mushroom cloud – at least not one on our soil.
Obama, as always, will act with restraint. He may talk tough, but talk he will before he does anything. I think that’s a good thing. In fact, that mind-set is one of the things I find most appealing about him. He thinks things through carefully before he acts. He is never irrational – or impulsive.
Let’s hope we can say the same about whoever is in charge in North Korea these days.
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Wednesday, May 27, 2009
The Value of Her Education
.
A funny thing happened while I was listening to KMUW this morning. On “All Things Considered” they were talking about, you guessed it, the nomination of Sonya Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. One of the people interviewed was the woman who had the highest grade-point average in Sotomayor’s high school class. What was funny was when she mentioned the year in which they graduated: 1972.
Now, I graduated from high school in 1970. Both Sotomayor and I wound up at Princeton University. Clearly, we were there at the same time, she one year behind me. (I took a year off in the middle and graduated a year later than I should have.) As far as I know, our paths never crossed. And I think I would have remembered a name like Sotomayor.
I mention this to make two points.
First, I have reached the age when the professional people around me are younger than I am. It’s another “official old geezer” moment. As if I needed one.
Second, I’d like to refute Karl Rove’s suggestion that a woman who graduated second in her class at Princeton is either unintelligent or unintellectual.
It’s true that, like George Bush, I got through an Ivy League institution without either turning into a scholar or developing any better idea of what I wanted to be when I grew up than the one I arrived with, which was none. I don’t blame Princeton for that. I still haven’t figured out what I want to be when I grow up, and as I said above, I’m all growed up.
But to graduate summa cum laude, which means with highest honors, and second in her class at that, Judge Sotomayor had to put in a lot of hard work and even that wouldn’t have got her there if she hadn’t had the native intelligence to make all that hard work, work. Like most universities, Princeton is different experiences to different students. If you want to truly excel there, however, you have to take a track that is grueling. And you have to be willing and able to compete like hell.
So tell any of your right-wing friends (Come on, we all have them.) that they don’t have to worry about whether Sonya Sotomayor is smart enough.
She is.
.
A funny thing happened while I was listening to KMUW this morning. On “All Things Considered” they were talking about, you guessed it, the nomination of Sonya Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. One of the people interviewed was the woman who had the highest grade-point average in Sotomayor’s high school class. What was funny was when she mentioned the year in which they graduated: 1972.
Now, I graduated from high school in 1970. Both Sotomayor and I wound up at Princeton University. Clearly, we were there at the same time, she one year behind me. (I took a year off in the middle and graduated a year later than I should have.) As far as I know, our paths never crossed. And I think I would have remembered a name like Sotomayor.
I mention this to make two points.
First, I have reached the age when the professional people around me are younger than I am. It’s another “official old geezer” moment. As if I needed one.
Second, I’d like to refute Karl Rove’s suggestion that a woman who graduated second in her class at Princeton is either unintelligent or unintellectual.
It’s true that, like George Bush, I got through an Ivy League institution without either turning into a scholar or developing any better idea of what I wanted to be when I grew up than the one I arrived with, which was none. I don’t blame Princeton for that. I still haven’t figured out what I want to be when I grow up, and as I said above, I’m all growed up.
But to graduate summa cum laude, which means with highest honors, and second in her class at that, Judge Sotomayor had to put in a lot of hard work and even that wouldn’t have got her there if she hadn’t had the native intelligence to make all that hard work, work. Like most universities, Princeton is different experiences to different students. If you want to truly excel there, however, you have to take a track that is grueling. And you have to be willing and able to compete like hell.
So tell any of your right-wing friends (Come on, we all have them.) that they don’t have to worry about whether Sonya Sotomayor is smart enough.
She is.
.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Crazy Horse Revisited
.
The Crazy Horse Memorial is far more than a carved mountain.
It is already an outstanding Native American museum as well as the obligatory visitors’ center with observation deck and gift shop. Between the visitors’ center and the mountain, however, the sculptor (Korczak Ziolkowski) and the visionary (Henry Standing Bear) who started all this imagined a University and Medical Training Center for the North American Indian. On that campus will rise a hogan-styled Museum of the North American Indian – and more than 50 other structures, all to be built using mostly lumber logged on the mountain and the stone that is blasted off it.
In some senses, that vision is coming to life now. Already the Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation has amassed what must be one of the largest collections of Native American art and artifacts in the country and hosts internships for university students to work in that collection for college credit. Furthermore, the Foundation gives out hundreds of thousands of dollars in scholarships to Native American college and high school students.
Just now, however, it is the carving of the mountain that dominates the activities at the site. Crazy Horse Mountain is quite a bit larger than Mount Rushmore. There are no statistics on the mountains themselves, but the Rushmore carvings could fit into the area that will be Crazy Horse’s windblown, flowing hair. George Washington’s face is 60’ high, while the Crazy Horse face is 87.5’. The head of the pony Crazy Horse rides will be more than 210’ tall. His outstretched arm is 263’ long and his hand will be 33’ tall. Overall, when finished, the carving will be 563’ high by 641’ wide – and it will be three-dimensional.
Even when you are on the observation deck looking at the model and the mountain, apparently side-by-side, it is difficult to comprehend the enormous effort that has been and will be required to realize the sculptor’s dream. More than 8.5 million tons of rock have been blasted away so far, and at least 2 million remain. Those numbers should not be interpreted as meaning that the carving is more than 80% finished, however: it is the more delicate details that take the most time.
For example, the decision to finish the face was made in 1987; it was not completed until 1998. But much was learned in that process, and the work at the end was done far more quickly than the work at the beginning. It took four months to carve Crazy Horse’s right eye, but only two weeks to complete his left. In other words, it is almost impossible to make projections about how long it’s going to take to get it all done.
But it is certain it will take decades more – and the work of the Foundation will never end, because it will always be working to improve the university and museum. They’ve done an excellent job so far, as everything appears to be first class. Even the gift shop is free of cheap kitsch but filled instead with the works of Native American artists.
I could go on, but words and numbers don’t really tell the story. You have to see it for yourself.
-------------------------
So that’s our vacation: four days of driving and three monuments in three days. It was remarkably pleasant, and I actually returned feeling rested rather than merely stressed in a different way.
Tomorrow, I’ll get back to politics, I promise.
.
The Crazy Horse Memorial is far more than a carved mountain.
It is already an outstanding Native American museum as well as the obligatory visitors’ center with observation deck and gift shop. Between the visitors’ center and the mountain, however, the sculptor (Korczak Ziolkowski) and the visionary (Henry Standing Bear) who started all this imagined a University and Medical Training Center for the North American Indian. On that campus will rise a hogan-styled Museum of the North American Indian – and more than 50 other structures, all to be built using mostly lumber logged on the mountain and the stone that is blasted off it.
In some senses, that vision is coming to life now. Already the Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation has amassed what must be one of the largest collections of Native American art and artifacts in the country and hosts internships for university students to work in that collection for college credit. Furthermore, the Foundation gives out hundreds of thousands of dollars in scholarships to Native American college and high school students.
Just now, however, it is the carving of the mountain that dominates the activities at the site. Crazy Horse Mountain is quite a bit larger than Mount Rushmore. There are no statistics on the mountains themselves, but the Rushmore carvings could fit into the area that will be Crazy Horse’s windblown, flowing hair. George Washington’s face is 60’ high, while the Crazy Horse face is 87.5’. The head of the pony Crazy Horse rides will be more than 210’ tall. His outstretched arm is 263’ long and his hand will be 33’ tall. Overall, when finished, the carving will be 563’ high by 641’ wide – and it will be three-dimensional.
Even when you are on the observation deck looking at the model and the mountain, apparently side-by-side, it is difficult to comprehend the enormous effort that has been and will be required to realize the sculptor’s dream. More than 8.5 million tons of rock have been blasted away so far, and at least 2 million remain. Those numbers should not be interpreted as meaning that the carving is more than 80% finished, however: it is the more delicate details that take the most time.
For example, the decision to finish the face was made in 1987; it was not completed until 1998. But much was learned in that process, and the work at the end was done far more quickly than the work at the beginning. It took four months to carve Crazy Horse’s right eye, but only two weeks to complete his left. In other words, it is almost impossible to make projections about how long it’s going to take to get it all done.
But it is certain it will take decades more – and the work of the Foundation will never end, because it will always be working to improve the university and museum. They’ve done an excellent job so far, as everything appears to be first class. Even the gift shop is free of cheap kitsch but filled instead with the works of Native American artists.
I could go on, but words and numbers don’t really tell the story. You have to see it for yourself.
-------------------------
So that’s our vacation: four days of driving and three monuments in three days. It was remarkably pleasant, and I actually returned feeling rested rather than merely stressed in a different way.
Tomorrow, I’ll get back to politics, I promise.
.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Devils Tower
.
So, continuing on our magical mystery tour of the Black Hills, we decided Tuesday to use our extra day in Rapid City to take in Devils Tower.
Devils Tower is possibly the most extreme example of a single granite rock rising up through the skin of the earth. You probably remember it from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” but let me remind you that it is one solid, relatively cylindrical stone with nearly vertical, grooved sides rising out of a landscape of rolling hills, with no other “mountain” around it. The movie does a pretty good job of communicating its size. You can see it from quite far away.
What I found most interesting is that there are several different scientific explanations for how it was formed, not to mention a wonderful Native American legend: Indian children were pursued by a bear who, in trying to climb the sides of the mountain, created those vertical grooves by scratching the sides with its claws as it climbed, then slid back down the sides. This led to the name “Bear Lodge” being given to the formation. Its name was changed by white settlers in the second half of the nineteenth century.
The Park Service calls those grooves “columns,” by the way, but they look more like reverse columns, being concave, usually, rather than convex. The rangers have no real explanation for how any them were formed. The tower has belonged to the Park Service for a long time, having been the very first National Monument.
There’s not much more to do there than look at the tower. There is a trail that surrounds the base, but I didn’t walk it, fearing it would be too long and too rough for my abilities. John did, however, and he said there is one point where you can actually touch the bottom of one of the columns and look straight up the side of the mountain.
I suspect my vertigo would have made that quite uncomfortable. I know, how can vertigo affect you when you’re at the bottom of a wall, you wonder. I don’t know. I just know that it does if the wall is tall enough. I don’t like being too close to monolithic heights from any perspective. And it gets worse every year.
As much as Devils Tower is a natural wonder, however, there doesn’t appear to be much study of it going on. If there are measurements and samples being taken, there is no visible sign of it. Every year, a certain number of climbers scale the sides, but that is being discouraged more and more. There’s always the danger of an accident and, anyway, Native Americans consider it sacrilegious.
That restraint on the part of the Park Service and the public at large fascinates me. We are a people who think nothing of carving up a mountain, yet we recognize the uniqueness of this natural object and seek to maintain that uniqueness.
What do those two sides to our behavior have to say about our characters?
.
So, continuing on our magical mystery tour of the Black Hills, we decided Tuesday to use our extra day in Rapid City to take in Devils Tower.
Devils Tower is possibly the most extreme example of a single granite rock rising up through the skin of the earth. You probably remember it from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” but let me remind you that it is one solid, relatively cylindrical stone with nearly vertical, grooved sides rising out of a landscape of rolling hills, with no other “mountain” around it. The movie does a pretty good job of communicating its size. You can see it from quite far away.
What I found most interesting is that there are several different scientific explanations for how it was formed, not to mention a wonderful Native American legend: Indian children were pursued by a bear who, in trying to climb the sides of the mountain, created those vertical grooves by scratching the sides with its claws as it climbed, then slid back down the sides. This led to the name “Bear Lodge” being given to the formation. Its name was changed by white settlers in the second half of the nineteenth century.
The Park Service calls those grooves “columns,” by the way, but they look more like reverse columns, being concave, usually, rather than convex. The rangers have no real explanation for how any them were formed. The tower has belonged to the Park Service for a long time, having been the very first National Monument.
There’s not much more to do there than look at the tower. There is a trail that surrounds the base, but I didn’t walk it, fearing it would be too long and too rough for my abilities. John did, however, and he said there is one point where you can actually touch the bottom of one of the columns and look straight up the side of the mountain.
I suspect my vertigo would have made that quite uncomfortable. I know, how can vertigo affect you when you’re at the bottom of a wall, you wonder. I don’t know. I just know that it does if the wall is tall enough. I don’t like being too close to monolithic heights from any perspective. And it gets worse every year.
As much as Devils Tower is a natural wonder, however, there doesn’t appear to be much study of it going on. If there are measurements and samples being taken, there is no visible sign of it. Every year, a certain number of climbers scale the sides, but that is being discouraged more and more. There’s always the danger of an accident and, anyway, Native Americans consider it sacrilegious.
That restraint on the part of the Park Service and the public at large fascinates me. We are a people who think nothing of carving up a mountain, yet we recognize the uniqueness of this natural object and seek to maintain that uniqueness.
What do those two sides to our behavior have to say about our characters?
.
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Mount Rushmore
.
Awe inspiring.
That’s really the only phrase that applies to the sights we saw this week. Every one of them inspires awe – at what man can do, what nature can do, what the human spirit can dedicate itself to.
We started with Mount Rushmore Monday morning after two days of driving through a surprisingly diverse landscape. I was taught in grade school that Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota were part of the Plains States, miles and miles of a sea of grass stretching as far as the eye can see. There are some vistas like that, but there are also the rolling hills left behind by the sheets of ice that once covered North America, some of them composed of sand, some of red clay, some of clearly rich soil, given the verdure that grows on them.
And that’s all before you get to the Black Hills, mere foothills to the precipitous grandeur of the Rockies, but larger mountains than you will find in an eastern state like New Jersey.
The area around Mount Rushmore, however, has more than mountains. It also has massive upthrusts of solid granite, more like huge boulders than craggy peaks. Some of those upthrusts are narrow enough to have been dubbed “needles,” but others are immense pieces of almost solid rock. If they were smaller, we’d call them boulders. One of those boulders was chosen by Gutson Borglum in the early 1920s as appropriate for a monument to the great men who gave us our republican form of government and preserved it when it was in danger of dissolving.
Aside from a few pine trees, nothing much grew on Mount Rushmore before Borglum began chipping away at it, a ton of rock at a time. There were and are quite a few pine trees at the bottom of it, but they grow in the earth that has gathered there in the wind and rain of centuries. The face of the rock was and is uncovered by soil.
There’s no room here for me to tell you the story of the carving of the mountain, of the mistakes made, the lessons learned, the titanic wills that brought it into being, then laid it to rest just as one could see one’s way to the end of the project. There’s an excellent book, “The Carving of Mount Rushmore,” that lays all that out, and I’ll happily lend it to you if you’d like. Better yet, go visit the monument. You will be awed.
If you’ve been there before but not in the past decade or so, think about visiting again. Between 1994 and 1998, a new visitors’ center and viewing terrace were built that vastly improve the presentation of the carvings. There’s even a gentle trail that leads you down to the bottom of the mountain where you can get close enough to get a better perspective – where even my father would have had to admit that things don’t look “just like the pictures.”
Well, I didn’t mean to say so much, but it’s hard to sum up such an endeavor in only a few words. I guess Devils Tower and Crazy Horse Mountain will have to wait ‘til tomorrow.
.
Awe inspiring.
That’s really the only phrase that applies to the sights we saw this week. Every one of them inspires awe – at what man can do, what nature can do, what the human spirit can dedicate itself to.
We started with Mount Rushmore Monday morning after two days of driving through a surprisingly diverse landscape. I was taught in grade school that Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota were part of the Plains States, miles and miles of a sea of grass stretching as far as the eye can see. There are some vistas like that, but there are also the rolling hills left behind by the sheets of ice that once covered North America, some of them composed of sand, some of red clay, some of clearly rich soil, given the verdure that grows on them.
And that’s all before you get to the Black Hills, mere foothills to the precipitous grandeur of the Rockies, but larger mountains than you will find in an eastern state like New Jersey.
The area around Mount Rushmore, however, has more than mountains. It also has massive upthrusts of solid granite, more like huge boulders than craggy peaks. Some of those upthrusts are narrow enough to have been dubbed “needles,” but others are immense pieces of almost solid rock. If they were smaller, we’d call them boulders. One of those boulders was chosen by Gutson Borglum in the early 1920s as appropriate for a monument to the great men who gave us our republican form of government and preserved it when it was in danger of dissolving.
Aside from a few pine trees, nothing much grew on Mount Rushmore before Borglum began chipping away at it, a ton of rock at a time. There were and are quite a few pine trees at the bottom of it, but they grow in the earth that has gathered there in the wind and rain of centuries. The face of the rock was and is uncovered by soil.
There’s no room here for me to tell you the story of the carving of the mountain, of the mistakes made, the lessons learned, the titanic wills that brought it into being, then laid it to rest just as one could see one’s way to the end of the project. There’s an excellent book, “The Carving of Mount Rushmore,” that lays all that out, and I’ll happily lend it to you if you’d like. Better yet, go visit the monument. You will be awed.
If you’ve been there before but not in the past decade or so, think about visiting again. Between 1994 and 1998, a new visitors’ center and viewing terrace were built that vastly improve the presentation of the carvings. There’s even a gentle trail that leads you down to the bottom of the mountain where you can get close enough to get a better perspective – where even my father would have had to admit that things don’t look “just like the pictures.”
Well, I didn’t mean to say so much, but it’s hard to sum up such an endeavor in only a few words. I guess Devils Tower and Crazy Horse Mountain will have to wait ‘til tomorrow.
.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Crazy Horse
.
I didn’t blog last night because I was busy preparing for a trip to South Dakota. We start tomorrow for four fun days of driving and three days in the area near Rapids City. What fun will we fill those three days with? We’re going to re-visit two monuments: Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse Mountain.
We first saw both on a trip taken with my parents in 1977. My father’s reaction has become a family joke. He was disappointed, he said, because Mount Rushmore looked just like the pictures on the postcards. Did you expect it to look different from the pictures, I wanted to ask. Years later, Daddy explained that he had expected to be able to get closer to the monument so he could “get a real good look at it.”
Crazy Horse, on the other hand, didn’t look like the postcards because there weren’t many and the photos for most had been taken years before we saw it. The project was started not long after Mount Rushmore was abandoned (the original plans for the monument called for three-dimensional figures) by a man who had worked on Mount Rushmore and learned how to sculpt on such a massive scale.
I don’t remember whether the mountain was his idea or if he was approached by the Sioux Indians, but by some method, he wound up buying a mountain to be changed into the three-dimensional figure of the Oglala Sioux chief Crazy Horse, sitting astride his horse and pointing towards the horizon, perhaps to the afterlife awaiting all his people, perhaps to the lands in this life which were taken from them.
When we saw him 32 years ago, Crazy Horse was little more than a vague form: the shelf that would be the top of his arm had been leveled and his head had begun to take shape. That was pretty much all there was to see. Since then, I know that his face has been completed and unveiled in a firelight ceremony, and I have been agitating for more than a decade to make the drive to see him again.
Why does he fascinate me so much? I suppose because he’s the last great undertaking of his kind. Once, big, public projects were, if not commonplace, at least less rare than they are today. I’m talking about really large tasks like the Gateway Arch in St. Louis or the Statue of Liberty. The most recent I can think of is the bas relief carving of Robert E. Lee on the side of a mountain outside Atlanta, and that was completed nearly 30 years ago.
(You could also lump into the mix the Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam – not art, but massive works requiring thousands of people to complete. How many of those have you seen started lately? I should also point out that, unlike these projects, Crazy Horse is being entirely funded by private contributions and the small fee charged to visit it, not by taxpayer dollars.)
So when did we stop mounting (no pun intended) these massive projects? When did our viewpoint become so firmly fixed on what is at our feet that we lost sight of the horizon? The Democratic part of me would like to say that it was when the tax reformers got hold of our souls, but we had stopped such undertakings long before Ronald Reagan became president.
My grandmother used to say of things like Mount Rushmore or events like the River Festival that they were “just a bunch of foolishness.” They didn’t put any meat on anyone’s table and just encouraged people to spend money they didn’t have, she’d say. It sometimes seems to me that sentiment has come to rule our lives. If it doesn’t have a practical application, we shouldn’t do it.
We need to know that our reach exceeds our grasp, the poet said. Before we can know that, however, we need to reach in the first place.
------------------------
My laptop having given up the wireless ghost some time ago, I don’t know how often I will have Internet access over the next seven days. I’ll do my best, but daily blogs will almost certainly be impossible. They will resume next Saturday.
.
I didn’t blog last night because I was busy preparing for a trip to South Dakota. We start tomorrow for four fun days of driving and three days in the area near Rapids City. What fun will we fill those three days with? We’re going to re-visit two monuments: Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse Mountain.
We first saw both on a trip taken with my parents in 1977. My father’s reaction has become a family joke. He was disappointed, he said, because Mount Rushmore looked just like the pictures on the postcards. Did you expect it to look different from the pictures, I wanted to ask. Years later, Daddy explained that he had expected to be able to get closer to the monument so he could “get a real good look at it.”
Crazy Horse, on the other hand, didn’t look like the postcards because there weren’t many and the photos for most had been taken years before we saw it. The project was started not long after Mount Rushmore was abandoned (the original plans for the monument called for three-dimensional figures) by a man who had worked on Mount Rushmore and learned how to sculpt on such a massive scale.
I don’t remember whether the mountain was his idea or if he was approached by the Sioux Indians, but by some method, he wound up buying a mountain to be changed into the three-dimensional figure of the Oglala Sioux chief Crazy Horse, sitting astride his horse and pointing towards the horizon, perhaps to the afterlife awaiting all his people, perhaps to the lands in this life which were taken from them.
When we saw him 32 years ago, Crazy Horse was little more than a vague form: the shelf that would be the top of his arm had been leveled and his head had begun to take shape. That was pretty much all there was to see. Since then, I know that his face has been completed and unveiled in a firelight ceremony, and I have been agitating for more than a decade to make the drive to see him again.
Why does he fascinate me so much? I suppose because he’s the last great undertaking of his kind. Once, big, public projects were, if not commonplace, at least less rare than they are today. I’m talking about really large tasks like the Gateway Arch in St. Louis or the Statue of Liberty. The most recent I can think of is the bas relief carving of Robert E. Lee on the side of a mountain outside Atlanta, and that was completed nearly 30 years ago.
(You could also lump into the mix the Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam – not art, but massive works requiring thousands of people to complete. How many of those have you seen started lately? I should also point out that, unlike these projects, Crazy Horse is being entirely funded by private contributions and the small fee charged to visit it, not by taxpayer dollars.)
So when did we stop mounting (no pun intended) these massive projects? When did our viewpoint become so firmly fixed on what is at our feet that we lost sight of the horizon? The Democratic part of me would like to say that it was when the tax reformers got hold of our souls, but we had stopped such undertakings long before Ronald Reagan became president.
My grandmother used to say of things like Mount Rushmore or events like the River Festival that they were “just a bunch of foolishness.” They didn’t put any meat on anyone’s table and just encouraged people to spend money they didn’t have, she’d say. It sometimes seems to me that sentiment has come to rule our lives. If it doesn’t have a practical application, we shouldn’t do it.
We need to know that our reach exceeds our grasp, the poet said. Before we can know that, however, we need to reach in the first place.
------------------------
My laptop having given up the wireless ghost some time ago, I don’t know how often I will have Internet access over the next seven days. I’ll do my best, but daily blogs will almost certainly be impossible. They will resume next Saturday.
.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Speed and Luck
.
I’ve been trying to become more environmentally responsible. I started recycling more than the aluminum cans and newspapers that Dillons takes, I try to remember not to run the water when I’m brushing my teeth, and I’ve decided to drive more slowly when I can.
So I set myself the goal of going no faster than the speed limit and, when reasonable, to use the cruise control to keep myself down to a speed at least 10% less than the speed limit or 5 mph below it, whichever is less. “When reasonable” means that I try not to hold up traffic at rush hour, especially on Kellogg, or in work areas where traffic is down to one lane and the people behind me can’t get around.
It is surprising to me how many other drivers go the speed limit or lower. I often come up behind a car and have to slow down because they are dawdling along. I don’t know if they are out enjoying the sights or simply unable to drive faster for some reason, but when I first started following my semi-irrational rules, I found those drivers incredibly irritating.
Then one day I told myself to just chill. Was the world going to end if I took an extra two or three minutes to reach Dillons? Would the library close if I returned my book at 10:03 instead of 10:01? Would I really die if I didn’t hear the sign-on music of “Countdown?”
What is the hurry?
Hurry makes us do things badly. We’re in a hurry, so we don’t really stop at the stop sign. We’re in a hurry, so we don’t read all the instructions on the error message. We’re in a hurry, so we mis-type and screw up the project.
We trust to luck that there won’t be a car coming, that the error message wasn’t important, that we won’t mis-type too often and can make amends with a simple apology.
But luck only gets you so far.
George W. Bush was in a hurry after 9/11 to prove that he wasn’t a bad president. He attacked Afghanistan before his people had really had time to scope the place out, so he placed too much trust in the warlords that used him to conquer their closest enemies. After the “shock and awe” (Oh, I bet they wished they’d come up with that phrase earlier.), searching for Bin Laden was too slow, so he turned his attention to Saddam. Saddam was who he really wanted, after all.
I surely don’t need to detail the rest of the story. He couldn’t be bothered to wait to learn about Iraq, so he got rid of all the people who said things he didn’t want to hear. Planning for the time after “mission accomplished” would have wasted time, so he just went with the easy form of warfare Donald Rumsfeld said was the latest thing.
Now we hear that he was so impatient to prove that Saddam had ties to Al-Qaida that he had people tortured until they “confirmed” it , even though he had been warned that these “enhanced interrogation techniques” would elicit only false and inaccurate testimony.
Yes, hurry makes us careless. What can you say about a man so careless he killed more than 4,000 American soldiers and uncounted thousands of innocent civilians, just because he couldn’t be bothered to take the time to get it right?
I’d say his belief in his luck took us too far too fast.
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I’ve been trying to become more environmentally responsible. I started recycling more than the aluminum cans and newspapers that Dillons takes, I try to remember not to run the water when I’m brushing my teeth, and I’ve decided to drive more slowly when I can.
So I set myself the goal of going no faster than the speed limit and, when reasonable, to use the cruise control to keep myself down to a speed at least 10% less than the speed limit or 5 mph below it, whichever is less. “When reasonable” means that I try not to hold up traffic at rush hour, especially on Kellogg, or in work areas where traffic is down to one lane and the people behind me can’t get around.
It is surprising to me how many other drivers go the speed limit or lower. I often come up behind a car and have to slow down because they are dawdling along. I don’t know if they are out enjoying the sights or simply unable to drive faster for some reason, but when I first started following my semi-irrational rules, I found those drivers incredibly irritating.
Then one day I told myself to just chill. Was the world going to end if I took an extra two or three minutes to reach Dillons? Would the library close if I returned my book at 10:03 instead of 10:01? Would I really die if I didn’t hear the sign-on music of “Countdown?”
What is the hurry?
Hurry makes us do things badly. We’re in a hurry, so we don’t really stop at the stop sign. We’re in a hurry, so we don’t read all the instructions on the error message. We’re in a hurry, so we mis-type and screw up the project.
We trust to luck that there won’t be a car coming, that the error message wasn’t important, that we won’t mis-type too often and can make amends with a simple apology.
But luck only gets you so far.
George W. Bush was in a hurry after 9/11 to prove that he wasn’t a bad president. He attacked Afghanistan before his people had really had time to scope the place out, so he placed too much trust in the warlords that used him to conquer their closest enemies. After the “shock and awe” (Oh, I bet they wished they’d come up with that phrase earlier.), searching for Bin Laden was too slow, so he turned his attention to Saddam. Saddam was who he really wanted, after all.
I surely don’t need to detail the rest of the story. He couldn’t be bothered to wait to learn about Iraq, so he got rid of all the people who said things he didn’t want to hear. Planning for the time after “mission accomplished” would have wasted time, so he just went with the easy form of warfare Donald Rumsfeld said was the latest thing.
Now we hear that he was so impatient to prove that Saddam had ties to Al-Qaida that he had people tortured until they “confirmed” it , even though he had been warned that these “enhanced interrogation techniques” would elicit only false and inaccurate testimony.
Yes, hurry makes us careless. What can you say about a man so careless he killed more than 4,000 American soldiers and uncounted thousands of innocent civilians, just because he couldn’t be bothered to take the time to get it right?
I’d say his belief in his luck took us too far too fast.
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