Too Many Witnesses

Have you noticed that the only presidential candidate really talking about making the nation better is the incumbent?

While there is an awful lot of nonstop campaigning for the Republican nomination going on, the men seeking the nod all like to blather on and on about "taking our country back," or "returning the nation to what the founding fathers intended," or in some way or another "restoring the freedoms we have lost."

But, really, there are too many witnesses who know firsthand about the shortcomings of the past to want that as a future for their children and grandchildren. I am not talking about slavery, sweat shops or child labor.

Those are all documented historic facts reflecting conditions in the United States that were sanctioned as official policy for decades or centuries. Yet, most of the victims of those systems are gone.

I'm talking about protective covenants in housing; glass ceilings and discrimination in hiring, promotions and other personnel matters, funding inequities in education and health care; discretionary law enforcement in cases of rape, sexual abuse, domestic violence and other crimes; racial profiling, lending and finance and the provision of basic services for socially, physically, or economically disadvantaged populations.
 
There are still millions of people alive who can speak first-hand of such injustices.

The founding fathers had the wisdom to ensure that an independent judiciary would have the final say on all constitutional matters.  Federal judges, and by extension, the Supreme Court have the right and the obligation to periodically reexamine laws and issues to determine whether, based upon reason and the times, certain aspects of American life warrant institutional review, revocation or change.

The problem is that freedom and equality have not always meant the same thing in this country. I've written before about property rights, voting rights, and human rights. People are entitled to all of these things whether they agree with you politically, morally, socially or not.

Religious freedom is not just for Christians, Jews and Muslims, it's also for Buddhists, Wiccans and Satanists.  Local standards and majority customs cannot define who can participate nor can any group force any individual to keep their own beliefs silent in the interests of not offending the majority.

Public education is not just for the gifted, the average and the able-bodied. It is something that is supposed to be universally offered and provided. Yet, more times than not, the courts or advocates have to fight tooth and nail to make sure that some children have access to the programs and services they need.

Women are still fighting for the right to maintain control over when and if they become pregnant, even as some would deny them the choice of whether to become parents.  We are taught that women have the right to say no and expect it to mean no. Now, some politicians are saying "I don't think so." 

Equal access in the job market remains a real challenge for many.  Growing numbers of men and women have learned during the Great Recession that the playing field is not level, and age, race, body type, sexual orientation and other factors can mean the difference between getting or keeping a job, and waiting for calls that never come.

Those who would seek to reign in courts, deregulate business, and limit the rights of the small to challenge the mighty do not offer a free and equal world. Instead they offer an America stripped of many of the protections that have gradually shifted us toward being a nation of greater universal freedoms.

They also promise their would be supporters a future they envision that those who have ever lived with the indignity of exclusion simply cannot allow. If justice is not blind, it is good to have laws and courts to offer her guidance.

 

A More Perfect Union

Before the American Revolution people on the colonies would speak of the rights of Englishmen.

The great leap the founding fathers were willing to make with the U.S. Constitution was support of a paternalistic system that did not deem property as the great legitamizer for voting and other privileges.

Germans, Scots, some French, free Africans and varied people of mixed races gained their rights by helping to create this nation.

Still, it took more than a century for women to constitutionally evolve to full personhood. It has taken twice as long for various ethnic, racial, religious and immigrant minorities to approach that status, and for many, it remains an elusive goal.

You do not hear many people who appreciate egalitarian ideals talking about class struggles, reigning in the courts, or restrictions of hard fought and hard won rights.  People who remember being ignored, structurally underserved, and socially subordinated to the privileged do not look back on those times fondly.

The Irish rose out of their service in the Civil War. Women gained theirs through suffrage movements over 50 years, and grew it through liberating actions of the 20th Century. Italians and various Eastern Europeans emerged from  two World Wars with a bit more of it. Jews gained it through horror, hardship and determination.

Negros who became African-Americans and then just black, native Americans from Florida to Texas and New York to Alaska, Asian and Latin American immigrants and the disabled are still fighting for the incremental gains that lead to it. As are those of  those of nontraditional sexual orientations.

I'm talking about the basic right to be an American. It represents full citizenship .The total sum of rights and privileges that add up to no one attempting to limit your opportunities based upon bigotry, professed gender superiority, or other absurd traditions.

If what once was, conceptually represents something unfair, that should never be resurrected.

I cannot imagine my daughters or granddaughters living under the system my mother or grandmothers were forced to accept.  I do not want any of my young people, male or female,  to work in an economy where standing is determined by color, familial relationships or social association.

I won't embrace a time when contraception availability was a political or religious choice decided almost exclusively by men.

So-called social conservatives often speak of returning the nation to how it once was.  What they seem to desire is a vision of America where the will of a fortunate few is foisted on the many.

America's freedoms continue to evolve. Looking backward to a romanticized past does not mean more freedoms for all. Instead, it is a false hopes that somehow, conforming to the visions of a privileged few.

Anyone who thinks back to the pain of those who had to fight for rights and basic freedoms cannot possibly embrace that vision. America moves ahead and gets better as it evolves, those who long for the past want something that is not good for the rest of us.

Policies and  laws limiting any of us, deprive each and every one of us.That is the true and real threat to our freedoms and our democracy. It is not about returning America to anything it once was, it is really about a future no freedom loving person in their rational mind could ever truly want for themselves or for anyone else.

Why Hate the Government?

Society needs its institutions. There are families,churches,  tribes, towns, cities, states, countries and more. None of those institutions are perfect. People who believe in them work to make them better.

Dissatisfaction with an institution does does not mean it cannot be improved, but few improvements come overnight. You push, prod, inch and drag what is good about it toward something better.  That's one of the reasons the United States has continued to evolve over more than 200 years.

People have looked at where the nation was in their times and worked to make it better. Some of the things that government has done include:

1) Identifying and promoting better farming practices so that the land, crops and livestock we depend upon to feed our families will be able to do the same for future generations. That solved the erosion problems that devastated farm families in the 1920s and 1930s. It also led to the banning of D-D-T and other chemicals that nearly killed off dozens of species in the interests of increasing yields.

2) Beating diseases like smallpox, yellow fever and polio. While private pharmaceutical companies will do some research, coming up with ways to manage, prevent or cure the most crippling diseases has always taken a combination of public institutional research, private sector investment and a good dose of government cash to produce results.

3) Providing basic minimum standards of education critical to the nation's defense, economic competitiveness, and basic cultural identification of what it means to be an American.  While local and state control may be important, sharing concepts on a national scale does play a tremendous role in making sure that people have some basic similarities when they need to function as a unit representing America.

4) Tying the country together so that people from coast to coast, and even in flyover country have access to the same goods, the same technology, and the same services. If you go to certain parts of the eastern United States, you will still find remnants of private  pikes, canals and railways that served portions of a state or region, but withered  because they did not connect to merchants to markets they needed to serve.

5)  Building codes and other safety safety and health standards. If the free market was always the best option, we would still be using leaded gasoline in our vehicles and asbestos in our floor coverings and break linings and lead paint in our homes. The government, through Congress, exercising the will of the people, has brought us many standards that have helped to create a standard of living unrivaled in much of the world.

6) If people were always fair and honest, we would not need to be concerned about human rights. But people have a weakness for acting in their own individual self interests. When people at the local or state level pass ordinances, adopt policies or enact laws that result in institutional unfairness,  government has an obligation to intervene. This is the United States of America so "if you don't like it, move" is just not an option.

So, when people go on the stump and start talking about how government has abandoned or is ignoring the people, they are pandering. In most cases, they do not suggest ways of making government better. Instead they harken to a past time when government was not doing its best by all of its people.

Talk of restoring the nation to its freedoms does not mean the same thing to all people. If you are disabled, elderly, female, an ethnic or racial minority or live outside of the social norm, it could mean a return to exclusions, restrictions or persecutions.

All of these things are part of America's past, yet even now, there are movements to eliminate or minimize their significance in the text books used in the nation's public schools. There are no perfect institutions, like families, countries do not always treat all of their children the same. And like people, acknowledging flaws and working to get better makes any institution stronger.

Don't hate the government or the courts for encouraging change. In the end, only change will make the nation stronger.

One More for the Team

President Obama's reelection campaign will need a lot of volunteers.  

Some will be involved in get-out-the-vote efforts, others will dedicate their time to fundraising. But tens of thousands will be use their talents to support the Truth Team. 

The campaign wants to recruit as many as two million people to pursue a single goal: combatting the misinformation pushed out consistently by the opposition.

"People don't just want tl hear from campaign statements ans ads-- they want to hear from family and friends they trust," said Stephanie Cutler, deputy campaign manager for Obama for America. 

This sounds like the kind of volunteer work I might enjoy.  You sign up online and then start joining the effort to stamp out bull _hit. 

The team will be divided into three parts.  Each unit will have its own Web portal: 

Attackwatch.com will combat basic and over the top nastiness:

KeepGOPHonest.com will challenge Republicans who lie about their records;

And KeepHisWord.com will promote the president's record. 

All of this is necessary because the opposition is willing to say and do anything to win the Whitehouse, retake the Senate and keep control of the House. 

One thing I've learned, over the years, is that you do not edit the president. Once an individual is elected leader of the free world, what he says, everything he says, is a matter of public record.

Honest communicators to not paraphrase, distort or mislead their readers or their audiences with words presidents have not or do not say. When the quotes are available, they simply provide the quotes and let the readers or their audiences form their own conclusions.

Since all sorts of positions, policies and statements are routinely attached to the president and repeated as though they were facts, the need for a Truth Team is obvious.  I think it's a very good idea. I wish them well.

Pragmatism? Pshaw!

Nancy Brinker built a movement to save lives and honor the memory of her sister. Her idea was simple, "helping women beat the risks of breast cancer is a good." People bought into it and raised tens of millions of dollars.

Somewhere along the line, Nancy Brinker allowed idealogues to divide, and possibly doom her organization. If only for a few days, she turned her back on the poor.

Pragmatism embraces practical solutions without consequences. If you pack a board with people who believe certain things, then they can change the rules, take a vote and end alliances that were crucial to maintaining broad appeal.

In picking funding for Planned Parenthood, or an end run to eliminate it, a faction of the Komen Foundation selected a powerless target. The poor women, very young to premenopausal, who go to clinics offering services at no - to low costs.


Brinker and others did not realize that these women have a reservior of goodwill out here that would not sit silently by as donated dollars were used for exclusive purposes. The money did not come from any one group of people who believe certain ways, it came from lots of people willing to do something for women's health.

The Komen Foundation allowed its intentions and its brand to become  pawns in a political power play. We now live in a time when people, charities and institutions may find themselves offered up for pragmatic reasons. That means that those who would abandon all reason and compromise in favor of any single goal
will roll the dice, consequences be damned.

In this case, they were willing to let poor women, those who lack insurance and generally seek out the only preventive screening and other services within a busline, languish in uncertainty about their health or get sick and die.

There was no talk of alternative care and no true notice that vital breast screening provided at Planned Parenthood would no longer be part of a very fragile safety net.

Pragmatism puts no stake in consequences. It is built on concepts or statements repeated by rote without regard to any waivering thought.

Declare it right, label it just, and disavow anything that falls outside that narrow view. This time it was women and breast screening, last time it was "the poor" and food stamps, or faceless immigrants and a backlash against a 21st century Bracero program.

Pragmatism could lead to protective covenants, discretionary work rules and worse. These are dangerous times, and we should be very concerned about the poor.

 If you are outside the narrow view of pragmatic thought, perhaps you should also be concerned about the rest of us too.

The Great Recession: We Survived

The economic downturn that began in 2007 statistically ended in 2009. While the human suffering and the struggle to recover has continued, somewhere along the line, that two-year period became a defining era.

The Associated Press, arbiters of journalistic style, and the hardest working collective group of 4,500  journalists in the world now refers to the period as the Great Recession. That means it is on a par with other benchmark events of the past 160 years. Those include the Civil War, World War I, the Great Depression and World War II.

When you look around the room take pride in the fact that despite your diminished circumstances, your derailed retirement plans and the assorted boomerang children you may still be harboring, the fact of the matter is that you survived.

Seventy-five years from now, when people start reviewing the personal data of the 2010 U.S. Census, the details of your survival will become more than statistics. It will be part of the historic record and available to anyone who cares to look.

One of my brothers is a retired journalist who has used his talents for genealogical research in recent years. He has been able to look back on census date from 1930 and learn a lot about how my own family weathered the Great Depression.

It turns out that my maternal grandfather once was a member of my maternal grandmother's father's household. While I only knew my grandfather as an old man and great provider, he was once a young man dependent upon his wife's family for his very survival.

It's funny what history and official documents will be able to tell future generations about you and the people in your life. Very few of us will look back upon the Great Recession as "the good old days," but it is likely some of our children will remember it as a time when people of all types rediscovered the meaning of family.

Climbing out of the misery, and slowly watching people we care about find jobs and hope for better futures, some of us can look back at the spiraling collapse of the first decade of the 21st century. As we turn our thoughts to God and all the strength he helped to pull from deep within our souls, we can give thanks, smile inwardly and breathe the fresh breezes of relief.

Confronted with the all too real hardships of the Great Recession, we survived.

By Any Means Necessary

A lot of us are in the habit of carrying voter registration applications around with us.  We give them to people who may not be registered or may have changed residences since the last election.

Maybe we should take the time to talk about things like voter intimidation and other dirty tricks they may encounter when they head to the polls.  Some people take politics that seriously.

They will lie about their opponents and smile while claiming their motivations are for the good of the country.  If people will destroy jobs to make money, blame the problems of the nation on "those people" and repeatedly desert sick wives for younger women, do you think they won't cheat you out of a vote against them?

Caucus results from eight precincts in Iowa are missing and will likely never be found.  Black people are being labeled as the prime recipients of food stamps even though only 22 percent of the recipients are black. 

If a man abandons sick wives, do you think he'll have much problem ignoring sick and suffering strangers? Then, there are the candidates who would use the courts to force their way onto ballots they neglected to qualify for.

Voter registration is only the beginning, voter education is the rest of the story.  When you talk to would be voters, encourage them to join the fight, then let them know there are people out there working everyday to keep them away from the polls.

Shhhh The News is On

Remember when there were just three television networks and we saw the world in black and white? Most people only had one television in their homes and the radio in the car was AM only.  Still, it seemed like everybody, from housewives and janitors, to secretaries and factory workers shared one thing with their bosses. 

They read two newspapers a day Monday through Friday, at least one on Saturday and one on Sunday. Besides the morning and evening papers, that were gently read and refolded for respected adults who couldn't see them until later, there were ethnic papers that offered thoughtful and focused perspectives.

The people we depended on also heard real news on the radio.Whether they had limited or no education or the benefits of college and more, they got a view of the nation and the world that could never be gleaned from those rare long-distance calls to distant relatives who lived in other parts of the country.

Generations of children grew up understanding that news was information, even if it was less than complete. If it was slanted in one direction or another, having some information was so much better than being ignorant.

I remember sitting there quietly with my brothers or cousins and watching grainy film that was often days old, as middle aged men and their white male reporters offered their observations about world events. If you were anywhere on the block, you were expected to be there when the news came on.

The stories might be fodder for dinner table conversation, or something to be discussed between parents and their friends or siblings after Sunday dinner. I grew up thinking it was necessary and natural to know something about the world beyond my neighborhood.

Today, there may be fewer newspapers and quality radio news is something you have to search for, but national and international news is a 24/7 packaged product. It is presented in living color and nearly as instantly as it occurs.

Yet, children and many adults seem clueless about world events. Ask five of them individually, for the last names of three of the Republican presidential hopefuls and three may have a hard time coming up with right answers. Ask them if Americans are still fighting in Iraq and they may not know we left in December.  Ask them what's going on in the world and they may smile and tell you the NBA lockout is over.

I wonder what would happen if we tried a little something different. Instead of doing what our grandparents would do which was to hush us up and offer the look that meant "park it and learn something,." we tried an instructive but abrupt  approach.

It might be something like this "Don't leave, 'Sit down now, and shut up, the news is on! It's your world, you might learn something." 

DeHoll-- My World, My View, 01-02-2011