Call me strong, don’t call me resilient. (Or do.)

Standing or caving?

‘Resilient’ is an important and strong and wonderful word, but I have to admit I’m weary of it. 

 

Widows and widowers, traumatized children, oppressed communities of color, survivors of cancer and war and natural catastrophe—and on and on and on—are all called resilient. When we say someone or a group or someones are resilient, are we saying anything more than that people keep putting one foot in front of the other and taking the next breath instead of lying down, giving up, and dying? Sometimes, in spite of my admiration for strength and perseverance, I want to say, Can’t we just realize that life is resilient and move on?

 

Really, though, my annoyance with that word is simply what I see as its overuse, and I’m being petty. It’s an important word and not at all offensive. It’s important to celebrate strength. Yeah. Forget I said anything. ‘Resilience’ is a good word. Let’s keep it going.

 

Ah, but what about ‘hack’ used as a noun? I am really sick of hearing any helpful tip or shortcut referred to as a hack, and overuse is not the only problem here. Let’s remember that hacking started out as a kind of virtual breaking and entering. Not a good thing. In fact, criminal. So when we offer an easy way to open a pomegranate and call it a hack, we’re erasing an important distinction. I have a similar gripe with anything beautiful being called ‘porn,’ as in bookshelf porn—God forbid! Whose bad idea was it to start calling helpful or beautiful ideas or things by ugly names, as if there’s no difference between good and bad?

 

Then there’s the business of referring to something bad or ugly with a neutral term or one that can even sound (if you don’t look too closely) positive? The worst such phrase in my book (I’ve written about this before) is ‘ethnic cleansing.’ Think about it. It’s good to be clean. Genocidal policies and practices, therefore, when called ethnic cleansing, are put forth as something good for a particular country, and it’s easy to see why a dictator or any other oppressive government would want to cloak its sins in clean-sounding language, but why do journalists around the world allow themselves to be led around by their noses, parroting this term in print, online, and on the airwaves? Trampling on human rights, deporting people because of their religion or ethnic background, putting their very lives at risk, sometimes taking their lives—there’s nothing clean about using euphemisms to refer to cruel and ugly actions and policies. 

 

Before I started writing this post, the words I first thought of were simply annoying. Words that elicited in me a peevish response. Modern locutions like ‘monetize,’ ‘privatize,’ incentivize,’ etc. Then came ‘hack,’ and I had a sudden insight as to why it strikes me as so offensive, and my post turned serious. I could never make a living as a nightclub comedian. Guess I’ll stick to bookselling. 

The Man from Plains

President Carter attended high school here.

 

You often hear it said: “Funerals are for the living.” For years, whenever I experienced anticipatory grief over the inevitable death of President Jimmy Carter, I couldn’t imagine him having a huge state funeral. He was such a modest, unassuming man, not the kind of person to take on the trappings of royalty or to exalt himself personally in any manner. His concentration on negotiating for the release of hostages instead of his re-election campaign in 1980, for example, may have helped him (along with the hostage crisis) lose a second term in the White House, but he was never in doubt about the priorities of that time. 

 

Political ambition is necessary in a political campaign, but Carter’s was not egoistic ambition. Rather, he saw a job that needed doing and that he believed he could do. I have written before today about Jimmy Carter’s presidency and how I see it. The words of Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s chief domestic policy advisor, go far beyond my own and are worth reading carefully. But every tribute at the state funeral for President Carter in Washington, D.C., was moving. Ted Mondale read the words his father, former Vice President Walter Mondale, would have spoken had he not preceded Carter in death, words he and Carter agreed best summed up their four years of the Carter-Mondale White House: “We told the truth. We obeyed the law. We kept the peace.” 

 

The first Carter news conference I watched when he was president astonished me. People from the press asked him questions – and instead of evading the questions, he did his best to answer them! 

 

Obeying the law – shouldn’t that be a necessary basic assumption for any man or woman fit to sit in the Oval Office?

 

President Carter went beyond keeping peace by pursuing it for other parts of the world, notably the Middle East. 

 

Since mine is a TV-free house, a friend who knows my longstanding devotion to Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter invited me to her house to watch the funeral, a state event with all the pomp and dignity and ritual owed to a man who probably had greater integrity than any other occupant of the White House in United States history. And the point was made that Jimmy Carter himself had planned his funeral, speakers and music selections and all. 

 

It wasn’t long into the service that I realized why. He wouldn’t have done it for himself. After all, he was not in the audience, and, as I say, he was never a president to showcase himself as royalty. No, it was for us. His funeral was for the American people. He knew we needed it. And he was so right. We needed his reminder that we are one country and need to love our neighbors as ourselves.

 

Do you believe in miracles? Are you a dreamer? Or do you think that only hearts like mine, already yearning for the integrity of our 39^th president, would or could be moved by the tributes spoken in memory of this good, good man? I want to think that words of praise for Jimmy, like the man himself, might open hearts and turn them toward the good. 

 

Accomplishments are important, and Eizenstat among others listed many of President Carter’s, but the very least, I maintain, that we must ask of anyone coming to preside over our country is this: 

 

We told the truth.

We obeyed the law.

 

Keeping the peace is undoubtedly harder--perhaps not always possible--but any human being has it in his or her power to tell the truth to the American people and to obey the laws of the land. We cannot do better than to honor the legacy of this great man by following his example.

Carter's boyhood home, Archery, GA

Guns and Money

H E A D L I N E    N E W S!

 

John Kenneth Galbraith, in his book The Age of Uncertainty, listed explanations commonly given for why, in an era of abundance (the 20th century), there should continue to be poverty in the world. “...[S]o many different and conflicting answers … given with so much confidence and such nonchalance,” he noted. In the list he compiled were: lack of energy and ambition; race or religion; lack of natural resources; faulty economic system; inadequate education, technical, scientific, administrative talent; consequences of past colonial exploitation, racial discrimination, and national humiliation. Galbraith’s answer is:

 

There is no one answer—obviously. It is because so many explanations have a little truth that so many are offered [my emphasis added]. But one cause of poverty is pervasive. That is the relationship, past or present, between land and people. Understand that, and we understand the most general single cause of deprivation. 

 

The “land question” has long been studied, as has population, but neither has yet been solved. That, however, is not my topic today. 

I have been thinking about another knotty problem, another question to which “many explanations,” each with “a little truth,” have been offered, and that is the question, the problem, the fact of gun violence in America. I won’t go over old ground and list all the various explanations Americans espouse for school shootings and other shootings of multiple people in public places, often strangers to the shooter. Instead I want to propose a parallel to Galbraith's claim. 

 

Might there not be an underlying relationship beneath and behind the epidemic of mass shootings in America? What can it be other than guns and money? All the other explanations play their little parts, but only because the basic relationship exists in the first place. At least, that’s what I’m thinking and what I’m asking others to consider.

 

There are a lot of stories we can tell ourselves and each other. We do it all the time. Some stories help us solve problems, while others—the unquestioned myths--insure that the problems will remain enshrined in our national culture.

 

Random Remarks: Michener’s “Young Colonels”

 

The old man

James Michener, in This Noble Land: My Vision for America, warned against what he called “the young colonels,” writing that what is often called a "revolt of the generals" (a military overthrow of democracy) is more often a rebellion led by younger men who take radical action, “fearing that time is being lost.” Michener thought that revolutions in Algeria, Liberia, and Haiti all had this flavor and considered Hitler the “archetype” of the young military rebels he was describing. 

 

I was curious then about the ages of our own Founding Fathers. Benjamin Franklin, of course, was an “old man” of the American Revolution, but on July 4, 1776, Ages of the Founding Fathers on July 4, 1776, James Monroe was only eighteen years old! Aaron Burr was twenty, Alexander Hamilton twenty-one, and James Madison a venerable quarter-century. 

 

The 1770s, however, were not the 1960s, and the young men put a lot of trust in Thomas Jefferson (age 33) and John Adams, Paul Revere, and George Washington (all in their 40s). Firebrand Patrick Henry was also a mature 40 years old, John Hancock nearly that age. 

Michener did not mention Americans among the impatient "young colonels" in his brief survey. And of course our Founding Fathers were not part of a standing army.

The young ones

The Explanation Is Simple

Traditionally and historically, an American president's Cabinet was a group of advisors to the president. No one has experience in every facet of governance, and everyone at times needs advice from someone with specific knowledge -- or simply a different perspective. That was the role of the Cabinet. Until 2017.

Now once again, half the public, many elected officials, a number of past and present ranking military officers, and reporters from all over the country and the world gasp at each new appointment made by the president-elect. Why? He is also a former president, so you have seen this act play out before. What don't you understand?

A man who does not want advice and does not see that he needs any is not looking for advisors. This man, as we have seen before, wants flunkies. Toadies. Yes-men and -women. Anyone not ready to nod like a bobblehead wouldn't last a week in his Cabinet, and anyone seriously qualified is, ipso facto, disqualified from the get-go.

Really, what else did you expect?

He Took a Stand

Moment of decision

October 18 was the birthday of French philosopher Henri Bergson. Born in 1859, Bergson presented his French doctoral thesis (two were required then, one in French, a second in either Latin or Greek) on “The Immediate Givens of Consciousness,” in English usually titled “Time and Free Will, to the examining faculty in 1889. The question he addressed was that of determination vs. free will: When we come to a fork in life’s road, are we free to choose which path to follow, or has our path forward been predetermined before we reach what looks like a point of decision? Bergson’s answer was that a "path" ahead in time does not exist. The fork does not exist. The future does not exist. We only create our path and our direction forward by going forward. Moreover, although we are definitely creatures of habit and perform countless habitual actions every day without thinking about them at all, we always have a measure of possible freedom, and when we act out of that freedom it is the expression of our whole life up to that moment.

 

Bergson died on January 3, 1941, of bronchitis. But it is what he did before he died that matters, not the manner of his death. Refusing the occupying Nazis’ offer of exemption from their race laws against Jews (inspired by American race laws against Blacks), just as he had already refused “honors” they wanted to bestow on him, Bergson stood in line to be given the yellow star indicating his heritage. He didn’t have to do it. He could have let himself be bought off. But he took a stand. 

 

What good does it do for one person to make a stand? Wasn’t his a futile gesture? His wearing of the yellow star did not save anyone from the gas chambers, and he himself did not even live to see Paris liberated.

 

I say, he died a free man, a man of integrity – perhaps with a broken heart, but not with a broken spirit. 

What kind of future do you hope to create? What legacy do you want to leave behind? 

 

I Am Not a Billionaire

Not in the 1%. I work for a living.

I am not a billionaire but a member of a group called “the working elderly.” I have run my own business for 31 years to make a living. It is not a hobby.

 

If I were a billionaire -- and cared for nothing but my investment portfolio -- the big tax cuts I would get under another Trump presidency would probably offset the inflationary increase in the cost of living brought about by his plan for across-the-board tariffs, mass deportations, and curbs on the Federal Reserve. Even conservative economists predict that American households can expect their living expenses to increase by $2,000 to $3,000 a year if Trump is elected again and puts his ill-conceived policies in place. 

 

Can you afford a $3,000 increase in your living expenses? Yes, of course, if you are a billionaire.