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.

If You Must Tell Lies –

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The other day I went down a rabbit hole, as people say these days, chasing the ninth commandment, “Thou shalt not bear false witness.” That’s the wording I remember from Sunday school days, the explanation we were given simply that lying was wrong. 

 

Newer translations online give the Biblical text as “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor,” and while some internet sites read the commandment as forbidding any false statement, others, even religious ones, claim that the commandment is not about lying in general but only requires that we refrain from giving false testimony about another. I’ll leave it to you to go down your own rabbit hole(s), if you find the prospect inviting.

 

For the moment, however, for the sake of discussion, let us accept the narrower interpretation. I have personal misgivings about allowing even “harmless” falsehoods, as in ordinary situations, dishonesty does nothing good for relationships, but for now, let that go and agree – for the sake of argument or discussion -- that I can lie about my age with impunity, and you can lie about your natural hair color, but we are all forbidden by the commandment to speak falsehoods against our neighbors. 

 

The next obvious question becomes, Who is to count as my neighbor? Only someone who lives in my immediate neighborhood? Someone I know? Someone I like?

 

The Jewish people are told in Leviticus to remember always that they were once slaves in Egypt and should therefore treat “the stranger among you” as one born in their land, a neighbor, while anyone who claims to be Christian and a follower of Jesus should recall the parable of the Good Samaritan and its message that even our enemies are our neighbors and should be loved as we love ourselves. 

 

Telling harmful lies about another person is slander, defamation of character, and constitutes grounds for lawsuit, whether the words are spoken on the witness stand or in the street. (On the witness stand, it is also perjury.) And when such lies – about entire groups of people -- are spoken publicly and widely disseminated, putting the slandered at risk for their very lives, how can a candidate for any public office, how can any public person whatsoever, claim justification for such lies because, for instance, lies about Haitian immigrants in this country legally “brought attention to the legitimate issue of illegal migration”? No!  

 

No! The Republican candidate for vice president claims to be a Catholic and has borne false witness against his neighbors. He also possesses a degree in law and is guilty of slander. This is not a matter of taking something out of context, as the context is public and broad, and his attempted justification has been publicly given. Going to confession does not undo the harm he has caused. He is unfit for any public office at any level. 

 

Moral of my story: If you must lie, lie about your age, your weight, your hair color – in short, lie about yourself, not someone else, and keep your lies trivial, please, IF YOU MUST LIE AT ALL. -- But really, is it necessary? Is it good for you? Do your words and actions align with what you claim are your beliefs? At issue is what is called character.

Who are these so-called “socialists,” anyway?

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Or call them “Communists,” as Republican candidates often do. This year’s Republican candidate for the office of President of the United States is fond of throwing around the lie that his opponent is a “Communist,” a lie born early in the last century and has been dragged out over and over again by politicians who seek to win by inducing fear. 

 

There are also idealogues who want either no government at all or government only for military purposes. To them, anything more is socialism. 

 

But enough with the generalizations. Let’s get down to something specific and look at it more closely.

 

Food stamps. No actual “stamps” are involved (there were stamps from 1939 to 1943), but that name for the benefit persists, so I’ll use it. I was curious about the people Reagan years ago called “welfare mothers” and who they are today, so I looked into it. Data found by the Pew Research Center (full article here for you) is eye-opening. Take a look. 

 

The majority of recipients of SNAP benefits are overwhelmingly white (62.7%) and were born in the United States (a whopping 87.8%). There are almost as many two-parent families receiving benefits (43.9%) as single-parent families with only a mother in the household (45.5%). As for the age of primary recipients, 44.5% of recipients fall into the 25 – 64-year-old age range. (Pew gives 25-44 and 45-64 separately. I have collapsed them.) The full history of the government program can be found here. Today over 12% of the American population receives this benefit. 

 

There is no way to determine the political affiliations of recipients, but I vividly recall one of my students years ago at Northwestern Michigan College in Traverse City, a self-proclaimed libertarian, who “did not believe” in government programs but acknowledged that her family relied on them. I did not then and do not now understand that. To me, what you do shows what you believe. If you believe in voting, for example, you vote. If you don’t vote, you don’t believe in it.

 

An important and often overlooked feature of food assistance in the United States is that it was inaugurated not only to alleviate hunger but also, essentially and perhaps primarily, to help farmers and business owners. Read about that here. The largest-ever expansion of government food assistance programs took place under a Republican administration for the benefit of American business. Communists? I don't think so.

 

Don’t fall for fake stories. And please don’t fall for name-calling and old, tired lies.

 

What Unites Us Is What Divides Us

We don’t agree on what the biggest problems are, we don’t agree on the causes of our problems, and we don’t agree on how to work toward solutions on even those issues we all agree are problems. So what on earth can possibly unite us? 

 

Emotions. We all love our country. We want to be proud of our country. We are, all of us, at times angry and frustrated, deeply saddened and impatient (with one another), wanting to be hopeful and feeling surges of hope, only to have it dashed once again. We Americans are all human beings with the same human emotions.

 

What unites us, though – the confusing stew of emotions – is also what divides us, because our emotions, too often, have different (you should excuse the term) triggers. It's enough to make a stone weep.

Stop Falling for the Either/Or Crap!

...Or so some people would have you believe....

It doesn’t make good sense to trust every aspect of life to government – any kind of government. Communism only turns into another kind of oligarchy, with party leaders on top taking the place of landed gentry and everyone else relegated to a peasant/worker class with few important rights. --But neither does it make good sense to trust every aspect of life to unregulated market forces. There are essentials in life, both biological and social, much too important to be left to unrestrained market forces. The only kind of economic “system” that makes sense is a mixed economy, with roles both for entrepreneurial markets, regulated where necessary, and government-run public institutions.

 

Note that I do not use the term “free market” for the ubiquitous either/or false dilemma so often posed. Why? Because what is meant by “free” when applied to market forces just is lack of regulation. We are asked to allow business to be as free as the wind, and if it whirls itself into a tornado or whips up a tsunami and destroys human lives in its path, well, we are told, that’s the price of “freedom.” No. I say no. That is the price of self-deception on the part of Americans who have bought into a dangerous theoretical fiction unleashed on the world by Milton Friedmann and confusing and destroying communities for decades.

 

Economists are theoreticians. I find it bitterly ironic that so many people who consider themselves “conservative” will reject evolution because it is a “only a theory” and then turn around and embrace an economic theory which has far less evidence for itself. And yet the untrammeled theoretical “free market” has become an article of faith for American conservatives, a plank almost religious (to judge by the fervor with which it is held), and certainly a litmus test for politicians, so that if a candidate voices the slightest support for any kind of regulation, that candidate is branded “socialist” or even “communist,” and conservatives run in fear, believing their “freedom” is in danger.

 

Bullshit! If all aspects of health, education, and banking were to be treated exclusively as unregulated businesses, with clinics, hospitals, schools, and investment groups run solely for profit and without any boundaries on their greed, the rights of American citizens to speak and organize and vote would count for very little. You don’t trust “government,” but you trust “corporations”? Really? With your life?

 

Would you do away with public libraries, public schools, public boards of health, and replace all of them with for-profit businesses, available only to paid subscribers, like cable TV? Would you close the government mint and throw American citizens on the stormy, uncertain seas of myriad “crypto-currencies” (digital “currencies” 100% dependent on huge, monster computers, with their huge, monster fans running 24/7 somewhere off in the countryside), an untested monetary abstraction that few even pretend to understand? 

 

A simpler example: A certain faction of our country seeks to “privatize” (i.e., sell to profit-seekers) the United States Postal Service, replacing it with anyone in the market who wanted to start up a company but would have no mandate to serve the entire country. Profitable areas could be cherry-picked, the rest underserved or not served at all. 

And note carefully here that “privatization” means more than letting business instead of government run something: it means selling off carefully constructed public goods that have been built and maintained for years with money from public taxes – not to those who paid the taxes for years (often generations) but to a private, profit-seeking organization or organizations. [Note: The United States Postal Service was government-funded until 1970. Since then, like county conservation district offices, it has had to pay its own way in the country, competing against private companies who do not have to serve every community.] Historic public good sold at fire sale prices? How can that be for the benefit of the public? How does that increase the “freedom” of citizens?

 

Those who would blind you with the false dilemma “socialism vs. freedom” rely on your not seeing that unrestricted “freedom” for corporate “persons” means seriously diminished real freedom for real persons, i.e., human beings. No one can own the air, and it cannot be restricted to a bounded place, so why should a corporation be allowed to poison it in order to make profits, and how does sacrificing environmental and human health to market forces increase our freedom? It does not. That is only one example.

I don't even want to say there are many shades of grey between black and white, and the idea of heads or tails on a coin is plain silly. It makes more sense and is truer to life to think of alternatives to either/or as a rainbow of possibilities.

The "road" of the future does not exist until we build it -- and in my imagination it is not one big superhighway but an interconnected network. Again, possibilities....

 

False dilemmas - Homework: Think about it. 

When does something count as a “BIG LIE”?

A timely title, no?

The other day I bought a Wall Street Journal for the first time in months, curious to see what it would have to say about President Biden stepping down from the 2024 campaign and endorsing Kamala Harris. In an extraordinary opinion piece, headlined (and I realize that writers do not provide headlines themselves) “Democrats Will Pay for the Biden Big Lie,” Matthew Hennessey wrote that Biden’s announcement 

...brings to an end the big lie Democrats have been telling about the president for at least a year and maybe longer — that he is in full control of his mental faculties…. 

 

What can I say about such a leap of logic? But wait. Let’s go back to Hennessey’s first paragraph: 

 

President Biden told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos earlier this month that only “the Lord Almighty” could get him to abandon his failing bid for re-election. Well, someone call the Vatican: I’d like to report the second coming.

 

My first question: Do Christians say the Lord must appear again on earth for Him to speak to his believers? I never heard that.

 

Leave religion aside, though, and let's address politics: No one is ever in a race for office until that person officially declares. It’s all denial, denial, denial until the announcement. Similarly, no one is ever dropping out until that person announces his or her campaign is over. That’s the way the game is played. Grow up, Matthew. You didn't know that?

 

As for “lying” on the part of Democrats, how does MH conclude, from Biden’s dropping out of the race, either (1) that the president's mental faculties are failing or (2) that other Democrats believed that to be the case and have been lying about it? As I say, quite a leap. Reaching such a conclusion would require at least one additional premise, but, if MH does have another, he has hidden it well.

 

If you want to judge President Biden’s mental strength, you have only to watch and listen to his interview with Lester Holt. In that exchange, it’s obvious that Joe’s mind is still sharp as a tack. His voice is weak, and he is showing the fragility of age, but his thinking is clear — unlike that of the Republican candidate. 

 

As for “big lies,” who is the champion? Who kept claiming that Barack Obama was not born in the United States? Who is still claiming, in the face of a mountain of disconfirming evidence, that the 2020 was “rigged,” “stolen,” etc., etc.? 

 

Has the Republican nominee, I wonder, made any true public statements? Let’s have one quoted, please. Just one substantive true statement. I’m waiting....