DREAMS

 America has forgotten how to dream. I saw something like that in a quote and it started me thinking. My thoughts: Yes we have. No we have not.

It seems to me that we have forgotten to dream of the things that make our country stronger.

We once dreamed of eliminating poverty. Lyndon Johnson tried. It may have represented a classic example of applying the right solution to the wrong problem. Perhaps the problem wasn’t poor people in poor areas. Perhaps the problem was the exploitation of poor people in almost every segment of our country since 1619.

Ronald Reagan dreamed of accommodating poverty by enabling the rich to become richer and the poor to become ashamed of being poor. More wealth was to trickle downward from the rich to the poor and obviate the need for the ones he pictured as being like his “Welfare Queen.” Wealth, falling from the sky like manna from Heaven would enable those below to free themselves from the quagmire of poverty.

It may have contained a twinge of applying the wrong solution to the right problem. It is a characteristic of the rich that that last thing on earth they want is to share in their hoard.

Our poor still wait like hungry pets for the largesse to fall their way.

Oh, we dream alright. The rich dream of a pure capitalistic society in which they face no regulations or pay any taxes.

The poor dream of not having to make a choice between food or shelter.

Many of the rest of us dream of our state’s college sports team winning a national championship.

EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 RESEARCH

Sometimes I read Harper’s Index and dream that if I happed to be younger, smarter, and more educated, I would consider my own topics, such as:

The percentage of the terrorists who attacked the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 who were card-carrying drag queens.

The ratio of women who said, in 2016, that they didn’t like Hillary Clinton but now say they analyze their voting decisions more carefully.

The percentage of evangelicals who affirm reading the Book of Numbers in its entirety and feel concern for the Midianites.

Percentage of affirmed MAGA voters who voted against Bill Clinton only because of his sexual misconduct.

Percentage of voters who feel multiple divorces is not a concern of Christians in selecting a president.

Who believe that the sexual orientation of married couples is.

Number of Trump supporters now in prison who worked as librarians.

Percentage of Americans who believe Lyndon Johnson personally fired the shots that killed John F. Kennedy.

Percentage of American registered voters who can name the U.S. Presidents in order since Herbert Hoover.

Percentage who can name the last ten Grammy winners for female vocalist of the year.

Percentage of mass murderers in the U.S. who were transgender.

Percentage of Americans who believe that the percentage of Americans serving in the military is greater than 25 percent.

Morning Thoughts: April 2, 2018

Over my career as a planning consultant, I’ve worked for many a mayor. I’ve found them to be a honest, hard-working, and dedicated group. Of course, the nice thing about being a consultant is that it doesn’t allow one to judge one’s clients. I may have a slight bias, although I do have a good vantage point.

That said, I’ve seen all kinds, genders, races, backgrounds. A very few traits, predominately back in the day, I could attribute to prejudice of one sort of another. Meantime, I’ve never known one to steal, ignore the law, or collude with foreign enemies. Most do use the political prerogative of prevarication, but almost always to further the common good, scarcely ever for fun, entertainment, or retribution.

A few of them moved to other offices. Several became state reps or senators. One made a try at governor once, but failed. One became a U.S Representative. I think there may be more, and some from other states, but I can’t recall. Lyndon Johnson had been a teacher, an occupation as honorable as that of mayor.

Overall, cities are well run, usually more so than (this is my humble opinion and please feel free to harbor your own) state or federal governments. Of course, (my opinion again) there’s not a city I can think of that isn’t being operated better than our present federal government.

That brings me to this morning’s point, which is: maybe it is time for a mayor to be president. Goodness knows, we’ve tried everything from engineers to vice-presidents to movie-actors to trust-fund babies to professional wrestling promoters. A mayor couldn’t do worse, and, if past performance is any indicator of future probability, could do much, much better.

Attorneys have dominated the ranks of president and have generally served us well. Given the current bias against the educated, though, there are many who don't want to to see another president trained in law, and familiar with the United States Constitution. Betsy DeVoss probably doesn't even want to see a college graduate again as president.

But trend is not destiny.

Back to mayors, though. They understand balanced budgets. They understand diversity in population. They understand public finance. And half of them understand the need to keep a careful eye on the males of the species. That half would also understand that government can never provide the military-industrial complex all the taxpayer money that it wants. Women are much better than men at saying “no.”

To follow the idea further, I even have someone in mind. In the interest of non-partisanship, I can’t name names, but this one is a Southerner who understands a bit about hurricanes and a lot about a city enjoying itself when it isn't being ravaged by a hurricane.

This one denies even thinking about running for president, a fact that historically means one thing:

He’ll run if he thinks he has a chance. Yes, it's a male. Female politicians at the national level still tend to make too many heads explode. He has the current disadvantage of being thoughtful, educated, erudite, intelligent, and an attorney. But we had such a president just one back. There may be hope for us again.

We’ll know he’s serious the day Fox “news” starts producing lies and slanders against him.

I even think that the lack
of hair would lessen the
ridicule from other countries.

Thoughts on a career: January 4, 2018

With my youthful demeanor and immature behavior, you’ll find this hard to believe, but on this day 46 years ago, I entered my profession. I had, somehow, landed a job with an urban planning consulting firm straight out of the military. Geez, I had hit the big time. Or so I thought.

The first planning commission I ever attended was in Hope, Arkansas, a fine community in Southwest Arkansas, the birthplace of President Bill Clinton. Last year, I attended a city board meeting in that very room. The furniture was arranged differently, but it was pretty much the same place. Tempus fugit and all that

Back in the day, planning commissioners all looked like me. That is to say they were all old fat white men. Lots of changes have occurred since that meeting in Hope. Along the line, African-American men and white women appeared on planning commissions, not in proportion to the local population, however. These days, African-American women and persons of Hispanic heritage are finding a place.

In one of those mental files I maintain under “interesting but I don’t know why,” I filed the fact that one saw African-American men appear first.

Those were interesting time. It was marking the end of the so-called “Great Society” era. That experience never achieved its lofty goals, to a large degree because too many important individuals and entities found that making war was either more profitable or more politically useful. I keep my thoughts about this in a file called “Tragedies.”

What the Great Society efforts did, in my observation, was to excite, like some charge applied to dormant electrons, a sense of social justice within a significant segment of the population. Leaders who staunchly declared there were no qualified minorities or women to fill upper-level jobs suddenly found some when they learned that the grant they sought required positive affirmative action.

Coupled with the monumentally heroic actions of people like Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John Lewis, the governmental emphasis on elevating those who were poor in spirit and who mourned, began, albeit slowly—and against much resistance—to loosen the stranglehold of the Jim Crow era.

Looking at urban plans from that era, one is struck by a sense of optimism, naïve perhaps, that we could wage a war-like crusade against bitter poverty and despair. Moreover, some whose grandparents had been counted as three-fifths human were themselves in positions to achieve, perhaps in their lifetimes, full citizenship.

What we didn’t know was that any action can have an opposite reaction. This emphasis on redressing past inequalities raised the hopes of some and soothed the consciences of others. For some, however, such progress only pushed racial hatred belowground. Like a monster from a 1950s sci-fi movie, it rested in dark, subterranean caverns, waiting for a catalyst, perhaps of nuclear strength, to open a path to the surface.

There was no nuclear-like source, just upheavals, one on top on one another. On April 20, 1971, the United States Supreme Court upheld the use of busing to achieve racial desegregation in schools.

All hell broke loose, accompanied by a great “whooshing” sound as white parents fled cities whose school districts contained a significant black population. Racal composition became a significant element, in some cases the most significant element, in an area’s population growth.

Then a politician coined the term “silent majority,” as a code name for many who would see America return to the 1940s and 1950s, when African-American veterans, many who had been wounded in the service of their country, were denied equal access to the GI Bill. The term resonated with many who had become successful because they did receive full citizenship, but only credited their own hard work.

Next, a presidential hopeful chose to announce his candidacy in the Mississippi City in which three civil rights workers had been murdered for trying to register black voters. Seeing this as a message, the monsters began to slither upward. Recently, the Current Occupant declined to denounce the monsters' worst foot-soldiers, loosening them upon us with increased fury and confidence.

I don’t have to recount what else happened. But I’ve seen it all. My vantage point is from the courthouse square, an area often marked by vacant buildings and concrete slabs where buildings once stood. Retail business owners can’t afford political influence such as the coal industry can exert. I fear that they will disappear, in small-town America, in my lifetime.

And urban plans? They aren’t designed these days, in many cases, for optimism but for something called “branding,” whatever the hell that means. Many are simply drawings of how neighborhoods should look, a result that tells us much more about the personal tastes of the “planners,” than it does about the needs of the people who live within the city, either by choice or the restrictions placed upon them by a present emphasis on greed and selfishness.

Oh, and Hope, Arkansas? It’s managed today by a woman largely considered be one of the best city managers our state has ever produced.

I file that under “well, I’ll swan.”

Needing our love

Sailing Inrto Oblivion: June 16, 2017

Shakespeare said it, “… for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” We see it already in this week’s tragedy. Various political viewpoints are already beginning to view it through the prism of their own belief structures. I see it simply as a further step into collective madness. When will it stop?

We see it through the scope of history as well. On January 30, 1068, Viet Cong and NVA forces launched a massive attack on cities throughout South Vietnam. I was just outside of one of those and can testify that it wasn’t a pleasant time.

By all accounts, American and South Vietnamese forces were victorious. The Viet Cong never recovered from their losses and it took a long time for the NVA to regroup. For the otherwise hapless South Vietnam forces, it was their finest hour. They fought like demons alongside us. I saw piles of dead bodies, purportedly Viet Cong, piled like tree branches along key intersections, warnings I suppose.

It didn’t matter. The press, tired of the reports from our generals that all was going according to plan, was incensed that an attack of this scope could occur under the very noses of those generals. Their voices, thereafter, ranged from wariness to opposition.

The American people, quite frankly, war-weary already, began to realize that too many of their young men would die in that far-off place. It was time to bring them home.

Even the ones fighting wondered what was happening.

In North Vietnam, they treated it as a setback and regrouped. The VC melted into the jungles and dug in to wait.

In Washington, men just scratched their heads, and a president decided to call it quits.

Why was I involved in this mess? I don't recall having ever believed the reasons they me.

Each actor in the event viewed the results differently. There is even the lingering belief by some Americans that we could have “won” that war. In the words of Ernest Hemingway, “Isn’t it pretty to think so.”

How sad. As hard as we might believe in the successes, it didn’t matter. Had we stayed another 20 years, the VC and NVA would still have been fighting us, just as the Taliban will be fighting us in Afghanistan 20 years from now.

It just doesn’t matter what we believe. The facts don’t care. They flow beneath our loyalties, prejudices, and predispositions like a weary river, “headed somewhere safe to sea.” No, the facts don’t care what we think. Nor, anymore, do the victims.           

That time of our living greatly? It sure as hell wasn’t 1968.

The photograph that proved violence
is not always effective, That it can prove
to be counter-productive, in fact.

Sailing to Oblivium: June 12, 2017

They say it never thunders in San Francisco. It did that morning. It rumbled from the west past an old Chinese man and me. It moved on as if carried by the fog, and the man yawned. I leaned against a building, lit a cigarette, and thought about the unfairness of life.

We were standing on the Southeast corner of Haight and Masonic streets just before daylight. I don’t know where the other fellow was headed, but I was headed to the Contra-County bus terminal on Mission Street to catch a bus to the Bay Area Induction Center in Oakland. That’s where they determined if you were fit enough for the military draft. It wasn’t the happiest day of my life.

It was in the late summer of 1966. Anyone who has visited the City by the Bay understands Mark Twain’s saying that “The coldest winter I ever spent was the summer I spent in San Francisco.” I pulled a sheepskin lined jacket tighter and waited. On a normal day, I would be at this spot two hours later, waiting for the bus to take me to work at a Babcock and Wilcox office in the mission district just across, incidentally, from the terminal where I was now headed. I wasn’t going to work today, though.

These were interesting times in “The City.” In a few hours, hippies would fill the streets, centering on a now-famous intersection a block from where we waited. Later, in the afternoon, Ken Kessey and his band of “Merry Pranksters” would join the crowd around his bus, still parked in the Panhandle Park, across the street from my apartment.

By that afternoon I would know my fate. I had no doubts. Despite suffering from a terminal case of underachievement, I was healthy enough to be sent to die in the jungles of Vietnam. The underachievement part didn’t bother General Westmorland, Lyndon Johnson, or Robert McNamara. My body was warm and I could breathe on my own. That’s all that mattered.

Despite my laconic nature, I had worked my way through a college degree. The last semester I had worked two part-time jobs and carried 18 hours with grades high enough to have me re-classified as fit for cannon fodder. With my degree in hand, and my life ahead of me, I could look forward to a variety of choices: Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, or Coast Guard.

I passed, of course, but I managed to stay in the city a couple of months longer. Then I was off for the seminal adventure of my life, one I wouldn’t do again for a million dollars, nor would I take a million dollars to have not done it. I’m sure there are other old farts around who feel the same way.

One who didn’t enjoy the adventure now serves as our president. To paraphrase the late Hunter S. Thompson, the 45th President of the United States never bought the ticket and he never took the ride. You didn’t have to if you had the right connections, and he had connections that have taken him all the way to the White House. I now read where he says he will make the country “great again” but he doesn’t elaborate, except to assure us that it will be … well … great.

As for me, I’m still looking for the time period that this greatness will replicate. I mean, I’d like the exact year and all that.  As of June 12, 2017, all the news has done the last week is remind me of that foggy morning on Haight Street, so many years ago. Nobody has suggested an exact date for this glorious time—this year of living greatly. I do know one thing, though.

It sure as hell wasn’t 1966.

At the beach in San Francisco. Just waiting.

Reconciliation: 14

Don’t know about you, but I rejoice to know we still live in a nation governed by laws. The country had, it seemed to me, been drifting too much along the lines of the Weimar Republic to permit a comfortable night’s sleep.

Politics is a messy business that many people don’t understand. In my household, decisions involve only two people. Even then, they may involve hours of analysis, scenario-imagining, alternative analysis, and fiscal computations before she decides what we will do and I begin figuring out how to do it.

Imagine, on the other hand, if you had to convince a majority of 99 other people to follow your thinking on the resolution of a single issue. Imagine further that a majority of that majority will not form a decision based on your logic, or any logic at all. Factors as disparate as ideology, party loyalty, donor demands, and personal prejudices will control any number of votes.

The truth is, it is a miracle that laws ever get passed at all. The rare individual who is good at getting them passed at all may be a creature more ruthless than redemptive. But, consider Lyndon Baines Johnson. Hardly admirable in his personal habits, and unable to evade the tragedy of Vietnam, millions now have health care and millions more are free to exercise a right to vote because of this man who wouldn’t shrink from the most deplorable methods to pass a law.

Perhaps that is why we often hear the quote, “One should never watch sausages or laws being made.” It is ofttimes attributed to Bismarck. Don’t know if he actually said it, but it’s popular from time to time to attribute quotes to him, so what the heck?

That having been said, there should be boundaries that we don’t cross, and it seems we have crossed a few lately. When such a danger looms, it is the rule of law, not prayer, that saves us as a country, one more reason for the First Amendment separation of church and state. Is this to say personal spirituality doesn’t matter in our voting patterns? Of course not. I even place my voting habits on a segment of Christian literature. Yes, I do. I always try to offer my vote to the candidate who best fits my favorite scripture in theology, to wit:

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn: for they will be comforted.

Blessed are the meek: for they will inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness: for they will be filled.

Blessed are the merciful: for they will be shown mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart: for they will see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they will be called children of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.

Does anyone ever make all eight points? Of course not. The real terror is that we elect so many that fail to score even one point, while trying to force their own brand of religion upon us.

Just thinking.