EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 CITIES

Not everyone is as fortunate as I to have worked with our state’s cities for over a half century. I have loved the hum and vibrance of a city since I can remember. I've lived in cities as famous as San Franscisco, as diverse as Little Rock, and small as our current location that serves as "the front porch of the Arkansas Delta."

I've never lost the wonder at the hard work it takes to make a city function as a place for its residents. A place where we can turn a faucet and receive clean water. A place where we can turn a handle to remove wastewater. A place where we can punch a button and receive police or fire protection. A place where we can move effortlessly from location to location. A place where the best of people work to make this all happen. I'm proud of every moment I've spent trying to help.

 It has been a rollercoaster of a ride. I’ve seen highs such as the opening of a new plant that will provide sanitary drinking water to a community. I’ve felt heartbreak when a governing body had to choose between cutting funds for the police, fire, or animal control. But through it all I’ve seen the finest of those among us strive, without rest, to create miracles of operations that allow us to rest “with a full stomach in a warm room.”

That is why I find a political party’s vicious attack on the city and citizens of Springfield, Ohio so unconscionably vulgar and un-American. This is not politics. It is the planting of the seeds of genocide. Those supporting it may someday have to stand in a line being forced to view the eventual results. Let us all hope it never comes that.

Germans Forced To Visit Camps

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TODAY'S EPIPHANY

 CHOICES

It’s difficult to choose one side unconditionally these days. I’ve always leaned left, but don’t always subscribe to the silliness. Yes, no offense, but there are some silly things going on ‘die äußerste Linke,” way over yonder. This “pronoun crap” in my opinion, is silly. This “I don’t feel safe hearing an opinion I disagree with” is silly. This stopping traffic while innocent people are trying to get to work, to the hospital, or home to their children is beyond silly.

Every sports coach knows that one never makes a statement that the opposing coach will tack to the locker room walls to motivate players. Think how many votes Donald Trump received just from “defund the police.”

But, to allegorize something Sigmund Freud probably never said but got stuck with, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

Silliness is just silliness. Unproductive actions are just unproductive actions. Extreme “wokeism” is just extreme wokeism. People don't normally die from them.

Making a 12-year-old girl give birth to a rapist’s sperm residue is more than silliness.

Attacking the police guarding the United State Capitol is more than just silliness.

Defunding programs that feed the poor is more than just silliness.

Persecuting someone because of their genetic wiring for sex is more than just silliness.

Decisions stem from points along a spectrum of reality. At one end are rainbow flags. At the other are crematorium ovens.

Morning Thoughts: December 13, 2017

Flipped back and forth last evening between election coverage and a documentary about Nazi invasion of Poland. The latter had some footage I’ve never seen before, and was more than terrifying. What a sore on the soul of humanity is racial hatred. What was particularly unsettling, and I’ve read about his many times before, was the cavalier attitude of the non-Jewish residents of the occupied cities as their neighbors and former friends were dragged from their homes.

I think it was Elie Wiesel who wrote so eloquently about the sin of indifference. It was well-evident in Polish city after Polish city as the Nazis began systematically going about their reign of terror with no protests from the non-victims.

Many stood and watched and others applauded as men, women, and children were beaten down the streets and crowded into ghettos. Some standers-by then took the opportunity to take belongings left behind. As I watched, dots began to connect themselves in my mind.

What kind of species are we? I flipped the channel. There was the smirking image of a man who, just this week, had said that the last time America was great was during slavery. My strongest image from what I have learned of that era, is an account (by Fredrick Law Olmstead I think, in Travels Through the South). The author, whoever it was anyway, recounted watching a slave owner punish a female slave for some infraction or other. She was pregnant, “bigly” pregnant, so her “master” had her dig an indention in the ground to accommodate her swollen belly before he made her lie down to be beaten.

Great? If so, then let’s not make America great like that again. Racism and hatred are no ways to make a country great. The Nazis proved that.

To borrow wording from a much greater American, “It is left for us, the living …” to rise above what may be evolutionary tendencies toward tribalism (now called “nationalism”) and embrace the "better angels of our nature" by embracing our sisters and brothers of all colors and places of origin. We could, I think, achieve greatness by letting love and peace replace bigotry and war.

Why the optimism?

Well, after all, America did become a little greater as recently as yesterday.

Auctioning off what conservative
textbooks call "Guest Workers."

Sailing To Oblivium: August 18, 2017

A boy I knew years ago and I gave wrong directions once to a black family asking the way to Memphis. We sent them in the opposite direction. I still worry about it.

There were three of us waiting in a parking lot on the main highway through our town for a fourth rider. The owner of our car, I’ll call him Joe, was giving us all a ride back to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville after a weekend visit home.

Joe was one of the biggest jerks I’ve ever known, but he had a car and would give us rides home and back if we paid for the gas. As we stood there, a car stopped with an African-American family inside. The man politely asked for directions to Memphis, Tennessee.

He was headed in the wrong direction, headed, in fact, for Dallas, Texas.

Before anyone could speak, Joe blurted out, “You’re headed right, just keep going for 150 miles or so and you’ll be right there." Then man thanked him and drove off toward Texas.

I say “we” gave them wrong directions, for I stood silent, making me just as guilty as Joe. I have thought of that incident maybe hundreds of times over the years, including on lonely nights sitting in a tower, or on a bunker guarding a Navy base against attack by a known enemy.

The ghastly sin of bigotry and racism is also a known enemy, and I have, on occasion, failed my country and my fellow human beings by falling under its spell through silence or apathy. Maybe there are others that feel that way too.

Oh, I have rationalized about the incident. Had I interfered, I would have been left on the side of the road without a ride back to resume classes the next day.

Interference may have led to a physical confrontation.

There was a third person who would have sided, no doubt, with Joe and it would have been a question of whom to believe.

The highway was clearly marked and I’m sure the family realized the deception before long.

It’s all bull of course. I was a coward and a bigot. My only hope is that the incident may have helped form my later belief system. Maybe Joe himself changed. On the other hand, maybe Joe was among the Neo-Nazis, KKK members, white supremacists, and hatemongers that the President of the United States of America has seen fit recently to defend. Who knows?

Maybe the incident served some distant purpose. I’ve thought about it while driving home late at night through the Arkansas Delta through swarms of insects as thick as fog. Often, I had just been the only white face at a meeting held in a small rural church building for the purpose of planning how to get a water system funded for one of the poorest communities in our state. Maybe the Galilean would give me a little credit for that, and for speaking out from time to time against hate. Who knows? By doing so, I've alienated some folks I had regarded as friends. Who cares?

As I say, maybe Joe changed. Sometimes education and responsibility lead us to change our hateful ways for the better. I’m not optimistic, though, after this past week, about the healing effects of education and responsibility. They sure haven’t had that effect on our president. We can only weep as we remember Zion. 

A holocaust survivor and target

of the Charlottesville marchers.

      

Sailing To Oblivium: August 16, 2017

It’s one of those days when a person ought to try to get his mind off current events. Unhinged minds are swarming about like hornets. Their buzzing dominates the news and clogs the very air we breathe. It’s like trying to respire nuggets of pure filth.

It brings me once again to the lines of Matthew Arnold:

“I, on men's impious uproar hurl'd,

Think often, as I hear them rave,

That peace has left the upper world

And now keeps only in the grave.”

Gosh I hope not. Arnold found peace and hope in Kensington Gardens. I’ve turned to watching and listening to Yeol Eum perform Mozart’sPiano Symphony Number 21. It gives me a few minutes peace. Moreover, it gives me hope.

If there are young people like Yeol Eum amongst us, and there is beautiful music waiting to be played and heard, can it drown out the insanity about us? Gosh, I hope so.

What was so startling about the last few days is the number of people whom I had considered normal, rational friends who have aligned themselves with, well, the scum of the earth: the KKK, the Aryan National, American Nazis, and assorted hatemongers. Where it will all end I don’t know. Those groups are quite adroit at passing their anger and hatred to others, and they now have a new friend who just happens to be the most powerful man on the face of the earth.

It’s more than a little unsettling.

What we are seeing may be what happens when people quit reading poetry and listening to Mozart. Perhaps we should all go to a public place of quiet reflection as Arnold did and seek hope as he expressed it:

Calm soul of all things! make it mine

To feel, amid the city's jar,

That there abides a peace of thine,

Man did not make, and cannot mar.

Meanwhile, send a bigot a link to Mozart.

It can’t hurt.

Sailing To Oblivium: August 15, 2017

The TV announcers seem surprised. What rocks have they been hiding under? Those chickens have been headed our way for a long time.

One wonders when a pundit, in earching for the origins of Charlottesville, VA, will remember SCOTUS Chief Justice Roberts’ famous cop-out in Shelby County v. Holder. As the Court gutted voting rights, he claimed “…while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions.” (Emphasis mine) That is to say, “Hey, racism is over now. We don’t need no stinkin’ voting rights legislation anymore.”

Or, will a reporter finally remind us that Ronald Reagan first announced his presidential candidacy in Philadelphia, MS, the town where the three civil rights workers: Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney were slain by white supremacists in 1964.

The message was plain, “Hey y’all, I’m with you on this race thing. Let’s make America white again.”

 The chickens coming home now have been wandering around long before Donald Trump announced his campaign. One only had to be there when America elected Barack Obama president. The thought of a person of color in the white house shook the foundations of white society with enough strength to awaken Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. It did awaken Jim Crow like nuclear tests awakened the monsters of the 1950s’ Sci-Fi movies. Bigotry was fashionable again in the bars, coffee shops, hunting clubs, and hair salons of the South. Like all cancers, it soon spread over all of America’s body.

People you thought were reasonable and sane began joking and frolicking: photoshopping watermelon patches on the White House lawn, wearing blackface outfits to parties, calling the gracious First Lady of our country a gorilla, or resurrecting stale old racist jokes from the 1950s.

The chickens began to strut and peck. We ignored them, perhaps because we were busy, perhaps because we were verifiably Caucasian, or perhaps because we thought America was too strong to be lured into the cesspool of racism, bigotry, and prejudice again. Maybe, after all, we did think the jokes and jibes were a little bit funny. What’s the harm if it doesn’t affect us? Warum ärgern? Es ist nichts.

When situations arose that required complex analysis, we discarded the complexity and chose sides. Violence drew lines that won’t be erased for decades. It was righteous food for the flocks, and it drew them like moths to a flame.

Other chickens, like the fundamentalist religion crowd, joined in dragging new targets. The flocks grew. Fox “news” found an audience and prospered, throwing enough grain on the ground to entice even the previously sane into the mix. Old breeds infiltrated: the KKK, the Aryan Nation, even the Neo-Nazis. Nobody seemed to notice who their flock-mates were.

It was a happy group, pecking and strutting the day away until the Sean Hannity show came on so he could throw them their daily grain. The chickens were happy and content.

Now they are coming home to roost and some wonder why. I just wonder how come it took them so long.

But maybe, just maybe, Charlottesville will provide a Joseph Welch moment for America. Click here for the video of how he handled the Donald Trump of his day.

Mr., we could use a man like
Joseph N. Welch again.