Seeing Both Sides Now

One of the difficulties I have had in my life is the ability to see both sides of an issue.  This doesn’t mean I don’t have opinions of my own, since I obviously do.  It does mean, however, that I often need to think about what I hear for a while before I comment on it.  Of course, sometimes I don’t think, and it comes out wrong!!  It is known as foot in mouth disease!

This past week on Martin Bashir’s program he had a segment discussing Congressman Alan Grayson’s comment comparing the Tea Party to the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).  Some other Democratic Congressman had criticized Grayson’s comments stating that he had learned as a legislator never to discuss fascism, the Nazis, the KKK or slavery.  I found that a tad odd since these all are historical facts, and they need to be talked about so that we can learn from history what is malevolent.

Bashir’s point was that the KKK had carried out a policy of lynching innocent black men for little or no reason, and the Tea Party had never done that.  To compare the two then trivialized the horrors of the KKK.  Grayson’s point, which he did not make very well, was that Tea Party rhetoric was very often racist, and that he had received many vicious and threatening e-mails of a racist nature.  Therefore, his analogy between the Tea Party and the KKK was valid.

How to reconcile the three ideas that had been tossed out there:  the first, that one must never discuss fascism, the Nazis, the KKK or slavery (the Democratic Congressman); that when one found common points between two events one had the obligation to compare them to each other (Grayson); to compare one truly malevolent historical fact with another historical fact that was not as malevolent but did have points of convergence was to trivialize the former (Bashir).  All valid points.

It is my opinion that the Democratic Congressman and Bashir were trying to make the same argument that one should not attempt to make a position stronger by comparing it to an horrendous event.  An example would be comparing Obamacare to slavery.  The comparison is ridiculous to start out with, but it also trivializes the dreadfulness of slavery.  And this is a very compelling argument to never do that.

And yet Grayson apparently recognizes that words can have terrible consequences if not unchecked.  It wasn’t until Europeans began to compare peoples of color and their cultures as being terribly inferior to European culture that the enslavement of people of color became OK.  After all, if a people had an inferior culture, and then only 3/5ths of a soul on top of that, it became almost the duty of the superior peoples to enslave them to save the people of color from themselves (the white man’s burden).  And in Germany in the 1930’s when it became the policy of the Nazis to begin the verbal assault against Jews, homosexuals, and anyone who the Nazis considered defective, that eventually the populace as a whole began to view these people as inferior or a detriment to society, so it was OK to treat them abominably.  I doubt in the beginning of this denigration the average German had any idea what the eventual results would be, but if the government thought it was the right thing to do, then neither did many of them care.  The end result was the murder by one means or another of nearly 9 million people, 6 of the million were Jews.

The lessons to be learned from all of this I believe is that it is just as important to talk about what has happened in our history – the good, the bad and the ugly – as it is to talk about what is happening in our country right now – the good, the bad and the ugly.  But how we talk about it can have great consequences.  Therefore, direct analogies between two uneven events should never happen.  But it is important to surface malevolence whenever and wherever it arises.  An example would be to discuss the coded racial rhetoric of the Tea Party from the perspective of depriving people of their dignity as human beings, of possibly depriving them of their civil rights, or of the Tea Party for being just plain cruel and immoral. 

Words do have consequences.  We must use them wisely.

Freedom Fried (satire)

All of this rhetoric over the tyranny of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and how it is going to take away our freedoms really had me concerned.  Now that the ACA has survived the attempt by the Tea Partiers to get rid of it by repealing, defunding, and delaying it has backfired, that may also have the effect of not getting rid of all of the rest of the nasty regulations that keep us from really being free.  Woe is me! 

With the federal Clean Water Act still in place and pretty much working, I don’t have the freedom to drink water that has little bits of stuff floating around in it.  I don’t have the freedom to drink water that might be tainted with cholera.  And just think, some of us won’t have the freedom to have our water from the faucet catch on fire or watch our rivers glow in the dark when they catch on fire. 

And how terrifying has it been to breathe air we can’t see after all of those regulations went into effect to control the amount of pollution from coal-fired plants, oil refineries, automobiles and other coal or oil fired engines?  Not to mention how our curiosity about how climate change will affect the planet over the long-term.  I really wanted to see all of those hurricanes, tornados, excessive rainfall here in California that causes our hills to turn to mud, and then the extended droughts here in the west that cause even more extensive wild-fires than we have had.  Boy, those people in Washington sure take the fun out of life. 

As for gambling, without food safety regulations we could have had a good time gambling on whether the food we eat had e-coli, salmonella or contaminants from herbicides all over it.  Of course, if we didn’t want to gamble on that we could buy locally produced food designated to be organic.  Except without inspectors to make sure the farms are organic, I guess we can still have the fun of gambling to see what will happen to us. 

When it comes time to take a vacation, we can have all of the excitement of not knowing what the weather will be.  Our weather reports come from a federal agency, so imagine the fun of driving across Oklahoma and being caught in a tornado.  We may get to whirl around at a couple a hundred miles an hour, and all for free.  You have to pay to ride a roller coaster you won’t know is safe because the inspectors are no longer on duty.  A tornado would be so much better.  And imagine the fun of being caught in a hurricane if the vacation is near the gulf coast.  Those surfs you see on TV look like they would be terrific to surf, and why not?  No one is around to tell you whether the surf is safe or not.  Nanny state all gone! 

We could, I suppose, still gamble when we decide to take a vacation.  If we decide to drive, we can be sure that our vehicle wasn’t inspected when it left the plant, so we can play a game of whether the vehicle will last long enough to get there.  Or if we fly, we can gamble on whether the plane was inspected before it was allowed to take off.  Now that will be a hoot!  We can grab the armrests with every little bit of air turbulence before we find out if that is all it is, or whether the plane is breaking up.  And if it does break up, no one will know why because the agency that determines what caused the air accident is a federal agency.  Without all of those regulations we can go back to having no fear of flying.

Since there won’t be any gun control of any kind, when there is a massive bombing, as at the Boston Marathon last year, we won’t have to waste time trying to figure out “who done it”.  Those incidents are investigated by federal agencies.  We can just shrug them off and go about our business, having the freedom to wonder where it will happen next.   

Ah, freedom.  I can hardly wait until the next government shutdown, or debt default.  Maybe if the feds go for a default and there is a total world-wide economic collapse all over the world, we will be free of regulations, and then the corporations will be able to give us all of the freedom we can handle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Confederate Flag? Amazing Grace??

The thing about age is one mellows. 

I watch the news program, Martin Bashir, eat my lunch, and then ride my exercise bicycle (sort of).  Today there was a segment about the House Republican Caucus that blew my “mellow” all to pieces.  It was about how the Caucus met this morning with a prayer.  Well, that’s OK.  It wasn’t a public meeting, and if they wanted to pray, that seemed like a good thing to do for them because, in my opinion, they need all the help they can get.  But they left the Caucus, in the halls of our government, singing the hymn “Amazing Grace”.  I came unglued for the following reasons, some objective, some not.  Let me state here that I profess to being a Catholic Christian along the lines of Pope Francis, long before he came on the scene, so this is not some anti-Christian rant.   

The first reason deals with the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …”  Now if the members had wanted to sing any other song that was not so blatantly Christian, I would not be so furious.  How about, “The Lord Hears the Cry of the Poor…”, or, “Let Justice Roll Down Like a River.”  These are songs that could be sung nearly anywhere.  But singing “Amazing Grace”, which is blatantly and specifically Christian, for me smacks a bit too close to being an attempt to subvert the First Amendment.   

Further, the words to “Amazing Grace” were written by John Newton, a former captain of a slave ship who became a committed Christian later in life.  He wrote the words obviously after he had a complete change of heart from his former occupation.  The melody, however, was written on the five black keys of our Western eight note octave, which are the five notes of West African music.  The melody is remarkably close to a sorrow chant of West Africa, and would have been chanted in the holds of his ship by the newly captured Africans on their way to be sold as slaves.   

Take the deeply meaningful history of the hymn and put it in juxtaposition to the waving of the Confederate flag in front of the White House this weekend.  Not only does this flag have very, very deep emotional scars for our fellow African-American citizens, but it also represents sedition for the rest of us.  It was the flag of the South during the Civil War.  Allegiance to this flag represents sedition to our Constitutional system of government, that all are equal before the law.  Our society often does not live up to this ideal, obviously, but that does not mean we should abandon it as an ideal.  To wave that flag in front of the White House when the current occupant is an African-American is beyond despicable. 

Perhaps the members of the Caucus don’t know the history of the hymn; perhaps they know and don’t care; or perhaps they know and are sending a message, along with the Confederate flag, that does not auger well for our entire country.  In any event, these were despicable actions on both counts

 

When will this gaggle of radical insurrectionists be called to account for their actions which are becoming, in my opinion, perilously close to being high crimes and misdemeanors. 

 

 

 

 

 

Tarantulas, Computers, and Other Irrelevant Matters

Tarantulas, Computers and Other Irrelevant Matters

For those not from the California Central Coast, and for some who are newly here, we have these really hairy spiders that are pretty scary sometimes.  They can be anywhere from two to six inches in length, but generally around four inches.  Coastal tarantulas can make you sort of sick, but unless the human has some already pretty bad health issues, the tarantulas are not generally lethal.  The male spiders live somewhere (I’m not sure where), but emerge around the first of October and start wandering around.  They used to really upset me until I realized that what they were looking for was a female tarantula similarly inclined.  These females live in holes in the ground waiting for a male to wander by.  I once found a hole with a female living in it, and a wandering male one day, so I scooped up the male with a shovel and put him by the hole.  The speed with which he jumped toward the hole, and with which she emerged and they mated was truly remarkable.  I didn’t wait around for the rest of nature’s way, but I have been told that she then kills the male, drags him into her hole, lays her eggs in him, and when the eggs hatch the little ones chomp on good ol’ Dad until the little ones go their tarantula way.  After learning this, the wandering males just sort of make me feel sad.   

The legend here on the Coast is that when the tarantulas start to walk, it will rain within three weeks. 

My husband Bill, unlike me, wakes up at some ungodly hour of the morning, and when that occurs on a Saturday morning, he watches the farm station from the mid-west somewhere.  On this particular morning there was a world-wide weather report from some hot-shot computer in Europe that predicted no rain in California for the foreseeable future.  Since we are in an extreme drought situation this was not particularly good news.  Later in the day on that Saturday, he had been working outside, gotten sort of tired, and sat down to take a breather.  While there, two tarantulas came from opposite directions to a stop in front of him.  He said it was like watching some sort of very slow-motion dance, with one tarantula slowly raising one leg out of eight, then putting it down.  The other did the same thing a few moments later.  This went on for a few more minutes, with one tarantula raising a leg, then the other.  Suddenly they leapt to their back legs and hugged each other for a few moments, dropped back down to the ground and each wandered on in the general direction they had come from, still searching for a female. 

Ah, but that meant a contest between the tarantulas and the computer.  Which would be right?  Would it rain and prove the computer wrong, or would it not rain and prove the tarantulas wrong?  Last week a low-pressure system moved down the California coast well within the three week tarantula legend, and I was most happy.  But, it only drizzled!!  There was moisture in the air, however, but does that really count?  Only the Shadow knows.   

Why am I writing about tarantulas and computers?  Because if I write about what is going on in Washington right now, I would be using all sorts of language that should not be read in mixed company.  By this time next week we may have an answer to this god-awful mess we are in, and perhaps I will be less angry.  Or, I may just write about it and use lots of @#%$&^(*s.

 

 

 

 

Giving in to Bullies

On 10/03/13, Andy Borowitz wrote a small satire in the New Yorker, “Boehner:  Obama Stubbornly Refusing to End Crisis I Created”.

 

The entire satire is funny, but the following lines attributed to John Boehner read, …”The President is stubbornly refusing to end the crisis I created. … “Government is about teamwork.  I’ve done my part by putting together an entirely optional crisis that has shut down the government and will throw thousands out of work.  Now it’s up to the President to do his part by ending it.”  I’m not sure which is funnier.  The satire or the fact that right under the title is the notice:  The article below is satire.

Sometimes satire can get a point across so much better than just plain explanations.  It is so difficult for me to understand why the Tea Partiers in Congress, who I understand were drinking something a tad stronger than tea the other day, can’t comprehend that the American people are so stupid they can’t understand that in order to change a law they must get both the House of Representatives and the Senate to vote to change it.  The change must be written out specifically so everyone will know what (assuming they can read) they are voting on.  Even if both Houses voted to change the law it is extremely doubtful the President would sign this particular law.  The Representatives have tried some 40 times to repeal the law, and they can’t get that vote to pass.  Why in the name of all that’s holy do they think they can force a change in Obamacare, which is the same thing as the Affordable Care Act, when it’s the President’s favorite law?   

My 8/5/11 blog, A Carefully Scripted Psychodrama, discussed how the Koch Brothers and their minions had caused the debt ceiling crisis, and that the media at that time asserted that President Obama had “blinked” in order to prevent a world-wide economic collapse, but that the issue was now water under the bridge.  It is my opinion that President Obama learned a very hard lesson during that time, and that was that if you give in to bullies, they won’t stop.  It only eggs them on.  I believe the Tea Partiers think he will “blink” again.  What they haven’t counted on is the outrage the majority of the American people are feeling over these trumped up crises.   

This whole fiasco reminds me of when I ran for office the third time around.  The left-leaning activists in this county were furious that I had beaten their chosen candidate in the primary.  From that point forward until my first full year in office they demanded I apologize to her.  My response was to tell me what I needed to apologize for, I would consider it, and if I felt she deserved an apology, I would do so.  Their reasoning was that since I had won, it had caused a rift in the environmental community, and it was my responsibility to heal it by apologizing.  For what?  Winning?  

It is the same thing, only on a much grander scale.  Don’t give in, Mr. President.  Our democracy will be overrun by a bunch of bullies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Correction to Anger and Hope

In my last post, Anger and Hope, I mentioned that the world needed a recognized authority figure to act for all of the positive things that are in everyone's hearts.  At 2:00 A.M. this morning I realized that I should have used the term "world-wide mentor" that world level leaders would listen to.  I would hope that Pope Francis could fill that role of mentor.