#251 – Dick Bernard: Campaigning.

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Yesterday our local candidate for state legislature was door-knocking in our neighborhood – at least I know she was, since there was a flier with a handwritten personal note from her in our door.
Campaigning for office is brutal work, not for the faint of heart, and I sometimes wonder what would happen if all of those who collectively run for all offices would just say, in unison, ‘forget about it, life’s too short, I’m outa here”. Then we might come to some appreciation of the largely thankless labor our representatives provide, regardless of party, regardless of position, regardless of level.
Our representative is running for a third term. Best as I’ve been able to see, she’s run as a centrist – a survival skill in her district – and she’s ably represented the interests of her district and the state of Minnesota, her state.
“Her district”, in Minnesota, means basically about 40,000 people in part of one suburban city. Conservatively, this is 10-15,000 households, minimum. Trying to balance the interests of just her constituents is one thing; trying to represent her constituents while at the same time entering into endless negotiations with colleagues and assorted interests at the state level is something else again. There is an endless barrage of competing priorities, and at the end there is a record, gleefully dissected by an opponents apparatus who, these days, is not constrained by that quaint concept, honesty. (And who, further, is not constrained by a record – the opponent has never run for office before, to my knowledge.)
So…about the time our candidate was knocking on our door, our mailman was delivering a piece of what I would call “hit lit” from the opposition. It was, of course, attractive, with lots of flying feathers, saying that the opponents had “ruffled feathers” over our Representatives reckless spending which was, they cutely said, “for the birds”.
One enterprising friend did the research on this claim. She found that the expenditure referred to was from a fund established by Minnesota voters 18 YEARS before our Representative was in office, and furthermore, it was fully funded by lottery ticket sales and mandated for the specific use to which it was put. In other words, our candidate had nothing to do with either the fund or the expenditure.
Another mailing from the same source “complained about an alleged expenditure from the Nongame Wildlife Management Account which…is totally funded by those who check the box on their personal or corporate tax returns saying they wish to donate $1 or more to the fund, plus by private donations.” (quote from my friends letter to the editor, likely to appear in the local paper next week.)
The damage, of course, is done. More people will at least glance at the fliers in the mailbox, than will read the letter to the editor. Allegations will trump facts…with some voters.
So, our legislator walks on, neighborhood to neighborhood, doing her best to knock on every door, while trying to keep some semblance of personal life together – dealing with her mother’s recent death and other things. One cannot be a real person and run for office, either. That’s why so few are up to the task.
In the warfare that is politics, there is no time for letting down, of taking things for granted.
We’ll do what we can to help our candidate, and candidates, as will many others.
But we all need to pitch in.

#250 – Dick Bernard: a troubling sign among Signs

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Certain at this time of year in Minnesota is change in the appearance of nature. Leaves change colors and ultimately drop off; Fall flowers erupt in all their glory, including some absolutely brilliant wildflowers on my daily walk.
Every other year, Fall brings with it a new and odd biennial ‘foliage’. Locals call them campaign signs, and they erupt along the area roads. In recent days I have begun to look at them with increasing interest, largely because of a new species I have observed for the first time.
Lawn signs for political candidates are essential, even though they do not inform. Note a lawn sign driving along a road (where most of them are found) and normally it will emphasize only a single word, either the candidates first or last name. The hope is that some befuddled voter will see the name and remember “Scotty” (or whomever) when they enter the booth on November 2, and vote for him because they saw his name on a sign. Certainly, the sign has no other purpose than name recognition. One would hope that we don’t elect our local candidates based primarily on what their name is….
But this week I saw a new sign, one which I haven’t seen before, along the streets I traverse each day.

Lawn sign Woodbury MN September 29, 2010


I noticed two things about that sign: the candidate is running for Judge, and he is proudly advertising his endorsement by a political party.
Rarely on lawn signs do I see any reference to political party, particularly for local office.
In this instance, the candidate is one of 24 candidates for a single judgeship in Minnesota’s 10th Judicial District. I am not sure what caused this tsunami of candidates in this district, but the fact of the matter is that each of us who vote on November 2 will have to select one of these 24, either somewhat informed or at random, or not cast a vote at all. This particular candidate seems to be looking to get a leg up on his competitors by getting a partisan endorsement, and that concerns me, especially in an election for a Judge. The opposing party is in a quandary: it must similarly engage.
Questions abound on an endorsement of this sort. The endorsing party is, first of all, currently a party of fragments, from fanciers of Tea to moderates and even progressive in attitude. When the label is placed on the lawn sign, which party members actually did the endorsing? It makes a big difference. But all we know is the name on the sign.
What risk am I to take if I happen to be of some other party, and end up in a contest before this particular person, if he is finally elected Judge in November? He has telegraphed his bias. There is no law that says Judges cannot be partisan; but they should not be seated at the bench in, say, Red or Blue robes. Achieving justice in our system is hard enough to have to deal with an avowedly partisan judge, who likely sought the endorsement he now proudly advertises, and implicitly is beholden to.
In a race with as many candidates as there are in this one, odds are that this guy will be wearing Judge’s robes come January.
This is not an outcome even the endorsing party should welcome.
The judiciary should not be an arm of one party or another. It should do what it is supposed to do: interpret the law.
This sign is one of many that certain groups are attempting to undercut and subvert the neutrality of the legal Bench.
This is not good news for our democracy.

#249 – Dick Bernard: Beginning a family history

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Monday I mailed the family history of my Dad’s French-Canadian family.
It is a weighty tome. Its 500+ pages read 3 lb 9.4 oz on the post office scale. It represents my efforts to condense 400 years of several families French-Canadian history in North America. More info: here and here.
Whether the book turns out to be a ‘weighty tome’ in an intellectual or even family interest sense remains to be seen. Other ‘scales’ will measure that, and I have no control over them. I did my best, collecting information over the last 30 years, and during the last year attempting to organize and make some sense of it. Being a family in 2010 means, already, that I have sent books to California and New Jersey and Montreal and Winnipeg and Santa Fe and many other places. The family is hidden in plain sight, everywhere. Like a bunch of needles in a haystack.
Mine is an ordinary garden variety kind of family, like the vast majority of families who have built every nation and community in every era in history.
I built this history around the families of my Grandma and Grandpa’s root families: on one side, Bernard and Cote; on the other Collette and Blondeau. (I did a similar history of my mother’s ‘side’ some years ago.) My French-Canadians came from an era where French-Canadian married French-Canadian, and above that, lived in a French-Canadian culture in a French-Canadian community, speaking French. When my Dad was born in 1907, the fairly rigid ethnic boundaries were breaking down in northeastern North Dakota, but even so, when Grandpa died in 1957, a majority of the 116 names (usually the wife, it seems) who signed the book at his funeral in Grafton, North Dakota were French surnames, and some of the non-French surnames I know had French maiden names. That is how it was, then.
I like to think – again, the critics will be the judge – that this document I labored over for the last twelve months approaches the status of legitimate history.
Such histories are difficult for common people to do.
My roots families were farmers and grain millers and sometimes small merchants, and for the most part not very educated in the formal sense. There were no journals to quote from; no treasure trove of family letters found in somebodies attic; no scribes recording their daily activities.
Still, once one is identified as having an interest in the history of the family, information begins to accumulate, and it did, in my project. I gratefully acknowledge at least 37 people who had at one time or another over the 30 years provided information of one kind or another. And I was lucky in that this family had some sense that photographs might be useful in documenting its members.
Importantly, I could use stories about the French-Canadian experience gleaned from a newsletter I edited for over 15 years. There are about 50 of these in the book, presented as they were presented in the ‘cut and paste’ days of the 1980s, forward.
And now it’s done…at least for me. I shipped the several boxes that constitute the archives off to the University of North Dakota library, ready for some unknown researcher in the future.
I noted, in all of this, that people of my generation – I am 70 – are truly the final keepers of what can legitimately called ‘the old days’, before television, computers, rapid transportation and the like.
If memories are to be carried on, it is people like myself who are well advised to take on the task, now, before memory fails.

Dick Bernard and Family History Book September 28, 2010

#248 – Dick Bernard: Awaiting a new season

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One of the duties on a quick visit to the home farm near Berlin ND was to harvest the last of the land falls off the apple tree beside the house.
This was a good year for apples – at least for three of the four trees on the homestead – but very few of the apples were salvageable, mostly landfalls that either rotted or were partially eaten by one critter or another. Produce from nature doesn’t wait around to be attended to. My uncle and aunt couldn’t get to the task, much, this year.

Apples at the farm September 19, 2010


I picked what seemed to be usable apples and temporarily placed them in an old washtub – a relic of the days before washing machines – and mowed the grass.
My uncle and aunt knew that most of their apples would end up spoiled, and that was distressing. In some other year there was a lot of apple juice, etc., coming from these trees.
This year, almost nothing from the trees would actually be consumed.
While I mowed, my mind wandered back to a long ago visit to a relatives home in Mt. Angel OR, not far from Salem. It was 1971, and I was in a summer program at an area college. We went out for dinner at this families home. We’d never met before.
I remember nothing about the visit except for the huge Bing Cherry tree beside the house. This was an undisciplined tree, reaching so high that the fruit on the topmost branches was unreachable. In fact, most of the cherries were rotting on the ground. This astonished me, a kid from the midwest who grew up when perhaps once a summer a truck would come through with these same luscious cherries for sale, and my parents might buy a lug or two for canning purposes. And here I was seeing these riches of the earth rotting on the ground – no doubt a smelly nuisance to the homeowners.
As I completed my mowing, I put together a small pail of the best apples and went back to town, and then back home to the Twin Cities.
My thought process changed as time went on.
From the point of view of the apple tree, those apples aren’t wasted at all. They are simply the end point of the apple trees job: to provide seed for a potential new apple tree sometime in the future.
Those apples rotting on the ground were simply the fruit of its labor.
Next year is another season. Maybe lots of apples, maybe few, maybe none.
Hopefully I can give back at least as much as I took out as my own cycle of life continues.

Prairie fruit near Berlin ND September 19, 2010


Today Fall begins.
Make it a productive season.
**
Vince and Edith’s garden was as productive as ever. There were immense numbers of green tomatoes, and some great muskmelons still thriving. No killing frost yet, but this is the time of year when that is bound to happen on the North Dakota prairie. Everyone, the natural world included, begins to hunker down for Fall and then Winter.
Muskmelons at the farm September 18, 2010

Green tomatoes September 18, 2010


Uncle Vince checking out the garden September 18, 2010

#247 – Dick Bernard: Musing about Taxes

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I’d consider Gerald Harris, editor/publisher of the LaMoure Chronicle and a couple of other North Dakota weekly newspapers, a friend, even though I have only met him in person one time, and then briefly, and even though we may well walk different paths ideologically.
But when I get to his town to visit my relatives, one of my must-buys is his newspaper, and I buy it so that I can read his opinion.
He tells it as he sees it. Dammit! And he seems willing to share other points of view.
So, I bought his newspaper on Saturday, and read his column, which was about re-doing the U.S. tax system – an ever popular coffee shop topic, whether in bib-overalls and seed caps, or business suits.
Gerald’s scheme was three tiered: 1) get rid of all deductions for anything, making a tax department unnecessary; 2) apply a Value Added Tax to all goods produced; 3) make some kinds of Sales Tax universal on everything. To deal with the vexing problem of people with nothing, he proposed an allotment of $600 per month per person, payable in two lump sums each year. The lucky poor would get $3600 checks twice a year, to steward carefully or squander…their choice.
The other culprits in his scheme: those evil politicians – always the easy ones to kick around, even though they are doing our collective bidding…so they can be elected or reelected.
I sent this reponse to Mr. Harris, which he may or may not reprint this week:
“Saturday afternoon after Mass I was standing outside Holy Rosary Church chatting with a couple of LaMoure friends. A young woman, dressed in summer clothes with a couple of small inexpensive backpacks, approached us and asked how to get to ______, a North Dakota town we knew was five or six driving hours away. She had been put out of where she’d been staying in LaMoure, and told to walk home. She didn’t even know the direction to walk. My friends helped as they could, staying with the young woman until they were comfortable she had the help she needed.
I learned the next day that the young lady – she said she was 21 – probably was taken to Jamestown for the late bus, and delivered to relatives in Bismarck. Perhaps this will show up in the police report in this weeks Chronicle. It was a quiet drama – one which most of the churchgoers probably weren’t aware was even happening, though they were milling around nearby.
After this unanticipated encounter, back in my room, I read your musings on reforming the tax system in this country, including the quotation provided by “a banker”** and your suggestion that each person get $600 a month, paid in lump sums twice a year.
Opinion intersected with harsh reality.
Taxes is easy to kick around, especially by those who are expected to pay it. The scheme always seems to be how to avoid as much taxes as possible, and switch the remaining tax burden to somebody else. The rich have platoons of lawyers and lobbyists to skew the law in their favor. Unlike Corporations, who are now, legally, “persons”, people like that young woman have no clout, no knowledge, no voice….
Greed is always a silent player in these conversations about individual rights versus community responsibility. The richer one is, it seems, the more that person feels entitled to their riches, as if he or she really “earned” them.
North Dakota is, I have heard, one of the wealthier states in the U.S. Why is it that there seems an inverse relationship between wealth and true generosity?
I wonder what has happened to that young woman I saw last Saturday; I wonder if anybody much cares.”
I sent the editor a link to this recent column on the issue of the rich and taxes.
A e-friend reminded me that Richard Nixon, long ago, had once thought of a yearly stipend of $25,000 per family to stimulate the American Economy….
** From a banker: “I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of the people.” Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Thomas Cooper, 1802.

#246 – Dick Bernard: Down and Dirty Political Advertising

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The lead letter in yesterday’s Woodbury Bulletin was mine*:
“The Woodbury Bulletin’s Aug. 25 “Our View” (“Hoopla over YouTube video on local GOP website…”) causes me to think back a few years.
I had written a letter, published in the Bulletin, which criticized a local legislator. It was, as are all letters I write, signed with my real name and town. I was a Woodbury resident, [then as now], listed in the phone book.
Your paper came out on Wednesday. About 3 a.m. the next morning our doorbell rang twice in rapid succession. I went down, turned on the light, and on landing was what the Woodbury Police Report later referred to as fresh “feces”.
Happenings like that tend to shake one. They say “I know where you live. Shut up.”
That had never happened to me before, nor has it since. But I remember.
That incident happened in the good old days (or so it seems) of political conversation in this community, state and country.
Now we’re facing over two months of political advertising everywhere whose intention is either to canonize one candidate or crucify his or her opponent. Anyone who believes any of this stuff is a fool.
But the makers of the ads really don’t care. And they know the slickly prepared pieces are essential to “win”.
Cost for this “feces” is probably way up in the billions of dollars each season.
It comes to our mailboxes, over our radios and through our televisions.
As is well known, all that is necessary is to plant the impression of good or evil in a potential voters mind.
You do this very simply: by constant repetition.
It isn’t funny, and it certainly isn’t productive for our community, state and country.”

As noted above, I was responding to an earlier editorial over a piece of offensive website content that had become national news. It turned out to be the local website for the local Republican party.
The website featured, for a time, a “funny” piece of video, produced somewhere, that compared “hot” Republican women, with “dog” Democrat women. You had to have a sick sense of humor to get any “laughs” out of the caricatures particularly of the Democrat women – real photos, probably, not even photo-shopped, but in this digital age when a minute or two “on camera”, particularly if you don’t know you’re being filmed, can yield (charitably) less than flattering images.
The editorial had no time for the offensive website. Of course, the editorial had to be “fair and balanced”, thus criticizing my own favorite news program which, I would admit, at times can be edgy and, while accurate, over the top. While I think there is a huge distinction between the “hot” and “dog” web production, and what I watch every evening, there is a point well taken: the sinning doesn’t stop at party lines.
Shedding light on it won’t stop it. About all that can be said is that old standard: “caveat emptor” – “let the buyer beware”.
If something, particularly political advertising, is too good, or too bad, to be true, the odds are certain that it isn’t “true”. All one can be is aware.
Caveat Emptor.
* – For whatever reason, the editor of the paper doesn’t include my name at the end of this letter in the on-line version. I hadn’t requested anonymity, but the earlier incident – which indirectly involved the paper – must have impacted….

#245 – Dick Bernard: A Painting Project in the Garage

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For the last ten years I have been driving into An American Garage that had never been painted. Yes, there was 20 year old dry wall which had been taped when it was built but it was, you know, a garage.
We don’t live in the garage.
I finally reached the ‘tipping point’ – got sick of it looking as it did when I drove in – and several days ago got down to the disagreeable business of painting it.
Today I’ll finish the job.
Of course, being an American Garage, ours is a repository of the assorted flotsam and jetsam of family history, and that had to be moved, first. Moving that junk around was a major impediment for me. That junk was really what made the task “disagreeable”.
Into the junk I dove, and amongst the treasures unearthed was this:

It was a hastily made sign for a memorial march on October 25, 2002, the day U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone, his wife Sheila and several others were killed in a tragic plane crash ten days before the 2002 election. I was one of tens of thousands of marchers in a massive memorial that October evening. (The scrawled text: “To Paul and Sheila, You’ve passed the torch of Peace and Justice to all of us. Rest in Peace.”)
Sen. Wellstone was a favorite of mine. I had watched his career evolve since the 1980s. He was cast as a radical liberal, the way “politicians” are labeled, but if one looked at the totality of his record, he was a very reasonable fellow, and he was odds on favorite to win his third term the coming election day. Though he had finally voted against the controversial Iraq War Resolution a scant two weeks earlier, he was a favorite of veterans groups. Sheila was a champion of causes for “we, the people” as well. But their lives ended in the woods near Eveleth MN that Friday morning in October.
The next week former U.S. Senator and Vice-President Walter Mondale agreed to take Mr. Wellstone’s place on the ballot, but it was too late in the game.
Politics being what it is, politics was played like a fiddle around the Memorial service for the Senator a week before the election. There, the Senator was only a memory (we were in attendance). Republican Norm Coleman won a very narrow victory.
It is appropriate that I found, this week, that sign I carried in Mr. Wellstone’s memory eight years ago.
Politics is raging in this country like an out-of-control forest fire, and some “Tea Party”-like candidates around the country are very scary. If they win, and govern as they promise, the American people will have genuine reason to regret the short-sighted decision to elect them.
We need, collectively, much more adult behavior from ourselves than I have been seeing in the last year. We can pretend we can have it all, without the commensurate responsibility, but such has never worked, ever. We will pay the piper, ultimately.
The Wellstone’s do live on in training people for political engagement. I have never had reason to think of attending “Camp Wellstone”, but I know some wonderful legislators who have, and in fact met with one of them during a break in my garage painting duties on Monday of this week.
Today, I’ll finish the last part of my project in the garage.
I’m glad I started it.
Some of the stuff I discovered will be tossed; others will be ‘garage sale’d’.
But that placard from October 25, 2002, will go back with my memorabilia.

#244 – Dick Bernard: Making a Disaster into a Catastrophe

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It’s Saturday evening, September 11, 2010.
A few hours ago, looking for something to watch on TV, I happened across the Weather Channel, which at the time was playing a program about the evacuation of Dunkirk, France, May 27 – June 3, 1940. It was an incredible rescue, thanks to a nine-day break in often treacherous weather on the English Channel. In all, 338,226 English and French soldiers were ferried to England by large boats and small; 40,000 French soldiers were captured by the invading Germans, presumably becoming casualties of WWII.
It was a heroic moment, facilitated by what some would later call a ‘miraculous’ set of weather circumstances. It was a very interesting program.
Dunkirk was almost two years before Pearl Harbor and the entry of the U.S. into World War II.
In those years before sophisticated media, the public learned of events largely after the fact through newspapers, telephone, radio and black and white images later conveyed in film. Winston Churchill became a heroic figure through good decisions, a great deal of luck, and a gift of oratory.
It was a simple time.
I was three weeks old.
As I write, after 9 p.m. CDT, my spouse is watching the History Channel, which is replaying archival tape of 9-11-01.
It is dramatic, with sounds and images as recorded in an age where media had become ubiquitous and instant.
It is not necessary to recite what I hear, and what is being shown on a large screen HD color TV elsewhere in my home. Even up here, it is a riveting film (which I do not plan to go down to watch.) I’ve “been there, done that”.
There were almost 3000 people killed on 9-11, about 2600 in New York City, 263 in four planes (including the 19 hijackers), and 125 at the Pentagon. There were casualties who were citizens of 70 different countries. Of the hijackers, 15 were Saudi Arabian, none were Iraqi. The word ‘al Qaeda’ came into the vocabulary, a phrase which I understand simply means “the base”, and responsibility was fixed on Osama bin Laden, a Saudi, who was harbored by the Taliban government in Afghanistan at the time.
We are now nine years down the road from this disaster, which has in the intervening years become a catastrophe which has captured our country and is destroying us economically and morally (i.e sanctioned torture) as well.
Over 4400 American service people have been killed in Iraq, and several million Iraqis were killed or displaced by the resulting Iraq War. Conservatively, about 100,000 Iraqis have been killed in the conflict since 2003. In some sources, only the “Coalition of the Willing” casualties are noted.
Afghanistan, the initial target of our national need for revenge, was for all intents and purposes abandoned in favor of invading Iraq, and we are now mired in Afghanistan in a conflict which, to be honest, is militarily unwinnable, and politically impossible to leave.
We close 9-11-2010 with conflict raging over an Islamic Center near Ground Zero, and an apparently cancelled burning of Korans in Florida.
We do not seem to learn our lessons well.
We had an opportunity, after 9-11, to choose a different fork in the road of relating to the world.
We chose War, indeed to celebrate War following 9-11. It was a politically popular decision Afghanistan Oct 7 2001001. I have seen pieces of the World Trade Center at the International Peace Garden on the border of North Dakota and Manitoba, and seen in the Peace Chapel there front pages of World Wide newspapers featuring the collapsing World Trade Center in flames from September 12, 2001. Somehow they seem incongruous and out of place, there.
It is not too late to choose peace, but the door is closing fast.
The TV show has ended. I didn’t watch….
Sunday morning, September 12, 2010:
My e-mail inbox has this headline from the New York Times, 4:17 a.m.: “On Sept 11 anniversary, rifts among mourning“.
The “rifts” have absolutely nothing to do with “mourning”. Rather it is like picking at a scab for nine years, not allowing it to heal.
So long as 9-11 is kept as a potent political issue, its dead cannot rest in peace.
We should be ashamed.

#243 – Dick Bernard: September 16 and 20, 2001, and a Day for Peace, September 21, 2010

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Today is September 11. 9-11. Why the title “September 16 and 20, 2001”?
September 11, 2001, was a Tuesday, and by the next Sunday, September 16, the initial shock had largely worn off, though confusion reigned.
(A good illustration of what was happening comes from a chart I’d seen many years earlier, where a normal Crisis Sequence for we human beings had been explained, and I had kept the handout which is below. This chart comes from the early 1970s, and I’ve preferred to keep it as I received it, then.)

The words on the chart are probably difficult to impossible to read here, but the chart itself is straight forward and logical: normally, shock lasts a very short time; the normal person has moved on – gotten perspective – in a matter of months. The continuing hysteria surrounding 9-11-01 is abnormal behavior which has to be fueled and encouraged externally.
So it is.
The essence of the ‘peaks and valleys of the illustration:
Phase: Duration of Phase
IMPACT: Hours
RECOIL-TURMOIL: Days
ADJUSTMENT: Weeks
RECONSTRUCTION: Months)
This posting is about the “Recoil-Turmoil” time: September 16, 2001, a Sunday, and September 20, a Thursday, in Minneapolis MN.

We went to 9:30 a.m. Mass as usual at the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis. The Church was filled more than usual that day.
We had a visiting Priest, Father Dandurand, for that Mass, and I wrote about his homily (sermon) to family members. The relevant portion of my September 24, 2001, e-mail follows:
“The Sunday after September 11 [Sep. 16] our Priest was faced with the universal dilemma of his colleagues of every denomination, everywhere: what should I talk about? In the end, he briefly and very powerfully focused on the Gospel reading for the day (Luke 15: 11-32) on the Prodigal Son, his father, and his responsible – and very angry – brother. [The Priest] chose to focus on the angry brother, and on the absolute need to replace anger with forgiveness.”
The [next] Thursday, September 20, 2001, I had been to a regularly scheduled meeting of the Catholic Archdiocese Social Justice committee. Understandably, the agenda of that meeting changed to accomodate the need to talk about September 11. I had described that meeting in my letter, and continued “…At the aforementioned Social Justice meeting, one lady commented on the aftermaths of a conciliation message preached by her pastor. Three families quit the parish. And so it goes…goes…and goes….”
Today we remember nine years, and the hysteria is once again ginned up. The 1970s Crisis Sequence presentation laid out what we all know is true: regardless of the event, a normal person/society moves on, and it is a matter of months. The devastation of the Haiti earthquake happened only eight months ago, and Haiti has been off the radar screen of almost everyone for months already.
Fear and Loathing are useful political tools, used to manipulate and control. They can only be effectively used with someone willing to be used.
After September 11, 2001, our society had a choice of two forks in the road: to Reconcile, or to War. We all know the fateful choice and its consequences for us and everyone else.

Something else was happening in New York City on September 11, 2001.
As the first plane was about to hit the World Trade Center, a group of children and adults had gathered at the nearby United Nations building to celebrate the International Day of Peace, which then coincided with the opening of the General Assembly of the United Nations. As some children played music, the first plane hit the tower, and the program was cancelled.
As such things happen, this September 11 event also celebrated a singular accomplishment by a young Englishman who had successfully lobbied the United Nations over several years to standardize the International Day of Peace at September 21 of each year. You can read about him and what he accomplished here.
September 21, 2011, is a specific, symbolic Day of Peace. Whether by yourself or with others, participate in it today, and strive to make all 365 days of every year days of Peace.
COMMENT ON THIS POST FROM MARCIA BREHMER:
Here are the lyrics to a song sung by Peter, Paul & Mary called “Fair Ireland”….It kind of reminds me of what’s happening with 9/11…with just a few change of the word, eh?
Blessings,
Marcia
They build bombs and aim their pistols in the shadow of the cross
And they swear an oath of vengeance to the martyrs they have lost
But they pray for peace on sundays with a rosary in each hand
Its long memories and short tempers that have cursed poor ireland
Its long memories and short tempers that have cursed poor ireland
We have cousins on the old sod and we dont forget our kin
From boston we send more guns and we tell them they can win
Then we turn back to our green beer and to macnamaras band
Its true friends with false perceptions that have cursed poor ireland
True friends with false perceptions that have cursed poor ireland
They weave tales of wit and magic and their songs are strong and free
But they fail to hear each other, prisoners of history
Orange flags wave for the british to greet the armys clicking heel
And irish curse their irish brother for the altar where they kneel
And now provoked to greater anger by the distant royal hand
Its old hatreds and young victims that have cursed poor ireland
Old hatreds and young victims that have cursed poor ireland
So were left with retribution its the cycle of the damned
And the hope becomes more distant as the flames of hate are fanned
Who will listen to the children for theyre taught to take their stand
They say love and true forgiveness can still heal fair ireland
They say love and true forgiveness can still heal fair ireland
Only love and real forgiveness can still heal fair ireland

#242 – Dick Bernard: A School for the Feeble-Minded

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When I was growing up in the 1940s and 50s, we would occasionally go to visit my Dad’s parents in Grafton ND.
While there, one of the certain trips was to the city park, Leistikow Park, on the bank of the Park River. It was an awesome place in the eyes of small town kids in the big city of Grafton (which probably was well on the short-side of 5,000 residents in those years).
Approaching the park we always passed what we knew as the State School for the Feeble Minded. There was one particularly large building that I remember, and on summer days the lawn was crowded with people we knew were very different from ourselves. Even in those years, when there was at least the beginnings of recognition of special needs, the perception was that these people were more-or-less warehoused, much as they would have been in an insane asylum. The financial resources and the political will were not yet there to help these persons who were very different from we supposedly normal folk.
We looked at those people behind the fence much like someone would look at animals in a zoo.

Undated photo of the main building at Grafton


By the 1950s enlightenment was beginning in states across the nation. Apparently, even though I remember the school only as the School for the Feeble Minded, its name had been changed even before I was born to the less descriptive “Grafton State School”.
By bits and pieces, everywhere, came new programs and attention and funding for “MAXIMIZING human potential for greater SELF-SUFFICIENCY*”
I’ve come to know about the importance and richness of the special needs community in the years since my youngest child was born Down Syndrome in November, 1975.
Heather is nearing 35 this year, and is a phenomenal human being.
This week I drew the pleasant duty of picking Heather up at her daytime work facility, Proact*, in Eagan MN. (It is Proact’s operating philosophy which I quote above.)
Off hours she lives in a pleasant suburban home with a couple of other special needs adults.
I’ve written before about her active engagement in after hours athletic activities most recently last month.
Last night, Heather watched the Vikings and the Saints at her sister’s home. She’s an avid sports fan.
It is easy to take for granted the safety-net we have constructed in this country for those less capable of competing on their own. It is easy to say they’re a waste of precious resources.
In a bygone day my Heather could have been one of those behind the walls of that School for the Feeble Minded. I sometimes wonder how it would have been had she been child, and I parent, 100 years ago. What forces would have worked on me, then.
Those were not the good old days.
And as for going back…when I picked up Heather yesterday, one of her workmates gave her a hug as she was leaving. Then this friend, named Mary, reached out her hand and said to me, “hi, I’m Mary”.
Can’t get any better than that.

Dick and Heather as photographed by the Smooch Project www.thesmoochproject.com