#380 – Dick Bernard: As good as it gets.

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This afternoon I happened across a marvelous video made by folks in Grand Rapids MI, supposedly one of the ten most dying cities in America. You can watch and read about it here. It is 10 minutes of sheer in-your-face optimism in the face of being ridiculed as a loser.
We can all use a break in the otherwise dismal nature of news. Some Grand Rapids folks made bad news into a viral video hit.
Then I went to Lakeville to watch “My gal, Sal” – Heather, my daughter – play softball with her crowd of adults with special abilities.
She has the major league moves down, Heather does, and this particular evening she was catcher, with all the necessary equipment.

Heather as catcher


She was looking good behind the plate, and first time up rapped an honest single, and was about to score a run when her teammate grounded out.

Heading for home, but for naught. The batter grounded out for the third out....


No matter, there was another community out there in Lakeville and everybody enjoyed everyone else – their hits and misses and everything.
Way tah go, Heather and all.
Extra Special Thanks to the bunch called “The Rave“, which has organized this league for adults like Heather.
Keep it up.

Game end, good sports, Heather second from right facing camera

#379 – Dick Bernard: Memorial Day 2011. Confusing Times

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Today I will probably attend a Memorial Day observance sponsored by Veterans for Peace near the Minnesota State Capitol; I’ll wear the Buddy Poppy purchased at Hibbing from a VFW member on May 13, and a Forget-me-not purchased from a Disabled American Veteran here in Woodbury a couple of days ago.
Yesterday I drove over to a Minneapolis Church and put up a display for and answered questions about World Citizen and A Million Copies. The founder of World Citizen, Lynn Elling, still living, was a Navy officer in WWII and again in Korea who witnessed the horrific aftermath of Tarawa Beach and has since devoted his life to seeking enduring peace. He is the subject of A Million Copies, along with Dr. Joe Schwartzberg, distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota. Joe is a military veteran in the Korean War era.
The ‘center piece’ for that display at the south Minneapolis Church was this photograph of Dad’s brother, my Uncle Frank Bernard, in happier times in Hololulu, before he probably woke up just in time to die on the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor December 7, 1941. He is one of a boat-load of members of my own family circles who served this country in the military, including myself.
Some did not return alive.

Frank Bernard of the USS Arizona at Honolulu HI sometime before December 7, 1941


So it goes.
Memorial Day is a day of mixed messages. We honor the fallen, true, but only our own.
In too many ways we seem to still revere War as a solution, when it never has been a solution: one War only begets the next, and worse, War…. Their deaths justify more deaths….
I offer two other websites this day – places to reflect on this business of Memorial Day.
The first is this from the Washington Post, a site with photos of our soldiers who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I did a rough count at this site, and it appears that in the year since the last Memorial Day, 132 in U.S. service have died in Iraq; 494 in Afghanistan. There have been 6,013 U.S. military deaths in all, just since 2001. Compared with WWII and Korea and Vietnam, the casualty numbers are small, which makes it easier to diminish our ‘cost of war’.
The deaths are tangible reminders of an endless debate over the need for or wisdom of War. This will be played out millions of times today, whenever somebody has a thought, or reads a paper or listens to radio or watches TV.
I looked at another long-standing website that has labored mightily to keep accurate records of the carnage in Iraq during the past decade: conservatively, over 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead from war – this in a country roughly the size and population of California. War is not one-sided, with only soldiers as victims. It is mostly innocent civilians who die.
The cost of war is far more than just our own cost in lives on the battlefield and, now, over a trillion dollars in national treasure just for Iraq. One of the last e-mails of the day, yesterday, was from a friend who had just attended a funeral of her friends husband “…62, mental illness, cancer, Agent Orange. His Purple Heart was there and other medals. His son [both are Marine vets] told me the Veterans Administration wouldn’t listen to his Dad. Do you know where [the son] could get some help?” Was that man a casualty of war too? There are lots of ‘walking wounded’.
I will follow up on the request. I’ll see what I can do.
We are a nation in love with War: if you’ve been to Washington D.C., or any State Capitol, see the monuments.
Can we act for Peace?
I’d invite you to visit the website for a group of which I am proudly a member, the U.S. Peace Memorial Foundation.
Consider joining.

#378 – Dick Bernard: Words

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This morning a friend of mine came in to the coffee shop about the time I was leaving, sat down at the table next to me and opened to the Opinion Page of the Wall Street Journal for May 28-29 weekend edition. The banner headline was “Word of the Decade” ‘Unsustainable’ “ by Peggy Noonan. A featured photo was Rep. Paul Ryan.
Noonan is a well known writer, former member of the Ronald Reagan administration, and chief speechwriter for George H.W. Bush when he ran for President in 1988.
Earlier, before coming for coffee, I’d read a piece by Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, in which certain public ‘facts’ from said Rep. Paul Ryan about medical costs were challenged. That article is here.
The previous Saturday, I heard former U.S. Representative Jim Oberstar, a veteran of 18 terms in the House of Representatives, talk with encyclopedic knowledge about things like Medicare and Social Security. Ryan and Oberstar could as well as have been on different planets.
Into this mess of interpretations of data comes the unsuspecting citizen, not knowing what to believe.
Peggy Noonan, on the conservative side, writes well – she was a Presidential speech writer after all. She knows how to lay out words.
Paul Ryan, another conservative, seems like a nice sincere intelligent young man. Certainly he wouldn’t lie, especially to his younger cohort.
Ezra Klein, a liberal, is a very young but recognized columnist for Washington D.C.’s main newspaper – he’s a young man who has access that the rest of us cannot imagine.
Jim Oberstar, another liberal, knows the real data probably better than any of the others from having lived within the institution that is the Congress for 46 years.
Each of these persons, and everyone else who uses words or images in print or in voice or visual media, seek to make a convincing case that their particular ‘spin’ will become policy.
Of course, policy can be tilted in a direction that will prove anyone’s point. If you wish to make something ‘unsustainable’ – to “starve the beast” as government was once described – you seek policies to make that result happen. You can’t starve someone, and make the victim stronger.
If you believe that certain government policies can be of value, and protected for the long term with relatively minor changes, you seek that result.
There is a war of words going on, and it is the task of the citizen, the voter, to attempt to discern somewhere the truth of the matter, and the protection of his or her best interest. But peoples eyes glaze over at words. “They’re all lying” is too common a mantra.
For the common person, which most of us are, discerning truth can be very difficult because Big Money controls in very substantial part the media of this country. The Wall Street Journal, for instance, is not the champion of the little guy or gal.
So, who’s truth is the truth? Noonan’s? The Wall Street Journal Editorial Pages? Paul Ryan’s? Ezra Klein’s? Jim Oberstar? And on and on and on and on.
Caveat Emptor.
UPDATE: I keep these columns brief on purpose – even the above 513 words (a regular newspaper column is about 600 words) is too long for many people to take time to read, much less to think about. Besides, I’m just an ordinary person: what do I know? (by implication, I know less than the four experts cited above). I beg to differ, but who cares….
But sometimes you need length. And just a few hours after I published the above came this much longer post by a Los Angeles blogger , on essentially the same topic of Words, in this case, focusing on the recent visit on the topic of Israel/Palestine. (I mention the words “Los Angeles” because this makes the blogger seem more important, coming from a bigger city than I. Of course, “Los Angeles” can be spun in different ways as well. Words….)
In this Twitter and Facebook Generation, sparcity of words is most essential.
But this will certainly kill us all, if we don’t begin to think things through.
Consider reading the longer post…and really consider the implications, to you, of official lying.

#377 – Dick Bernard: The Fargo Tornado of June 20, 1957

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Two grandsons and I were enjoying a major league baseball game at Minnesota Twins Target Field on May 25. It was a perfect day for a ballgame at this new park, which is at the very edge of downtown Minneapolis. (click on photos to enlarge them)

Downtown Minneapolis from deep left field, May 25, 2011


I couldn’t help but think that a few days earlier, perhaps three miles to my right, a disastrous tornado hit one of Minneapolis’ poorer neighborhoods* causing immense destruction, though nothing like the massive death and destruction in Joplin MO several hundred miles to the south.
I also got to thinking of a memorable tornado in North Dakota June 20, 1957. I was about to begin my senior year in high school that year, and we had just relocated to a town about 200 miles from Fargo. That storm had such an impact on me that I still have all of the newspaper clippings from the Fargo Forum from the day after that memorable storm. Fargo Tornado Jun 1957003

Fargo ND June 20, 1957



Storms came with the territory in ND and elsewhere in 1957. Out there on the prairie you could see the weather coming, and the prudent person had some kind of a storm cellar to retreat to just in case. I experienced one memorable close call in August, 1949: the roof of my grandparents barn blew off less than 100 yards from where we were sleeping late at night. Straight line winds were the problem; a shelter belt behind the house probably saved us from death.
We knew, then, that there was a tornado belt, its epicenter Oklahoma. We knew there had been a Dust Bowl, and where that had been, and when. We did have some history at our disposal.
I got to thinking of compare and contrast between 1957 and now: commonalities, differences.
1. WEATHER FORECASTING and COMMUNICATION about the weather was evolving but relatively unsophisticated then, unlike the nearly pinpoint accuracy of today’s forecasts. Now you can watch disaster developing. Then you were more likely caught by surprise.
2. Strong local COMMUNITY and GOVERNMENT existed as it does today*. But community was more isolated and independent then. It was still possible to imagine that your little space was the center of the universe and you could get along without others beyond your horizon. You were not immersed in a global system as we are today. Imagine being dropped, today, into a place without grocery stores and cars and such. For most of us in 2011, such a fate would be hell on earth. We are dependent on outside goods and services to an unfathomable degree. Local support systems are no longer enough.
3. In 1957, HUMAN INFLUENCED CLIMATE** CHANGE was not even the tiniest of concerns. People could remember the droughts of the Dirty Thirties, but hardly anyone thought (as they should have) of human impact on such phenomena. People, then, did not have to worry about denying reality. Now we do. Out of ordinary weather** incidents, as severe flooding, seem more frequent, and ordinary.

Sheyenne River Valley City ND post threatened flood May 14, 2011


A new reality has taken shape: we humans, particularly in the industrialized countries, are a major cause in the matter of climate change…even if many deny such. (Here, and here for some recent opinions. The topic deserves both attention and action.)
4. I’m not sure how VISION impacted in 1957, nor how it compares with today’s looking at the future. What I do know is that in 1956, the Act which led to today’s U.S. Interstate Highway system was easily passed and funded by Congress through then-huge increases in gasoline taxes, whereas today’s political and even business decision making seem short on consideration of the greater good or the longer term. Things like those then new freeways of the late 1950s and 1960s are at the end of their lifespans and and the ubiquitous shelter belts planted in the 1930s and 1940s are dying, and there seems little interest or attention to their renewal. Too many of us have been convinced that short term wants count more than long term needs.
5. POLITICIANS (who accurately reflect our best and our worst attributes) do not make us look very good in the present day. They, particularly those in Congress, truly reflect us.
It’s never too late to change behaviors. We need to.
* – How could 30,000 of us be sitting in a stadium enjoying a baseball game when there was a disaster area just a few miles away? I’ve asked myself that question. We are a city of 3,000,000 people, and government was doing more than an adequate job organizing etc as we watched the game. That is why we have government. Had we all descended on the disaster area, it would have been chaos.
** – Succinctly, as I understand the terms, “Climate” is the long-term average condition; “Weather” is localized incidents. “Weather” and “Climate” are directly related, and their phenomena often deliberately confused. They really don’t care about human rhetoric or denial; they do depend on human behavior.
#
AN END NOTE: It is ordinary, these days, particularly in nostalgic e-mail forwards, to paint the 1950s as an idyllic time in our history. Early in 1950 I turned 10; early in 1960 I turned 20.
There is a great deal truly positive to say about the “Baby Boom” years of the 50s, like the Presidencies of Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, but there are ample bumps in this road as well.
The 50s had hardly begun when the witchhunt for “Un-American” people began. At the Congressional level, it was the House Un-American Activities Committee; in the Senate, Senator Joe McCarthy. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was hardly a saint. A lot of damage was done. The 50s were the time of bomb shelters in school basements and backyards to protect against the certain Soviet attacks with ICBMs. Fear always sells well; it sold well, then.
I would suspect that African-Americans, Native Americans (“Indians”) and other people who were ‘different’ than we whites would have a slightly different view of these times than people of my race. The 50s were ‘back of the bus’ times for “Negroes”; and a time when the Indians always lost in “cowboys and Indians”.
Even Catholics and Lutherans didn’t get along well, then.
It is useful to reflect on what the 50s brought to us, good and bad, as we continue into the 21st Century.

#376 – Dick Bernard: Listening to Jim Oberstar and Thinking About Our Collective Lack of Political "Wisdom": "shoot first, and ask questions later"?

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Among the many magnificent gifts the U.S. Founding Fathers gave us when framing the Constitution and Bill of Rights of the United States ca 1787 was the right to select our representatives.
To be sure, the framers initial draft was imperfect: only certain kinds of people could vote, then, and so on…but over time near universal franchise was given to Americans over 18 years of age.
As often happens, it is easy to take for granted that which comes free, such as voting. But one day you wake up and what you thought you had was gone, and if you look closely, you had something to do with that which you lost, which you cannot recover.
I got to thinking of this last Saturday when I was privileged to be among too-small a group able to soak up some of the collected wisdom of former MN 8th District Congressman Jim Oberstar. Oberstar was defeated in his run for reelection in November, 2010 by a Tea Party candidate known to virtually no one.

Cong. Jim Oberstar, May 21, 2011


For eight years, from 1983-91, Cong. Oberstar was my Congressman. But Congressional Districts encompass much geography and several hundred thousand people, and I can recall actually seeing him in person only a few times in the immense 8th District. He always had a sterling reputation and until 2010 was easily reelected every two years.
Oberstars predecessor, John Blatnik, had served in Congress from 1946-74 and was one of the five co-authors of the 1956 legislation that led to the Interstate Highway System.
Jim Oberstar joined Cong. Blatnik’s staff in 1963; and when Blatnik retired, Oberstar ran for and won his office, in which he served with distinction for 36 years.
Congress is seniority based, and the party in power names the powerful chairs of the assorted committees.
In Oberstars case, he followed in his mentors footsteps and became an acknowledged expert on Transportation issues. A good share of his talk on Saturday was about our short-sightedness as a country: our failing to deal with future needs in many and sundry transportation areas. Succinctly, places like China, Brazil and Europe are leaving us in the dust, while we live in the past.
Oberstar is so knowledgeable that in the fall of 2010 he’ll become a professor at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. But rather than make actually make policy, he’s now just another expert.
Of course, Oberstar knows more than just Transportation. In the hour he spent with us he also dissected the assorted myths about Social Security and Medicare (pick the indictment you’ve heard about them – it’s likely massaged mythology).
But in the end analysis, none of this matters. Oberstar was thrown out of office, replaced with a non-entity Tea Partier with no power and (likely) almost no knowledge: a guy who railed against Big Government; a Freshman who will likely last one term and be forgotten.
There is endless analysis of why Oberstar lost in 2010, but rarely is responsibility fixed on the voters (including tens of thousands who didn’t even bother to vote). Oberstar likely won’t be running for office in 2012. And were he reelected, he’d have to start over as a Freshman again.
This is the fallacy of a “teaching the bums a lesson by throwing them out” philosophy.
Sad to say, we “pick our poison” in this country by ignoring the responsibility we hold as citizens to not only vote, but to cast an informed vote.
I am hopeful, as we enter a new election cycle, that more and more of we fellow Americans have learned that voting against, rather than for; or not voting at all, did not bring positive results for our country in 2010.
Time to go to work for a new direction in 2012.
UPDATE May 25.
It is difficult to assess the true feelings of the ‘body politic’ about our countries direction. News is slanted towards the bias of the media (including blogs such as this); polling and advertising is commissioned to help move and manage public opinion, and on and on and on.
Last nights special election results in New York State’s 26th CD at least signaled a discontent with the Tea Party philosophy which seems to be running the current Congress. A very conservative district elected a Democrat as new Congresswoman. In my opinion, this doesn’t mean the district is ‘liberal’; rather that the so-called radical right wing has taken the Republican party too far off the traditional Republican center. The new Congresswoman will doubtless serve as a moderate to conservative Democrat, reflecting her constituency. This is how politics works.
Also, last evening, I attended a year-end dinner for the teacher union local with which I began my union career from 1968-82. The dinner has been an annual event for at least the last ten years. I expected the mood to be depressed, given the attacks on labor in the past months. Rather, I felt optimism and willingness to work for change. In that local situation, too, polling is revealing what is called ‘voter remorse’ – people not supporting their own vote in the past election.
People are, apparently, thinking about what they have done.
Perhaps 2010 and its calamitous turn to the radical right might end up as a blip in the long term history of this country.
One can hope.

#375 – Dick Bernard: Dooms Day 2011: Remembering a trip to Israel, January, 1996

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It is appropriate that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in the United States on the very day that Harold Camping has determined is Judgment Day: May 21, 2011, at 6 p.m. (As I write at 8 a.m. CDT, it is already 6 p.m. in Kabul, Afghanistan, and later still in Japan and Australia, and there have been no bulletins as yet, so perhaps Camping’s calculations were again off, as they were the last time he made his definitive prediction, but no matter…as I learned the End Times business in Catholic school, nobody knows the day or the hour or anything else for that matter. Sometimes mere mortals manage to attract and capture attention before returning to well-deserved obscurity. But people panic anyway.)
I’ve long considered New Jersey sized Israel to be the U.S.’s 51st state, albeit unofficial, and I’ve long considered the little country to have something of a death wish. With those biases up front, here are some memories from a January, 1996, trip to that tinderbox, particularly for those who’ve never been able to go there (it is worth the trip, by the way.)
First, three ‘background’ pieces:
1. Here is a geopolitical ‘picture’ of the place, from a postcard somebody distributed two or three years ago (click on photo to enlarge):

2. Here’s a recent and fascinating geopolitical history of the Middle East that takes perhaps two minutes to view.
3. Roger Cohen of the New York Times had an interesting column about the general history May 21. It is here.
In January, 1996, I was able to join a Christian group which spent a very meaningful week or more in Israel. One of our leaders had an apparent connection to the conservative Zionist ‘side’ – something I didn’t realize till much later, particularly when I reread the tour book we each were given. This sanction gave us a perspective and access probably not as readily available to other groups.
It was a powerful trip.
This was a time of relative peace in Israel:
There was no wall separating Palestinian Bethlehem from Israel; in Manger Square fluttered a two story banner with an image of Yasir Arafat, a candidate for President of Palestine.
I spent too much money (my opinion) buying a Christian manger set from Palestinian merchant in Jerusalem: I still have the figures carved from Olive wood, and we still display it at Christmas time.
We were able to visit the Moslem Dome of the Rock on Temple Mount. No shoes allowed….
Earlier we had visited Armageddon, actually Megiddo, which overlooks the Plain of Armageddon, which is where the end times are supposed to materialize; later we visited the south end of the Dead Sea, the fabled place of Sodom and Gomorrah. (There’s a hotel there now, fronting on the smelly sea. I suppose someone could actually drown in the Dead Sea, but they’d have to work at it.)
Even though it was a time of relative peace, belligerence was not far below the surface. We visited the fresh grave of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated by a right-wing Israeli barely two months before we arrived, on November 4, 1995.
At the purported site on the Sea of Galilee where Jesus appointed Peter to lead the new Christian Church, our leader was reading the relevant Gospel text, when his words were drowned out by two Israeli warplanes screaming low and overhead, coming from the southeast across Galilee, heading to some unknown place. When we visited the River Jordan, of John the Baptist fame, security was tighter than usual as U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher was apparently meeting some leader at a nearby location.
And so it went, at a peaceful time in Israel, an epicenter of three major world religions, January, 1996.
So, on today’s “judgement day”, the odds do not mitigate for a peaceful end for us, and particularly for Israel, and it will be humans refusing to deal with each other who will do ourselves in, if we can’t learn to cooperatively live together.

#374 – Dick Bernard: Amazing Grace for Cousin Vince

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A week ago today I was walking in to a place called Tar Paper Annie’s, a recently collapsed shack in the woods overlooking Bear Island Lake just north of Northern Lights Lodge near Babbitt MN.
The occasion was the farewell to my cousin, Vincent Busch, who passed away in January of this year. The shore of the lake would become one of the final resting places for his ashes.
I hardly knew Vince. I was nearly 11 when he was born; by the time I was in college, his family had moved hundreds of miles away and our paths rarely crossed. In the circle after the Memorial, at Tank’s in Babbitt, where we introduced ourselves, I identified myself as Vincent’s cousin, but I had no specific memories to share.
Such is how it often is in these days where we live separated by many miles, differing interests, and all the rest. Even “family” can be and are virtual strangers to each other.
But the ritual of saying goodbye is an important one. Death is always a time for reflection: looking back (memories); but more importantly (I’d say) looking at ourselves. Such gatherings are a time to realize that our turn is, inevitably, coming.
At Tar Paper Annie’s, a few feet beyond the ruins, near the shore of the lake, facing the lake, sat a solitary man, sitting on the ground, playing a harmonica. It seemed a sacred place and time for him, so I didn’t interfere.
As we gathered to remember and to say farewell, it became more obvious why he was there. Roger Anderson had been one of Vince’s close friends in high school, and long afterwards. Vince’s sister, Georgine, remembered “Vince would always speak with joy of the times he and Roger would get together and play music“.
As Roger sat in the doorway of the collapsed shack that Vincent had once called home at a very difficult time in his life, Roger played a profound rendition of “Amazing Grace” on his harmonica*. It was, truly, as good as it gets (click on photo to enlarge).

Roger Anderson, Amazing Grace, Tar Paper Annie's, May 13, 2011, Babbitt MN


As we concluded our gathering, Roger played “You Are My Sunshine” at that same place, on that same harmonica.
Yes, it was as good as it gets.
Farewell, Vince.
You made a difference. That’s the best any of us can expect.
My photo gallery of the Babbitt events remembering Vincent Busch is here.
* There are many harmonica versions of Amazing Grace on You Tube. Simply enter the words Amazing Grace Harmonica in the search box. In my opinion, none can compare with Roger’s version on May 13.

#373 – Dick Bernard: What to believe?

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A friend of mine just returned from a trip to Washington DC. He and his wife had last been there in 1978. There was much new to see. They enjoyed the trip.
He mentioned that their tour group visited the World War II Memorial (completed 2004).
A younger member of the tour group, a college student, apparently told the group that President George Bush was responsible for building this monument. It’s one of those things common in conversation: a factoid comes from somewhere, is passed along, and soon casually becomes fact. We don’t have the time or the interest to fact-check everything, much less provide reasonable context.
We chatted a little about the topic, and later in the afternoon I decided to satisfy my own curiosity about the issue. The easily found answer is here. Succinctly, the authorization for the Monument was passed by a Democrat Congress and signed by a Democrat President in early 1993. It takes years to plan such a major project and it happened to begin construction early in the administration of a Republican President.
Forty-eight years, including 28 with five Republican Presidents (Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, George H.W. Bush) passed by without authorizing such a Memorial.
Such facts likely wouldn’t much matter to the student on the tour. The WW II Memorial is George Bush’s accomplishment. And to some degree it is, albeit initiated and made possible by other parties and other presidents and endless numbers of other people.
Such is how political discourse goes in this country: fragments pass for truth.
It happened that my friend was in DC during the week of bin Laden’s death in Pakistan. We haven’t talked about that, and since they were on vacation, and he normally is not much into politics, there probably wasn’t a whole lot of attention paid to the barrage of information and misinformation that flowed during the week. Each constituency, of course, who appears on television or in other media, has a particular and carefully prepared ‘spin’ on what the event meant or means. I haven’t changed my interpretation since I wrote my commentary the day after bin Laden was killed.
The assorted bunches are all busy making virtual ‘billboards’ of their own particular bias: it was torture that got bin Laden; President Obama is a war President; on and on and on. Each takes some fragment of truth as they see it, and busily construct it into their form of whole cloth. If you follow only the iterations of one theory you can easily be convinced, as the college kid at the World War II Memorial quite obviously was, that there is only a single reasonable way of looking at the issue: George Bush built the monument to World War II.
I see no accumulation of evidence that President Obama in any way reveres war, or sees war as the answer to human problems.

We are, unfortunately, a society that does almost revere war – try to find any peace monument in Washington, DC. I’ve been there many times. On the other hand, you can hardly walk a block there without running into some monument to War. They are as ubiquitous as churches in Rome.
We have a national attitude problem about the virtues of war. Paradoxically, as we become ever more sophisticated and dangerous in the business of weaponry, we are ever more vulnerable, and losing capacity for long term success. When one fights war from cave-to-cave, or villa-to-villa, as we did finding bin Laden, all of weaponry’s magic is lost. There are too many villas and caves to cover.

Inevitably, there will come a time when our warriors will be back on horseback, or on foot, defending our village from those in neighboring villages. It is not a joy to contemplate this future for my descendants.
Consider becoming a Founding Member of the U.S. Peace Memorial Foundation – I have been since 2006 – and helped build towards something positive.
Bring an image of peace to the United States Capitol, as well as to your own community.

#372 – Dick Bernard: Spring inches northward.

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Today, May 10 in suburban St. Paul MN, the leaves on the trees have burst out, and the leafy green of woods in spring has returned once again.
Exactly one month ago, in suburban Albuquerque NM, I was taking a solitary walk along the Rio Grande River, and noticed a simple tree which intrigued me (click to enlarge photos):

It was about the identical stage of leaf development as the trees I saw on my daily walk today.

Carver Park Woodbury MN May 11, 2011


Further north of here, other trees will leaf out in coming days.
Further south of Albuquerque, somewhere, trees were leafing out precisely on the Vernal Equinox of March 20.
So it goes.
Spring brings with it the predictable; the only unpredictable is the precise timing for such events as the first leaves of summer.
Across the driveway, a duck has set up a nest beside a neighbors house.

With some luck (the family has a cat and a dog) the ducklings will hatch and follow Mom to some pond a few blocks away, and survive, and life will go on.
Walking along this morning, I was momentarily surprised by someone coming out of the adjacent woods.
Not to worry. Just a gray-haired lady who bent over to inspect some green foliage. “It’s milkwort” she said, excitedly, and walked on in the opposite direction.
Happy Spring.
I’ll include a photo from Babbitt MN to be taken on Friday, May 13….

Sandia Mountain Range east of Bernalillo NM Apr 10, 2011


Some Minnesota wild flowers May 11, 2011:

The much-maligned Dandelion (my Dad's favorite "wild flower")



Remembering a life as spring begins at Bear Lake near Babbitt MN May 13, 2011.

#371 – Mary Ellen Weller: Reflecting on Teachers, Teaching and the current situation in Wisconsin

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UPDATE: Note response at end of this post.
Mary Ellen Weller is a retired teacher whose career was spent in Minnesota schools, and who presently lives in Madison WI. She responds to Dick Bernards National Teacher Day Reflection.
I read the text of your letter concerning teaching and the current attacks on teachers in general and our contracts in particular.
AND, I am inspired to share some thoughts. Here goes.
Teachers are nearly all people who are motivated to share, and not very motivated by money. We go into this profession because we enjoy learning ourselves and because we want to share our learning, and our enthusiasm for learning, with the next generation. We make this decision with our eyes open, knowing we are never going to be rich.
In the 1990s, when the economy was more robust, a younger friend said to me that she couldn’t understand why anyone would choose to be a teacher. She observed that I worked very hard and noted that “Teachers don’t make any money and they have to put up with all those squirrely kids”. She also said, “well, thank God someone’s willing to do it”. At the time she was approaching 30 and her salary was more than double mine. She worked for a large corporation.
About the same time I had colleagues who looked enviously at the greener grass of corporate jobs with starting salaries that equaled the top pay step in our teaching contract. Some actually left teaching to join the economic boom, or the real estate bubble. The rest of us kept on making lesson plans and exploring ways to improve our teaching. We often reminded ourselves that we did have a good bit of security, good benefits, and a dependable retirement. After several of the mining companies on the Range went bankrupt and employees lost even those supposedly secure retirement programs, it was a solid consolation. People like my young friend always continue to deride teaching as a profession. They often think we are saps or perhaps unable to ‘make it’ anywhere else. I Thank God those people are not licensed to be in my grandchildren’s classrooms!
In 2011, it seems to me that some of these corporate people are now the envious ones. Some have learned the hard way that along with the tremendous opportunity of the corporate ladder, there is also tremendous risk. Unemployment is up, salaries are down, benefits are not as freely and readily available as before. Suddenly, those saps who are teaching seem to have a good deal and the attack is on. The proposals explain that teachers and public employees should share in the economic downturn. Never mind that we did not share in the boom times.
Nonetheless, I still think that teachers and other public employees are motivated to share. Rather than cut excellent programs like Social Security, Medicare, state healthcare programs like Wisconsin’s BadgerCare program, we should be extending them to the entire population. Some say we can’t afford it. The truth is we can’t afford not to do it. Continuing to develop policy based on envy and resentment will harm our society in very fundamental ways. It should be just plain impossible to loot retirement funds. Tax cuts? This is not the time. Rather than fight each other we all need to share.
Sooooo, I’d be happy if you would comment and continue this dialog.
Mary Ellen’s e-mail is her first, middle, last name as one word AT aol.com
She has previously written for this blog: here.
Her background: First teaching assignment was as a Teaching Assistant for the level one French classes at the University of Minnesota in 1968.
BA-French, BS-French and Spanish certification, and MA-French all from the University of Minnesota; 19 years at Apple Valley (MN) HS and 7 years at Mesabi Range Community and Technical College in Virginia MN.
She took a few years off from teaching when her son was little; and did a year as a Fulbright Exchange Teacher in a suburb of Paris.
She now substitute teaches in the Madison WI Public Schools.
RESPONSE:
Dick Bernard: To Mary Ellen: speaking in general, from lifelong experience growing up in a family of teachers, being a teacher myself, and then serving a long career representing teachers, I agree with your analysis.
Very, very briefly: collective bargaining issues were almost always framed by both ‘sides’ in economic terms (things with an economic cost) that the local newspaper could understand and report, but the true underlying issues – the ones which got a contract ratified or rejected – were, in my opinion, more often than not around issues of basic respect, often on what most would consider tiny items such as, can the teacher be trusted to take personal leave only when necessary, that sort of thing. Money was important, yes; but, when a package was ratified, almost always there was some “respect” provision included.
Business notions of teachers and teaching, on the other hand, seem most often to be based on the traditional business model: put someone in charge, pay him or her well and make them CEO of the school district, or of the school or of the Department. “Respect” comes from raising test scores, getting rid of ‘dead wood’, or such….)
It was rare, in my experience, to find a teacher who lusted after CEO status (and salary); or to find a CEO type who successfully could manage a school, or teach. Still, the factory paradigm still seems to prevail in judging schools and teachers: hire somebody who’s willing to manage as if the school is a manufacturer of widgets; increase “productivity” (test scores); identify and get rid of the “ineffective” or “bad” workers on the floor of the shop.
Personally, I find myself most offended by the critics labeling teachers as “ineffective”. First of all, every day every classroom teacher is faced by numerous “judges” in students, parents, peers and – worst – themselves. Not all of these judges are fair or balanced (including the self-criticism). And they all have power to punish, whether deserved or not. Then comes the current mantra: make at least part of the evaluation the aggregate test scores of the students. This presumes that students can be forced to do their best on tests, when this is never true.
There is, I would agree, a lot of room for improvement. But the current method of threatening punishment is not the way to reform.