Impeachment.

I write on Saturday, December 14.  Some weeks ago I said I’d comment on the Impeachment of Donald Trump.

Thursday night I watched much of the rhetoric in Judiciary; overnight, a rare nightmare visited in my sleep – one that I’ll remember: an ominous very dark storm cloud rapidly approaching a crowd, one of whom was me.  We were all trying to escape.

Then I woke up.

My position on the Impeachment of President Trump: Three of the four presidential impeachments have been proposed in the past 45 years: Nixon (1974), Clinton (1998), Trump (2019).  The fourth – Andrew Johnson, 1867 – was the only other presidential impeachment proposed in the nations first 200 years.

Donald Trump deserves impeachment.  Most likely the Senate will acquit, if the House votes to impeach…we won’t know any of this for certain for some time.  This is a political matter, and politics is people.  Nonetheless, to me, what is important about this impeachment, regardless of outcome, is that there will be a formal historical record for posterity, all of it; the recorded argument the evidence for some future time.  Those who follow us hopefully learn from this.

At this moment I don’t even know for sure when the final House vote will be – possibly next Wednesday.  We will know who voted, and how they voted.  Every one of the House positions, and many Senators as well, are up for election in November.  Representatives will have to go on the public record, not only for 2020, but for the rest of history.  Ultimately the truth will out.  Sooner or later every one of us will die, including Trump.  But the residue of what we do will live on, and it will be undeniable to those who follow us.

The Storm Cloud:  On Halloween night, 2000 – it was a Tuesday – my wife and I were in Washington D.C., and then-Rep. Bill Luther gave us gallery passes for an evening session of the U.S. House of Representatives.  There were only a few of us in the gallery. Cameras were not allowed, so I have only my memory.  While I recall the debate while we were there, the topic isn’t relevant.

At some point in our time in the gallery, a Congressman whose name I don’t recall, a Republican from somewhere in Illinois, came up to greet us.  Specifically, he came to apologize for what we were witnessing below: two small clumps of legislators, one Republican, the other Democrat, hardly anyone listening to anything the speaker was saying.

The hearing adjourned.  About a week later, the Bush-Gore election of 2000….

We were witnessing the still young, but already very apparent and acute dysfunction of the Federal Legislature.  Why the Congressman came up to visit us, I don’t know.  He wasn’t any of our representative.  I do remember him saying he wasn’t running for reelection.  He was disgusted.

The Present Day: I write between the spectacles we have and certainly will witness: Judiciary and full House.  Preceding was the House Intelligence Committee; for the preceding two years the committees were controlled by the Republicans.  We are witnessing in real time the wisdom of the Abraham Lincoln quote “a house divided against itself cannot stand”.  As a nation, in my opinion, we are in the deadliest Civil War we’ve ever had.   There have been and will be no winners, regardless of who prevails in one battle or the other before or down the road.  We are killing ourselves and our nation is ever weaker.  Nature (ourselves), history proves over and over, needs balance, not dominance.

Personally: To be clear: I strongly supported (and support) Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama; I have confidence in Nancy Pelosi, and Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler.

Ultimately, the judge and the jury in coming weeks will be the American people, who will reap the benefits or the punishment of their own collective action, through their elected representatives.

Elections always have long-term consequences.  In my opinion, the consequences of especially the tax policy passed at the end of 2017 – year one of Trump with Republican controlled House and Senate – will be the millstone for all of us within ten years.  How do tax cuts pay for the benefits we all take for granted.  Too late, we’ll wonder, why did this happen?  The simple answer: our own action or inaction made it happen.

Much was said about how popular Trump is.  The sound bite parade talks about how he got 63,000,000 votes (about 27% of potential voters).  In 2016, Hillary Clinton got 66,000,000 votes.  About 100,000,000 didn’t vote at all, some for fringe or write-ins.  Far fewer citizens even vote in other elections for other offices.  Lack of informed voting and voters is a major problem for our society.  Trump was elected by about one-fourth of the electorate; 2018 was the first response to his election and performance.  Billions will be spent for the upcoming election, to what end?

Another sound bite: we don’t need to Impeach, let the people speak in the 2020 election.  I remember the last year of Barack Obama’s presidency – and Republican majority refusal to even consider the nomination of Merrick Garland as a Supreme Court Justice.  The Republicans lament lack of fairness in the hearings leading up to the impeachment.  They speak out of both sides of their mouths.  Since 2001, the Republicans have controlled Congress for 14 of the last 19 years, the Senate effectively for even longer (majority rules are more difficult to counter in the Senate).

The Republicans lament what they  aggressively exploited when they were in control.  (Here is the party representation in the Senate and U.S. Congress over history, particularly recent history: U.S. Government001)

There is a great deal more I would like to say.  LEARN THE ISSUES.  We all will live by the results, whatever they turn out to be.

Below are some reflections from a personal standpoint on the past.

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POSTNOTES:

A. I think it is pertinent to at least provide readers with my own bias, conveyed the months of July and August, 2016, the run-up to the 2016 Presidential election,  published August 3, 2016, in part “Government by Twitter.   The Republican Convention, endorsing Donald Trump, was held July 18-21, 2016, in Cleveland.  The Democratic Convention was held in Philadelphia July 25-28, 2016.  For anyone really interested, other blog posts which touched the topic of politics in that time period in 2016 were July 6, 19, 31 and August 10 and 26.   Access in the archive section.  At the time, I knew next to nothing about Donald Trump – I never even watched “The Apprentice” or whatever the program was called.  I remember hesitating to use the word “Twitter”.  I knew little about Twitter, and what I knew, I could not imagine it would be commonly used even if Trump became President.  How wrong I was.

B.  The Nixon Impeachment 1974: I was 34 years old, and politically aware.  This was in the days before the internet.  I remember watching Nixon’s resignation speech on a lounge television with a group of teachers at a summer leadership conference at the College of St. Benedict.  My recollection is that we were a very somber group.  This was a national issue, and to my recollection the Republicans and Democrats dealt with it as such, rather than the later tribal wars we now deal with on most other than routine issues.

C.  The Bill Clinton Impeachment 1998: I was 58 years old.  I assess every Republican utterance in the current Trump matter against their action against Bill Clinton basically in 1998.  I did take a personal position through a letter to Sen. Joe Lieberman, which you can read here: Clinton Impeachment001.

D.  Just Above Sunset for December 16: Peerspective and Context: This is very gloomy, but realistically so.  If there is to be change, it must happen from each and every one of us, one action at a time, unceasingly.  We either are part of the solution, or part of the problem.

The World Is My Country, Sunday, Dec. 8, noon

Today is Pearl Harbor Day.  Each year I see my Uncle Frank Bernard’s death as the USS Arizona explodes.  I have written about him many times at this and other spaces.  He experienced war, up close and very personal.  He and millions of others are witness to the horrors of war.  As the song lyric goes, “When will we ever learn?”

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Tomorrow, Sunday, December 8, noon CST, on TPT Life Channel (Minneapolis-St. Paul area), see the one hour edition of this wonderful film.  Here is the TPT link with details.

This film will be shown only one time.  (A week or two ago was a free preview week, since expired.)

The film has much historical significance, including rare archival footage of the enactment of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations Dec. 10, 1948, in Paris.

The narrator of the film, Garry Davis, joined the Army Air Force as WWII was in its early stages.  His brother has been killed when his Destroyer is bombed off of Salerno.  The insane incongruity Davis comes to see from killing others to avenge his own brothers death in war, leads him to make a decision to become a Citizen of the World – an adventure in idealism.

I’ve known of this film project since 2011, and immediately became intrigued with the value of the project.  I’ve said often that I asked to show the original rough draft to a group of high school students in St. Paul in November, 2012.  I wanted to see how kids would react to a movie narrated by a 90 year old man, reliving his 20s, during the time during and after World War II.

The student response to a completely unknown product was enthusiastic, and it convinced me that the film would have great value as a teaching tool, to help young people engage in becoming leaders to determine their own future.

If you’re in the Twin Cities area, watch the film if you can.  You won’t regret taking the time.

 

A Year

A year ago, December 4, 2018, the team at Fairview Southdale in Edina MN went to work on me.  Dec 1 and 2, 2019, a year later, I took the two photos below.  In the last 365 days between lies the story of the last year.  I’ve written a number of times about the trip in between.  The links are at the end of this post, for anyone interested.

Dec. 2, 2019, right after the exercise at Lifetime Fitness. The photographer (moi) is in the background.

The game, December 1, 2019

Actually, the Monopoly game sets the real anniversary, May 25, 2018.  Grandson Ben and I share the stage, neither of us enthusiastic participants; our respective caregivers thrown into the role, which they thankfully accepted.

May 25, 2018, was the day when my primary care physician listened with concern to a heart which was making not-cool sounds, starting me down the path to the Operating Theatre some months later.  It was a routine physical – no one had to pick me off the street and rush me to the hospital.

The same day, a few hours later and about 150 miles away, Grandson Ben, 13, and his Dad, were in a very nearly fatal highway collision, with Ben being very nearly in the ‘bullseye’, ending up medivac’ed to Children’s Hospital in Minneapolis; in a coma for about three weeks, thence a long period of beginning recovery which lasted into the fall, at Children’s and then Gillette hospital in St. Paul.  Ben had severe head and other injuries.

Sunday, Ben and his Grandma were playing Monopoly, and at the end, he asked her to leave the Board up so that he could show his parents.  I was at the gym at the time.  One and a half years out, Ben has largely recovered except for an injury which possibly will be permanent.  In the Monopoly game, he is able to make strategic decisions, and he can make change, but he cannot read the cards or the Board descriptions.  He can count, and he can read the individual letters, but not the letters put together into words.  I think I can say, without exaggeration, that none of us, back in May of 2018, had any reason to believe that his recovery would be as remarkable as it had been, and this is largely due to those incredible communities within the general medical community.  Ditto for myself.

Thanks to all of you.

As I say, my personal journey is, in part, described in the links at the end of the post.

I think I am essentially as close to 100% as a person nearing 80 years old can be.  There is no 4-minute mile in my future; nor any marathon, or “leaping tall buildings in a single bound”, nor any childhood fantasy sold by Charles Atlas!

I, and Ben, join millions of others who today, or yesterday, or tomorrow end up somewhere they’d probably rather no be.

There is no point in talking in detail about my own personal experience, or what I know of grandson Ben’s.

From the beginning – long before even diagnosis – I was part of the Fairview system, so I saw many years of excellent medical service.  But when you reach the big leagues, which open heart surgery really is, a quick learning is that medicine is really a community action, part of which is the patient, of course, but as important every single cog in the wheel of service to the patient, who is not always the most gracious of consumers.

Some personal thoughts:

We tend to see on the news only the atrocities or the miracles.  The business end of medicine is in the ordinary day to day service by all manner of medical and technical personnel.  Human beings.  My surgery happened on a single day, but it was by no means a single event.  The experience began months before the surgery, and continues even now.

I use the word “community” much in the same sense as I would use the word to describe “public education” or “police” and “fire” and assorted similar services where the reality is often far less than perfect.

There is a downside, a systemic defect, which is driven by our own collective political will.  We. and Ben’s parents as well, were advantaged by having good insurance.  Huge numbers of people have no access to affordable insurance for various reasons.  In this wealthiest country on the planet, there is no good excuse to not cover every citizen similar to the coverage I had.  Insurance spreads the risk – that is what it is whether public or private.

Were I able, I’d carry this in some form or another world-wide, to basics like access to clean water, or toilets.  Two enduring memories for me:

  1. In Haiti, which I visited on two occasions, 2003 and 2006, witnessing first hand that access to health facilities is very sparse.
  2. In Cebu City, Philippines, in 1994, I was given a tour by the wealthy man who was my host.  I recall standing within sight of a hospital in the city, and my hosts simple and quiet and respectful declaration, which went something like this: if you’re rich in my country, you can get medical care  as good as anywhere in the United States; if you’re poor, you die.  It was not stated as dismissive.  But just a political reality.

I’m very grateful, this day, to be mostly recovered, hoping for good continuing reports.  I’m thankful to every single person who in any way participated in my experience.

Have a most blessed and merry holiday season.

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PRE-NOTE AND POST-NOTE: I decided to look up whatever I’d written since the surgery Dec. 4, 2018.   I simply entered “heart” as search word, and up came the following, all of which I’ve scan, none of which I expect anyone to read…but the links are there.  Here they are in order.  I may have missed one or two.  Dec.22, 2018; Dec. 28, 2018; Jan. 1, 2019; Feb. 1, 2019; Apr. 20, 2019; May 4, 2019; Jun. 20, 2019; Jul 13, 2019; Oct. 14, 2019; Oct. 25, 2019.  I did not ‘spill the  beans’ on the upcoming heart surgery until after an early July family get-together in North Dakota; and I delayed the surgery until after grandson Spencer’s graduation from Marine Boot Camp in San Diego in October.  I was ‘walking wounded’, and not a crisis case.

Some preliminary dates to the surgery itself related to myself and grandson Ben, who with his Dad was in a near fatal accident on May 25, 2018: May 27, 2018; Jul. 4, 2018; Jul. 14, 2018; Jul. 17, 2018; Nov. 20, 2018.  Possibly I’ve missed some others.

Spencer Hagebock and Cathy, Dec. 25, 2018, four days home from the hospital. Spencer had two months before completed Marine boot camp at San Diego, and was a surprise visitor on Christmas. I had been discharged on the 21st.

Daughter Heather and myself, late November 2019

POSTNOTE:  Last Sunday, Fr. Tasto, retired gave his homily (always splendid) and a featured part was a story about musician Jim Croce, who died in a plane crash at age 30 in 1973.  I won’t even attempt to match Fr. Tasto’s skills in telling stories, but this one, about “Time In A Bottle“, struck a chord with me, and doubtless many others.  Croce wrote the song sometime before he died in a plane crash at age 30, then the song continued to rise on the charts to #1.  Of course I was not recording the homily, only listening, and making my own interpretation, which was, not to take life for granted.  There may be tomorrow, maybe not.  Have a great day.