Three times in the last couple of weeks, I’ve seen  very unique appearing automobile in my city of 83,000.  Twice it has quite obviously been the same car; the third was the same vehicle, but this one an advertisement for some company.

Since each of these encounters have come while I was driving, I couldn’t take a photo.  So, here’s a link Tesla Foundation; and a Review.  If you’ve got a spare $100,000 lying around, you can order one of these limited edition automobiles….

Every now and then things like this appear, and the new owners strut their stuff.

The most recent one I recall in my limited view of the past is the Hummer which had a run at fame during the Iraq War.  I suppose they more or less had the image of the WWII Jeep, though they were not an everyman’s vehicle.  There was an implied status and power image connected with them.

Every once in a. great while, nowadays, I see one of them somewhere, but they were a fad, probably mostly stored in their owners garage today.  Will the new Tesla’s have the same fate?

Conspicuous consumption is not restricted to today’s status seekers.

Over 100 years ago, my grandfather Bernard came into possession of a 1901 Oldsmobile. It was the car my Dad said was his driver education car when he was a youngster; and I actually had an opportunity to drive it back in the late 1990s.

1901 Olds, and family, Grafton ND, ca early 1920s.  My Dad is the tall guy at left.  He was only 14 or so, but already 6’3″. Grandpa Bernard was in the middle of the phot, and Grandma between he and her son….  The barn is in the background.  The visitors had come to town from Winnipeg, according to my Dad.  That’s a 120 mile trip, very significant in those days.

The Olds, with owner Tony Bowker, and my grandkids Spencer and Ted 2006.

I wasn’t around when the Olds came to be part of our family, but over the years I’ve picked up bits and pieces of the story of the car.  (The longer story – 7 pages – is here: 1901 Oldsmobile)

Someone came to Grafton in the early 1900s, and apparently had a few extra dollars to play around with and bought the Oldsmobile and it came by rail to Grafton.

It had utility, but for what!?  It was a curiosity, of course.  There were incidents like frightening horses.  And gasoline stations were unknown, and spare tires, and who’d want to even get in the thing!  Utility beyond purchase was not a given.  Now that I’ve got it, what do I do with it?  And does anybody care?

At some point, the man left town for other parts, and wasn’t inclined to take the car along.  Grandpa Bernard had a small barn, and agreed to store the car there, which is where it sat, protected from the elements, except for infrequent visits to the outdoors.  It helped that Grandpa was mechanically very adept, and knew how to care for machines, and he was a faithful steward.

The car wasn’t his, but years passed and the owner was never heard from again, so it became Grandpa’s property.  He was a fireman in the town, and later the little car was stored in a municipal building, where it stayed for years, occasionally coming out for a parade.  Then it became a display in the Oldsmobile dealer in Grand Forks, where it was later sold to a collector, and sold and resold and resold, as such things go.  I have no idea the name or destination of the original owner.  It is probably lost to history.

Californians Tony and his wife became the owner for a lot of years, and took the little rig to London, England, to drive in the Old Car annual event, London to Brighton, and years later did the New London – New Brighton MN version of the rally.

I had a chance to ride in, ‘drive’ (max speed 18 mph), and even buy the little car, but what would I do with it?  I passed.

Best I know, it’s at some car collector in Pennsylvania….

So, what does this all mean?

What will be the future of the fancy dandy new Tesla’s I’ve been seeing.  Will be the next Model T, or will they be the Edsel of the 2020s.

1900 was about the beginning of what became the automobile, and it was perhaps 20-25 years before autos became common means of transportation.  There were automobiles of one sort or another long before 1900, but not before manufacturing technology improvement and reduction in cost slowed growth, not to mention things like roads, stations, and the like.

The new generation of cars has to evolve similar to the cars we’ve become accustomed to.  A good primer on the past to present that I found on the internet is here, from Car and Driver.

I’ll be watching!

46 days.  The National portal for all the states: Vote.org

Today is the first day for Minnesotans to vote in the 2024 election.  The website is here,  If you are a Minnesotan, I would recommend that you download and print a copy of your ballot.  The contents vary, of course, dependent on where you live, so I won’t include a copy of my own ballot, which contains (not including write-in) 9 candidates for President/Vice-President; 4 for one U.S. Senator; 2 for Congressional Representative; 2 for State Representative.  Every position is crucial, and its important to know the candidates and the issues.

There is a single proposed amendment to the Minnesota Constitution.

There are 8 candidates for 2 positions on the Woodbury City Council – the people who run our city

Then there are the Judges – 24 of them by my count.  To my knowledge, all are incumbents.  Four of them have an opponent.

Judges and City Council members are non-partisan, and how to assess them is not easy.

A humorous handout at the MN Judicial Branch table at the State Fair in 2024. https://www.mncourts.gov/

For the Council candidates I watched the on-line League of Women Voters introduction.  Two of the candidates who filed did not attend the League event.  Some of the candidates had a website, which I visited.  Otherwise, I simply have to go by feedback from others, since I have generally approved of how my city works.

For the judges, all of those with competition, and their opponents, had websites, which were useful.  One of the contenders did not have a website as of this week…there was a placeholder without content.  The contenders websites were not very revealing.  A retired Supreme Court justice wrote a letter to the editor in today’s paper supporting one of the incumbents.  Absent some other evidence, the safest bet is to vote for the incumbents, who were generally appointed to the bench.  Here‘s what the judicial department says about Minnesota judicial appointments.

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Personally, my electoral choices for 2024 remains the same as articulated earlier.

Kamala Harris/Tim Walz for President/Vice-President, here.

My most important post (personally) is at Sep 2 here.

I maintain that at this moment in history there is no Republican Party.  The party name has been hi-jacked, and until the GOP reconstructs it really doesn’t exist.  We are in very dangerous times with our democracy at serious risk.  At minimum, I urge no favorable vote for any candidate at any level who joined the Election Denial brigade which has plagued us all for the last four years.

Project 2025 is a legitimate threat to democracy; as is disinformation of all kinds.

Joyce Vance has an interesting column today on elections in America.  You can read it here.

See you at the polls.

POSTNOTE:

For those interested, I have three additional posts within the last couple of weeks.

The City Manager

Solzhenitsyn

Cornell West et al

POSTNOTE 2:  The annual Twin Cities Nonviolent begins on September 21 for twelve days.  Do check it out.

About October 1 may be my next post, recalling Jimmy Carter on the occasion of his 100th birthday.  He is in very fragile condition.

POSTNOTE 3:  The first comment to this post came from Joyce, in my town in Minnesota: “[We] voted early this afternoon; there were a lot of people voting, and I hope that’s a good sign.”  Another comment from someone else talked about a controversial decision by our City Council, which is non partisan, but apparently ideologically majority Republican, while electorally our city has been Democrat.

Last night we watched a truly extraordinary film premier, “From Russia with Lev“, about Lev Parnas and the Russian involvement in American politics.  [The film airs again tonight (Sat Sep 21) at 7 p.m. CDT on MSNBC]  The link has more information.  It will certainly be available for viewing again, but I don’t have details.  It is phenomenal, if you have any interest in looking behind the screen at political reality in our country.  Of course, it will be trolled.  So what else is new.  The story is told by Lev and documented heavily.

Then overnight came Heather Cox Richardson’s commentary on the Electoral College, which I’d recommend to everyone.  The temptation is, sometimes, to not vote at all, since it seems that this single grain of sand will make no difference anyway.  I very, very strongly disagree.  If our democracy is to work, it takes all of us, one at a time, to make it so.  There is no alternative.  Do everything you can, and VOTE.

COMMENTS:

from Mary: not surprised to see your ‘first day voting in Minnesota’ commentary!  I do hope for lots of voters.  I still plan to vote in person-I vote with every election and can count on one hand the number of times I have used absentee.  Just a habit and no, I never tell folks who I vote for.  It should be pretty clear who I don’t vote for but I have been known to not do enough homework and make a decision on the way to the polling place based on who has signs in their front yards.  I have a perfect yard for political signage but don’t permit it – not to say that renegade signs have sometimes appeared.

from Lois:  I would like to see someone give facts of just what is “threat to democracy” – specifically what actions will cause us to lose our status of a democracy.   I started to read Wikipedia for a very detailed history of facts and will take time to read the entire article, but would like your words, or from others – either party, on what positions and platform items make the threat.

Thanks for the link to the sample ballot!

from Remi: I find it very strange that in the U.S., judges are either elected or appointed by senators. In my view, this politicization undermines the principle of the separation of powers. Recently, Mexico also decided to elect judges, which many argue signals a serious threat to democracy. I watched “From Russia with Lev“ and loved it.

September 5 I footnoted the following suggestion in another post:

Yesterday, came a link to a 1978 commencement speech at Harvard by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn .  I printed out the 16 pages, read them, went to the  “Reflections on Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard Address” from October 26, 2020, and also looked up Solzhenitsyn’s wiki-bio.  This is not light reading.  Respectively, these are 16, 17 and 31 pages.  At the end the 1978 speech is a link to Solzhenitsyn’s own personal reflection on his 1978 speech, written in Fall 1978. Here is the official brief biography of Solzhenitsyn.

Solzhenitsyn, born in 1918, was 59 when he gave the speech at Harvard; and it was in the second year of President Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

I took a special interest in this commentary because in the same 24 hour period the link was forwarded to me from an unlikely source, the Department of Justice made a major announcement relating to Russian disinformation intended to interfere with the United States election and functioning.  The news release is here, and highly publicized in U.S. media including my own local paper, the Minnesota Star Tribune September 4&5: MN StarTribune Sep 4&5 2024.  There was no direct connection indicated within the DOJ communication; but the topics were so directly related that it wasn’t a wild leap to connect the two. (Heather Cox Richardson on the Department of Justice announcement Sep. 6 2024.)

I asked the person who forwarded the Solzhenitsyn link to me, who forwarded it to him?  No answer.

I printed out and read all of the articles, totaling 51 pages, and observed that there was a great deal of content to discuss from all sorts of points of view.

Without arguing the substance of the speech, which was powerful, I just want to give it some context, since it was given at a particular point in history, by a Russian, to an American audience at Harvard, and ultimately worldwide.

As noted above, the speech was given in the spring of 1978, which was the beginning of the second year of President Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

Three years earlier the Vietnam war ended.  A year before, President Nixon had resigned, replaced by Gerald Ford, who in turn had replaced Nixon’s vice-president who himself had resigned in disgrace.  Ford pardoned Nixon.  The 1960s and 1970s were turbulent political times in the U.S.

In Jimmy Carter’s recap of his life, written when he turned 90, he remarks that the beginning of the movement which ultimately became today’s White Christian Nationalist group began to sprout about 1979.  Carter was one of the most active Christians ever to be President, but he kept the wall between church and state.

The other actor at the time was Solzhenitsyn’s Soviet Union, which directly affected him, of course, since that is where he grew up.

I simply looked up the assorted leaders of Russia.  The names will probably ring a bell.  Lenin (1922-24); Stalin (1924-53); Malenkov (six months, 1953); Kruschev (1953-64); Brezhnev (1964-82 – the President of USSR in 1978); Andropov (1982-84); Chernenko (1984-85); Gorbachev (1985-91, in whose time the USSR collapsed); Yeltsin (1991-99); Putin (2002-2008); Medvedev (2008-12); Putin 2012-present,

Solzhenitsyn’s reference points pre-dated 1978.  His unknown “wall”, like our own, was the future beyond 1978.  He died in 2008.  I wonder what his thoughts were in the days after 1978.

In the 2020 commentary on the 1978 speech by Romanian Sergiu Klainerman, Princeton, I took particular interest in his reference to “Woke”, a word I’d not heard until very recent years, and now has a derisive connotation.  You can look up its definition.  What I notice is there is a fence of sorts to keep Woke within specific limits.  For instance excessive wealth and concentration of power within certain elites, and the preeminence of Capitalism, however defined, are not Woke, but it seems to me are no different than diversity, equity and inclusion….

History is complicated.  The speech and additions is well worth reading, reflecting and discussing.

See important postnote #2 at the end of this post.

The ‘meat’ of this post is the link in the next line.  But see the postnotes as well.

This link, Peace Race (1) (3), opens to a very interesting 8-page commentary on a very noteworthy citizen initiative through the 1960s calling attention to, and mobilizing citizen action, about the Arms Race.  Author Jim Nelson, an active member of United Nations Association MN for over 50 years (1972 photo below), was and continues to be an outspoken advocate, and bears witness to the virtue of persistence. and the quest for peace in our world.  This article, published in 2024, speaks for itself, and I’m proud to present it here for your reflection, sharing and discussion.  Great work, Jim.

A key character in Peace Race is Hubert Humphrey, former Minneapolis mayor, U.S. Senator and Vice-President of the United States. through the late 1940s through the 1970s.  On Friday evening, Twin Cities Public Television airs a program on Humphrey, live streamed to where you live.  Details are below the photo.  This is a unique opportunity, and Jim’s article is a major contribution to understanding how Humphrey fit in to the politics of peace.

Also below, are links to other activities which highlight that we have a long way still to go towards a peaceful world, but actions like Jim and many others give reason for hope.  As Churchill so famously said:”never give in, never, never, never“.

Jim Nelson, United Nations Association State Fair Booth, 1972

Friday evening Sept 13 at 8 p.m. CDT, TPT Channel 2 in the Twin Cities will air a special on Mayor Humphrey of Minneapolis. This program will be live-streamed https://www.tpt.org/watch-live.  It will air again, though not live-stream, on TPT Life Channel  channel on Sep 19 at 8 p.m.  Here’s the TPT descriptor from their program magazine: Hubert Humphrey on TPT Sep 13 and 19 2024

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POSTNOTES: other programs for anyone interested:

1. Middle East Peace Now is sponsoring a zoom program about Hamas, Saturday morning Sep 14

Date/Time
Date(s) – Saturday, September 14, 2024
10:00 am – 11:30 am

“What Hamas represents politically,
why most Arabs support it,
and how Israel-US should deal with it”
with Rami G. Khouri  

Saturday, September 14, 2024    MEPN Zoom Webinar
10:00am – 11:30am CT

3. Twin Cities Nonviolent for several years has sponsored programs related to nonviolence for twelve days, this year beginning on Sept 21 through October 5.  Here is this years Program.

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4.  9-11-01.  Sunday evening CBS’ 60 Minutes gave a full hour reprise of it’s 2022 special honoring the fire fighters of New York for their heroism at the time of 9-11-01.  NYPD lost hundreds of its own in the aftermath of the attack.  The report brought tears to my eyes, as it always does and will.  I had basically finished the draft of this post before watching.

Those who knew me then, and now, know that there are two “me’s” when it comes to 9-11-01.  The first is the early weeks after the disaster itself,.  I was working on a Habitat for Humanity build in Minneapolis the week of, including  9-11, and only heard about it on a radio at the site during the day.  This was before cell phones, and obviously there was no TV either.  We didn’t know the towers collapsed until arriving home late in the afternoon.  The e-mail network which years later became the Outside the Walls blog, thence Thoughts Towards a Better World originated in late September, 2001 – it was sort of a group catharsis venture, which some readers would remember.

In early October my mood changed as the decision was made to bomb Afghanistan in response.  To get al Qaeda.  That and other actions were applauded by the general public.  Often at this space I’ve shown the news article that I kept at that point in time.  It is below.  In my opinion, retribution was not a worthwhile response.  It was a lonely time: I was in the 6%…..  But it was also became the entry point for me into the peace movement, of which I’m still a more informal part.

The debate will go on forever, I suppose, about 9-11-01 and what it means.  I’m not alone.  To remember is important.  To disagree is okay.  Our war on Afghanistan, then on Iraq, then back to Afghanistan, really has not ended, 23 years later.  When will we learn?

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4.   Public television: I am a long-time contributor to TPT, for the last six years $1,000 per year as AMillionCopies.  If you would like to be a co-participant,  send me a check for any amount, made to TPT, post-dated to October 31, 2024, and I will add it to the 2024 contribution.  Every little bit helps.  Interested by don’t have my address?  Just ask.

POSTNOTE #2 3 p.m.: Shortly after I published this post, the breaking news was about the just released Congressional Report on the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.  That debate can go on with out me.  In the Sep 2 post, I included a recent column from John Rash in the Minnesota Star Tribune interviewing the American ambassador to Kabul, Minnesotan Ross Wilson, at the end of the Trump years, and beginning of Biden years, 2020-21.  He was a direct witness to particularly policy considerations in those difficult months.  You can read it here: John Rash 8 31 24 STrib Afghan.  It is an important addition to this conversation.

Re the “Debate”: I will likely watch it, but that is about all I’ll have to say about it here.

POSTNOTE #3 Sep. 11:  I did watch the entire debate and quite a bit of the post-debate discussion, and I’m glad I did.  Kamala Harris was pitch perfect.  Still won’t make the rest of the campaign any easier.