The Christmas cards above and below (they were like today’s picture postcards) were saved by my Grandmother and Grandfather Busch at their North Dakota farm in the early 1900s*.
This year, my annual Christmas Reflection can be found here. It is easily the longest I have done (the 33rd in a series beginning 1977), with several parts.
It is the one I least expected to do.
If you go no further than this page, here are what I take as my essential learnings from this years recollection:
First, not one of us – not a single one of us – is an island unto ourselves. We are part of something much greater: a community.
Further, our community is everyone, everywhere, a world without borders, whether we know those persons personally, or expect that we’ll ever meet in any way.
Our world is our community.
Second, back then – my reflection is about the years 1963-65 – the last thing Barbara and I could do was to express our gratitude. Our struggle was to simply survive from one day to the next. One of us did survive, the other did not.
Third, it is never too late to say ‘thank you’.
God Bless Us All. Every One.


* – A story about these century old postcards can be found here.

The below commentary of mine appeared on the opinion page in the December 2, Minneapolis Star Tribune. You can also read it as printed in the STrib here. I was responding to a commentary by George Will of the Washington Post which appeared in the Nov. 28 newspaper.
I was gone most of the day and late into last evening so didn’t see the on-line comments on the column till late in the evening. Most interesting to me was that the always-anonymous on-line comments about the column in the newspaper were generally negative and most of the most negative ones seemed to unanimously agree with each other (which is very unusual, even on-line, almost like an orchestrated response); while the in-person comments I heard from many random people I saw at various events yesterday were 100% positive.
I apparently struck some kind of nerve. Bottom line: I like the kids I wrote about; I think this is a topic that needs a lot of civil and rational discussion; the vast majority of people don’t act out based on things like virtual violence, but we never have to be concerned about the vast majority…it’s the tiny minority that cause the huge problems.
The headline writer for George Will’s column on video games subheads the column “Today, it’s video games. In another era, it was comic books. So, pass a law? Pshaw.”
Oh, were it so easy to dismiss a very serious societal problem.
Will is exactly one year younger than I am, so he and I come from the same generation.
Here’s a counterpoint, doubtless replayed tens of millions of times every day across our nation.
A few days before Wills column appeared, Thanksgiving Day, we were at dinner at a relative’s home, and there was a certain amount of competition for the large screen TV. A video game ultimately won out over football, at least for a while.
Two of the kids, a girl, 7, and a boy, 11, were playing a realistic video game reenacting battles of World War I and II. Dutifully they worked to take out the enemy with their hand-held remote controls.
It was all so normal, including the scorecard at the end, where the one who had the most “kills” (planes shot down) and “deaths” (victims of war) was the winner. The kids were learning how to win, through death, but with no threat to themselves. Death was a casual act, meted out on somebody else, tallied on a score sheet on a television screen.
I thought back to the days in the 1940s when I was the age of those kids. Where I lived, those days were long before television, and yes, there were comic books, but not yet common for people in my station in life. What Will and I experienced as kids, he buttresses with selective anecdotes about then-experts. He then makes these people his fools: vintage Will.
I remember visiting my grandparents ‘back in the day’, and a favorite find was the very dog-eared copy of Flash Gordon – outer space futuristic fiction where, indeed, people were zapped by things like ray guns. But it was all in the deep dark distant future, and we had to read about it. We weren’t doing battle like those two little kids I was witnessing Thanksgiving Day.
A few days before Thanksgiving we were waiting for our plane home from Salt Lake City. The plane was delayed due to weather, and there was extra idle time in the boarding area.
Near the window were two older men, waiting with wheelchairs to assist disabled passengers who’d soon be deplaning.
They were conversing about war, these two, mostly through the lens of “Saving Private Ryan” and John Wayne movies.
One guy tended to dominate the conversation, the other nodding gravely, as the talk turned to things like War on Terror topics. “They don’t follow the rules of warfare like in the old days”, the one said, observing that the enemy now melts in among us, and can be anywhere.
“We just have to be able to go in there and take them out. If some civilians are killed, too bad.” Doubtless he was just a nice family man.
His civilians, of course, are a nebulous them who dress funny, or look a little different, or talk a different language. They aren’t persons, they’re things, like a bunch of animals in someone’s sights. “The ends justify the means.”
So it goes in our society where violence is a staple of our lives, nothing more than a casual act.
There may not be a place for another law, but for our society to survive as a civil place, we need to pay a whole lot of attention to sanctioned and impersonal violence against others.

I don’t know why 1969’s Woodstock fascinates me but it does. Here’s some YouTube clips from ‘back in the day’.
I was 29 when Woodstock happened, and while certainly in the age range, I was about as far from the stereotyped Woodstock life style as I was from it geographically – Minnesota to New York. It was a different world. In fact, at the time I don’t recall even knowing that it had happened. Two weeks after Woodstock my second child was born; in the same week we moved into a new house. I was busy and about as completely ordinary as they come. It could be said that I missed the 60s.
Still, when I happened across the revisiting of Woodstock on the History Channel Saturday night after Thanksgiving, I was riveted to it. There is something about it that speaks to me across the years. Had I been out there, then, I probably would’ve wandered over.
We all have our biographies, however dramatic or mundane. I had some of both in the 60s.
I was a junior in college when 1960 began; later that year John F. Kennedy was elected President of the U.S.; Dwight Eisenhower’s eight years in the White House were concluding. An Italian Pope, John XXIII, had convened something called the Second Vatican Council to reform the Catholic Church I still belong to. One of JFK’s first initiatives was the promise of a man on the moon by the end of the 60s, a truly audacious goal which was achieved.
College over at the end of 1961, I joined the Army to get it out of the way – those were still the days of the Military Draft. The Cuban Missile Crisis occurred on my watch in the service. I was engaged to my college sweetheart and we got married in June of 1963. Without knowing it then, I was part of the first ‘class’ of that military group called “Vietnam era Veterans”.
A month out of the Army, teaching school in northern Minnesota, JFK was assassinated. My new wife was pregnant and very ill. The Beatle’s joined the American conversation. In July, 1965, my wife passed away, leaving me a single Dad during most of the rest of the 60s. She was buried on the very day that the Medicare act was signed into law. Survival became the essence of each day for me.
In the spring of 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated, then, a couple of months later, Robert Kennedy fell to an assassin’s bullet. The riots; the Democratic Political Convention in Chicago…. I remarried at the end of November, 1968.
So, a few things were happening as 1969 entered.
Then Woodstock happened, apparently without my knowledge, not long after Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon.
Four months after Woodstock we had a house guest for a short while: my brother had been nearly killed in a aircraft accident over Thailand. He survived. (We just returned from a visit with him in Utah.)
The 60s ended, but not the conflict. the Kent State massacre occurred on my 30th birthday in 1970.
The 60s began 50 years ago this year. They were the “best of times, and the worst of times”. One could be both troubled and optimistic. They were a time of change.
Today we’re long past Woodstock and the 60s…or are we? There are good reasons for a new ‘revolution’ centering on the crucial question: will our descendants even have a planet worth living on 50 years from now?”
It’s worth a thought, since we’re the ones who will make it or break the future for those who follow.
Time for another Woodstock.

Two years ago today – it was the day after Labor Day, 2008 – eight of us got up very early, and made our way over to Concordia University in St. Paul, to make final preparations for, and open, the Peace Island Conference, sponsored by the Minnesota Alliance of Peacemakers.
It turned out to be a very successful event. Something like 400 people registered for all or part of the conference; there were 23 major speakers**, and 31 exhibitors. Subsequent evaluations were very positive. It was probably one of the more successful, as articulated in the program booklet, “Peace, Justice, Harmony, the Environment and Global Issues” conferences ever held in the Twin Cities.
I ‘see’ this conference every time I go into my garage. The Peace Island box is in clear view and, like any archive, gathering dust..

An immense amount of planning and hard work went into the conference. There were nine on our committee*, two of us were laid low for extended periods of time by serious illness. All but one of us were retired people.
Peace Island started out with a dream of Susu Jeffrey, a Twin Citian who envisioned St. Paul’s Harriet Island as an island of peace during the Republican National Convention. I’m not certain when she first had her dream, but it began to take shape in a conversation with Dennis Dillon at a conference of Network of Spiritual Progressives in Minneapolis in mid-October, 2006. Not long after, a few of us jumped on board and (each of us probably thought at one point or another) didn’t have the good sense to jump off the conference ‘train’ until it was ‘running too fast’. Dreams don’t just come true – they take a lot of passion and effort.
As with everything else, every word in the title of the conference was (even though we were generally peaceful people) fought over.
The crucial element in this conference, we all agreed, was that it be positive and constructive – a “Solutions Driven Conference” – and that is how we billed ourselves, and how we encouraged our speakers to frame their presentations.
At this link Peace Island 9-2008001 is the tattered cover of my conference program, along with two Peace Island buttons – our official presentation of the conference.
It was difficult, we learned, to keep people focused on Solutions. It is far, far easier to focus on Problems. To actually accomplish Solutions requires lots of efforts on one’s part; a Problem can easily be ignored or cast off onto someone else – it’s THEIR problem.
I have thought a great deal about ‘solutions’ since our conference ended on September 3, 2008.
Two months after the conference closed Barack Obama was elected President of the United States, and there was – very clearly – an unrealistic expectation placed on him to not only solve the abundant problems awaiting him, but to solve them yesterday. The worst financial crisis in living memory exploded two weeks after our conference adjourned; the United States economy virtually imploded before the time that the new President took office in January, 2009, and it’s been a rough ride ever since. Pres. Obama and the new Congress inherited a very, very sick national ‘horse’.
I’m sure we’re all looking for “solutions”, but I often wonder about our expectations, particularly on ourselves, as the essential agents of Change.
I wonder, too, about our standards for judging that Change: Is accomplishing something positive, even some little thing, better than nothing? Or is there some invisible and unstated criteria that whatever has been accomplished is too little, and that the only adequate solution is immediate gratification of what we want…accomplished by someone other than ourselves.
Rabbi Michael Lerner, visionary leader of Network for Spiritual Progressives (NSP), was the speaker at that October, 2006, conference where Susu and Dennis had their first conversation about Peace Island. I’d guess that all of us on the committee were at that conference as well. In an editorial in the September/October 2010 issue of NSPs magazine, Tikkun, Rabbi Lerner makes a statement I think needs to be the operating philosophy of those wanting positive change in this country: “…we…need to do the mass educational work…and [become] involved with our work to advance these ideas.”
Check out NSP here, and as Gandhi so famously said, become the change you wish to see in the world.
* – The Committee (in alpha order): Dick Bernard, John and Marie Braun, Dennis Dillon (chair), Rebecca Janke, Susu Jeffrey, Ann Lewis, Bob Milner, Verlyn Smith
** – Speakers: Ron Bowen, Leslie Cagan, Matthew Commers, Susan Cornell Wilkes, Marv Davidov, Mel Duncan, Sara Flounders, Bruce Gagnon, Terry Gips, Jim Harkness, Anne Hastings, Lili Herbert, Susan Hubbard, Douglas A. Johnson, Antonia Juhasz, Kathy Kelly, Richard LaFortune, Lisa Ledwidge, Ray McGovern, Bharat Parekh, Sami Rasouli, Coleen Rowley, Sandy Spieler, Starhawk, Kaia Svien, Ami Voeltz, Kevin Winge, Ann Wright

Most of my working career I represented public school teachers in union matters like negotiations and grievance processing. It was a powerful learning experience in realism. Ideals collided with unpleasant realities. Even people on the same side of an issue were frequently in conflict about how to approach the problem. My world was full of shades of gray, created by people on sides who were sure that they were right, and the other wrong. I learned lots of lessons with ‘boots on the ground’ in those 27 years. It was a invaluable experience.
I also learned the tactics of the black art of advocacy communication, particularly how to sift a grain of truth out of a mound of – shall I say – BS. Advocates were trained in how to mislead by seeming to be sincere and truthful; they learned how people in authority escape and evade accountability by saying nothing at all…at least nothing with a paper trail.
Nonetheless, I was ill-prepared for the slap in the face of the middle class and working people generally that I saw in Bob Herbert’s column in the July 31, 2010, New York Times. The column speaks profoundly for itself. I hope you read it and really think about it.
The gist of the column: the recession as measured by economists has been over for a year; American business is bloated with Profit, but in no hurry to put its employees back to work, helping to alleviate unemployment; nor to bring back middle class wages; or to allow the re-enablement of the abundant benefits of good government. The worst crisis since the Great Depression is being exploited as an economic opportunity.
Why?
These are days of sophisticated communication – and mis-communication, and non-communication – so any theory advanced by some peasant like myself can and will be denied. Even “smoking guns” can be denied, plausibly, by the smooth pitch-people for business and industry. Communication – and non-Communication – techniques are highly refined.
But let me pose a possibility in this particular outrage as outlined in Mr. Herbert’s column:
A key to restoring American confidence in its recovery is more people at work, particularly in well-paying jobs. It is private or public sector employers who need to put these people back to work. No job. No work.
More people at work should be a no-brainer, since business depends on people who have money to spend. But American big business, especially, is chafing at any sense of loss experienced at the hands of a new American political administration. This “loss” comes in the face of re-regulation after many years experience with the unmitigated disaster of de-regulation. The titans had their chance at a de-regulated environment, and failed miserably.
Their loss comes coincident with the need to re-tool industry practices to make possible new approaches to other looming catastrophes like traditional energy depletion, climate change, etc. Business has no problem with these things, and likely knows the implications of doing nothing, but will not move to support these changes until it is in a position to control the policy and corner the profits.
The key to regaining complete political control is seen as keeping common people angry – against the very government they depend on. The very people big business relies on to feed this anger are the very people it is cynically keeping out of the work force for political advantage. They will be relied on, in a few months, to vote the “in’s” out, and bring back in power the very people who caused the catastrophe in the first place.
Read the article, and give it some serious thought.
No one in the big business world is going to be caught dead saying that Economic Depression is good for Profit. But the data is pretty troubling.
In the long run, we will all, including Big Business, sink in our own excess. But not to worry…we will probably be dead before that happens, and other people down the line – our children and grandchildren – will pay the price.
We are, truly, “spending our kids inheritance”.
We ought to be ashamed, the “fat cats” especially so.