#385 – Dick Bernard: A 2:43 Speech: "Last Night I had the Strangest Dream". A matter of Climate Change and Other Things.

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UPDATE/SUPPLEMENT June 19, 2011, here.
As we all do, I dream, and I just awoke from a dream whose essential message I remember. This doesn’t always happen.
I want to share the dream, and speculate from whence it came.
For some reason I found myself as king# of the world, only for a few minutes, able to direct people who were influential decision makers.
Since only a few run things in this world of ours, I didn’t have to speak to all 7 billion people, only to a few. We were in a large, stark, room, and the few of us could gather in a corner. Perhaps there were a dozen of us. Significantly, there were no women# in this directed conversation.
We gathered in a square, each bringing our own platform, which seemed to resemble a school desk such as a student would occupy. They were of random design, these desks. Again, we were all men#.
All gathered together, I gave the direction, which for some reason sticks vividly in my mind.
Each person in this square had precisely two minutes and 43 seconds to say what they had to say. No rebuttal, no debate. Two minutes and 43 seconds.
Then I woke up.
There are people who make their living interpreting dreams. I’m not one of those people.
The back story of my dream perhaps came a few hours earlier when I, along with perhaps 70 others, men and women, participated in a powerful one and a half hours with world climate expert Professor John Abraham of the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul. He started his talk with a satellite photo of the world, specifically Africa; he ended his presentation with photos of his two daughters, age four and five, who are, he said, the reason he’s devoting his professional life to the crisis of climate change. He is, after all, making their future, and that of their descendants. Africa in particular, and the coming generations will reap the consequences of human activity, especially during the period of the Industrial Revolution.
It was a powerful evening.
I wonder if, when I read this aloud, I’ll come out to two minutes and 43 seconds.
*
“Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream”? I first heard John Denver sing that song years ago; it most impacted me when Lynn Elling led us in that song in June, 2007. It was a moment, that one in 2007, that changed my life.
You can listen to John Denver’s rendition at my website A Million Copies. There you can also read about Lynn Elling, and also about Dr. Joe Schwartzberg’s Affirmation of Human Oneness. Dr. Schwartzberg was in charge of last nights meeting, and at the beginning, we read his Affirmation of Human Oneness, appearing at the website in the 41 languages into which it has thus far been translated.
On reflection, my dream was not at all strange.
How about for you?
What would you say in your two minutes and 43 seconds, and to whom would you say it?
Most importantly, then what will you do to put that 2:43 into reality? Not, what will you order others to do, but what will YOU do?
This is an especially important question to the women. Men have mucked things up royally, and perhaps terminally. Women can turn things around perhaps more effectively than any group of men can.
It’s time to act.
Some Resources:
Dr. Abraham’s climate science organization website is here. There is a lot of content accessible here.
A website he recommended is CoolPlanetMN. And another, Minnesota Environmental Partnership.
The organization Lynn Elling founded in 1982: World Citizen. The organization sponsoring last nights event with John Abraham: Citizens for Global Solutions MN. I am privileged to be part of both groups.
(Click on photos to enlarge them.)

Dr. John Abraham, professor, School of Engineering, St. Thomas University, St. Paul MN


Dr. Joe Schwartzberg, President Citizens for Global Solutions MN, Professor Emeritus in Geography, University of Minnesota, June 16, 2011


Extra Special Thanks to Lee Dechert who made this program happen.

Richard (Lee) Dechert introduces Prof. Abraham June 16, 2011


# – A woman friend challenged me on these references. The references were intentional, and as I remembered the dream. It is we men who have and continue to run our world into the ground. More and more women are involved, but until women make the election to take the lead, past mistakes will continue to be made.

#382 – Dick Bernard: Lying our way to mediocrity, and perhaps worse….

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In two years and 381 blog posts, I can think of only one other posting in which I emphasized a single piece of writing I had seen elsewhere.
Today is the second.
I’d highly recommend a reading of this lengthy item, “The fascinating story of how shameless right-wing lies came to rule our politics” by Rick Perlstein in Mother Jones magazine. (There are endless self-righteous and always anonymous comments on this article, as with most articles. I never waste much time reading these arguments back and forth.)
OK, you’ve already tuned out because you’re conservative and you align with the right wing, and you’ve heard Mother Jones magazine is lefty or worse, and you think you know how biased I must be…. (On the final point, you don’t know, but no matter.)
Fine.
Bill Clinton’s famous 1998 lie is in this article. Democrats don’t get a pass*.
But as Perlstein points out, for sheer volume and gall, there is no contest between the right-wing disinformation machine and the left.
To speak truth in politics in this age is to be a loser, and the more lies you can convincingly tell, the better. This goes for high profile clergy, as well as everyone. You’re taught to lie with gravitas. “The ends justify the means.”
My favorite political lie, recently, is not in the article. Recently former vice-president Dick Cheney was quoted famously, about Paul Ryan’s crusade in Congress. The May 26 quote can be read and seen here, plus an earlier statement on the same general topic by the exact same person, taking precisely the opposite public position.
The simple response to this business of political lying, which I have heard with my own ears, is “they all lie”, which gives the person making this claim the permission to lazily vote for the individual he/she prefers (or not vote at all), without getting into the fine points of whether their candidate has any grasp of the truth, or even cares.
It is rationalized that in politics, the truth really doesn’t matter: “they all lie”.
But it definitely does matter.
As most all of us learned when we were kids, what goes around comes around.
What happens to us individually, when we lie and finally get caught, is no different than what will happen to our entire society, if we don’t start paying attention to facts versus fiction*.
We the people are the government of the United States, not the Legislators we elect (and who we seem to loathe as a group as they do battle against each other.
We have asked for, indeed demanded, what we detest.
We get exactly what we deserve.
* As I was writing this, Rep. Anthony Weiner of NY (Dem) admitted, after days of denial, that he indeed did the infamous Twitter and several others in past years. He becomes only the most recent in a long list of politicians caught in personal lying about sex – his Twitter caper will dominate “news” for the next few days…to be followed by someone else. (Re Weiner, I didn’t think he did the deed – it was too stupid. But, he did do it, and so be it. His voters will decide his fate next year.) I differentiate between what he did, and what this column is about: official lying for the purpose of moving political agendas. Politics being politics, what Weiner did, personally, will be mixed into the political agenda and beget more lies, by extending and implicating…. Sad but true.
Also, yesterday, it was revealed that the staff of Sarah Palin had attempted to revise the history of Paul Revere’s ride on Wikipedia, to cover for Palin’s historical gaffe about his action. “History” is fair game for liars too….

#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.

#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.

#362 – Dick Bernard: The Challenge of Change, and "Spin"

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Back in the 1970s, when overhead projectors were the way of conveying information, and handouts were the takeaway record from attending a meeting, I once attended a meeting where the below handout left, and stuck, with me. (Click on it to enlarge.)

The premise of the handout is very simple and timeless: change is not only inevitable for everyone, but is desirable, and often essential. It doesn’t take much thought to identify someone – maybe ourself – whose ‘bad habit’ may have all but killed them.
BUT, even if one knows that a certain change can be demonstrated to have long term positive benefits, there is a huge challenge to actually changing the behavior (see the chart). Adjusting to the change, whatever it might happen to be, is extremely hard work until the new behavior has become a new habit.
While change is terribly difficult for individuals; it is far more difficult for organizations of any kind. Change can be imposed by law, threat or whatever, but lack of buy-in is a real problem. A surly undercurrent of attitudes held by people who weren’t sold on the great idea can sabotage change.
It’s even worse when competing ideologies demand change, as is true in our country today. Change is what the other side must do, since we know what is right.
So, politically these days we have constant talk about the need for deep change in how our American society does business. It comes from left, right, center about most everything…. But precious few are talking with each other. More prevalent is talking AT each other. The objective is to win the war of ideas. The win is always temporary. The war is continual.
Almost always this conversation is premised on the need for the OTHER person or group to change. The initiator gives him (or her, or their) self a pass: “if you accept my superior idea or wisdom, and change by conforming to my views, all will be good. But I don’t need to change my own attitudes or beliefs.”
It just doesn’t work out quite that simply. Societal change is a team sport.
An immense contemporary impediment to positive change is “Spin”.
“Spin”, the increasingly black art of buttressing one’s argument, while simultaneously dismissing an opposing point of view, essentially sabotages change initiatives. These can be perceived as positive or negative changes (depending on one’s point of view).
Spin has always been a part of the political conversation, but until fairly recent history, a receiver of information would have at least some assurance that “facts”, while skewed, did indeed exist, and could even be found, to support or refute an argument.
Today, almost anyone on any side of any issue can successfully avoid personal accountability by choice of information, image, expert…. It takes very hard work to find some semblance of “truth” in any political positioning statement. Even ‘truth’ becomes suspect. Most recently, The President’s release of his full birth certificate does not quiet the birthers. For assorted reasons, they deny reality to keep the issues alive.
I don’t think it is possible to find a well known pundit or personality who is ‘objective’. Their bias is embedded somewhere in their writing or script. If we share their bias, we like their thinking; if we don’t, we reject it.
We pick and choose who we wish to believe. “They’re all liars”, I’ve heard a good friend say, then she selects the liar she wants to believe – the one which confirms her bias.
If you’ve read this so far, you’re already thinking of the people you don’t like who are the real culprits in this deadly game.
Best we think of ourselves, and how we’re complicit as well.

#357 – Dick Bernard: Lurching towards catastrophe

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My opinion: some kind of agreement will be cobbled together to avoid a partial government shutdown tomorrow. That won’t solve the problem, only delay what seems inevitable: the gradual but inexorable slide of the U.S. to at minimum mediocrity. As a society we are “doing stupid”, as a Forrest Gump might say. You don’t translate coffee klatch conversations among people of like minds into good policy for a complex country. But that seems to be what we’re about.
Actually the game plan of the radicals who pretend to be Republicans is very, very simple. It plays out over and over and over again.
1. Refuse to compromise, and when you do compromise, deny that you compromised at all.
2. Substitute belief for reason, and wrap your belief in the label “truth”. Scoff at Science. (My favorite in this regard comes from my own Catholic Church which has devised something that they call “objective truth” which is truth so purified that there can be no legitimate alternative realities. “We have said it; thus it is so”. Of course, it is only the Church’s opinion about the “truth”, but nonetheless it is portrayed as the genuine, real truth.)
3. If something goes right, take credit for it, even if you had nothing to do with it; if it goes wrong, blame the opposition.
4. Demonize the opposition; canonize your heroes….
5. Never, never, never get off message.
And on and on and on. When it comes to propaganda, one only needs your own core principles and the gall to attempt to impose them ruthlessly. I have such a tip sheet, used against myself and my organization almost 40 years ago. It is a single typewritten sheet, one side, double space. You don’t need 300 pages of explanation to lie. You just need the gall.
Just today came two items, separately, which seem to fit this conversation. An e-mail came from a retired friend who lives in Madison WI and has been involved in the protests there. I knew she lived there, but not that she’d been involved in the demonstrations.
An hour or two earlier, in today’s U.S. mail, came five pages from William L. Shirer’s “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” captioned “THE SERFDOM OF LABOR”. (See it here: Shirer 3rd Reich001 ) The person who sent this to me is a retired teacher who grew up in Nazi Germany (born 1926), lived through the war in Germany, and came to the U.S. in 1947. She says this section of Shirer’s book perfectly describes what happened in the pre-War Nazi Germany she lived in, and she sees the same happening here with the assorted moves to kill union influence through assorted means.
Of course, the “rule”, now, is to never ever compare what is happening here to what happened in Nazi Germany. Take it from our German friend. Take what is happening here very, very seriously. It can indeed happen here. It is only a slight modification of the modus operandi that kept the Nazis in power till their country was destroyed.
There is a famous descriptor of we rubes which goes: “There is a sucker born every minute“. Too often, in this media age, this is true. We are so easily manipulated in working against our own interests.
We are in control of our own destiny only if we do the requisite hard workl.
And where we start is to begin to question the politicians who we freely elect, particularly those who represent us in Congress and State Legislatures – they are the ones closest to us.

#346 – Dick Bernard: Part 16. "The more things change, the more they stay the same."

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Sunday afternoon, enroute to other things, I found a cartoon I had saved for some reason back in March of 2002. (Click on photo to enlarge.)

About the same time I found the cartoon, came a CBS “60 Minutes” segment on a New York City experimental school that pays $125,000 a year. You can see the segment here.
A few hours earlier, a couple of folks had forwarded on a Nicholas Kristof post on the same general topic. One suspects that he had access to the same general source as did 60 Minutes.
The previous day my local legislator and some in her audience were lamenting being unable to get rid of “bad” teachers….
The song goes on and on and on and on: get rid of unions, and so-called “tenure” laws which give “bad” teachers life-time no-cut contracts and all will be well.
Having been in the trenches for many years, including growing up in a family whose Mom and Dad were public school teachers (and excellent ones, including their public citizenship), I know that the cartoon catches the reality far better than the high-falootin’ philosophizin’. For assorted reasons, the Power that runs things cannot abide its Public Workers having any status even roughly equivalent to it. It, including that angry Dad in the cartoon above, demands a subordinate class.
It would be truly nice to have a substantive conversation about ideas such as the $125,000 teacher in every classroom. The way things are going, when that $125,000 goal is reached; poverty level will be, perhaps, $130,000.
I have all of my Mom and Dad’s old teaching contracts – there are 71 of them in all. I pulled them out for the year I graduated from high school – 1957-1958.
1957-58 was Dad’s 28th year of teaching. He had been serving as “Superintendent” of many tiny schools since 1940-41.
We had lived in this town before, from 1945-51; in the interim, there were three other places, till Dad and Mom got another contract here. In addition to doing the assorted kinds of administrative things that go along with administrating even a tiny school, Dad had to teach two classes, as well as Drivers Ed, and he had to Coach sports. The latter was something he wasn’t interested in and was not good at, but there would have been no Basketball or Football had he not taken it on.
There were about 45 students and two other teachers in his tiny high school; my Mother taught the elementary (most elementary kids, including three of her five children, were in the Catholic elementary school down the street.)
That year Dad was paid $4800 with no fringe benefits and, excepting a one year contract, no legal protections whatever. At the end of the year his reemployment was completely at the whim of the local school board.
For Mom, it was her 17th year as a teacher – the off years were to bear and raise we kids. Her salary was $3000.
Likely there were plenty of people in that little town who were envious of this two-income couple.

Bernard family 1958. Mom was then 48 and Dad 50.


They lasted three more years in that place they were content to be, but their contract was non-renewed by the school board for some reason they had no right to know, and off they went again.
Teachers everywhere and in every age can tell similar stories. Even the ones who confide to their friends that they don’t like the Union, are the first ones to call for help in times of trouble.
Trust me. I know.
Something else has become very noticeable today. In the relatively short time I watch TV each day: the ads heavily focus on the “me”. No longer is it adequate to be covered only by a group insurance plan (if you are so fortunate as to be in one). Now the rage is to build a plan to your own specifications. Etc. Of course, with sophistication of data management, such things are possible these days. On the other hand, such schemes are just further evidence of the breakdown of our society into a mass that is the have-nots, versus the truly elite individuals who are the haves, and who believe they have earned and deserved their right to make choices.
This is a time of back-sliding. It is only a matter of time before there will be a reaction, and it won’t be pleasant. Unions didn’t happen because of benevolent and enlightened management. Quite the opposite.
One reaps what one sews.
Teachers, their unions, as well as other employees and their unions as well, may be open to criticism, as any other persons or entities are open to criticism, but we will all rue the day Unions go out of existence or are stripped of their power. Most of us are, after all, subordinates, and Wisdom does not necessarily follow Power.

Minneapolis Star Tribune cartoon September 25, 1995


This series began with Part 1 on February 17. It will likely continue.

#342 – Dick Bernard: Part 12. Dropping in on Madison

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“Dropping in on Madison” was a no-brainer for me on Friday. I was enroute to Chicago, and the car would have steered itself towards the Capitol at the Hwy 151 exit. (Click on photos to enlarge them.)

Wisconsin State Capitol March 4, 2011


It was a gray afternoon, in the low 40s, when I parked near the Capitol about 1:30 p.m. Fifty miles down the road, into Illinois, the rain would begin.
All in all when I visited was a quiet time. A relative few protestors were on the sides of the building.
I had an open shot at some of the now-famous Ian’s Pizza, but passed on the opportunity…I’d just had lunch with Jermitt and Karen a few miles west at Portage (more on them in a following post).
I walked to the Capitol building past a large collection of news vehicles, ready to upload to the world news of happenings in Madison. Some nicely groomed guy, artificially front-lit, with the Capitol in the background, was preparing to do some report from the scene. Another reporter interviewed a solitary AFSCME worker. As I was leaving, some reporter and, probably his producer, were comparing notes on good places to eat in Madison. You can’t work all the time.
Such is how it is in the internet age of instant communications. The protesters know they need the media; the media knows they need protesters, the more unruly the better. Neither is much interested in “fair and balanced”. Somewhere out there is the audience, disconnected from the action by sometimes tens of thousands of miles, but with a front row seat nonetheless.
The next day, Michael Moore showed up at the Capitol while I was in Chicago, and without question he became a media event which I didn’t have the opportunity to see. Full disclosure: I’m a fan of Michael Moore, and he knows the rules of the contemporary communications game. I haven’t seen television since Friday, but I suspect the people in those mobile units, and behind the microphones and cameras got lots of audio and visual on Saturday, thanks to Michael Moore.
In my quite boring time by the Capitol, I became most captivated by a small gaggle of protestors. Their leader, with a bull horn, often supported by the group, was taunting the Governor who apparently was somewhere behind one of the windows in front of them. Everyone was very well behaved, though a bit raucous. Here’s my photo:

March 4, 2011, at the Wisconsin Capitol Building, approximately 2 p.m.


At one point a small roar came out of the assembled protesters. Apparently there was a sighting of someone inside a window of the Governors office. But that soon ended.
That scene defined as well as any the absurdity of such conflicts.
If by some wild chance the Governor had come out just to engage the group in civil conversation, the assembled group would have been dis-armed and probably not know what to do. Similarly, if that same Governor had said to the small group, “Come on up. Let’s talk,” there would have been a similar dilemma. Such is how it is in conflict mode.
When you’ve painted yourself into a corner, as the Governor and his legislature backers have, it is all but impossible to concede on any point, and a death struggle ensues.
Similarly, as the protesters are finding out already, the long haul on the line is very, very boring. Sooner or later you run out of speakers who can motivate; sooner or later the cameras and the people with the notepads and the microphones go on to the next crisis, and there you are, sitting by yourself on a damp, cold uninviting piece of pavement.
No question, I’m with the protestors in this crucial struggle to retain workers rights to organize and bargain. But the support comes with acknowledgment that being with them, even at a distance, requires some kind of formal commitment from me. Words like this are not enough.
Visit over, I headed for Chicago, and an unintended coffee at Wally’s Donuts the next morning…stay tuned.

#337 – Dick Bernard: Part 7. Misinformation and sloppy citizenship: An invitation to commit national suicide

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An unplanned trip took me out of town most of the last three days. I had planned to write this post about how money ends up in collective bargaining agreements; specifically about supposedly “free” money for Pensions given for Public Workers (a false charge).
I don’t have to write that commentary. David Cay Johnson of Tax.com has “hit the home run” on the issue. You can read it here. I hope you do. Last night after returning home Pat Kessler of WCCO-TV in Minneapolis also did a pretty good job in a minute or two to summarize out this issue as well. But is anyone listening?
In our contemporary society, we seem to prefer opinions over facts. Facts can be troublesome, so if the “wrong” facts surface, the volume of background noise is simply turned up, or the hearing aid is turned off…. In the process we’re killing ourselves as a society. We don’t want to hear the bad news; and the bad news is NOT public unions and collective bargaining agreements or deficits. We are being taught to hate the very entities, unions, which made American prosperity possible. If the contemporary version of the Republican party succeeds in its quest (likely) we will rue the day. There will remain unions, but these unions will have no teeth – they’re called “company unions” – and they’ll be blamed for being weak and ineffective. As I say, “we will rue the day”.
On return home last night I chose to take down from my bookshelf “A Man’s Reach”, the autobiography of my deceased friend Elmer L. Andersen. Elmer was the wealthiest man I personally ever knew. He was life-long Republican, served in the Minnesota Legislature from 1949-58, was Minnesota Governor 1961-63, and afterwards was a philanthropist and outstanding public citizen for the rest of his life. Public buildings are named after him. We learned of each other in 1992, and were good friends until he died in 2004. I have written of Elmer Andersen several times in these pages.

“A Man’s Reach” is still available in libraries and I would not diminish it by attempting a long review. It can and should be read.
The book talks about how politics was back in the day of Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower (contemporaries of Elmer L. Andersen).
Then as now politics was a competitive business, but there was recognition by most in all parties that a winner take all philosophy was not in anyone’s short or long term best interest. Andersen had no problems with unions – he worked with rather than against organized workers, including in his own companies. They were more partners than enemies, and everyone prospered.
I specifically took down the book last evening to see if I could find one particular passage to quote. For now I’ve failed, but I know it is in there, since I read it there some years ago.
Andersen was talking about how lawmakers went about making important decisions back then, and in essence said this: lawmakers in both partisan and non-partisan settings would first determine what good public policy was – what was needed by the citizens of the state. Then, and only then, they would determine how to pay for that policy through taxes or other fees.
Today the philosophy seems completely opposite: decide what we’ll pay, and that and only that drives the policy.
Andersen’s position in government came coincident with the the greatest surge of prosperity ever in our state and nation.
I think there was a “chicken-egg” relationship between that prosperity and the governing philosophy of Republicans and Democrats like Elmer L. Andersen.
We desperately need a rebirth….

Elmer L. Andersen Oct. 12, 1995. Photo by Dick Bernard at Mr. Andersen's home


NOTE: What’s behind, and ahead. I began this series on February 17 with no idea that it would continue as it has. Quite by accident, it was preceded by another five-part series February 6-11 before I had any notion of troubles in Wisconsin. (Part 5 of that series remains incomplete. I’m still considering exactly what I want to say.) Part 7 of this series is doubtless not the last. This issue is far too important to forget about. Keep checking from time to time. Thank you.

#328 – Dick Bernard: Part 4. A Message to the Proles*

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Shortly after the Super Bowl, even with the events continuing in Egypt, the nightly news paid a lot of attention to the rollout of Donald Rumsfeld’s new book, “Known and Unknown“.
There is no need to waste words or even internet links about Donald Rumsfeld – anything one wants to know, positive or negative, about the man, can be easily found…except his own personal secrets.
Personally, I believe that his career – most of his work life – as a “public servant” exemplified manipulation by use and misuse of all of the means of Power** at his disposal, as that word is defined by people who are Powerful. This includes the right to do wrong and never, never, ever admit that you make mistakes, and blame someone else for whatever mistakes were made.
I didn’t see all of the interviews, but the ones I saw were of the Rumsfeld of old: completely on message, not about to be tricked into going off script even the tiniest amount. No accountability.
Examples of shady kinds of behaviors by powerful people are endless. Rumsfeld is way up near the top of the list of those who feel righteous in what they were trying to do, including supposedly to bring, euphemistically, “democracy and freedom” to places far away, all for the greater honor and glory of themselves.
I am particularly interested in the title of Rumsfeld’s book: “Known and Unknown“. I’ve been intrigued by that phraseology since I first heard him use it in the early days of Iraq War.
It brought me back to a lesson learned in one outstanding program of an international company called Landmark Education in the summer of 1998.
In the programs of Landmark, we learned many obvious things that most of us never really connect with.
One of the lessons that stuck was this (paraphrased): “There are things that we know that we know. There are things we know we don’t know. Finally, there are things that we don’t know that we don’t know.”
I could have sworn, from his use of this phrase, that at some point in his development Rumsfeld had taken the same Landmark program that I did. He simply parroted these words, much to the delight of the media, since they were so quotable.
In my assessment, he had the vocabulary down, but he misused the entire concept in denying any culpability for catastrophic calculations made by himself and others at the highest levels in the U.S. Government during the entire post 9-11 time of Iraq.
Not part of that Landmark Lesson was a fourth phrase that I’ll coin that perhaps should well be paid attention to: “There are things that we don’t know because we don’t want to know them.” Think a gangster leader who sends word, “take care of that problem”, and somebody downline ends up dead….
You can never tell what to believe from an executive with Rumsfeld’s experience. Rumsfeld will likely die not revealing any unspoken truth. No apologies at least to his earthly counterparts.
Perhaps the best strategy for us is to believe nothing on first hearing or reading. To be endlessly skeptical. But to retain hope that you can impact on the system.
That’s my message to the Proles (of which I am one).

* – In George Orwell’s book, 1984, the masses were called the Proles. “Prole” was probably a shortened version of the word “proletariat” and 1984 was apparently modeled on then-Soviet Union. Orwell’s book was published in 1949.
In Orwell’s book, the Proles were caricatured through images like the meek housewife, happily singing a tune while hanging out her wash on a clothesline; and the boys hanging out at a pub, getting drunk on cheap gin. In Orwell’s world, Big Brother and his minions were in control in a gigantic pyramidal headquarters in London, and Newspeak (i.e. “war is peace”, etc.) was the alternate official language of power. Telescreens and the Two Minute Hate against a distant enemy kept the rabble afraid and compliant.
The Proles vastly outnumbered the power, but (it seems) never got organized.
The first decade of the 21st century we’ve been living in “1984”, in my opinion.
** – Power defined. I once heard an excellent talk about some of the many kinds of “Power” in plays in all of our lives. As I remember them: there is the power that comes with authority (“I can fire you”, or variations usually involving money); there is the power that comes with the capability of defining the rules of society (“I can make laws”). Power comes with family connections – a family marries into a family with power. The list goes on.
But there was one power I paid most attention to, and the speaker called it “referent power” or “the likeability factor”. For people immersed in the other kinds of power, this is the scary one: this is the problem of relationships, and builds outside, and independent of, the others.
Related Posts: Feb. 6, Feb. 7, and Feb. 8